In this episode, I discuss the importance of defining your role as a caregiver, similar to how you define other roles in your life like being a parent, employee, or friend. By understanding your role and setting clear expectations, you can navigate the challenges of caregiving more effectively. I guide you through six steps to define your role as a caregiver:
Reflect on where you are in the caregiving journey.
Understand what things are outside of your control.
Define what you do have control over and focus your role on that.
Clarify your values related to caregiving.
Brainstorm your purpose as a caregiver, focusing on who you want to be.
Define the role of a caregiver for yourself, incorporating your values and purpose.
By going through this process, you can create a clear and actionable role for yourself as a caregiver, providing a sense of grounding and direction in the midst of challenges.
As a Resiliency Coach for people who are caregiving for their partner, I'm here to support YOU, the caregiver. Learn more about my work at www.coachmarika.com.
In this episode, I discuss the importance of defining your role as a caregiver, similar to how you define other roles in your life like being a parent, employee, or friend. By understanding your role and setting clear expectations, you can navigate the challenges of caregiving more effectively. I guide you through six steps to define your role as a caregiver:
Reflect on where you are in the caregiving journey.
Understand what things are outside of your control.
Define what you do have control over and focus your role on that.
Clarify your values related to caregiving.
Brainstorm your purpose as a caregiver, focusing on who you want to be.
Define the role of a caregiver for yourself, incorporating your values and purpose.
By going through this process, you can create a clear and actionable role for yourself as a caregiver, providing a sense of grounding and direction in the midst of challenges.
As a Resiliency Coach for people who are caregiving for their partner, I'm here to support YOU, the caregiver. Learn more about my work at www.coachmarika.com.
Announcer:
Welcome to In this Together, a podcast for partners turned caregivers, where you'll discover invaluable insights and actionable advice to navigate the ups and downs of caregiving with resilience and strength. Here's your guide, Marika Humphreys.
Marika Humphreys:
Hey caregivers, good to be back with you. How are you? I have been pretty good, but it's funny. I just recently had a conversation with one of my clients about that very question how are you? And sometimes as a caregiver, that little question can be really difficult to answer because it's not always a simple answer and sometimes we feel like when we say oh, I'm good or I'm fine, it doesn't feel truthful, but then you may not always want to go into all the details. So sometimes a little question like how are you when you're a caregiver, or for me, I remember also the question, how's your husband doing when he was not always doing great, those can be really hard questions to answer.
Marika Humphreys:
I will do a whole podcast episode about this because I think it deserves talking about and it's something I really had to think through and I struggled with. But it's funny. I think that's really kind of unique to being a caregiver or care partner is you can't always answer that question very easily. But back to today and this topic. I really do want to know how you're doing. I want to know what you feel like your top three struggles are. Please tell me, email me at marika@ coachmarika. com, and that will help guide future episodes of this podcast, because I want this podcast to be really tuned into the struggles that you have as a care partner. Okay, so today we're going to talk about how to define your role as a caregiver. So last week I really talked about the importance of learning how to trust your own instincts and guidance around finding the way that's right for you for now, instead of looking to the outside world or sort of looking for a blueprint out there. And today I'm going to go into a way to do that. This is going to be a little bit longer episode because I'm actually going to lead you through steps to define the role of caregiver or care partner for yourself, and I will just say from the outset I do refer to caregiving for your partner. However, this process will apply to any sort of caregiving that you find yourself in, so it is not unique to that. It's just. My specialty is to focus on people who are caring for their partner. This works for anybody really in a caregiving role.
Marika Humphreys:
So let's dive in Thinking about caregiving as a role you play. That is probably not the way you think about it, but I want to introduce it that way because it's useful to think about the role of a caregiver, just like all of the other roles that we play in our lives. So you might also be a parent, you might be a sibling, you might be an employee. You're obviously probably a spouse or a partner. You are probably also a friend to somebody.
Marika Humphreys:
So we play all these different roles in our lives and we often have developed or adopted expectations for how we should play those roles or what it means to be a good in those roles, like what does it mean to be a good friend? Or what does it mean to be a good employee? Or how should an employee behave? Or if you're a business owner, how should a business owner behave? We often have developed these expectations, but they're really in the back of our mind. They're not something that we think about consciously. So I'll give you an example.
Marika Humphreys:
If you're a parent, you might have the belief that parents should be supportive and loving and you should set high standards for your children and enforce discipline. But maybe you should also believe you should teach lessons and always be calm and never yell at your kids, and you can see that some of them may not always be super realistic, like never yell at your children or never lose your temper, right? That's pretty unrealistic, because we're human, we all lose our temper at some point. But when we have these expectations that we've either created for ourselves or adopted from various experiences in our life and they're in the back of our mind, we don't always have awareness of them until we sort of fall short. Let's say, we yell at our kid and then we feel guilty about it, and part of that is because we have this idea that I should never yell at my children. So my point here is to say that we do this in all areas of our lives. We develop expectations around what it means to be right or good or the way we should do something, and when we find ourselves falling short, that's a lot of times when guilt and even shame and self-judgment can come up. But if it's in the back of your mind, you may not realize what's happening, right? You're just experiencing the guilt or the self-judgment. So the solution is to bring some consciousness and deliberate decision-making to this area of your life, because you can see that when we let our subconscious define this role for ourselves, it can be very unrealistic and often full of contradictions, and we end up feeling bad about ourselves for failing in a role that we didn't even deliberately make decisions about or define what success is.
Marika Humphreys:
So I want to encourage you to give some thought to this process, to this area of your life and who you want to be in it, and I will just say that I borrowed this idea from my good friend and coach, Ben Pugh. He is a coach of parents, of teens Impact Parenting. Go check him out. He's amazing. Especially if you've got a teenager, he's amazing, and he leads his clients through a process of defining their role as a parent, which is very powerful. I have done that myself, and when I did that, I thought gosh, this is really helpful to do when you're a caregiver as well. Define the role for yourself. There are six steps in this process that I'm going to lead you through, and steps one through three are really about getting in the right mindset to create the role, so I kind of think of them as preparation steps, and then four through six are the actual process of creating the role. Okay, so let's dive in. Step number one is to reflect on where you are in the caregiving journey.
Marika Humphreys:
Often, the roles in our lives evolve and they're influenced by the stage of life or the stage that we're in, what else we have going on in our life, what's most important to us? All of that changes Again. Thinking of parenting, you can see that very easily. Who you are as a parent when your children are young changes very dramatically really as they become young adults and into adulthood. So I want you to think about where you are as a caregiver for your partner, separate from your role as a spouse, so meaning as a caregiver or care partner. Is this a new role for you? Perhaps this is a new diagnosis or new condition for your partner, or is it a role that you've been in for years? Perhaps you've been their care partner or caregiver for years, or maybe this is a reoccurrence, something that happened before, and now you're a caregiver again.
Marika Humphreys:
Take a few months to think about that and some questions to get you thinking okay, and you can jot these down or just think about them in your head. What am I struggling with most right now as a caregiver? What do I need right now, again, as a caregiver or a care partner? What do I think my partner needs right now? What do I think my family needs? Those questions will just help you wrap your head around sort of what you're experiencing right now in this part of your journey, and understanding where you are just helps you set the stage for defining who you want to be because, again, it's going to be influenced by the various challenges that you are facing right now at this time in your life, and those evolve and change over time.
Marika Humphreys:
Okay, so step number two is to understand what things are outside of your control as a caregiver. I really go in depth on this topic of what's outside of your control in episode four, so I will link to that in my notes, but you can listen to that one after this. But I'll restate them here because this is really important and repetition helps here, and this is something that comes up a lot for caregivers. Placing all of our focus on the things outside of our control is one of the most common things we do as caregivers and one of the ways we cause ourselves a lot of grief. And I will say this is a human problem. It's not a caregiver problem to focus on things outside of our control and wanting them to be different, but I do think, as a caregiver, it's super helpful to really be mindful of this tendency and the areas where it tends to come up so that we can just be on the lookout for it. What are those areas?
Marika Humphreys:
Again, you cannot control anything outside of your own thoughts, your own feelings, your own actions. Okay, so that means you can't control what happens with your partner's health. You can't control how they deal with this disease or condition or the treatment that they're going through. You can't take away their pain or their anger, their sadness, their fear. You can't protect your kids and family from this experience. That may seem hard to hear a little bit, but all of those things are outside of us and finding just acceptance of that helps us refocus on what we can control. Okay, so anything outside of you and your own behavior is not within your control and when you're clear about that, you can define the role of care partner for yourself by focusing it on who you are and not who you're trying to make other people be or not the result of your actions, but more how you want to show up in the world in this part of your life. Okay, so, for example, some people might say they want to be able to comfort and reassure their partner, but actually that is not something within their control. If their partner feels comforted or not is not something that they can control, right?
Marika Humphreys:
I am sure all of you have tried to say something comforting or reassuring or tried to boost your partner's needs, only to have them respond by maybe being upset or angry or shutting down. It kind of had the opposite effect. I'm sure probably all of you had that experience. What you intended to say was comforting and it did the opposite, because you can't control how someone feels, but you can decide you want to be a source of comfort and strength for them or something along those lines. Right, that's a slight different in wording, but it is important and does make a difference. Because when you think I want to be a source of comfort and strength or reassurance, then you'll be thinking about your actions instead of how they impact others, right? So when you're thinking about, okay, how do I do that? It might lead you to ask the question to your partner how can I be a source of comfort for you? And that is very different than just assuming you know what it is the answer is and saying something with the intention of making them feel better. When it, then it has the opposite effect. So, again, I hope that makes sense. It's a way of thinking and I want you to think about. Who can I be and let go of the result it's going to create, because that's the part that's outside of your control. Okay so?
Marika Humphreys:
Other people's actions, anything outside of you, your partner's health, other people's pain those are some of the big areas that are outside of your control. Okay, so step number three is defining what you do have control over and focusing your role on that. So let's again talk about what those things are. You control how you think and what you focus on, and I should qualify that a little bit. We have a lot of thoughts that come up unintentionally, but you do have the ability to direct your thoughts and how much attention you give those thoughts. So, for the most part, your thinking is within your control.
Marika Humphreys:
You have control over how you deal with your emotions, whether you allow them or you try to ignore them. You have control over the actions that you take. Do you get triggered and just react out of that, or do you have tools to cope with those triggers so that you can take more deliberate and conscious actions? You have control over the decisions you make. That's one of the biggest areas we have control over in our life is through our decisions. So it's important to know if you're making decisions out of fear or obligation or some other kind of pushy emotion, versus deliberately and really from a clean and intentional space.
Marika Humphreys:
You have control over whether you are reactive or proactive, okay, and just by going through this process of defining a role, it will move you more towards being proactive and less reactive. So anytime we bring consciousness and like make decisions around any area of our life, it allows us to be more proactive and less reactive, because we have in our heads like, oh no, this is how I want to be. So it's powerful. Even just giving this, just by listening to this episode, you're going to be more proactive and because you will have thought about it, about how you want to be, you have control over how well you take care of your own health and energy. Okay, so that's going to be very different for each of you, based on what your own struggles are.
Marika Humphreys:
You have control over yourself and how you show up each and every day. This is something we don't think about, right, but it is really. What makes us the most powerful in our lives is when we can remind ourselves yeah, I get to decide how I want to be or who I want to be or what my next action is. And yeah, sometimes that's hard, but it's hard. Being a care partner can be really challenging. Partner can be really challenging, but we do have control over how we show up in that challenge, okay, so, again, I go into this more in depth in episode four, so definitely listen to that one after this, if you haven't. This is where I want you to focus. Your role is on who you are or who you'd like to be as a caregiver or care partner, because that is where your power is. By defining who you want to be, you'll have something that grounds you and sort of anchors you when the times are tough. That's really the beauty of this process, okay, so now we've set the stage and gotten you in the right mindset to create your role. So the next three steps are really about creating an actual role that I would encourage you to put onto paper and have as a reminder for yourself. So step number four is to clarify your values, to define a role for yourself.
Marika Humphreys:
Starting with your values is a great place. We often don't take the time to really think about and articulate what our values are in the various areas of our life, but we have them, and so when we put words to them and think about them deliberately, it can be really really helpful. Values are what we decide, the areas that are important to us and that give our life meaning in those areas, and they can really serve to anchor us when we're clear about what they are, because then it allows us to act in ways that line up with our values. But when we haven't articulated them, that's not, as always, a simple thing to do. To act in accordance with your values when you're not always sure. Well, what is more important to me here? So thinking about it beforehand is very helpful. So I want you to think about three to five values for your relationship. That part is important, thinking about it in terms of your relationship, because you may have different values for your role as an employee or different values for your role as a friend. So think about it in terms of your relationship.
Marika Humphreys:
I will link to a values chart in the show notes and I'm also going to give you some values here so you can think about this as you listen to this podcast. But you can also just Google values list and you will get several lists that just can help you brainstorm. Some values that come up for caregivers around relationships right are honesty, security are honesty security? Commitment, collaboration, compassion, cooperation, dependability, fairness, flexibility, forgiveness, friendship, fun, grace. I love that one growth. That's another one of my favorites. Okay, so I was going in alphabetical order. You can see reading off a list, but I do encourage you to find a list if you can't really think of them right now. You get the idea.
Marika Humphreys:
Pick three to five. Don't overthink this, just go with your gut. The words that stand out to you are going to be what's most important to you and I really like to emphasize that you can always change this later. The role that you create is just for now. It may evolve and it most likely will. As your partner's changes, as your life changes, our roles evolve and that's okay. And this process, just by doing it once, you'll have the idea in your mind and you can do it again or reflect and re-decide in six months time. Is this still relevant for me? Is this still what I feel works for me? So remember it's always shifting. What I valued in my marriage with my late husband when we first met was very different than 10 years later in marriage, and it shifted again when he got cancer. Those really change throughout time, so that's a normal part of the process.
Marika Humphreys:
Okay, step number five is to brainstorm your purpose as a caregiver. So think about your purpose as the who do you want to be in this area of your life, and just be careful to keep it focused on yourself and not the result or impact on other people, right? So who do you want to be? How do you want to show up? And I will just say here that our purpose shifts as our life shifts. As life changes, our changing situations, our purpose may always shift with that, and that's pretty normal. So if you think about your job or your career, your purpose, what drove you when you were younger may have been to rise in the ranks or to achieve a certain position. Over time, that might have shifted. Maybe you started a family and your purpose was to have more balance in your life or spend more time with your family. It is okay for our purpose to shift over time. Often, though, we don't take the time to reflect on how our life has changed and how that impacts what's important to us and what our purpose is, or how it's shifted. Think about this really in terms of who do you want to be as a caregiver and know that it may shift over time.
Marika Humphreys:
Many times I find my clients trying to be everything all the time right, and that basically leads to overwhelm and exhaustion. And I think I did that as well. I was trying to be a stellar employee at the time when my husband was battling cancer, as well as show up 100% for my kids and be there a hundred percent for my husband and just trying to be everywhere all the time. And you can't do that. We burn out right. We get exhausted. Okay, so the way to do this sit down with a piece of paper or think about it in your mind and just brainstorm. What do you want your purpose to be as a caregiver? What is important to you? Why is it important? Remember, you only have control over yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, so keep it focused on you.
Marika Humphreys:
The last step is to actually define the role of care partner for yourself. So this is where we sort of put all the pieces together Create a role for yourself that includes your values, and then just a few sentences about who you want to be, and you can even maybe include some whys in there. You might make a few versions if you want, just to see what you like, but the way to do that is look at your values list and then just put them all into one sentence. So, for example, I value acceptance, friendship, growth, honesty and communication. And then, in three to five sentences okay, try to keep it pretty short Look at your brainstormed purpose and just put the ideas together into three to five sentences. You may want to combine some things. Just pick out a few of the things that are most important.
Marika Humphreys:
So I wrote this process in a blog, which I will link to, but I will also. I'll read here what I wrote, and I just want to be clear. I wrote this not when I was actually a caregiver for my partner. I wrote this later, after he passed away and I was developing this process for my clients. But I was reflecting on how I felt at that time. So this is something I didn't do at the time, although it would have been so helpful. I really rethink now. Had I done this for myself at the time, it would have been very, very helpful. Here's what I wrote as an example, but you can take from this what you like or what resonates with you Value, acceptance, friendship, growth, honesty, respect and communication.
Marika Humphreys:
As a partner and caregiver, I want to love him. I can't fix his pain, but I can always offer love. I want to be a champion of his own inner strength, even if he doesn't see it himself. I want to be a champion of his own inner strength, even if he doesn't see it himself. I want to connect and be present. The present and moment is all we ever have. I want to be supportive, but also honest. I know this will be hard sometimes. I want to show compassion for myself and honor my own needs during this time, because that is how I show love for myself. In order to be the person I want to be right now, I know I have to take care of my mental and physical health so I can be resilient. Okay, so that is what I wrote.
Marika Humphreys:
Going through this process kind of later on and I will say it's a little long, that's not a bad thing, but sometimes when you have a role that's condensed down to a few things that you can have in your memory, that can be really powerful. But either way, it's fine. Just going through this process of writing it down will be helpful, and then I want to encourage you to put it somewhere that you will see it frequently. Maybe you look at it every day, maybe it's your morning meditation on just reflecting who you want to be as you go through this part of your life with your partner. This can be really grounding to have.
Marika Humphreys:
Okay, because often we are faced with situations where we have sometimes conflicting values or you don't know how to balance the role of taking care of yourself versus taking care of your partner. And so, just giving this process some thought and it helps you make decisions right, it can serve as an anchor. I like thinking about it that way. Our role can serve as an anchor and you can revise it at any time. Okay, I'm a big fan of being flexible and letting yourself be flexible, because so often we kind of think of, oh, this is the way it has to be and I'm stuck with this, and really we need to be able to adapt ourselves and how we're being to the challenges that we are faced with, because they change right, so being adaptive is part of being resilient.
Marika Humphreys:
All right, I know this was a long one. I hope this was helpful for you all and again, if you are enjoying this podcast, please leave me a review. This helps other people find it, and send me your comments. Tell me what you're struggling with as a caregiver. I will do an episode of frequently asked questions. So if you've got questions as well that you'd like me to cover common questions or challenges that you face and you'd like me to just talk about them, send them to marika@ coachmarika. com. I'll see you all next week.
Announcer:
Thanks for listening to this episode of In this Together. If you would like to learn more about Marika's work, go to www. coachmarika. com.