So my mum died when I was five.
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.
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.