With Mother’s Day approaching I’m reminded of my mom and how she made my brother and I her priorities, even though she always had a very busy professional life and faced many challenges as a relative newcomer to Canada.
Without taking well-deserved attention away from who we typically think of as mothers, I want to acknowledge that many people take care of others in ways that are similar to the ways that mothers take care of their children: step-moms, foster moms, aunts, grandmothers, coaches, teachers and neighbours who look out for others since they all do things that are in the “mothering” category regardless of their “official” title.
The mothers’ role evolves as family members grow and age. At certain times in our lives we may be taking care of young children, and then at other times, we spend time taking a different kind of care of teens and young adults. Eventually, if we’re lucky, we’ll have grandchildren to enjoy. Yet the relative freedom of having young adults and (possibly) grandchildren who visit often comes at the same time as our parents needing more support and care.
Depending on our stage of life, our jobs and careers need to finance different necessities, and niceties. At first, its diapers and daycare, the sports, music and/or dance lessons; next comes college tuition, and maybe grad/professional school application fees; then there’s help with wedding expenses, help with down payments on homes. Later may come various forms of support during divorce or separation, or assisting our own siblings facing dire circumstances, and of course, elder care. 
Regardless of our stage of life or our gender, most of us need to build resilient careers so that they will provide a livelihood that helps us take care of our loved ones. And whether you’re a parent, grandparent, or someone’s quirky uncle, most of us do much better when we are working in healthy and resilient organizations.
Through it all, we feel more confident and less stressed out when we know that our livelihoods will allow us to take care of our loved ones. So, to borrow from the airplane metaphor, we should keep the air flowing to our careers, so that we can ride out sudden changes in pressure.
If you’d like to make sure your career and/or organization have the resilience that they need to survive whatever life brings, I invite you to contact me today for a free and confidential initial consultation by phone, email, or via direct message on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
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I/O Advisory Services – Building Resilient Careers and Organizations.™
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