EP03: Balancing Your Business & Everything Else: How I Dealt with a Cancer Crisis
In this episode, Toa recounts her dad’s surprising medical diagnosis and how it led to a complete upheaval of her family’s life and her small business. Hearing about how Toa dug in deep to put her family first, and learned how to also ask for help, we learn firsthand some of the ways a small business owner can face those unexpected crises.
Toa’s highlights from the episode:
The reality of trying of finding your role while helping through a crisis
The challenges of putting life first over work
The freedom of giving yourself time and space to prioritize what matters
The importance of asking for help from your community
Life and work can be messy and hard. We hope you find inspiration in Toa’s story for when life’s inevitable curveballs come your way.
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Quotable Moments From the Episode
“They discovered that he [Dad] had a bunch of tumors in his chest, and that is when he was diagnosed with stage three lung cancer. It was just a big torpedo in our whole life and it made everything else not matter anymore because it was just such an urgent situation. It wasn't like we had six months to deal with this. We have to deal with this now or he's not going to survive.” - Toa Green
“Because I'm not a physician and I don't really understand what's going on, but I can be there to support my family. The joke was that I became the medical Uber, so I was helping to get whoever needed to go to an appointment and making sure that happened, big shout outs to my husband, Mike, because he basically became a single dad as all of this was unfolding. And he said, ‘you go do what you need to do to help your dad. I will take care of the kids to keep our family and our house going.’” - Toa Green
“When you're in it and it's just so constant, there is no real time to process. I definitely had a lot of moments where I just would come home and I would just cry.” - Toa Green
“I’m really not that great at asking for help because I come from an immigrant family. So we just do things on our own. And just knowing and opening my heart up and opening our time and our space for people to come in to help us was such an uplifting experience and it was heartwarming and it was really something that really got me personally through.” - Toa Green
“There's just so many things that you have to let go. Being able to mentally know, okay, I'm not going to be able to answer emails, I'm not going to be able to answer Slack messages, probably not going to be able to call them back for like another few months. But just giving yourself that space, to have that freedom, I think, is so important.” - Toa Green
Connect with Toa!
*Production by Four Eyes Media*