Elizabeth Miller 4/22/25

(This interview has been edited and condensed for length)

Zack:  Tell us about your caregiver story from the beginning till today.

Elizabeth: Well, I've always been exposed to caregiving because I'm one of six kids and I've got an older brother who was born with an intellectual disability. And we recently found out he is on the autism spectrum as well… So, I live outside Atlanta, Georgia. My folks were retired living in Florida, and they had chronic health conditions my entire adult life… But in 2014, the stuff really hit the fan there. And my mom got really sick. She had COPD and was intubated and we thought we were going to lose her in the Spring of that year… She bounced back miraculously and many times after that would bounce back…  when she came back to the home in Florida, my dad was a primary caregiver then for my mom and my brother and he had his own health cocktail of things that he was taking care of. Well, he got sick and he ended up getting sepsis and within a month's time was a rapid decline and intubated four times… And then spent his last week on hospice and died…  

So at that point, my mom came to Georgia. My brother came to Georgia. My bachelor brother took my brother…  who has special needs. And then my mom had high needs. She had mobility challenges, COPD, diabetes. She had to have these leg treatments every day. So I worked. She lived nearby in an assisted living community… mom lived about a year and a half or so here in the Atlanta area while I was a sandwich generation caregiver working in my IT job…  Work was amazing for me. I'm lucky that way…  my CIO was a caregiver so he totally understood that…  he was great about like do what you need to do, work remote…  that doesn't mean that I didn't feel guilty about stuff and didn't feel like maybe I would get passed up for opportunities…

And then ultimately, care transition of my mom after the assisted living thing did not work, took a nice toll on my health and happiness and all of that. I started Happy Healthy Caregiver during that time. She went to live with my sister.  And my mom had like six bonus years with my sister because of the amazing care that she provided. The last two years of my mom's life, she was bedridden and on hospice.

And then my brother has been a little bit of shuffling…. He lives half  the year in Michigan, half the year in Georgia… So this gives my siblings a break. He doesn't live with me. He lives with a brother nearby about an hour from me here in the Atlanta area. They're roommates and I am like his primary caregiver when he's here. I take him to appointments. We make sure he's getting his meds. I help him get acclimated into different social programs and trying to figure out how we can make this more sustainable and then we pivot. The goal is ultimately for him to live in Georgia.

 Zack:  If we can go back to your CIO, how did you know that he was a caregiver?  

Elizabeth:  …  So even though the rest of the company didn't do a lot of remote work…  we were always kind of the little test incubator department for those kinds of things. It was a close group of people and so just in conversation he was a very accessible CIO… It was me, my boss, the CIO.

Selma:  In talking about caregiving for your parents and your brother, you mentioned other siblings. Sometimes siblings don’t always agree on what course of action to take. Can you share any of that experience with us?

Elizabeth:  Sibling family dynamics is a real thing for sure.…  We don't always agree on some of the decisions… most recently with my brother Tom who needs help… this whole thing about where he should live full time and should he live in a community with people like himself? Would he thrive in that environment? We are not necessarily all on the same page with that, but I'm definitely pushing some of that and I'm saying, well does it hurt?  It's not like these things we can't reverse… What if it's amazing?... Let's investigate and at least get the information.

 Zack: I know you've written a great book, a journal. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that?  What are some coping mechanisms that got you through some of these challenges?

Elizabeth:  I think at first it was definitely before there was a website, I needed some accountability and I needed some intentional focus on health and happiness for myself. So I started One Hundred Days of Healthy, posting on Instagram a picture a day of something that I was doing for myself. And that was kind of the precursor to then blogging. I started writing and then I found writing to be really therapeutic… I would go to Starbucks and I would write and I would weep while I was writing…  It was therapeutic. The Just for You Daily Self Care Journal, is a prompted journal with prompts, three sixty five writing prompts that help people prioritize their own health and happiness because I wanted them to try journaling without staring at a blank screen or piece of paper…

I had a book club of women that I still have this book club to this very day. They are people where we have seen all kinds of transitions together. We do read the book. We also do drink wine, and we have a lot of great laughs and conversation. I think finding support in that community is really important. I became a certified caregiving consultant with the Caregiving Years Training Academy because I wanted to help myself while also helping other people and so I felt like, let me just do this and then I really started Happy Healthy Caregiver because I wanted to quit my job. I wanted to quit my job and care for my family, but it didn't happen overnight. It took years of grit. But eventually in 2021, I did quit my job and resigned from my corporate career to be a full time entrepreneur.

Zack:  Becoming a certified caregiving consultant, how much of your experience have you been able to put into that role?

Elizabeth:  I think almost all, if not all, of the certified caregiving consultants are caregivers, or  have been caregivers at some point in their life. I do think that you need some of that to really understand it. I also wanted to become one because I felt like I don't have all the answers. Will this help me know all the answers? And really what it did is it said I didn't need to have all the answers, that I really just needed to listen to caregivers, validate their experience…

 Zack:  You just gave great advice to maybe a manager who might be reading this. That you don't have to know the answers, but I like what you said. You're just listening and just validating what you're hearing. Just being supportive is a lot for a manager to do.

Selma:  Over the last ten years as you're working with people in this space, do you find any trends that everyone seems to be dealing with?

Elizabeth:  I think there are trends… I think the pandemic certainly put more caregivers in the spotlight… I love that the the remote environment got tested… do I think it's the answer for every role? No. Do I think that [working remotely] can be a helpful thing for a caregiver? Absolutely! Even if you're just saving time on the commute, saving time in different ways that you can value add. But I think some of the topics that are still relevant and probably will never go away frankly, is like how do we juggle all of these competing things? You mentioned the family dynamics, Selma, -- that's a big one. And then how are we paying for this? That's why we need to keep working, many of us, while we are caregiving because it may seem like the right idea to stop working, but aren't we just kicking our problems down the road later?  Who's going to pay for our care?  I'm potentially going to live longer than my parents. Care is expensive. I think that's still the thing that really catches people by surprise. Medicare does not pay for long-term care…

Zack:  One trend I'm seeing, and I think you and I, Elizabeth, are pushing this on LinkedIn, is to put down your caregiving skill sets if you have gaps in your resume. From your own caregiving experience, give me the top five that you would list on your resume as skill sets that an employer needs?

Elizabeth:  You did inspire me, Zack. Even if you don't have a gap, let's put it on our resume anyway.  It shows that you can manage a lot of competing priorities. So for me, I think, decision making was something that I did a lot of, in making the best decisions with the information at the time.  We have to do that in our company roles all the time, right? You can't just wait until a perfect situation is happening. You've got to act… I think diplomacy among people… so many different opinions and things that come into play…  I think listening and really understanding where people are coming from and trying to find the root commonalities so that we can come to a compromised situation…  I think research. I've done so much research and advocating for loved ones in that way. And then I think just the organization of mass volumes of [information]… I can't be the only one who knows how to get access to these things, and we have to do that in a work environment too, right?

In fact, I feel like a caregiver role is a project management role. It is a big project management role. You have to identify the gaps on your team and fill them with either internal or external people who can fill those gaps for you. You've got to manage your budget, right? You're working with a limited set of resources and team members, and you've got goals that you're trying to hit and potentially timelines. Somebody has to be that person that's going to manage that big project and it doesn't necessarily mean they have to do all of the work. They got to find the right people to do all of the work. But that's how I feel about the primary caregiver role. And sometimes we're reluctantly taking it on because you know what? There's no pay like there is with a project manager role.  And sometimes there's not even one of thanks.

Selma:  What can we do to help change the perception of caregiving in this country? Because for the most part, it's not perceived as something that needs support or visibility.

Elizabeth:  I do think that for change to happen either in an organization or on a larger policy scale, we've got to let the cracks show in what's going on in our life. We've got to be vulnerable. We got to talk about it. We're not just, you know, 53 million in the U. S. caregivers. We're Elizabeth and Selma and Zack and we've got personal stories, and your project that you're doing here, is putting faces to that. And I think that is important and keep bringing that to the forefront. And then I think in our organizations, what I love to see happening is I work with a lot of employee resource groups in different companies. And what that allows people to do is with confidentiality, be able to express what's not working for them in their work environment without the risk of it being Elizabeth coming to HR… to say this is a problem.

So you've got this group that you can work with and then the group brings it forward and says, hey, this is what we're hearing from our parents and caregivers groups of the things that they are struggling with. And that gives a safe space for people to be able to bring up some of those issues and really kind of prompt change in that area. I also think we need the top of our companies to be able to come forward and be brave and say, look, I'm a CEO of a company, but I'm also a caregiver for my kid, my spouse, my parent. And the more that happens, I think change happens…

Zack: If you went back to the 2014 Elizabeth, knowing all that you know now, what would you tell Elizabeth in 2014 to get ready for what's ahead?

Elizabeth:  I think I would probably have a poster on my desk that would say -- Grace. One of the things that I say a lot of is, there's nothing I can say that's gonna make the guilt feelings go away for me or for anybody else. But I say oftentimes like when that “g” word comes up of guilt, replace it with grace and  know that you're doing the best….  We’ve got to give ourselves grace.

Selma:  How can people learn more about the Happy, Healthy Caregiver? How can they find your journal project?

Elizabeth:   It's all in the happyhealthycaregiver.com.  It will take you to all those roads, the journal, the podcast, the newsletter, all of it. I just hope it's a value for people that land there.

Zack:  You've got amazing podcast. If there is a manager reading this who wants to learn more about raising awareness and empathizing with caregivers, is there any particular podcast you would recommend?

Elizabeth:  Good question.  So the past couple years I've accumulated a lot of different resources, a lot of different podcasts and articles. And so when you go to happyhealthycaregiver.com, underneath resources, you can go to find your community. And under there you'll see “working caregiver”. If you go there, that's going to lead you to the working caregiver podcast episodes and stories. And then, you click on the topic. Click on the  “I'm a sandwich generation caregiver,” “I'm a young caregiver,” “I'm a male caregiver.”  It will give you a path to go to because it's already overwhelming enough. Like, how can we make it work?

Zack & Selma:  Thank you Elizabeth!