Name: 'Losing a parent made me more resilient' | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2020-10-08T19:15:30.000Z
Duration: 4 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

I just didn't have the words to describe it.

It makes you so tough because it's just like

when you lose your primary caregiver when you're so young

and having to overcome that is the hardest challenge.

When we're faced with death I think that it's like that veil

kind of gets lifted up and we feel fragile.

You are faced with just sadness and numbness

and extortionate pain and sometimes it feels like a living hell.

for what was thought to be a routine operation.

My aunt appeared and she said, "Albert, your daddy has just died

and you have to be the man of the house now

and look after your mummy and your sister."

It's almost like a table, a leg of a table coming out

and so there has to be a kind of readjustment.

As a 10-year-old, I wanted to become a doctor

to stop other boys' and girls' mummies and daddies dying.

And that was the motivation, the purpose in my life

He said to his private secretary, "Have I done enough?"

And his private secretary, sort of, was taken aback

saying, "Of course Sir, look at what you've done world peace and so on."

And he said, "No, have I done enough to make my father proud?"

There may be things that children and young people take from it. \N \N \N \N \N \N \N \N \N

There's something about empathy - somebody who's been through

an experience like that may be a better listener.

Whether that leads to leadership or not I don't know.

I think the correlation between a significant early loss,

and leadership, particularly successful leaders

is probably to do with passion and drive,

and somehow at some level wanting to make that person proud.

There's a disproportionate number of children who end up in prison,

unemployed, etc. So the downside can be simply staggering.

Everybody is different, but what we know about grief

generally is that it doesn't really go away.

There has been different models of grief over the years

that have kind of said that it starts off overwhelming

and slowly gets smaller and smaller over time

but actually it's not really what we've found to be true.

is this concept of growing around your grief

and creating a bigger world so that you're not suffocated by the grief.

I have never, ever, been allowed to say goodbye to my dad.

People who have done quite a bit of work on it

found a way of making sense of what happened to them

and they've got this growth mindset as it's called,

they can be fantastic leaders - real inspirations.

They have a kind of optimism, ironically.

My identity and the things that I like most about myself

When you reach a point where you have accepted it

and reframed it into a more positive narrative

you have gained so much determination, so much resilience.

Compared to that, everything else is nothing.