What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do EP 298

Welcome to your daily dose of hope.

I'm Phyllis Nichols and I'm glad you're here.

Today, I want to just talk about what you can do and you don't know what to do.

But in this situation myself here lately, I'm helping to take care of my mom who has

dementia and things have gotten sort of complicated and it's all new.

I've never done this before.

I've never held to deal with these issues before.

The resources I'm not familiar with, I don't know what all the options are.

So it can feel really hard because everything feels so uncertain, right?

And that can be the biggest barrier sometimes, the uncertainty.

And certainly, you know, we want to move forward.

I know in this situation, not only did I want to move forward, I really had to move forward.

I had to make some decisions.

Here's something I just want to help you remember.

You don't have to have every single answer, but you can shift from anxiety and into action

and give yourself permission to start asking yourself a few things.

And here's really the simplest way to get started or at least I found for me.

It's just asking yourself, what's the smallest useful thing I can do right now?

In my case, for a while, it was just gathering information.

It was learning what I didn't know.

It was asking questions to people who'd been in this situation before,

was finding out what kind of resources are out there,

and really educating myself instead of imagining worst case scenarios

or just kind of letting myself spiral because I didn't know the answers.

Sometimes it might just be something as simple as writing down some options

or maybe talking to a friend who knows you well who can give you some perspective.

In fact, sometimes thinking about what you might tell a friend

in the same situation you're dealing with can just give you that little step back

where you can see like, oh, hey, this is what I would tell her to do.

Gives me some good insight as to what I can do now.

Clarity often comes after we start taking action and not before it.

Every step can reveal something new.

And certainly, getting educated has helped me make better decisions.

But I don't know that they're all the perfect decisions.

I'm just doing the best that we can.

And that's really all that any of us can do.

This podcast is part of the Sound Advice FM Network.

Sound Advice FM, Women's Voices Amplified.