A couple months ago, I put forth five lessons about leadership and life that I’ve taken away from over two decades as Gabriella’s dad. As I noted then, my experience at a mission-based organization and my passion for leadership led me to consider how parenting a child with multiple disabilities made me a better leader.

Today I offer five more lessons:

1. Cherish Routines: Over the past 22 years, Gabriella and I have shared a bedtime ritual that we both look forward to, including reading stories, saying prayers and whistling songs. It can be depressing that the specific stories or songs have gone unchanged since early childhood, but the familiarity brings comfort to both of us. We’ve also had to adapt; for example, when she was younger I snuggled her in a rocking-chair, but today at ninety pounds she lies in her bed and I hold her hand.

The very idea of business routines, from staff meetings to planning and budgeting, raises the specter of tedium and bureaucracy, but management experts see many benefits. They create structure and build good habits. Routines also create opportunities to bring teams together, to engender fresh thinking, and even to have fun. Sometimes this results from the mindset the leader evinces, sometimes from making an unexpected change. Once I transformed a meeting about annuities by incorporating Lollapalooza-style music. Soon that got tired, too, and we had to mix things up again.

2. Keep Moving Forward: It’s natural to get paralyzed by bad news. So many setbacks have stopped us cold over the years, from the blurring of Gabriella’s pupils to the growing bump on her skull, but she depends on us to keep advancing every single day. We contribute in different ways: Lisa is pragmatic and action-oriented on medical treatments, while I remain optimistic and help push us through the endless waits and gloomy outlooks. Gabriella models this theme herself, as she loves to be in continual motion.

The day-to-day of the work-world offers many obstacles to progress. Lost clients, budget overages, unexpected twists in a career – each can slow us down, but they don’t have to make us stop. It’s important to understand why setbacks occur, but the post-audit should be swift, with accountability but minimal finger-pointing. Then we move ahead once more, with an action orientation and a sense of optimism.

3. Err on the Side of Patience: As my family would readily admit, I’ve never been a patient person. But life with a child like Gabriella can require great endurance. We’re forever waiting for test results, waiting for dismissal from the hospital, waiting for clarity about what’s going on. The famous prayer asks for the serenity to accept those things we cannot change, and it’s those unchangeable things that require the most patience.

It’s easy to be impulsive at work, wanting to respond to events or people. The demand for urgency is perennially high, but acting without thinking, or more so without listening, can cause real damage. I’ve attempted to balance acting swiftly and bringing a thought process appropriate to the situation. My rule of thumb is: the bigger and more complex the problem, the more brainpower, the more different perspectives, and often the more time, are necessary. While that sounds obvious, it’s not always the way events unfold.

4. Empathy is Felt more than Thought: Not long ago, I posted about what it would be like to be Gabriella. While the challenges I described were familiar because they happen regularly, I had never considered them from her perspective. Writing that entry forced me to think about her feelings, but it also offered insights about her very different, much more innocent, way of responding to each.

We’ve all heard that we should seek to understand the perspectives of other people in the workplace by “putting ourselves in their shoes”. I always thought it sounded simple enough: consider the situations they face and picture myself facing the same challenges. I realize now how much harder it is to measure how they might have felt, and why their responses might differ from my own.

5. Sometimes it’s Better to Receive: People are drawn to Gabriella, and they exhibit this attraction in different ways, with affection and smiles, and with gifts, as happened one evening on the boardwalk. A small girl’s generosity had a profound impact on our family.

As I progressed in my career, I found that colleagues and friends increasingly looked to me more for advice, whether on technical matters or about their careers. This was a great compliment, and I set aside time for coaching. To my own detriment, I was not so quick to seek guidance from others. (Who knows? Maybe I thought I knew all I needed to know.) When I announced my retirement, I was approached by a colleague I barely knew who offered his help in getting my new writing life off the ground. He’s become a good friend and I regularly draw on his wisdom. We’re all forever learning, and some of us could be a little more open to the advice of others.

I had the fortune to serve as a senior leader for most of two decades at a great mission-based organization. Long a student of leadership, I benefited from working alongside some amazing mentors and colleagues. My career offered many opportunities, leading strategic initiatives and managing products and businesses. But I believe my life as Gabriella’s dad also gave me insights that helped me become a better leader. Here are five lessons about leadership and life that I learned from my daughter:

1. Expect the Unexpected: Lisa and I are planners, and we had laid a lot of groundwork for our first child. Visions of my soon-to-be-born daughter in a communion dress filled me with joy. Then Gabriella arrived, presenting us with challenges we could never have imagined and reshaping my conception of the future.

Contingency planning is vital to many activities, but no one can anticipate everything. It’s more important to adopt an attitude of flexibility, so that when a Black Swan event happens, we’re not frozen. I can’t say I’ve always been as agile as I wish, but I try to keep an eye on the big picture. More often than not, that has enabled me to stay calm in the face of the unexpected.

2. Be Optimistic: Gabriella’s diagnosis at six months old was a paralyzing outcome. Instead of bringing hope and a path of action, Opitz Trigonocephaly offered only variations of doom. But we refused to give up, doing our best to remain upbeat. Our faith and optimism were rewarded when the geneticist recanted the diagnosis.

It’s easy to get dragged into the doldrums by bad news, whether in the media or our private lives, but maintaining a positive outlook helps. It doesn’t change the outcome, but it makes it easier to cope. And as ironic as it sounds, sometimes optimism means saying No and refusing to allow despair to win out.

3. Express Your Gratitude: Gabriella clicks to show she’s grateful, for a hug or for lunch or just for attention, and those clicks are sought after by family and friends. They also remind me it’s important to say Thank You.

The pragmatist might consider that being thankful increases the likelihood that the person being thanked will do another favor in the future, while the moralist might say expressing gratitude is just the right thing to do. Whatever the motivation, it’s good karma. And it’s never too late. While it’s better to offer acknowledgement soon after we receive the good deed or gift, I have felt pleasure as well at a Thank You for something I did a long time before. Almost as much pleasure as I get from one of Gabriella’s clicks.

4. Maintain Perspective: Our life with Gabriella has been a whirlwind of challenges and tough news. It’s also brought amazing rewards, as I’ve shared in some of the posts to date. One benefit of all this excitement is that it’s brought perspective to everything else.

When I’ve suffered disappointments at work, failed deliverables or squandered opportunities, I try to ask myself “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” No matter what, it’s never more daunting than what we’ve faced at home. This thought process helped me overcome my fear of speaking in public, despite being an introvert, thinking that no embarrassment was worse than some of the scares we’ve had in the hospital and elsewhere. With that said, sometimes I look back and consider how I might have done a better job maintaining my perspective.

5. Find Life-Work Balance: When Gabriella went into the hospital with dehydration, I realized that my life had changed for good. Everything that had seemed important a few weeks before paled in comparison with doing whatever it took to keep her alive. We altered our routines entirely, and while she was back in the hospital, Life took precedence over Work.

It’s easy to allow our careers to overwhelm everything else in our lives, and sometimes it’s appropriate, whether for client installations or project milestones or other big events. Likewise, I learned that week that our personal and family concerns can absorb all our attention. But I’d argue that those are the easy decisions. The key is what we do the rest of the time. I prefer to put life first as opposed to the usual “work-life balance” construction, just to shake us out of our norms, but the most important word is balance. I believe success requires navigating an equilibrium in one’s life: if you can objectively look at your week and feel balanced, you probably are.