Should I Stay or Go

Should I Stay Or GoWe all age. At some point we are all going to die.

When you get the call that it looks like someone is on the other side of recovery you have some tough decisions to make. Should you stay or go?  When do you choose your family over your job? Every time might be your knee jerk answer.

In these times is that really true? When I was faced with this decision after getting a call from my brother regarding my father I was in Europe for work. Not easy to just jump in the car and get over there. There was a bit of coordination and additional cost involved. I also wanted to manage the guilt I was feeling towards my job performance.  What would leaving early do to my performance and effectiveness as a leader within the Finance group? 

Here in the U.S. there is so much insecurity, some imagined but some real about losing your job, or moving lower down the pecking order. This can be especially true when your focus and balance swings more towards your family. You need to figure out where that balance is and how to manage through it.

Call it real or not but I was really conflicted with deciding if I should have left Paris and jumped on a plane or stayed. The guilt I was feeling for abandoning my work was real, the money involved in the trip, the cost of returning home early was real and significant. I was comparing that guilt to the thought that he would pull through and it would be a "false alarm".

In the end, I waited a few days and then cut my trip early to go back home. The fact my boss demanded that I get on the plane and go helped the decision. Hey, maybe I'm the odd ball but it was a tough decision for me as I always try to balance work and home. But I feel good about the decision now. I think you need to make sure that the guilty feeling is not overwhelming and will not haunt you (on both the side of family and career). Replacing that guilt with the feeling of being able to say good bye is comforting. I know it was the right decisions but that didn't make it any easier for me.

Maybe it was a little bit of insecurity on my part and overly concerned about my job. But when I thought about it logically there was no way that leaving to go home would impact my job. But it still weighed on my mind.

It was the right call, my father passed away five days later.