Consulting, Change and PSP: I Didn’t Know I Was Training for This

There is no training course for being diagnosed with PSP.

Nobody teaches you how to deal with losing abilities, independence and, ultimately, parts of yourself. There is no handbook for retiring earlier than planned, giving up driving, moving from running 5K to using a wheelchair, or coping with behavioural changes that can sometimes make you feel less like yourself than you would like.

Yet, oddly, looking back, I was better prepared than I could possibly have expected.

For more than twenty years, I trained consultants and advised clients on dealing with change. I remember delivering a training course in Madrid, and I think one of my slides contained words remarkably close to these: determination, agility, adaptability, honesty, trust, communication and positivity.

At the time, they were wrapped in the language of mergers, acquisitions, change management, the change curve and probably a fair amount of consultant gobbledegook.

But strip away the jargon, and we were really talking about something much simpler: how do you cope when the future suddenly looks very different from the one you expected?

I had no idea that one day I would need to answer that question myself.

PSP has forced me to live those lessons rather than teach them. It demands adaptability because the reality keeps changing. Determination because there are days when giving up would be easier. Honesty because pretending something isn’t happening doesn’t stop it from happening. Trust and communication because I increasingly depend on other people. And positivity, not because everything is positive, but because there is still so much good amongst the bad.

Looking back, though, my career was only one part of the preparation.

My faith prepared me. My family prepared me. My successes and failures prepared me. Even some of the challenges I would happily have avoided taught me things that became useful later.

Thank God—and I mean that literally—life prepared me far better than I could ever have imagined.

Of course, it also prepared me badly in some ways.

I’m a control freak living with a disease that steadily removes control. I like to move quickly when slowing down would often be wiser. I’m a perfectionist facing increasing imperfection. Some of the same characteristics that helped me build a career now make living with PSP harder.

Perhaps that is part of the challenge too.

Lean into the qualities that help me and learn to manage the ones that don’t.

There is no training course for PSP.

But when I look back over my life, I realise the preparation had already begun.

I just didn’t know what I was training for.