From Race Cars to Caregiving: Jessica Soodeen Navigates Life’s Toughest Turns | EP027

Well, welcome everybody. I have a special guest today. Her name is Jessica Sooden, and she's from the cold north of Alberta, Canada, and I'm in somewhat colder, not colder, cold New Jersey today. So we're not going to trade too many notes about the weather, but it's probably affecting everybody, and we're going to have a little conversation about caregiving and how to handle it. And Jessica comes to us from a very surprising place as a caregiver, so I'm really delighted that she made the time for us today. So I'm going to let Jessica introduce herself a bit and tell tell us about her, Jessica. So

my background is actually in engineering, and I earned a mechanical engineering degree here in UC at Calgary. And while I was in university, I won motorcycle lessons. Never had any idea of motor sports or motorcycles or anything riding on the back with my brother, but I won these motorcycle lessons, and little did I know that that was going to step my whole life path into motor sports. So when I won them, I started going to the race track just to learn my bike now, my mom was a burns nurse, so she had all the motorcycle accidents were her patients, you know. So she wasn't very happy about about this motorcycle riding. But after a few years of being at the track, I started racing, and when she had come out to watch me race, that's when she said, Oh, wow, this is actually a lot safer than on the street. Everyone's going in the same direction. You've got an ambulance there or two, you're head to toe in gears. So she was like, she turned into my biggest fan. It was fabulous, anyway. So that that motorsport racing motorcycles actually turned in quite the obsession. I bought a motorcycle that I had to do work on like I had to change the pistons. I had to do the bottom end crank like this. I'd never done this before. So that was a huge step for me in a learning while I was still doing engineering work, but that was the paving stones for me to donate, sell, burn almost everything I owned, and pack up and move to northern Spain and Basque Country and earn a master's in race car engineering. So after working as a freelance race car engineer at the best circuits all over Europe. I moved back to Canada with my husband. I met a Basque man, and we got married, and we moved back to Canada about 12 years ago, where I went into corporate again, worked my way up the ladder, got a ton of leadership training, like I was so very fortunate in in the jobs that I applied for. I was very strategic about it as well. I was a global engineering director and and all of these things. And then after a while, I thought, Well, I think I'm such a special person, which such a diverse background, that I left and I walked away and resigned from my corporate to start doing keynote speaking and corporate workshops on emotional intelligence, social intelligence, situational awareness. And little did I know, right as I was starting that journey, my mom called me with a cancer diagnosis, and I dropped everything, and I flew to Newfoundland and was her caregiver for her end of life.

Yeah. Wow, exhausting to think about a very deep breath. Yeah. I think one of the things that strikes me so much about what you've told me is the situational awareness it is so important in just about everything we do, and how vital when being a caregiver, to be that alert that you can stay rational during the moments that are the most irrational things that you can imagine. So much of the unexpected happens. So I'm really intrigued about about those parts of your journey. And it it, while there are many, many, many different parts of it. It ties together in terms of the quality of attention that you're able to give to the subject at hand and the focus. I mean, I think if I were not well, I would want you to be my caregiver, because I see that that intensity and the understanding and good intuitions about what's going to happen, and you couldn't drive the bike if you didn't have those things. And so although all of these things kind of fit together, so what could we offer from that vast array of experiences? What are the kinds of notes that you would want a caregiver to cultivate in themselves to be less stressed about doing it.

Yeah, for me, for me to de stress was, the more organized I was, the less stress I had. So when I was caring for my mom, I really took the pages out of my when I was doing some project management in my. Corporate life, I really took the page out of that book to literally write in a book what all was going down. Because what would happen was, if I wrote down, here are the meds that I'm doing. Here are the effects of the meds. Here how much she's been eating today, or how much she slept, because that would affect everything, but writing those down made it so much easier for me to go to sleep. Now I was in the same room with my mom, so we were waking up every three to four hours anyway, but it allowed my brain just to relax, because I knew that I had her I had everything written down if we had to call an ambulance, because in in Canada and Newfoundland, specifically, they have an amazing palliative care team that you call 911, you say, I've got a special patient number, and they have a handful of ambulances just for palliative care. So even the palliative people are like, my god, like you and your book, this is so helpful for us, for when we need, you know, maybe some anti anxiety drugs that needed to be administered intravenously, or, you know, all of these things. But that really set me free. That really set me free was to write everything down. I think, I

think that's great. Once it's in the notebook, it's not something you have to keep thinking about. No, did she go to the bathroom? Did she take her medicine? What medicine was it? And so and that was, that was a real challenge for me when I had to take care of my dad all of a sudden, after my mom passed away, they were taking care of each other, a doctor and a nurse. You know, it wasn't going very well, let's just say, but I didn't know any of their meds. I didn't know what anybody was doing about anything, or how serious my dad's condition was at that point, either. I mean, I knew what was happening to him, and my mother would give me occasional reports, but I really had no idea of the global scope of all of this. So situational awareness wasn't even a possibility. But what I know is that the more you know and the more on top of those details you are, those are the driving forces there. Not all the worry about what's going to happen if, if he dies, what's going to happen if this all those crazy what ifs that could drive you nuts. You need to see real facts, and that's what yes about, yeah. So was there a challenging moment where you thought, I'm not sure I'm the right person for this? Oh my

goodness. There were times after four o'clock, wake up in the middle of the morning because she's moaning. And then there was some personal care to do. There was some extra meds to give. You know, you're calculating, when am I doing breakthrough doses of morphine or this, or that, all this. And there were a couple of times where it's like, four o'clock, 430 in the morning. And I just finished my care. I leave the room so that she can fall asleep a bit. And that was when I was realizing, like, I've got my mom's life in my hands, you know? And it was the sense of pride that she trusted me with it that got me over it.

Yeah, yeah, a new kind of bond, really, forages if things are handled well enough between the caregiver and the recipient, or you and your parent, depending on how you want to label it, that is like no other you know. It's not just being their daughter or just just being, you know, a sister or brother so well.

And a big challenge actually, was interesting when she had to go into the hospital for a little stint, and when she was about to come out, one of the doctors had told me, you know, Have you guys talked about potentially going to a hospice? And I said, we have talked about it, but my mom prefers having me, and she wasn't a very large woman. She was paralyzed for one half of her body, so she was quite bedridden. So there's a lot of different, you know, pivot lifts and very technical things that I had to do. But one of the doctors had said, you know, consider being her daughter as opposed to her caregiver near the end, if it's too much. And I really understood the value of this. And on the same hand, being the caregiver with the relationship that my mom and I had was being the daughter. Yeah, it was very curious, very curious

that intimacy that develops can be very dangerous, you know, and all consuming, or it can be the best time of your life that you really have that exchange. So. So I think so.

I think that situational awareness of what does your relationship need, right? And my mom was so acute I wasn't. Calling of giving that up, I wanted every second with

her. Yeah, yeah. I didn't want to leave my dad's side either. And we finally had conversations we weren't able to have when my mom was alive. So to both of us, I think with all the nonsense that was going on in the craziness of of his situation, having the time together was probably the most precious thing that ever happened to either of us at that point. So I'm also looking at another side aspect of your life. I was talking with another with a therapist this morning about helping children with when they were diagnosed as needing speech therapy, and we talked about how it's important not to look at life as a race that you're trying to win. So I'm wondering, since you've done so much racing, and you have, you know a body, you know that body, sense of it, and the feelings of adrenaline and so on, that kick in when you're going to be competitive, how does that apply when you're caregiving? Or how's that factor into your life, that race experience,

how it really, how the race of experience really factors into the caregiving is that you realize that you know when you get a trophy, when you win a race, even when you lose a race, that's a very small part of the moment. It's the journey. So leading up to the day that I knew that my mom was going to die, or that her partner was going to die, you know that that's going to be a very small moment of the whole journey. And I really could reflect back and think, Well, lap after lap, I'm remembering something different for this corner, for that corner. Well, every day with my mom, I'm learning something new about her, or I'm learning a new way to make her comfortable. And it's really not about that, that last bit, it is about all those laps that you put in, not necessarily crossing that finish line.

That's that's a beautiful way to think about it, that it's not the destination, but it is very much the journey. And I think caregivers have to take that kind of long, long view, especially because we don't really know what the ending is going to be. A lot of people think they can predict and you really can't. You don't know what a person's resilience is or or anything, until you really get started on this. So it looks like you've come through it all very well with flying colors, and with both sadness and happiness along the way, from what you're telling me,

and full disclosure, I think this is really important for people to understand and for caregivers to understand I've been such a strong force in what I've wanted my career, moving countries on my own, learning languages, all of this. I was full on depressed and with PTSD for a good chunk of time after my mom died, and I didn't know about the really acute identity loss that I was going to have for a short bit of well, it wasn't that short bit of a time. It was almost a year, but the identity loss of what am I doing with my life? You know, I just left my full time job to go and work as as a keynote speaker and to work as an organizational development consultant. But all that went away for a little bit, and I was very fortunate to be surrounded by my husband, who was very supportive in me being lost for a bit. And that's something that I would have liked to have known first, not in the way that I would have been worried about it, but I wouldn't have judged myself so hardly

being lost, great expression of it, I think there's, there's the final phase of caregiving, which is the separation part. And I do remember feeling like a complete orphan when my dad passed away and disconnected, and I had lost a business in the process because I just couldn't keep all the balls in the air, and I didn't know that was going to happen. So it was a real wrench for me to give up something I had worked years to to build at the time. So, you know, I can, I can feel for that, you know, real, real stress response of PTSD. It's not No joke, and it does happen to people grief. Grief is entwined with that. But there's some other things going on that we that we all have to deal with as well. And I think I mentioned that you were helping another relative to handle the end of life, business, work, which just comes at the whole wrong time, to turn your life into a business for the government and in order to put it out of business. So that that's another, another part of the the equation that we tend to rule out, but I think you're you're that overall wisdom of looking at it as a journey and studying each lab the way an engineer would, so that the next one is better. That's priceless. That is something that I will certainly take away with me, and I thought many of our listeners will as well. You can tell us a bit about. About how people can connect with you, because I'm sure a lot of people are going to want to do that. Where do we find you after the show?

Absolutely. So I have two main platforms that I used. I used LinkedIn, and I'm always open to getting private messages into LinkedIn or a connection on LinkedIn. And that's Jessica sudine, s, w, O, D, W N, and my Instagram handle for kind of more of the younger generation is the Jessica sudin and again, always open to connections. I have a public profile, and I offer 30 minute complimentary dive in. Let's figure out how I can serve, serve your your needs. And that could be, hey, we've got an AGM coming up and we want a dynamic speaker, or we've got a whole speaker day and we're looking for someone to wake people up after lunch or be our our closing keynote. I'm really good at closing keynotes. Just get everyone moving again. So that's how you can get a hold of me.

That's fantastic. So talk about your situational awareness. It really doesn't matter what situation Jessica is in, she can handle it and she'll spend for you. So I thank you so much for coming and talking with me today and taking the time, and I really appreciated that we had this time to chat, and I look forward to connecting with you again.

Thank you so much. Deborah, your work is so important, and anything that I can share, I'm I'm just blessed to be here. Thank you. Thank

thank you and everyone. Please look at the show notes for all those links for Jessica. We'll make sure that you can get hold of her and certainly connect with me if you're having heavy difficulty finding her, and we will track her down. Let's have a great afternoon, and thanks again for listening.