Work life balance is something that is quite important to me as a leader. I always tell my team that you need a safe haven at either work or at home to help alleviate pressure and stress. When you are faced with pressure in both it is a real struggle. Since I can not control what happens at home. I can only influence indirectly, I try and do my best to control the work environment. I try and create an environment that has psychological safety. An openness to express yourself and not be afraid of making mistakes. Mis steps are an opportunity for growth and to learn. Mel will disagree with this as I am quite intolerant of mistakes in my personal life. They annoy me greatly..my employees or students though. They can make all the mistakes they want. I am seeing the impact of work life balance now. Not in my performance, but in Mel. She has taken on a new position at work. There is chaos in the house with the renovations and there is now the added stress of my health. Leadership carries a heavy burden of solitary responsibility as you are accountable for the team. When you are at the top you do not always have someone to lean on for help. Within our home where it was once a partnership it will shift towards a single person to guide everything. This is stressful as Mel no longer has reprieve from stress. Instead of having a partner to vent to at home about struggles at work, or the challenges at home she needs to bear the burden on her own. I have a reputation for being calm and steady in the face of turmoil when problems arise. I can quickly assess and see the path forward. She no need has me as a sounding board as she does not want to increase my stress levels. So now she feels more alone. Interestingly she does have a lot of support and people offering to help. Her dad and family friend who is helping out with renovations has told her that they will take care of it all. When they told her that she got about emotional with me last night. It is hard to accept assistance when you are use to carrying the full load on your own. It is difficult to know how to express thanks. What she is worried about is that she is not doing enough or being judged. We normally split chores and if I do something that she was going to do, her thoughts are that I am upset with her for not doing it. In reality, I see something that I can do to help ease some of her workload. I know that she is feeling overwhelmed with the amount of things that need to be done before the weekend.
We are away at a tournament this weekend and we will have people at our place working on things without us. So there is the stress of are we doing enough. I know that in the next couple of weeks we will be leaning on friends for help. It is a burden that all of our friends will happily share with us and they will not see it as trouble at all. I am also a bit of a hypocrite. I do not believe in charging family or friends for assistance, but will reciprocate to those that help me as a gesture. I still have not heard back about my PET scan. It has been confirmed that it is with them and they are reviewing it still. I hope that it will not delay treatment. The CT of my chest has been read and the fact that my family doctor has not called me would suggest that there is nothing in there that he feels I need to know right away. The benefit that I have is that at least I know where I currently stand in regards to what is happening. I know enough people that they can find out information for me.
Information about my cancer is spreading a bit more, some people whom I have not told directly know and it is always interesting to chat with them. They do not know if they should bring it up or whether I want to talk about it or not. I tell them that I wrote about it all publicly and I do not care who knows. I tend to be quite private about a lot of things, but not this. If I am quiet about this it is more work and people will worry about me. At least with this we do not need to update people individually and people can read how things are. It amuses me when people tell me that reading this is part of their daily routine. It has become part of my routine to write when I am waiting at an arena waiting for Xavier to go on the ice. Soon I will not be attending as much. A parent made a comment to me the other day about how our kids are a reflection of us. What we teach them and how we guide them is directly impacted by how we have raised them. On the drive home last night I was pointing out to Xavier that he kept on making a mistake. He got annoyed with me and told me that he knew. He said he was tired. I asked him how he thought he practiced and he said he was terrible all around. Typical Asian kid. On the bright side he remembered that A is average. He is hard on himself and is always looking to improve. He has a reputation for always being calm on the ice. No matter what happens he rarely gets rattled or shows much emotion. Every action is calculated and made to look simple. Turning complexity into simplicity. He is like me in that regards. I rarely get stressed by things and when I do show some sort of anxiety or stress it throws people off since it is something that rarely impacts me. I know that I am even keeled through this and it stresses Mel out as she does not know what I am thinking. She just wants affirmation from me that the decisions that she is making are the right ones. I need to make sure that through this I maintain communications. She will be leading the household by herself for a while, so it is up to me to make sure I communicate back to her the needs of myself and affirm her intentions and decisions. In a couple of weeks our life will be in a constant state of daily unknowns. The least I can do is provide stability in communication.