How much of your Act Two is spent taking care of someone else? Your children, your parents, a senior someone, how are you managing this role? Not well? Well, you have come to the right podcast and are about to hear of a book Tanya has written that might ease this challenging journey. How are you taking care of yourself and the many other demands in your life while you're being a caregiver? Today, our next guest is going to join us in the conversation about how to navigate our best lives while taking on that role.

Meet Tanya Straker. She is on a mission as a family caregiver advocate, author and speaker; she wants to change how we think about and support the millions of women and men providing care for family, friends and neighbors. As a family caregiver and life strategist, she wants every family caregiver of a chronically ill adult to have what she had an extraordinary, life-affirming, transformative caregiving experience. For 20 plus years as a coach, trainer and hospital administrator. Tanya has indulged her passion for innovation and helping individuals and teams grow and achieve away from the distractions of her job, she became her own life coach applying all the tools of her profession to better her and her mother's lives. Tanya is also the author of 6 Life Hacks for Family Caregivers: Be your own coach and beat burnout.

Highlights Include:
“And it's really coming to understand and accept that role and be and feel empowered in that role. That's where you, that's how you beat the burnout is, is really aligning the comprehensiveness of that role. And the fact that you've done all these other things in your life, you can do this, right, I got this, you have to get to that point where you realize, yeah, I can do all the things I've done in my life, I can handle this. And I can do it in a way that is energizing for myself and for my care receiver.”

“...what is it that moved me from being exhausted and resentful that I was playing this role that my brothers are living in another state calling me saying you can do this? Okay, fine. I have to do this. Right. So I'm resentful and not feeling that I'm necessarily doing the job well. What moved me to feeling that I was living the best possible life I ever could and helped me deal with the fact that I wasn't bringing in an income. I wasn't contributing to my own retirement, right. My whole entire life trajectory had changed. What are those things? And I said, I need to write a book about it. I need to talk about the mindset that allowed me to have a different experience, because that's what's not being talked about - this incredible, emotionally rich experience.”

“I'm not suggesting in this book that these things don't happen. I'm not suggesting that I didn't ever feel sad. But what I am saying is that by putting wellbeing at the center of everything, no matter what came up, that was what was going to have to ground the day it was going to have to ground the experience it was going to have to ground, my life or else what was I going to say about having left my professional life to be to be doing this right? The message of the book is your life is not on hold. Your life is not on hold.”

For more information on Tanya:
Website: https://www.careyearsacademy.com/user/tanya/
Buy her book on Amazon at:  6 Life Hacks for Family Caregivers: Be your own coach and beat burnout.