When Life Interrupts: Leading Through Caregiving

In this episode of The Impostor Syndrome Files, we explore caregiving. My guest this week is Cynthia Iorio, founder and managing director of Monarch Solutions, who shares how her own experiences of how caring for her terminally ill parents disrupted and reshaped her 25-year career and how this ultimately led her to redefine what leadership looks like.

We talk about the invisible burden millions of professionals carry as they juggle work and caregiving. Cynthia opens up about the moment her identity shifted, not just as a daughter but as a caregiver, without even realizing it at the time. From project management to emotional survival, she breaks down how her professional skills translated into deeply personal leadership, and how self-compassion became her most powerful tool.

Cynthia also shares why companies need to do more to support caregivers in their workforces and what actionable steps they can take to retain and empower professionals navigating caregiving responsibilities. We talk about the pressure high achievers face to hold it all together, the career impact of caregiving leaves and the mindset shifts needed to survive the uncertainty of caregiving without losing yourself in the process.

About My Guest

Cynthia Iorio is a Certified Caregiving Consultant™ and Program Management Professional based in Montreal, QC with over 20 years of experience working in Tech, Media, and Aerospace. Her life has been shaped by what she calls the privilege of caring for both of her late parents through their untimely illnesses, and she has a deep understanding of the sacrifices and triumphs of taking on an informal caregiving role. Through her business Monarque Solutions and Top 100 podcast Love.Transform.Evolve, which explores the caregiver’s experience, Cynthia is transforming perspectives in caregiving while empowering organizations to partner with their working caregiver demographic, turning a perceived liability into a competitive advantage.

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Connect with Cynthia:

Website: https://www.monarquesolutions.com/

Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/2p8WGa38RZUT0fSnzX836L?si=bbdd6c889ae34df3

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Transcript

Kim Meninger

Welcome, Cynthia, it's so great to have you here. I'm excited for this conversation, and I'd love to start by inviting you to tell us a little bit about yourself.

Cynthia Iorio

Thank you very much for having me here. I have been a fan of your work for a really long time. Your insights are wonderful and so relatable, and I'm so grateful to be able to share my story and talk a little bit about leadership and what I'm doing in this space. So my name is Cynthia Iorio. I am the founder and managing director of a company called Monarque Solutions, which works with small to medium-sized businesses to help integrate the phenomenon of caregiving into their workforce by supporting employees who are juggling family caregiving, informal caregiving responsibilities and their jobs and work. This is a passion of mine. It is something that I've come into based on two experiences I had throughout my 25-year-long career where I had to take a leave and care for each parent who was young and diagnosed with a terminal illness, sporadically. So you know, my career started in out of university, I went into marketing, and I worked a marketing job for five years, and ultimately went back to school to get a degree in journalism, because I had this, this view, this desire, this want to help share stories from of the world. And I didn't land in journalism, but I ultimately found about 10 years after, after I had joined the workforce, I found my passion in project and program management, and so I worked in various positions in it, firms and professional services. I worked for a business aircraft manufacturer and program management. I worked in it. And the first career disruption that I had was when I was 34 years old, and I got the call from my mom to accompany her to a doctor's appointment later that week. At the time, I was not married, I didn't have any children, and so of course, I said yes, I had a great relationship with my mother. And I said yes. And what I didn't know is that at the end of that week we would learn that my mother's stage two cancer that she had had two years prior that was supposed to have been kind of eradicated from her body, had now returned and metastasized in her blood, in her lungs, in her bones and in her brain. And it was a moment that you obviously can't prepare for and, became the first of, of two, you know, life-changing moments of watching each parent get sick and ultimately pass away. The, yeah, sorry, go ahead if you want to…

Kim Meninger

No, no, no, not at all listening and empathizing. I'm sorry to hear that.

Cynthia Iorio

Yeah, yeah. And I appreciate that it's kind of when I, when I talk about this, you know, I also like to gauge people's reactions, because it can be a really heavy topic, and I'm grateful that I'm on the other side of it to process, to have processed it, and I can see a great, you know, with gratitude. But I know a lot of people might also be going through this right now, so taking this pause, but So initially, in that moment, what I will say is I didn't know, in that moment, I was becoming a caregiver. I didn't have that… I didn't wear that title, I didn't have that identity. I just kind of went into project and program management gear and saw this one-year life expectancy that we've been given for my mom in that moment as almost a project. I saw it almost as weirdly we've been given an opportunity to do whatever time she has left in her life, right? And so I made the decision in that moment that I was going to move home and care for her. It was stronger than me. It was a little love and fire and passion, and I had no idea what I was about to jump into. So the first three months were of, you know, this trajectory, my mother kind of led the charge. She was the one who was the person responsible for all of her appointments and, you know, decision-making, but after three months, she was hospitalized, and that's when the need for me to step in and take on a much bigger role became very clear. I went from being the person who was following my mom her whole life to now needing to lead the discussions with medical professionals, and was ripped from my career I was not able, no longer able, to juggle all of the things on my shoulders and became, became the be all, end all for my mom, until she passed away in April that year.

Kim Meninger

Yeah, I'm so sorry for everything that you went through, and I know that your own experience has inspired the work that you do today. And I want to get into that in more detail, but I also want to just sort of stay in that moment for a bit and think about how that decision, or maybe even whether there was any pushback, like when you made the decision, I have to leave right, it sounds like part of it was this values-based decision to want to spend more time with her and to want to give her the attention that she deserved. But there was also a way in which you felt like I can't do these two things, take care of my mom and do my job at the same time, right? And Something's gotta give. So, can you talk more about that decision, and you know, sort of how it affected your career, conversations that you had with your manager at the time, like, can you just kind of paint a more vivid picture of what that looked like?

Cynthia Iorio

100% these are the kinds of things that creep up on you. The decision crept up on me, and truthfully, it wasn't even my idea. It was my manager's idea. So in the workplace, I always took a lot of pride as being a high performer. I was the kind of person who threw herself into her work. I was always someone who wanted to be a part of the team. I would, I would work the extra hours, I would go the extra mile. This was who I was. And so, you know, in those first three months of juggling work and care, I would have open conversations with my manager, let him know a little bit what was happening, and I would you know I was able to get the flexibility that I needed and ask for the flexibility that I needed to do some work after hours, if you would. And so when my mother was hospitalized, it was a day-to-day kind of trying to figure out what the demands were. And I was on the phone every single day with my manager, telling him, you know, it's going to be one more day and please send home, or send me. What else I need to do, or I'm trying to find, you know, other resources. And I know I'm these deliverables are for you. You know, I are due. And this was back in 2015 I didn't have a laptop. There was no work from home. This was desktop kind of timing. And so it was my manager who was able to see that, you know, this was more and more becoming something, that business was suffering, and I was starting to suffer, and it was he who said, you know, Cynthia, I'm based in Montreal. He said, There's a compassionate caregiver leave that you can take, that you can get government funding to care for someone who you can, you know, who's terminally ill, and your job will be guaranteed here at this company or a job at the same level, this might be something you want to consider. And it was in that moment that I realized, first of all, a, am I a caregiver? I don't think I'm a caregiver. I'm a daughter. And B, my boss is open to the idea of me taking some time. And the moment it became an option was the moment for me that I said, Oh, can I do this? I want to do this. What? What is that going to look like? And so it was a new path that I went down. But up until that point, I just wanted to hold on and do well in both areas, be there for my mom and, you know, be there at work, and this is one of the things actually, that is informing the job that I do today, is that in this kind of equation of care, of, you know, my role and responsibility as somebody who's supporting my mom, the healthcare their responsibility in caregiving and supporting somebody who's ill, the government's responsibility to have policies in place. It was my employer who was also instrumental in me being able to take the time off that I needed to and also create an environment where I didn't have to stress or worry about that. So it, it stopped being it didn't it was because the initiation came from him. It was not a decision of, am I taking a step away from my career and what's that going to look and feel like it was the permission to step into a new leadership role for my mom.

Kim Meninger

That's so interesting to hear you say it that way, because that is, sadly, probably one of the places you'd least expect, to get that kind of encouragement, right? I mean, certainly managers are human too. But as the, as the, the one who initiated that discussion, I think that may be rarer than we would like it to be.

Cynthia Iorio

And I think, but I think it was, you know, selfishly motivated. He kept having somebody who was on his team calling in every day saying, I can't be there, I can't be there, I can't be there. And so his productivity was suffering, and the team dynamic was suffering. And living in that uncertainty, which is so often what caregiving is, is living day to day in a reactionary state to, you know, at the whims of the healthcare needs of the person you're caring for. And so he kind of took the reins, knowing and understanding the resources that were available, and also having had a little bit of that history and that relationship with me, to plant that seed and also provide this kind of partnership and safe environment where I could take that step away, but he could also get his work done and restrategize on what needed to be done. So that was, you know, he was selfishly motivated, and I got to get this work done, and she's throwing us down.

Kim Meninger

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, too. And so can you tell us a little bit more about what you're trying to do in the work that you do today?

Cynthia Iorio

Sure. So I was fortunate. So that was the situation with my mom. My mom ultimately ended up passing away 11 months after her diagnosis, and I went back to work, and it was wonderful. And then, six years after she passed, my father was diagnosed with a terminal illness as well. And because I had done all of the therapy and all of the reflecting and I had healed from all of that, I went into this need to be a caregiver for my dad in this situation, it was a much shorter situation, but nonetheless a critical diagnosis, knowing that there were potentially things that the employer could offer that were available to me. So I was fortunate to be working for Microsoft at this time, or a company that had been bought out by Microsoft. And so I went to look at all the resources. Okay, does Microsoft have a caregiver program? I talked to my manager again, I went and reached out to these resources, and fortunately for me, there were these programs available. But I know that this is both, having worked in the aerospace company and working in big tech, they were the exception, not the rule. And so what I'm doing with Monarque Solutions today is I am empowering small to medium-sized businesses, companies with 100 to 1000 employees who don't necessarily have the structures, the financial bandwidth, the breadth of an HR department, who can develop these types of policies. I help empower them with getting, getting their employees access to the tools and the resources and the language through a platform that I have through one-on-one coaching, so that this kind of pressure that is inevitably going to fall on the shoulders of their workforce ends up getting mitigated. Right now, there are in the US, upwards of 39 million working caregivers in the US, and this is a huge burden and a huge responsibility on the workforce in Canada, we are 6.1 million, but the, the representation of the population is that 60% of The population is juggling work and care, and it's the kind of responsibility that creeps up on you. There's a fine line between supporting someone you know to go to an appointment here or there, and then the huge ongoing pressure and stress of having to help someone who is either aging or has a critical illness or suffering with a disability. And so the goal with Monarque Solutions is to not have to make these employers suffer, or, you know, ramp up all of their knowledge or, or become experts in the caregiving space, but to provide that leadership and permission to their workforce at a relatively low lift and their and the permission to their employees to access things that would take them a lot longer to potentially access and reinvent the wheel each step of the way.

Kim Meninger

And so I love that you're basically concentrating on providing the support and resources to the people who are in these situations, from both angles, right, the company and the individual, so that they don't have to do all the research that you've done, right? And I wonder too, because you, you made a good point about the distinction and some of the caregiving, caregiving types of activities, right? Like, I don't care for aging parents. I care for two children, right there. Like. Lives are a little bit more predictable. You can kind of work around their school schedule and you know, like what their calendars are going to look like. But to your point, then there are things that might throw you for a loop, if it's a diagnosis that comes out of the blue, or a crisis that requires a lot more hand-holding and support. So when you think about supporting individuals and organizations, I imagine there's a spectrum of kind of it. Do you, do you kind of see yourself in a certain like, if I'm the person on the on the caregiving side who's looking for support, do I say I'm, you know, I'm kind of like a two on a scale of one to five, right at this point? Or how, how do you kind of navigate the that spectrum or that distinction?

Cynthia Iorio

Yeah, it's an excellent question. And the reality is, is that there are some really amazing frameworks to think about, the phenomenon of caregiving. And I really try to get away from calling people caregivers, because it's such a title and an identity that is rooted a lot in imagery that is controlled by health care and government, which, you know, pigeon holes, the way we think about what caregivers look like and who they who they are, and what their responsibilities are. You know, health care professionals are not going to talk to you really about the financial responsibilities of paying your parents visa on time. And you know, needing to know where all of bank accounts are, or taking care of your ailing sister's house when she is hospitalized and you have to have a lawn mowed, like, you know, healthcare organizations, they don't do that in the marketing. So the phenomenon of caregiving kind of runs this spectrum. From a stage perspective. You can be an expectant caregiver, for example, somebody who knows that they have aging parents and will eventually need to care for somebody. And so there's this kind of preparation, this language around what are the things I need to know? So it's helping individuals realize the things that would be respond they will eventually be responsible for. And then you have another stage up, which is kind of freshman caregiving, when someone's brand new and they don't even know so I would help people, you know, using language of, okay, this is just landed on your plate. You are supporting somebody who's going through something challenging. Here's how you can approach this. Here are the strategies on how to approach this. And kind of moves through kind of six stages of freshmen that entrenched when you're kind of in it and trying to juggle all the balls, and then you're, you know, a pragmatic stage. You're in a letting go stage and a transitioning stage, and the last stage is kind of, you're reflecting back on your on your caregiving experiences. So there's, there's different needs through different stages, and it's really just providing language and accessibility to people to help situate, situate themselves in this spectrum of care. And the other thing that's really important is also helping people learn how to manage and lead themselves through these stages when somebody is supporting somebody else, one of the natural propensities is to say, you know, what can I do to help how can I help you? What can I do? And to go to the doing. A lot of family caregivers are high performers, and they're the ones who will take on a lot so they go into this kind of doing mode, and what they will often forget is the being mode and how they have to self-regulate, and how they have to include themselves in this equation of care, and so providing that perspective, that guidance, that kind of demystifying and breaking apart caregiving using actually business language, you know, using parallels with project management themes, using parallels with leadership themes, helping to talk about it in a way through different toolkits and workshops and stuff that I offer that is a language that they're accustomed to in professional business workspace. So those are the ways that I help people on this spectrum to make the synapse connections in their brains that they may otherwise not necessarily have the capacity to.

Kim Meninger

Well, and I'm so glad you brought that up, because there's so much value to what you're describing. And a couple of the things that jump out at me are, number one, just normalizing the experience, because it is a very intense, like you said, often surprising transition for you, and it's easy to forget that you're not the only one who's ever been through this before, right, that there, there are people and really. Sources, and, you know, just different ways of approaching this. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, as you said earlier. The other piece that I think is so helpful is focusing on caring for yourself at the same time that you're caring for whomever it is that you're caring for. And I think about this, and I'm curious what your personal experience was with this. It sounds like you had a supportive manager, but maybe before that issue came up, if that natural pressure that we put on ourselves to be everything, do everything, especially if you're high achiever, and maybe you've got some perfectionism in you, or maybe you've got some imposter syndrome, that fear that I'm gonna do this wrong, that you know something bad is going to happen. And so, on top of all the stress that you have about whoever it is that you love, that you're trying to support through this, you're also fearing for what are the consequences going to be to my career, and can I afford to take time off, even if I can get my job back, will I be behind in my career? Right? Like all the mindset stuff that comes up.

Cynthia Iorio

Yeah, I mean, listen, there are no two caregiving situations alike. There are no two situations of care alike, and there are a lot of variables that go into the, the way we care. There are your, you know, your own personal capacity. There is the, the person you're caring for, their want, need and desire for support, how they handle it and, and the condition, if it's a medical condition, or if it's just natural aging, or, you know, the complexities and the variables that go into that and it will, you know, what happened with my mom, because I wasn't attuned to it, because it was The first time that I had kind of been taken been taken out of this my life in this way, feeling like the rug had been pulled from underneath my feet. It was a complete dissolution and loss of sense of self and who I was. It was this breakdown. It was the it challenged everything that I thought I knew about the world. It challenged the amount of control that I thought I had over my life and the outcomes and how it was going to be. It challenged, it challenged the strengths I thought I had and the weaknesses I thought I had, and so on the, on the other side of it, when everything was said and done, and I talk about the therapy that I did and the work that I did, what I really had to learn was to exercise a self-compassion muscle. I really had to learn how to exercise this perspective of not beating myself up and accepting that I wasn't going to be perfect in these situations, and accepting that the uncertainty and going from, let's say, thriving in a workplace to now surviving just pure survival mode because you're being asked to react and operate at a certain level, but with an emotional deficit that, you know, to allow for this to exist and to not beat myself up over it. And so, you know, three of the greatest lessons that I learned out of this, that out of the caregiving with my mom that I applied with my dad and I, truthfully, I apply in everyday work is one, it's not one person's sole responsibility to care or support someone else. Two, your presence, whether with somebody else or with yourself, is the greatest gift you can offer. And three, we are where we're supposed to be, and these three principles, knowing and understanding that it wasn't it's not just my responsibility alone. So finding resources as quickly as possible, finding colleagues, finding community for myself in what I'm going through is which is critical to any kind of crisis type situation, that managing myself and taking those, those you're talking about, you know, mindset stuff, taking time away to either do some type of meditation or journaling for three minutes, even if that's it, getting control over that presence of being with myself and understanding that I can't be a million places at once is critical, and then the we are where we're supposed to be, truly coming to the acceptance of if life were meant to happen any other way than it's happening than it would. So I have two choices. I can either resist this and be a part of the chaos or I can sit back and strategize and accept and gain perspective and not just have my perception of the situation. So, you know, there's a, there's a lot of uncertain the when you realize that the whole, your whole life is uncertain, that you can't control anything, and that decisions, making decisions are the illusion of control. You know, finding the compassion to say, I'm going to do the best I can with the information I have access to today, and then, you know, make a decision, move forward, and if things change, then so too will I change and will I pivot.

Kim Meninger

Yeah, and, you know, I love the, I love the mindset shifts that are embedded into what you're saying, and it just makes me think about even outside of caregiving, people right now are feeling overwhelmed by all of the curve balls that are being thrown at us on a regular basis. Like he said, right, nothing is predictable. We don't have control over the external forces around us, we only have the ability to control how we respond to it, how we show up in these moments. And I think that you know that, combined with the, the natural tendency we have to look for the negative, right, like we're so self-critical, we're so hard on ourselves to be it's instead be able to say like, Hey, I am I'm handling it right? Like this took me by surprise, and I'm handling it right. There is a perfect way to handle it, because no one else has been exactly in my shoes at this moment, under these circumstances, there's no manual to follow. There are resources we can access. There are things we can do to make it easier, but to really find more intentional practices to give ourselves credit for how much we're doing.

Cynthia Iorio

100% you know, we are so much of our lives today, I find is curated. You know, so much of our everyone's trying to sell you a solution. Everyone's trying to tell you, this is how to go through life, or I'm going to make it easier for you. And sometimes you just have to also accept that life is going to be hard, and that doesn't negate or take away from all of the things that you're doing to help you get through it. And if you wake up in the morning, it means you're getting through it. It might be painful, it might be uncomfortable, but you are, you know, you are getting through it. And you know, there are things that, for example, that were highlighted for me in the caregiving that were my strengths that I could do, which was, you know, Project program management, organization, stakeholder management, risk, all of those things. And there are things that we are all good at, and almost like a parent looking at a report card and only focusing on, you know, if the kid has all 90s and one 70 and focusing just on the 70, you know, the flip side is to look at all the 90s, because it's not the it's not the thing that you're not good at that's going to help you through. It's the things that you are good at. So leaning into acknowledging, giving yourself that pat on the back of the things that do let you up, that do make you feel good, those are the things, the skills in any type of situation, regardless of whether it's, you know, leadership and caregiving or leadership in the office, those are the things that are going to help get you through and so angling on and leaning on and giving yourself that check mark is kind of necessary to survival through uncertainty.

Kim Meninger

Absolutely, and I love that you put business language around it too, because I think sometimes we feel like, Oh, I'm, you know, I'm just doing this other thing over here that's personal and feels like it's a distraction from my career, even though there, you know, we obviously there are emotional attachments that we have to the people that we're supporting. But I think it's important to recognize that you are pulling from the same skill set, right? Like you're saying the project management all these it's they're not these totally compartmentalized sides of yourself. There's a lot of overlap there. And being able to say, Hey, I know how to manage projects, right? You know, I know how to lead. I know how to, you know, have tough conversations. Those kinds of things are going to serve you in the capacity that we're talking about here too.

Cynthia Iorio

Absolutely, and if it's not, if they are not skills that you have, if you're in, let's say, a purely individual, contributing engineering type of role. Let me tell you, caregiving is going to help you foster those skills. Depending on your caregiving situation, you're going to have to sit potentially in a doctor's office and learn from the doctor about you know, what's important to them, and communicate symptoms quickly under time pressure, and then take that information and have to go back and share it with Aunt Betty. Aunt Betty, who doesn't speak. That language. And so that's stakeholder management. And then it's, you know, the skill that you need that if you have to speak with financial advisor, you know, making sure that you are organized, that you understand the numbers, that you're financially planning, that you're budgeting on behalf of the person you're caring for, on behalf of yourself. Again, you're building that skill. And so you know, changing the mindset or the framework to looking at the experience you're having as being actually investment in your skills that are ultimately going to be transferable, it shifts the experience from being as devastating as it is because there are, for sure, it's challenging to one that's also an opportunity for you to transform, evolve, grow, and, you know, just be, eventually be better in business and in life.

Kim Meninger

That’s such a powerful perspective, and one that I don't think we necessarily think of in those moments. Wow. Cynthia, this has been such a fantastic conversation. I so appreciate your sharing your own personal story and just the work that you're doing. For people who want more of you want to learn more about your, your work and how they can access it. Where can they find you?

Cynthia Iorio

I have my website, Monarque Solutions dot com, Monarque is spelled M-O-N-A-R-Q-U-E, I am in Quebec, so it's the French spelling. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Cynthia Iorio, my last name is spelled I-O-R-I-O, I'm on LinkedIn. And yeah, those are the two of the greatest ways to get in touch with me.

Kim Meninger

Wonderful. I'll make sure those links are in the show notes as well, and thanks again for being here.

Cynthia Iorio

Thank you so much for having me.