Transcriber: Naman Yadav
Reviewer: Michael Nystrom At the age of 46,
I finally became a child. For 46 years, I took on
the role of caregiver to my mother. You see, shortly after I was born, she was diagnosed
with schizoaffective disorder, which later became
a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. And as a child, I was convinced
that my birth had caused her illness. If she hadn’t had me,
she never would have gotten sick. But because she did, and it was my fault, it was my responsibility
to take care of her. Things were volatile
with my mom’s illness. She’d be good for a while,
and then something would trigger periods of mania
where she would frantically clean. I mean, literally, you could eat
off of our kitchen floors; they were so clean. Now, that might not have been so bad, considering that my parents owned
an office cleaning company, and I’m sure her clients did not complain
about the cleanliness of their offices. On the days that she was unwell, she would be in bed
until three in the afternoon. She would get up, she’d make dinner, she’d feed us, and off to work she’d go. She never missed a day of work
unless she was hospitalized. She’d leave at 5 p.m. with my dad.
They’d come home at one in the morning. And I never fully appreciated
the amount of strength that must have taken for her
to get out of bed on those days. After the frantic periods of mania
would come the crash of depression, And honestly, I don’t know
what I hated more: the mania or the depression. Because with the depression, it ultimately would result
in a call to 9-1-1 and her being hospitalized
against her will. I watched my dad struggle
as he made those calls. I could see he didn’t have
the heart, the strength, nor the confidence
in his English language to make them. And I recalled the very
first time I called 9-1-1. I was only seven years old. About a month before my 13th birthday,
my mom was hospitalized yet again. When I went to see her,
she invited me into her room. She desperately wanted
to show me something. When I walked in, I saw
that she had taken her blue spring coat, and she had laid it
on top of a yellow hospital blanket, kind of in a square pattern on her bed. She leaned in,
and she whispered in my ear, “You see this? This is the Ukrainian flag, blue for the sky above,
the yellow wheat fields below, where so many died for your freedom." Huh? I was really confused. Like, I have no idea
what you’re talking about. I was born in Canada, not in Ukraine. (Laughter) Then she continued
to mutter about Nazi spies, and that my father
had planted bugs in the wall so that he could listen and watch her,
and tried to poison her food. As a kid, I was terrified.
I didn’t understand. How could she possibly think this
about her husband, my father, that he would do those things to her? The next day, I came back
to the hospital to see her again. When I walked into her room,
there was a doctor and a couple of nurses in there, and they had asked me to leave because they were trying
to prep her for her “treatment”. Her treatment consisted of ECT,
or shock therapy. I watched as my mom struggled
and resisted against this, and they strapped her down to the gurney, and they began
wheeling her down the hallway. Frightened, I ran after them,
begging them to stop, as my dad held me back. And the entire time that she was
being wheeled down that hallway towards the elevator,
I could hear her screaming, “I’m not crazy! I’m not crazy! I’m not crazy!” When she came back from those treatments,
she certainly wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t anything.
She was mindless for days. That particular treatment happened
two weeks before my brother’s wedding. She'd been in the hospital for a month. They had let her go home
for the weekend to attend the event. When she got home,
nobody knew what she had endured. How could they? We didn’t talk about it.
We were ashamed and embarrassed. And that’s what stigma does. It silences us. So when she showed up
at my brother’s wedding, she looked every inch
the mother of the groom. But inside, she was suffering silently. And on Monday,
she returned back to the hospital. As a kid, I didn’t understand. Why couldn’t somebody help her? Why couldn't somebody fix her? And I thought, okay, fine,
nobody’s going to do it. It’s up to me. And hence the birth
of my identity as the fixer. This identity served me well
in my teen years and became solidified as my mother
tried to take her life numerous times, And each time resulted in a call to 9-1-1, and my dad and I being in the hospital
trying to deal with it. The more unwell she became,
the more frightened I became. And unfortunately,
when I become frightened, I pull away, I withdraw, I want to move into logic,
and I want to squash all of my emotion. I just want to deal with the problem. Now, unfortunately, when you start
to view people as the problem, your relationships become
really challenging and difficult. And her and I, woo,
we had a difficult relationship. We fought like cats and dogs. I became rebellious and angry as a teen. But underneath that rebellion
and anger was fear. I feared I was going to lose her.
I feared I couldn’t help her. And I thought, okay, if I can’t save her, then maybe I could save others,
and then I wouldn’t be a failure. And that fear propelled me
into a career in mental health. When I began working in mental health, I began working with individuals
who were living with diagnoses with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder,
and borderline personality disorder. And I felt responsible and accountable
for every single one of my clients' lives. My first epiphany happened
on a typical housing visit with the second woman
who had influenced me. And her name ... was Henrietta. (Laughter) And Henrietta,
oh, she was small but mighty. Oh, there she is, small and mighty. And she was living
with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and she was in jeopardy
of losing her housing because of her declining mental health. When I went to visit,
I walked into her apartment, I looked around and was like, "Oh, Henrietta, we have got
to do something about this. You're going to lose it all. We got to get you back on your medication. You need to see your psychiatrist
and keep your appointments with me. Or really, you're going
to be out on the streets." And she looked at me, and she asked,
"Have you ever had schizophrenia?" I said, “No, of course not.” And she said, “Then, why are you
telling me what to do? Why are you telling me
how to live my life?” I responded with,
“I think that’s my job. I’m supposed to help you,
and I’m supposed to help you stay better.” And she said, “No, no,
your job is not to tell me what to do. Your job is to ask me
how I’ve managed to survive for 30 years with schizophrenia.” My entire world tilted on its axis. Wow. Ask instead of tell. Could this possibly be effective? I didn’t have to have all the answers. Oh, well, I was willing
to give this a try. Okay, let’s ask questions. And so I began to ask
questions, lots of them: great ones, crappy ones,
all sorts of questions. And here is what I discovered: as I started to ask questions,
I could journey alongside of others instead of feeling like
I needed to carry others. The third woman in my life wasn’t someone
I had spent a lot of time with. In fact, I didn't know her very well,
and her name was Philomena. And Philomena also was living
with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Unfortunately, most of the time
that her and I were working together, she was quite unwell. She was seeing and hearing
things that I didn’t, and it made our conversations really hard
because she wasn’t present. But my gosh, when she smiled,
she could light up an entire room. So one day I’m on my way,
going to a meeting, and she stops me in the hallway,
and she grabs me by the shoulders, and she looks me square in the face
and she says, “Christine, an organization is like a fish:
it stinks from the head on down.” With that, she stopped,
turned and walked away. I was like, wow,
how could she possibly know that I was struggling with
the leadership in this organization? What did she see that nobody else did? And in that moment of clarity, she gave me a piece of wisdom
that I carry to this day. While working front-line mental health, all I wanted to do was fix people. Not just their problems, but I wanted to fix them. I kept thinking if I could somehow figure out what happened to people, that I would magically come up
with some solution to fix them. And over time, I began to realize
my need to fix wasn’t about others; my need to fix was about me. People didn't want it or need it,
or hell, even asked for it. But I did it because
it made me feel better. And I noticed I carried that tendency
with me when I moved out of front line and into leadership positions. An employee would come to me
with a problem, and I would have the solution,
and I would feel so fantastic. I would tell them what to do,
and off they would go, oh, so good. Ugh, and then I’d hear
Henrietta's comments in my ears. "Why are you telling me what to do? You should be asking me
how I've survived so long." I was doing it again. Okay, so the next time
an employee came to me with a problem, I began asking questions. When in the past have you
experienced something like this? What did you do? What was helpful? What, what, what questions
is what I started asking. And here's what I discovered. People have way better solutions to their
problems than I could ever give them. And not only that, but people became
a lot more accountable and responsible for fixing their problems. I didn't have to. It was just another reminder to me
I didn't need to fix people. Along my leadership tenure, I discovered
the world of executive coaching. Oh, it was bliss. It was an entire world
of just asking questions and not telling people the answers. And here was a place
that I could practice again, journeying alongside of others
versus having to carry them. Curiosity, questions, all became
a superpower, thanks to Henrietta. And with Philomena's comments, it reminded me of the importance
of not only working with individuals, but working within systems
to make work better for everybody. And so leadership development
became my passion. I just wanted to help leaders
be the best that they could be, so that they can create
environments of success for their teams. Because it is true, a fish does stink from the head on down,
and so do organizations. And I just want to help you as leaders
to have less stinky organizations. And so I began to teach
leaders how to coach, how to ask great open-ended
questions, be curious, and listen intently
to the answers being shared. And the leaders who applied this skill
discovered some remarkable improvements in a couple of areas: communication
and psychological safety. And when those two were in play, they noticed an improvement
in overall productivity. Our histories shape us. They become the M.O.
in the course of our lives, and sometimes our insights and ahas
come from some unlikely places and unlikely sources. I thank Henrietta for teaching me
about curiosity and asking questions from a person’s lived experience. I thank Philomena for highlighting
the importance of leadership and how leaders
make or break our workplaces. Both of these insights profoundly
impacted and shaped the work that I do to this day. These lessons, however,
they were easily - well, maybe not so easy applied,
in my professional life, but I could because they made sense to me because they were cognitive,
intellectual, and rational. I could see the results of this,
whereas the lessons from my mom, much more complex
and riddled with emotion. She showed me
that people living with adversity and mental health disorders live full,
meaningful and productive lives. She and my dad were married
for more than 55 years until his death. She raised three successful kids. She helped support us,
and she helped her children. She had friends. She and my dad managed a business. And she did all of this despite
having a mental health disorder. And yet, over the years, I just kept trying to get
to the root of her illness. I just wanted to discover the why. What happened? Why did she get sick? And underneath it all, I think I just really wanted to prove
to myself that it wasn’t my fault. As long as I kept my mom in the energy
of her illness over her wellness, I can never truly see her. Despite her successes, all I could see were the problems,
because when there are problems, there is a role for me as her fixer. It wasn’t until I was finally
able to accept the fact that I couldn’t fix my mom. I was going to love her for who she was. That's when our relationship changed. And then, letting go
of my need to be her fixer, my siblings and I made
the really difficult decision to move my mom into a nursing home. And much to my surprise,
she absolutely flourished there. I mean, she joined groups,
she played games, she did arts and crafts. She sang, she danced. She won a hip-hop competition
at the age of 92. (Laughter) She had done things I had never seen her
do in her entire life and my entire life. My final lesson from my mom wasn’t just in the ability to love
and accept her for who she was, way beyond the diagnosis. More so, it was for me to be able
to let go of my need to be her fixer. At the age of 46,
I proudly became a child, and she became my mother. Thanks, Mom. (Applause) (Cheering)
