I usually prefer to separate between my private life and my public one. However, at times this is almost impossible to do. Sometimes the boundaries simply can’t contain the tide. Sometimes, one side can not be prevented from spilling into the other. This is such a time.
Some of my readers noted and wrote in to ask why I was rather quiet recently. Few emails, few posts, very little communication. The reason for this is that I was too busy supporting my wife in her battle against brain cancer. A battle that she inevitably lost on January 18th. She passed away in our bed, tended for by myself and our children, surrounded with love. She left behind her no big dreams unpursued, no important words unsaid, no anger and no regrets, only happy memories.
But this post is not about my personal loss.
When Limor was diagnosed, it was a little astonishing and rather frustrating to find out how little the doctors can actually say with any level of certainty. They have statistics, they have historical results, but what these mean for the specific case at hand… even the world-famous expert that we consulted could not really say. We really had only one assurance – there is no cure. We may be able to delay the sentence, but this was going to kill her.
We were also fairly certain that regardless of the success level of the treatments, she will never regain effective use of her left arm and leg. We knew that she was going to die within anything between frighteningly soon and ten years from now. Everything else was speculation.
So what do you do when faced with this nightmare of uncertainty? How do you make the right choices? What can you do? What would YOU do?
I don’t know. I can only tell you what I did, and why.
The principles behind the 1-Day Executive Coaching system are those of Results-Focused Thinking. One of them is that our level of success is linked to our ability to derive our actions from the highest and furthest levels of desired results, rather than from the immediate, short-term ones.
In Results-Focused Thinking, Values are the highest level of results. What we define as our successes or failures, we judge to be what they are against the scale of our values. They are successes BECAUSE they are realistic manifestation of our values. Therefore, when your current actions are aligned with your true values, you can never go wrong. Whatever you do becomes a success.
The tools of the 1-Day Executive Coaching system are designed to lead the client this way. They are especially suitable for extracting meaning out of chaos and identifying what is important in any situation. I could lie to you and tell you how I used them to analyze my situation and make the right choice. However, the truth is that I have practiced them now for so many years, that it has become almost instinctive for me. I no longer need to follow a formal process or to write down the detailed Results-Map to get clear on my long term results, and what current outputs are the most critical to obtain them.
One of my main driving values is Personal Responsibility. I am the only person responsible for the results in my life. This responsibility is total, and cannot be transferred to anyone else.
It does not mean that I am responsible for random accidents, acts of deliberate malice or the basic laws of the universe. It is, however, my responsibility to choose and act to optimize and achieve the best possible outcome in every situation that I find myself in.
This value was the one through which I channeled some of my other driving values: Independence, Association, Realism, knowledge, Integration, and the underlying most important of all – love. Together, they immediately translated to the following conclusions:
- I am going to take care of Limor to the fullest of my ability. I will do whatever is necessary. I will do whatever can be done. I will never quit, never surrender, never stop.
- I have a responsibility to myself, to our children, to Limor’s own wishes, to survive this difficult ordeal and maintain the integrity of my personality, so that our family will prevail and that we will be able to rebuild our lives and learn how to become whole and happy again, however long it may take us.
So I cut back on anything that was not crucial, but I did maintain the key relationships, the key processes, that will continue to support us during Limor’s illness and will allow us to bounce back and continue to grow in the future. We rearranged the house and the studio and everything else to fit our new needs. We communicated openly and truthfully with everybody, eliminating the wasteful energies of secrecy and suppressed fears. We asked for assistance when we needed it, and received immeasurable amounts of practical support, as well as wishes and prayers from people we didn’t even know. We reached and consulted the best doctors. We did everything worth doing. As it happened, it was not enough.
Our sorrow is deep, but it is pure, untainted by regrets, unsoiled by “could have, should have”. We lost, but never surrendered. We were defeated, but we can take pride and consolation in having never wavered, never betrayed who we are or what we value. We hurt, but we maintained what is required to heal.
As I said, I no longer need to follow the steps of the method to find my way. However, if I had used the Results-Map to identify the critical outputs of the situation, I would have reached the same answers, because they are based upon who we are rather than on what we go through. I teach this method in the setting of Corporate and Business environments. It is just as effective for personal issues.
The unexpected pace of my wife’s illness forced me to postpone again and again the opening of the next Masterclass. But I have not lost my passion for spreading this wonderful tool and exposing more people to the benefits it can bring. I have enough experience on the internet to foresee that some people will view this post as a cold manipulation or my readers feelings. I don’t care. Anyone this far gone down the path of cynicism is not welcome in my world.
If you wish to learn this result-focused way of thinking, if you are interested in having this powerful coaching method in your toolbelt, now, once again, you can.
Limor David, “The Practical Fairy”