Lisa Lisson - Navigating Life, Loss and the Road to Success

Good morning everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm also on the board of SickKids and I chair the Human Resources and Compensation Committee, which means I guess I get to do Ted's performance review. It's a pleasure to work with him every day. We're going to take a little bit of a journey here through my story. They say that what doesn't break you makes you stronger, and I've learned there's a certain X-factor in there, and whether that saying is true, I've come to think of it as a word called resilience. What I've come to think about resilience over the last 10 years of this journey I've been on is it's not just about grit or toughness or self-control; it's actually about suppleness or flexibility. Can you bend in the wind? I want to share with you today my story of resilience and how I've learned, like this Georgia pine, to bend in the wind but still find a way not only to survive but thrive. I also want to share with you some of the life lessons this has taught me both personally and professionally. So this journey begins, if you will, back in August 2003. My husband and I just returned from our family vacation up in Muskoka. We were there with our four young children. Our daughters were nine, seven, five, and three at the time, and our son was three. At this point, I was a vice president of marketing and customer experience at FedEx Canada. That Sunday evening after this wonderful vacation, Patrick and I sat on our patio sharing a glass of wine. We just put the kids to bed, and Patrick began reflecting about how grateful he was for the life that we had built together. I remember being a bit surprised about how philosophical and profound he was being in this chat, but eventually we went to bed so that we could hit the ground running the next day, like we always do. For those of you that are parents, you know that when we have children, we develop bionic hearing. I heard something at 3:00 AM. I'm thinking, okay, this is very strange. Where did he go? I got up and walked around the bed and saw him laying on the floor. I raced over to him and quickly realized that he was not breathing and had no pulse. Adrenaline was rushing through me. I immediately phoned 911. The dispatcher, who I'll never forget, walked me through doing CPR as I was screaming at my husband, 'Please don't die on me.' I had been with Patrick since I was 14; we were high school sweethearts. My seven-year-old daughter walked into the room and said, 'Mommy, are you okay?' I quickly went into mommy mode and said, 'I want you to go and sit on the stairs and look for the flashing lights.' Thankfully, my nine-year-old daughter, my oldest, and my son who was three slept through everything. The first responders arrived: paramedics, police officers. I remember a fireman just scooping me up when I was beside Patrick doing CPR and put me outside the bedroom and shut the door. I went downstairs to join my little ones, and a police officer was standing right beside me because they didn't know what was wrong with Patrick and they couldn't let me upstairs to get anywhere close to him. As ten minutes became twenty minutes, I went to the bottom of the stairs, and just as I got there, another police officer was coming down. I grabbed a hold of his arm and said, 'Do you have a pulse?' He said, 'Yes, we do.' That's all I needed to know that my Patrick was alive. They took him to our local hospital and told me that he had suffered a heart attack. They put him in a drug-induced coma because when the brain experiences a lack of oxygen, you need to reduce the swelling. I was in complete shock because here he was, 38 years old, super fit, super active. After a week of being by his side literally 24/7, the medical team did a brain stem test. There was no responsiveness, no pain response, no light response, really nothing. A team of doctors pulled me aside and said, 'Lisa, we don't think he's capable of having a meaningful life, and we suggest that you let him go.' I said, 'Is he brain dead?' They said no. I said, 'Well, we're both in our late 30s, we have four very young children, and it is true that he signed a living will stating that he did not want a life prolonged if it was not worth living. But I think when he signed that, he assumed it was a decision that someone would have to make when he was 80, not 38.' I told them that of course miracles happen every single day, so I was not prepared to let him go and I needed to know if we would get our miracle. At this point, I truly envisioned Pat waking up one day, coming home, and I wouldn't be raising the four babies without the love of my life. I really felt I could control this, that is what I thought at the time. I just thought that I could bring him back the way I always controlled everything in my life: through research, planning, preparedness, going the extra mile. Through my research, I quickly discovered there was a cutting-edge rehab center for people with severe brain damage about an hour from my house, and they agreed to take Patrick for at least three months. The doctor there was known at the forefront of brain injury treatment, and what I loved about her is she did not take no for an answer. Instead, she dedicated herself to finding ways around obstacles. She ultimately became my friend and a mentor in this new uncharted territory I was in. As months passed without Patrick responding to brain drugs or even simple measures that assure us of ongoing consciousness in this vegetative state, she taught me very gently to start to manage my expectations. She knew better than I would allow myself to. She pulled up an image of my Patrick's brain, and it was dark and black. She looked at me to see if I understood, and in that split second, reality came crashing into my life once again. I was being forced into realizing I was not going to get my miracle, despite how truly optimistic I was being. I'm a firm believer in the power of optimism, but she taught me in that moment that it has limits. The hard truth is that there is also power in knowing when to stop hanging on to someone or something that you cherish. Learning to appear to let Patrick go allowed the doctors to remove his feeding tube and do what else was necessary to ease him into his death. It was the most painful decision I've ever had to make, not only for myself but as a mother. Two years after his heart attack, we truly lost Patrick. He died peacefully in my arms at 40 years young in August 2009. I'm sure I don't need to tell some of you here that the death of a beloved one is like enduring an amputation without the benefit of anesthetic. That's the best way I could describe it. The grief came in waves that I simply had to keep my footing. In order to get through it, I realized that life suddenly takes a hard right turn and you slam into its fragility. The experience focuses you on what truly matters. Too many times I became witness to people losing their cool over trivial matters, wasting their energy on really small stuff that in the whole scheme of their life means absolutely nothing. I truly learned that if you are healthy and safe, then you are truly blessed, because everything else in your life you can fix. So many people forget this every single day. I began to look more closely at the idea of resilience. What did it mean? My mother said, 'Lisa, life is not about what happens to you. Although you feel completely paralyzed in your life right now and you can barely breathe, just remember this: you have choices. You have choices in how you respond to this.' That was a critical first step for me. I realized that I couldn't control the hard turn my life had taken, but I could focus my attitude and my response to it because I could control that. I could control my inner voice, the story I was telling myself after he died, which at the time was saying, 'I can't do this, I'm not going to get through this, will I ever be happy again?' But what my mother was saying is that I had the power to reframe. There was a study in 1998 that really underscores what I came to see. Psychologists interviewed the American diplomats and the Kenyan staff in Nairobi after a bombing. While many of the diplomats were traumatized even though no one was killed, the Kenyans experienced themselves to feel grateful and to feel okay because they framed that experience differently, less about the attack and more about their good fortune and gratitude for their survival. So we can frame how we look at things when we are hit with life forces. I realized I could control my life if I reframed. I came to realize that attitude is a choice. You choose your attitude every single day, no matter what is happening in your life. So back in that difficult time, I began to tell myself as I pulled myself out of bed, 'Lisa, everything will be okay. You've got this.' I had no idea what okay actually meant anymore, but I could no longer control what it meant either. I just had to believe that it was true, because why wouldn't I? The most important conversations we have in life are what we're telling ourselves. Think about that. Belief is the engine behind every successful endeavor in your life. If you want to succeed, you have to believe that you can. I'm not saying it was a walk in the park by any stretch of the imagination. I had to keep focusing myself on living in 24-hour increments. What does that mean? I had to stop living in the past. If my mind was going to the past, I would say, 'What is the life lesson I can take and be present now?' But if I wasn't living in the past, my mind was worrying about the future. Worrying about the future is a down payment on a problem you may never have. I had to manage my time and my goals in baby steps, focusing my attention on what I could control and influence, and truly letting go of what I could not. I practiced this to be present for my children when I was at home, to be in the moment, to be mindful with friends and family, giving them my full attention. None of those two previous approaches about reframing or using time compartmentalization, thinking in terms of baby steps toward my goals, would have been possible without another life lesson my mother offered me in that period of my life. She said, 'In the darkest of times, if we look hard enough, we can always find a reason to smile. Always.' For me, that observation turned into a very conscious and cultivated practice of gratitude. In a way, gratitude is the opposite of control because you're focusing on what you're grateful for. I thought about how Patrick could have been driving the car with some of the kids when he had his heart attack, and thank God that didn't happen. Or we could have just had an argument that night and never got to resolve it before he collapsed. But how amazing was it that our last discussion was about gratitude? He was expressing how grateful he was for our life. So I began very deliberately trying to live a more present and grateful life. I asked my kids every day, 'Tell me what you're grateful for from today,' and I asked the same thing for myself to ground me. In the morning, I would say to my kids, 'Let's wake up every morning and say today is going to be a great day, and we're all going to find a way to make it great.' I'll never forget when my son turned five, his room was beside mine. It truly is impossible to deny the pain of grief or life hardships, so I'm not talking about seeking silver linings as a form of denial. What I'm saying is it's the only way to get through it: day by day, month by month, by focusing on what you have to be thankful for and not what's been missing, until you look up one day and realize that the worst is behind you. It will happen. You will see the worst is behind you, and you relinquish that, let it be truly behind you, and accept what you can't change. Think about what brings you joy and focus on that. After Patrick died, in August 2010, we were coming back from vacation, coming home, and I got a call from our CEO. He offered me the position of president of FedEx Canada. I became the first female, the first Canadian, and the first female to ever run a division of FedEx around the world. I went into complete shock and said, 'Aren't you going to interview me?' He was offering me the job and I was just like, 'What is going on here?' That was almost a year to the day that he passed away. He just laughed. He's been one of my mentors, he still is. He said, 'You know, you've been interviewing for 18 years.' He always used to say to me, 'Use every interaction with upper management as a mini interview, and you've been doing that for 18 years.' He said, 'I've also told you to always let your intentions be known, and you let your intentions be known. Even after you lost your husband, you reconfirmed those intentions.' I really do believe that. Above all, the antidote is our attitude and being flexible to life forces, no matter how big or small, that come at us. It's how we respond. I've learned that happiness is truly a state of mind, and one that must be cultivated every single day. So find your blessings, find your footing, find your framing, and through that process, I promise you, no matter what life throws at you, you will find your resilience and you will ultimately thrive. Thank you.