Caregiving – Don’t Do It Alone

You are listening to Boomers Today with your host Frank Samson. Well, welcome to Boomers Today. I’m your host, Frank Samson. Of course, each week we’re bringing important, very useful information and issues facing baby boomers, their parents and other loved ones.

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I’m not going to disappoint you today because we have with us. He’s the co founder of Soaring Families, Mike George, who transforms his personal experience into impact, helping families move from survival mode to resilience and enjoy. He leaned on his background and AI process improvement and enterprise systems to develop the Soaring Families Way, a structured yet compassionate approach that equips families with practical tools to regain control, reduce stress, and find fulfillment. So, Mike, thank you so much for joining us on Boomers today.

I really appreciate it. Thank you, Frank, It’s a pleasure to be here. Yeah. Now, it’s such an important subject manner, you know, As you know, I’m been in the industry for a while and helping families and sometimes the emphasis, which I guess it should be, but the emphasis is on the person that needs the care.

But you know, sometimes we forget about the person, the caregiver himself, who a lot of attention, and we’re going to talk about that. So tell us about, you know, how’d you get this started and give us kind of an overview what Soaring Families is all about. Sure, So I’ve been a family caregiver my wife and I for over three decades for our son Ben, who requires twenty four hour care. But he’s also a university graduate and when we jumped into this world of caregiving completely unprepared.

We had no idea what the future would hold. And in fact, a few days after he was born, we were told he’d probably never walked, talk or go to school. And so it was life changing, I mean, overnight things changed, and over time we found a way to kind of navigate that journey lots of lows and some highs, and at some point it became obvious to us that you know, we were we kind of had figured out some things that were making this doable, you know, and about ten years ago we my wife and I decided to, okay, we need to find a way to share this information to try and help families who are in similar situations, whether it’s for their child or you know, their spouse or their aging parent, on how to change this journey from all of overwhelming and you know, pain and burden into something that’s, you know, a better experience for people. And so we created Story Families in twenty fifteen, not really knowing where we could help, but we knew we had to help in some way.

And it has evolved quite a bit since then, but the biggest I guess change for us, and the biggest thing that helped us was understanding and admitting and realizing that, you know, caregiving is not a solo act, that none of us can do this all ourselves. We’re not built for that. And so we in our case, we built a team around us to help with you know, providing the care, delivering the care. And that’s that’s kind of our bread and butter, and how we show families how to sort of distribute the load and figure out how to make this a little more of I guess fulfilling journey rather than just you know, stress and overwhelm.

So so explain to me. So if somebody is going through this with a loved one, whether it be a child, parents, is it is it more of a community networking? Is its consulting? Talk to us more a little bit more about that. Yeah, community is part of it in a loose sense. And what I mean by that is when we’ve when we I guess started out, we thought we could bring people together to share their ideas, you know, and to sort of share their struggles.

But what we found is most people are pretty private about that and that you know, they’re not comfortable in those settings, especially if it’s virtual. And so while we still you know, have a have a you know, a fairly large following of of families who want to get that support, it’s the way they’d like it delivered is different for every family. And so what we’ve started out with doing is sort of meeting families where they are figuring out, you know, where do they need the most help now, and that’s through you know, products that we have tools and frameworks. There’s also online training we have basically on how to you know, find the right caregivers to support their family, and there’s other interactions that we do, you know, sort of on an ad hoc basis, depending on what the family needs.

You Know, when I started out, I thought, you know, I’ve been in this role as a family caregiver and as an IT professional for years, Like I know what people want, but it’s it every day surprises me and I’m learning more and it’s really all about you know, where do they need the help now and really empowering them to you know, bring back control in their life so they can make informed decisions on what what happens next. You know, I’ve read statistics before. You probably know this better than I, but I you know where someone is caring for a family member, whether it be a spouse or adult child, and I’m talking more of the seniors, you know, I’m we’re more in the senior space. I know you’re working with children and adults, of course, but where the adult child or spouse ends up getting sick and maybe even passes before the person who needs the care because of the stress.

So is that a true statistic? What have you heard and and what suggestions do you have for listeners that are in that situation or about to be in that situation where the stress is getting to them. Yeah, that’s that’s a great question, and I guess the Let me also clarify too that my dad lived to the age of one hundred and so my wife and I were I wouldn’t say we were his caregivers, but we were there to support him. He was a very independent person. You know, we were fortunate that his mind, you know, was was sharp up up until the end.

But you know, there were a lot of physical challenges. You’re not built to live one hundred years. Your body isn’t. And my mom, mother in law, actually is going through our own health challenges.

So there’s been a lot of variations in the type of support that we’ve I guess been asked to ask to give. But to answer your question around sort of that burnout and you know, being you know that that the family member would pass before you know the person they’re caring for. It’s it’s it’s a real thing like it. And that’s one of the reasons why we try to help families understand that you know, you shouldn’t be doing this all yourself, and it’s the kind of thing that creeps up on you.

It’s almost a death by a thousand cuts because you at the beginning, when you’re when you’re if you’re just perhaps been given a diagnosis or you have some oh no moment as we like to call it, you get into survival mode and you become sort of, Okay, I can tackle this. You know, we’re going to get through today, We’re going to get through tomorrow. But then little by little it becomes you’ve changed your whole life on how you do things. You you give up the things that bring you happiness and joy, you might have even to you know, quit your job to provide the care, and little by little it starts to have this burden and add up and and what families.

Many families don’t want to give up that control. They feel it’s their obligation and it’s something that they feel they must do. But one of the things we try to help family see is that, well two things. It’s you know, we asked the question, what happens if you’re not there, if you’re the primary caregiver, and what if something happens to you? Then then what who’s going to provide the care? And it doesn’t have to be you know, you don’t have to die to be that what happens to you, You could be anything.

You know, people get sick. You can’t provide the care every single moment of every day. And the second thing is to try and help them see that it’s not about them as the caregiver that you know, look at it from the family member’s point of view. And if you change your mindset into you know, who can provide the best support, what’s the support that’s needed, then it becomes a little more I won’t say clinical, but you can then compartmentalize that and say, okay, I can do some of the care, but I can’t do this part of it.

And then you start to see it differently, and then you’ve sort of elevated your role as the caregiver to not have to be their hands and feet every day, but you can actually you know, be the coordinator of that care and figure out what’s better, whether they can remain at home, whether an assisted living facility is better. You know, you can step back from that overwhelming chaos and actually start to make better decisions. So that’s kind of the support and the coaching that we help families transition into so that they can you know, make the best decision for their family. I mean, you’ve been doing this a while, not only caregiving fear, you know, your own child, but working with a lot of family.

What would you say is kind of the number one challenge that the families are confronted with, our caregivers are confronted with. Ah, I would say that it’s the you know, the the the the belief that no one else can help them. That it’s you know, I guess we’re kind of in you know, our society would tell us that, you know, you should be able to be independent and you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you it’s important to be that way, and we tend to not raise our hand and ask for help because somehow that’s seen as weakness, and so we don’t and we try to, you know, compensate and cover things up and do things all on our own. So I say, that’s the biggest challenge is that you know, maybe in there, you know, intellectually, they might say, yes, I can’t do it all on my own, but they’re you know, they’re hard to saying I have to.

That’s just how I’m built, and I don’t want to appear like I can’t somehow I failed if I can’t do it all myself. Do you think that that could be? Because it just guilt. Absolutely, there’s there’s guilt. There’s there’s a lot of you know, there’s grief involved in caregiving, right, I mean suddenly, especially if if you’re dealing with you know, if your spouse is going through dementia of some sort, Suddenly that person that you you know, lived with for many years is now kind of not there and your life has changed and you don’t want to become their caregiver, but somebody has to do it.

So there’s that there’s the grief of that as well, and then you know that can sometimes lead to you know, some form of despair. Right, and and depression and so it’s it becomes sort of a downward spiral if we’re not careful with it. Yeah. So, you know, just reading up a little bit about your organization prior to our discussion today, I saw something that said the power of getting out of your head and on the paper, can you expound upon that statement? Sure? So, a lot of caregivers they, as I said, they try to manage everything themselves, and a lot of it is in their head.

There’s there’s a mental load that they tend to carry and it just gets heavier and heavier as things change with the care and so, you know, because if they are the primary caregiver, then they’re the ones who know, you know, how to administer the medications or what are the preferences that my family member likes, you know with their coffee, or how do they like to get organized? And you know, what’s the routine to go to bed? So only they know. But all those things they try to keep track of in their head or it’s on scattered notes, or it’s you know, a little bits here and there. And one of the I guess one of the breakthroughs I guess for us would have was you know, when you start to write things down, when you start to sort of get it out of your head, then it becomes shareable and then other people can carry the load as well. But when it’s only you, then it’s only you that that’s carrying it.

And just the the process of writing things down changes how you see that task or that activity, and it actually then start you start to question whether you actually need to do all these things or at the same time, now other people can see just exactly the level of support that’s required, and that can be somewhat liberating. And the other part of it is, you know, you don’t have to remember it all. We’re not built to remember all these details around care. And the more you can sort of get it out there and paper is a is a is a media that changes how you see things.

And just the just as I say, just the physical act of writing things down or typing it on your laptop whatever. If it gets out there on paper, you can lay it out and see it and the whole your view of how the care is delivered changes. Right, right, Great, So Mike, we’re going to take a quick break and just recognize our sponsor and we come back give you the opportunity to share with our listeners more about your organization, how they can learn more, and we want to talk about your pink book, which is fascinating. It’s your personal caregiving companion that I think our listeners would be very interested and so we get back, well, we’ll address all of that.

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If driving retirement is the appropriate decision, then the individual and their family are offered possible alternatives, resources and a specific plan to ensure a smooth and successful transition from the driver’s seat to the passenger seat. So to learn more, you could go to www. Dot Beyond Driving with Dignity dot com and you can connect with a senior care authority advisor in your area. We are back with Mike George, who’s the co founder of Soaring Families.

So, Mike, it’s commercial time tell our audience how they can learn more your website and anything else you’d like to share, and then that will kind of lead into talking about the pink book that you developed. Sure. Thanks, thanks Frank. So our website is soaringfamilies dot com and I’ll offer anyone to reach out to me at Mike at sewingfamilies dot com.

And what we provide, primarily, as I said earlier, is really helping families understand and figure out how they can not have to navigate this journey alone. We show families how to build their team around them. We have training available to do that, we can do coaching and give them guidance along that. If but if families aren’t ready for that, if they’re not ready to bring somebody in to their home, then the pink book that we’ve developed is really a practical care framework that reduces that mental load of trying to carry everything on their own.

And in this AI and digital age, it’s actually counter to that in a way that because it’s meant to be a paper based framework that helps family get the critical information out of their head and onto paper so that it becomes shareable and it becomes a way for to ease the burden. So if if people want to know more about it, if you can go to new pink Book dot com. You can get more information around what this really does. But that’s kind of the starting point for anybody actually, whether they tend to want to do it on their own or whether they’re transitioning into other phases of care.

Really getting that information organized and figured out is kind of the main first step. So if you don’t mind just kind of give us a little bit of an outline of the Pink Book. You know what, what can they expect if they were to get the Pink Book and take that next big step of you know, not not trying to do it all alone. Sure, So, the the Pink Book is organized into a number of different It’s a digital download and a number of different plates that helps families deal with medications and nutrition and care routines, emergency procedures, you know, all the professionals that are in their life, and it’s to help them organize all that information into this into this framework and what it does is it helps to families to personalize caregiving from their point of view.

So it’s not you know, a home care agency coming in and providing them with a care plan. That’s important, but the Pink Book is not that. It’s it’s not a set of activities. It’s a way in which they can, you know, understand what the how they deliver the care, what it looks like in their home.

So the way most families would start out with with the Pink Book is most people have one or two or more medication, So it’s starting to get that information out and organized and start to build it from there. And then there may be some situations where you know, if you’re if you’re caring for your for your dad or your or your mom, and you know they like their coffee a certain way in the morning. Around this is how you prepare it and the specific things that are personal to that to that family, that’s what goes in the Pink Book, so that you know, if you’re delivering the care or you’re providing that support, you know what the steps are, you know what they like, but no one else would because it’s it’s only in your head. And this way it helps make care transferable and shareable, and then you know, if you wanted to step away for an hour, someone could come in and the delivery of that care would be consistent because now it’s part of the Pink Book and people then know what to do and the family member expects it a certain way and it’s delivered no no matter who it is.

So it’s really about helping them reduce, you know, a constant decision making because one of the things with caregiving is I call them micro decisions. We go through hundreds of them every day and whether we realize it or not, and so having that explicit and out there reduces that load and so they can actually make better decisions for the ones that really count. And I would think it will help and get organized so when they’re meeting with health professionals, physicians, et cetera, that it keeps them organized, so the questions that the health professionals might have, it’s right there. Right absolutely, yeah, yes, yeah, I mean, it gives them the structure.

Whether they realize that it’s they’re unstructured or they like structure, it helps them to give them that organization so they’re not just relying on memory or you know, if, as you say, if you’re meeting with a healthcare professional and the appointment’s a stressful one, right, you tend to forget some of the things that you that you know that you probably knew all along, and that leads to more incomplete information. But when things are written down, the conversation then shifts, right because now you don’t have to remember all those things. You have them sort of at your fingertips. Yeah, so those are listening that maybe they have a loved one that might be in some sort of assisted living or even memory care, you know, in a third party you know community, they may say, well, I don’t really need the Pink Book because I have now have they have their own caregivers in that community.

What would you say to that, Well, I guess I would say that, you know, there is probably some limitations if you’re under the care of somebody else on you know what, how much direction you can give. On the other hand, you know, the informing the people who are providing the care with this is how we do things, this is how my family member prefers things done, and have that written down. That can add to the care that they deliver and it provides a much better experience, and oftentimes, you know, when you’re in an assisted living facility or some other place that’s not your home, people will follow, you know, the staff and so on will follow things that are best practices, are things that they understand apply to you know, the majority of people. That personalization and customization they can’t do for everybody because they don’t know that.

But the pink book can insert itself in a way that it can make that delivery of the care far more acceptable for the family member, and the staff themselves would would be appreciative of knowing those things. And if it’s well organized and structured, you know, and not too prescriptive, then that just makes their job that much easier. Yeah, great, great, So maybe we could spend you know, a couple of minutes talking about, you know, the old saying, I don’t just I don’t know what I don’t know? Yeah, so. What a famili’s generally in your experience, don’t know, but they should.

Well, I think that most people go in, aren’t you know, They don’t raise their hand to say I want to become a family caregiver. Right, It either happens there are there happens because of some incident or a diagnosis, or they kind of back into it little by little, maybe there’s a slow decline you know, in cognitive function or something. And I guess what people don’t see is the I guess the cost that they incur by by providing that care. You know, as I said earlier, it really is death by a thousand cuts in a lot of cases, and they don’t see that invisible load and the fatigue and the you know, the decisions that they have to make because it just becomes part of their normal life and it doesn’t have to be that way.

That it’s you know, one of the one of the main things that we happen to focus on at Sowing Families, and it really kind of came to light a number of years ago, but we want to help families see that their caregiving life doesn’t have to be, you know, all a cost, that it can be a gift and the fulfillment that comes with it. So, you know, help them sort of migrate and rewrite that story from all of that, because they may not when they’re immersed in it. They don’t see the cost until something happens or they their own health starts to deteriorate, and then sometimes it’s it’s very difficult to recover from that. So helping them see that, if they don’t take care of themselves, if they don’t try to see that from a you know, how can other people can support, then it can lead to, you know, a worse outcome for everybody.

Got it? Got it? So, you know, I want to make sure that you know we finish up this podcast that you’re not thinking to yourself. Boy, I wish Frank would have asked me this. I really wanted to discuss this, but I guess we didn’t have the time. So I’m going to give you the opportunity here.

We only have a min or two left. Just anything at all that you wanted to share with our listeners, and maybe I haven’t asked you yet. Well, you know, I think we covered a lot really good, really good topics. But one of the things I think is, you know, to let families know that caregiving they don’t have to figure it out alone, that it’s and it’s not just a set of problems to be solved.

That’s what it feels like. You know, you have to go from crisis to crisis and you’ve got to solve this problem and do that. It’s it’s it’s actually an experience that that is to be lived, and it’s a journey that unfolds, and every person’s journey is a little bit different. And but if you can see things, if you can see things more clearly at each stage, then you can make better decisions and the you know, most people want to when you really ask them, they don’t want to be the person’s hands and feet.

They want to spend more time with their family member. And how do they do that? And that’s really what we try to help family see to move from that chaotic and you know, the grind of the care, to move them into a more steady state so they can make better decisions and see things better and you know, spend more time with with the person that they that they love the most. Right like George, thank you so much for joining us. Check it out soaringfamilies dot com.

Thanks Mike for joining us. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Thank you. Everybody, Please please be safe.

Talk to everybody next week. You’ve been listening to Boomers Today with Frank Sampson. To learn more about today’s show, visit Boomerstodayradio dot com and join us next time for another edition of Boomers today,.You are listening to Boomers Today with your host Frank Sampson. Welcome to Boomers Today. I’m your host, Frank Samson. Of course, each week were bringing important and very useful information on issues facing baby boomers, their parents, and other loved ones.