She had breast cancer.

I was so aware of everything,

I just didn't have the words to describe it.

It makes you so tough because it's just like

when you lose your primary caregiver when you're so young

and having to overcome that is the hardest challenge.

When we're faced with death I think that it's like that veil

kind of gets lifted up and we feel fragile.

You are faced with just sadness and numbness

and extortionate pain and sometimes it feels like a living hell.

My dad had been admitted to hospital

for what was thought to be a routine operation.

My aunt appeared and she said, "Albert, your daddy has just died

and you have to be the man of the house now

and look after your mummy and your sister."

My childhood ended.

It's almost like a table, a leg of a table coming out

and so there has to be a kind of readjustment.

As a 10-year-old, I wanted to become a doctor

to stop other boys' and girls' mummies and daddies dying.

And that was the motivation, the purpose in my life

which has persisted until now.

He said to his private secretary, "Have I done enough?"

And his private secretary, sort of, was taken aback

saying, "Of course Sir, look at what you've done world peace and so on."

And he said, "No, have I done enough to make my father proud?"

It's called post-traumatic growth.

There may be things that children and young people take from it. \N \N \N \N \N \N \N \N \N

A greater sense of maturity,

a different sense of purpose.

There's something about empathy - somebody who's been through

an experience like that may be a better listener.

Whether that leads to leadership or not I don't know.

One would like to think it might.

I think the correlation between a significant early loss,

like the death of a parent,

and leadership, particularly successful leaders

doing great things,

is probably to do with passion and drive,

wanting to make a difference

and somehow at some level wanting to make that person proud.

There's a disproportionate number of children who end up in prison,

unemployed, etc. So the downside can be simply staggering.

Everybody is different, but what we know about grief

generally is that it doesn't really go away.

There has been different models of grief over the years

that have kind of said that it starts off overwhelming

and slowly gets smaller and smaller over time

but actually it's not really what we've found to be true.

What seems to make a lot more sense

is this concept of growing around your grief

and creating a bigger world so that you're not suffocated by the grief.

I have never, ever, been allowed to say goodbye to my dad.

And that image of him on my shoulder -

he never knew I'd passed the 11-plus,

he never knew I'd met a wonderful wife

who has been with me for 54 years -

that regret is also very, very powerful.

People who have done quite a bit of work on it

and work on themselves and they've

found a way of making sense of what happened to them

and they've got this growth mindset as it's called,

they can be fantastic leaders - real inspirations.

They have a kind of optimism, ironically.

I'm such a happy, optimistic person now.

My identity and the things that I like most about myself

are directly from being bereaved.

When you reach a point where you have accepted it

and reframed it into a more positive narrative

you have gained so much determination, so much resilience.

Compared to that, everything else is nothing.

It's a walk in the park.