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Welcome to your daily dose of hope.
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I'm Phyllis Nichols and I'm glad you're here.
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Today, I want to just talk about what you can do and you don't know what to do.
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But in this situation myself here lately, I'm helping to take care of my mom who has
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dementia and things have gotten sort of complicated and it's all new.
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I've never done this before.
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I've never held to deal with these issues before.
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The resources I'm not familiar with, I don't know what all the options are.
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So it can feel really hard because everything feels so uncertain, right?
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And that can be the biggest barrier sometimes, the uncertainty.
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And certainly, you know, we want to move forward.
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I know in this situation, not only did I want to move forward, I really had to move forward.
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I had to make some decisions.
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Here's something I just want to help you remember.
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You don't have to have every single answer, but you can shift from anxiety and into action
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and give yourself permission to start asking yourself a few things.
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And here's really the simplest way to get started or at least I found for me.
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It's just asking yourself, what's the smallest useful thing I can do right now?
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In my case, for a while, it was just gathering information.
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It was learning what I didn't know.
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It was asking questions to people who'd been in this situation before,
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was finding out what kind of resources are out there,
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and really educating myself instead of imagining worst case scenarios
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or just kind of letting myself spiral because I didn't know the answers.
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Sometimes it might just be something as simple as writing down some options
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or maybe talking to a friend who knows you well who can give you some perspective.
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In fact, sometimes thinking about what you might tell a friend
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in the same situation you're dealing with can just give you that little step back
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where you can see like, oh, hey, this is what I would tell her to do.
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Gives me some good insight as to what I can do now.
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Clarity often comes after we start taking action and not before it.
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Every step can reveal something new.
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And certainly, getting educated has helped me make better decisions.
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But I don't know that they're all the perfect decisions.
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I'm just doing the best that we can.
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And that's really all that any of us can do.
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This podcast is part of the Sound Advice FM Network.
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Sound Advice FM, Women's Voices Amplified.