LISTEN to the podcast of this blog post on Spotify:
WATCH the podcast video on YouTube:
In this series of podcast/blog episodes, I share real-life stories and experiences from my clients and people I have chatted with through a decade of working in the aging sector. Below is a summary of how each podcast/blog is outlined.
*Details of all podcast/blog stories are adjusted to ensure confidentiality of all parties.
In this episode :
- The Situation – What the client was experiencing or the circumstance they were facing.
- The Client – How the client was perceiving and responding to the situation – their mindset, emotions and result.
- The Guidance – How I helped shift their perspective to renew their mindset, emotions and result.
The Situation
Back in the fall I was attending a lot of holiday markets to promote and sell my Leaving Legacy journal that I created. And I started chatting with a woman about Age Planning and what I do.
This woman was probably in her 50s I would say…early to mid-50s. She started telling me a bit of her story and she had gone through multiple traumatic aging experiences with her grandparents and now with her own parents.
Her grandparents never planned for their long-term care.
She described putting her young children to bed and then driving an hour to her grandparents home to spend the night with them and care for them through the night, only to then drive home in the morning to get her kids on the bus and herself off to work.
She was the care team at night. There was no one else.
The Client
MINDSET & EMOTION
Like – WHOA. Talk about a situation to put you straight into a full cycle of burnout.
This poor woman – as she told me her experience, the mindset she had behind it all was that it’s just what she had to do in that season of life. She described how there was no other option for her family at the time and she wasn’t willing to watch her grandparents go without the care they deserved.
An amongst all of her description and explanation, was this deep sense of complete defeat and burnout and exhaustion. I do not doubt for a moment that this woman just craved support in that season of her life.
RESULT
And that experience has now resulted in a discussion that she’s trying to move forward in with her own children, but it’s getting stuck. So let me tell you what she described to me and what I mean by that.
Out of her past experience, this woman is thinking about her own aging, and she wants to be proactive so her kids don’t experience the overwhelm and distress that she went through in a family that did not prepare for the needs of her grandparents.
She’s trying to proactively talk to her kids about her aging and what that could look like and what her preferences would be, but she said to me,
”How do I get my kids to talk to me about it? Whenever I bring it up, they just tell me to make my plans on my own and they’ll do whatever I want them to when the time comes.”
Jess Davis
She was visually frustrated about it while talking to me. It was clear she’s tried to have the conversation with her kids and they just ‘don’t get it’ as she kept saying. And in my head I thought, you just answered your own problem but she didn’t realize it.
This was the sticking point that she was missing: Her kids don’t understand WHY she needs their conversation and input.
Of course they ‘don’t get it’. They in their late 20’s and they didn’t experience what their mother did in caring for her grandparents.
They don’t know what that strain and reactive struggle feels like. They don’t see the need to be proactive.
The Guidance
So I said to her,
“There is a reason inside of you that NEEDS your kids to be apart of your Age Planning – and they need to understand what that reason is.”
I said this and I watched her heart drop. She knew exactly what I meant.
Jess Davis
And she said with such a heavy heart, “There are four reasons that instantly come to mind”.
I could see her as she was saying this, transporting herself into an experience or an emotion or something that she hadn’t fully allowed herself to process and share with her children.
So I encouraged her and I said, “You need to work through those 4 reasons within yourself, and decide how you can comfortably present them to your children so that they understand WHY you need their collaboration in planning for your own aging.”
And it clicked for her in that moment.
I could see the lightbulb go off above her head and she understood what they had been missing all along.
RENEWED RESULT
Her demeanor and body language even shifted at this point in our conversation because she now had an action step to move towards proactive conversations with her kids. She had hope again that she could get through to them and not feel so alone in trying to plan for her future aging needs.
After she walked away and I was chatting with other people at this market event,
she came back to my table and she said,
“I am so glad I met you today, Jessica. I can’t tell you how meaningful this conversation was for me.”
And my heart melted y’all.
Jess Davis
This is my purpose.
- Helping families find Optimal Aging.
- Intentional Conversation.
- Proactive Planning.
- Autonomy in Aging.
That is what I want every family to have. It’s what I want your family to have.
And I mean that so genuinely and so humbly.
3 reminders before you go –
#1. Go check the show notes for any resources or links I mentioned in this episode that peaked your interested. (I link these directly in the blog above.)
#2. Please share this episode with a friend whom you think it would bless. Because in order for more families to benefit from my Age Planning resources, I need listeners like you to spread the word.
And #3. I would love to hear from you – email me with your thoughts on this episode, or to suggest a topic you’d like to hear on a future episode. Find my email in the show notes.
And remember, we’re all aging. Aging is the same as Living. And it is a privilege to live and to age.
Jess
