BW 154: Building a Life You Love After Loss: Emotional Resilience, Confidence & Manta Rays
Jun 10, 2025[TRANSCRIPT BELOW]
Grief. Hawaii. Manta Rays. And Healing.
In this episode of the Brave Widow Show, I take you behind the scenes of a transformative trip to Hawaii—and share the powerful life lessons that came with it.
From navigating emotional valleys to swimming with manta rays in the dark, this episode is a real-time reflection on how far I’ve come after grief… and what’s possible for you too.
🔥 What you’ll learn:
- What building a life you love really means (it’s not constant happiness)
- How emotional resilience changes everything
- The surprising source of true confidence
- A scary story about manta rays—and why I’m glad I didn’t turn back
- Why things can change faster than you think
🎧 Whether you’re newly grieving or years into loss, this episode is packed with encouragement, wisdom, and real talk about rebuilding a meaningful life.
00:00 Introduction and Upcoming Workshop
02:34 Personal Reflections and Gratitude
06:49 Emotional Resilience and Life Coaching
13:07 Client Success Stories
15:42 Personal Journey and Finding Love Again
21:59 Navigating Life's Challenges
24:38 Emotional Resilience: Holding Opposite Emotions
26:57 Building Confidence Through Challenges
30:42 Navigating Fear: The Manta Ray Experience
39:54 Applying Confidence in Real Life
43:29 Invitation to Coaching and Workshops
💬 Ready for your next step? Book your free consult here: https://www.bravewidow.com
💥 Don’t miss the FREE live workshop: “The Widow’s Guide to Beating Loneliness” → https://www.bravewidow.com/live
📍 Want to go deeper? Book a free coaching consult at https://www.bravewidow.com
🔗 Mentioned in this episode:
🎁 Free Starter Kit: https://www.bravewidow.com/start
👭 Join the Brave Widow Community: https://www.bravewidow.com/join
📅 Book a 1:1 Consult: https://www.bravewidow.com/consult
TRANSCRIPT:
BW 154: Building a Life You Love After Loss: Emotional Resilience, Confidence & Manta Rays
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome to episode number 154 of the Brave Widow Show. If you are listening to this in real time or close to real time, I am hosting a free public live workshop next Monday, June 16th. From 12 to one 30 Central Time where we're gonna talk about how no one is coming to save you. The Widow's Guide to Beating Loneliness. In this workshop, I'm gonna teach you the key things that you need to know and do to overcome loneliness, to kick loneliness to the curb, and to actually start feeling connected again.
Loneliness is one of the number one challenges that widows come to meet with, and it's challenging and it's frustrating because as widows and as people who are grieving. We're hurting and we want people to reach out to us, and we want [00:01:00] people to be there for us. And unfortunately, the vast majority of people just are not, they're not there for us the way we want them to be.
They don't show up for us the way we want them to be. And because in many cases, we withdraw and we isolate during our hurt, which is totally normal. We emerge after our hibernation period and realize like everyone is gone. And so what it requires to overcome loneliness, I'm gonna tell you. But the key thing that you need to know before the workshop is that no one is coming to save you.
People aren't just gonna magically show up at your door. If you're a homebody or an introvert, I know you wish that was the case. Or maybe you don't, but no one is going to magically do this for you. So I am gonna teach you the things that you can do. The control that you have in being able to overcome loneliness and to start [00:02:00] building relationships that allow you to feel fully connected, seen, heard, cared for, all of those things.
So I would love for you to join me at that free live workshop on Monday, June 16th. If you can't come real time, you can also watch the replay. To sign up, just go to brave widow.com/live. LIV. E and if you want to if you missed signing up but you still wanna watch the replay, you can still go to that same link and you should be able to find the link to the replay there.
Emily: Welcome to the Brave Widow Show, where we help widows find hope, heal their heart, and dream again for the future. I'm your host, Emily Tanner. After losing my husband of 20 years, I didn't know how I could ever experience true joy and excitement again for the future. I eventually learned how to create a life I love, and I've made it my mission to help other widows do the [00:03:00] same.
Join me and the Brave Widow membership community and get started today. Learn more at BraveWidow. com
Alright today I intentionally did not want to record today's podcast episode in advance. I wanted to record it last minute, which goes against. Every fiber in my body of trying to overcome any type of procrastination. That I normally struggle with. I've been really doing a lot of work to record episodes and write content and things in advance so that I have a nice buffer of time.
But today I wanted to do things a little bit differently because last week I got to go with Robert on a work trip that he had to Hawaii, and it was just. Such an incredible trip for a variety of reasons, and [00:04:00] I just feel such a deep sense of gratitude not in getting to go on the trip. Although of course that exists.
But just this trip was really a moment in time where it was like a mirror. It was a reflection of how far I've come, how much has changed in just the past two years. Guys, two years ago, I didn't even know Robert yet. Crazy. So crazy. And we've been married just over a year, but two years ago. I hadn't met Robert yet.
I hadn't gone to Hawaii for the first time. I was just about to go on a trip to Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, all in the month of July of last year. So a lot has changed in the last couple of years, and I. I was on this trip. I read a couple of really great books that I'm gonna be sharing some things with you about that I think will be [00:05:00] super impactful on your journey.
But it just as part of that process allowed me to really sit back and go, wow. Things have really changed in such a short amount of time, and I want people to know what's possible for them. I have so many widows or people who come to me who have been grieving for years. Who've been struggling and suffering for years.
One of my clients, Karen, you've heard her testimonial, you've heard her story on the show. She was grieving for almost four years before she found me Another consult that I've talked about. This person had been waiting for seven years. Seven years, and they don't feel better because they've been waiting on time to help them feel better.
So what's really remarkable to me is that. Even what Grief Recovery [00:06:00] Institute teaches is that the key to recovery and grief is action and not time. I'm not saying time's not important. It's not part of this recipe, right? Because it doesn't matter how many steps I take you through, how much I teach you, I can't flip the switch and tomorrow you're never gonna feel sadness.
You're never gonna feel grief. You're never gonna have a difficult time. Time is a component of healing of. Ling with God of figuring out this new, weird, crazy life, but. Time is only going to compound and grow what you're actively doing. So if you're actively healing and learning and growing time grows that and compounds that.
If you're suppressing, distracting and waiting time compounds that and ultimately can make the healing process more difficult.
So today coming from a place of deep gratitude and [00:07:00] appreciation, not only for the trip and the opportunity to have experienced it. But just where I am in life and where I am able to help other widows and other grievers get to. I wanted to wait to record this podcast until I was in this zone, until I was ready to really share deeply from my heart.
I like to start out by talking about what it means when I say. You can have a life that you love again, because it can sound very like pie in the sky, rose colored glasses. Oh, I love my life. Everything's great. I'm never sad. I never have difficult days. And that simply isn't true. So when I talk about having a life that you love, I'm not talking about a life that keeps you in this state of.
Happiness, quote unquote, happiness all the [00:08:00] time, every day. I just feel happy. And I'm gonna talk in a future episode more about emotional resilience and about emotions and what we should expect, because sometimes I think we get caught up in this thought that we should feel happy all the time.
That's the goal, is that we feel happy. And what's interesting is that before I learned about emotional resilience and before I learned about life coaching and all of these things, I would notice periods of time in my life where I would be like really happy and then. Maybe a few days later I was having a difficult time and I would be sad, and I was just noticing these big emotional changes and I'm like, why can't I just be happy?
Why can't I just be happy? Why can't I just stay happy all the time? And over time I started to realize that when you're in these moments or these seasons where you're happy and you're on top of the world [00:09:00] to. Really savor and enjoy and appreciate those moments because that is not the peak of life. That is not the point of life is to be in an emotional state where we're just happy all the time.
Our emotional baseline, if you will, is in a much more neutral place. I think of it more as feeling grounded, as feeling peaceful. As feeling filled with purpose and intention, like that is a very neutral in the middle, peaceful, calm place to be. And that for me has really become the baseline. So when I talk about having a life that I love, it doesn't mean that I don't experience negative emotion, doesn't mean that I don't have days that are still hard.
And I'm gonna share some examples of exactly what I'm [00:10:00] talking about here, but as I speak to you about having a life that you can love again. It's not to say that you don't experience tough emotions, bad days, hard times, but that you can wake up in the morning and go, ah, I really, I'm enjoying life. I really love my life.
I feel. Grounded. I feel peaceful. I feel that I have a life of intention and one of the things that I teach all of my clients is how to build that emotional resilience, which means when you're having those happy times and you're on top of the world and you're experiencing these really big, wonderful emotions that you can embrace and savor and enjoy that knowing that you're not gonna stay there forever.
And when you're having those just really difficult times, those hard moments, the fear, the doubt, the anger, the hurt, all of that is that you know that you can go through that [00:11:00] season or that period of time knowing that you're gonna come back to the middle. You're gonna come back to a place that's calm, that's peaceful, and that's really back to what your baseline is.
As someone with emotional resilience, you're able to make those changes more and more quickly over time so that you don't have a bad day and it ruins your week, or it ruins your month, or affects you for the next three months, but you're able to go through those difficult times knowing that your compass is set back to a place of baseline and a place where you are more emotionally regulated. So maybe one way to think about it is this. When you live in a place like Arkansas, we experience all four seasons. Winter, spring, autumn, summer, I went totally outta order there. Okay. Winter, spring, summer, autumn, all of the four seasons.
[00:12:00] When you live in a place like Hawaii, one of the things that they shared there is that the temperature and the seasons really don't change. They might have a rainy season, they might have a little bit of a warmer season. One of the guys that was giving touring us around the properties said, in the summer it's about two degrees hotter.
That's about the biggest difference. Otherwise it's the same temperature year round. And so in our minds, we might think that. The point of life or our goal in living our life is to live in Hawaii where we're always happy. It's a great, 75 degrees. The weather is great. There's little pop-up rainstorms here and there, but for the most part, it's the same.
It's just. Life is the same every day. We can wake up and pretty much expect the same thing. It's beautiful, it's great, it's wonderful. And in our minds we think when I have a life that I love, it's going to be like that. Like I'm just gonna love my life. And in reality, having a life that you love is [00:13:00] like.
Living in a place where I do Arkansas, where you're experiencing all four seasons. You're experiencing the cold of winter, the heat of summer, the storms that happen in the springtime, the coolness and crispness of the air in autumn, you're experiencing all of these different seasons knowing that you are not staying in one season permanently and knowing that you're gonna come overall back to.
Like a baseline. You're gonna experience highs, you're gonna experience lows, you're gonna experience fears and doubts and all of those things, but you can love your life and embrace all of those really big emotions together.
Now when it comes to having a full, vibrant, abundant life that you love, I often talk about clients that get really fast results. So let's think about my client, Karen, who's very open in sharing her story and her testimonial, and [00:14:00] I am for forever grateful for that. When she and I first started working together, she had been grieving close to four years and struggling for four years over the loss of her husband.
As we are working together, she noticed a huge shift in just the first three months of working together. Now, I want you to think about that from struggling for four years where he, she has openly shared. She was to a point where she was almost gonna be terminated from her job because it was to a point where she was struggling to, within three months, that same employer saying, what have you been doing?
You are so different. Not only do we wanna know what you're doing, but we're gonna help continue to pay for it. Over this foreseeable future so that you continue to grow and develop and get the support that you need. So think about how momentous, how [00:15:00] significant of a shift in three months that you can experience now.
Does that mean Karen and I are finished working together? No. Does it mean that she isn't still learning or that she doesn't have hard times or that she doesn't still feel sad? Or that setting boundaries isn't still a practice and something that we work on? Absolutely not. But think about what changes that you could experience just within the first.
One to three months of coaching that would not only shift how you felt about your life and how you interacted with the world around you, but caused other people to go, Hey, what are you doing? What's different about you? I've noticed you've definitely gone through some changes. What? What would change that significantly in your life in just a few months?
So when you think about creating a life that you love, creating a [00:16:00] life that brings you hope, that brings you inspiration, that completely changes the tra trajectory of where you're headed with your life, what I want you to hear is that things can change much more quickly than you ever expect.
This was one of the things that I reflected on most recently on our trip to Hawaii. Two years ago. I didn't know Robert. In fact, two years ago at the end of May, I was at my life coach graduation, getting my certificate and celebrating the six months of dedicated work that my classmates and I had done to become certified life coaches.
And we were in Key Largo at my coach, Dr. Betsy's place and. We were planting our vision and our dreams for the future. And in fact, in May I had been talking with one of my fellow classmates about dating again and. She was [00:17:00] asking me about Nathan and my first husband, and you know what? He would've thought about me dating again, and I was feeling a little bitter that day, because so many people say, oh, your spouse would want you to be happy.
But I remember laughing with her about it and saying no, he wouldn't, like when he was here, he was very clear if anything ever happened to him, he didn't want me to date again. He didn't want me to get remarried again. And then. Fact, it was a joke that, the Bible says in heaven we're not gonna be married.
We're gonna be like the angels, like we're not married, we're not given into marriage. And he would joke and say, Nope, no angel boyfriends for you. You and I we're married for eternity. That's it. I'm gonna hang out with you in heaven all the time. That's it. And it just became a running joke for a few years.
And so I was telling one of my fellow. Coach classmates about this and right before our graduation about how no, people say, Nathan, we want [00:18:00] you to be happy. And I'm like, no, he wouldn't. You didn't know Nathan, obviously. And we had a really good conversation about that and how. When we're in heaven, we just have an elevated awareness and maybe we, do we see things that happen on earth?
Who knows? Maybe there's some awareness. How do we not be sad or angry about things that happen? I don't know, there's some unanswered questions there, but we had a great discussion about it. So in May two years ago, that's kinda where my head space was at. I didn't feel guilty for wanting to date again.
But it did fester in the back of my mind. Oh, I know, like Nathan would be so upset, but then I would be like he shouldn't have died. So I don't know what to tell him from that aspect. That was the headspace that I was in. And the graduation for the life coach school that I went through and it was a retreat that lasted, it was like two and a, two and a half or three days.
And during that retreat. Another coach and I had a [00:19:00] very close experience and conversation where she was able to help me really come to peace and to a place of acceptance in feeling okay and dating again and saying and part of her words to me was that it's time. Whenever you're ready. It's time.
Like it's okay. And I don't have time to tell you everything that happened in that retreat, but I will tell you, it changed my life and it was pretty amazing some of the things that happened. Ultimately, it brought me to a place of peace, and so on a last day, I. We were creating these vision planters and we were planting like our dreams, and so I thought okay.
I'm gonna put a little bit of romance in here because I do feel ready. It had been almost two years. July would've been two years since Nathan had died, and I was really enjoying my life again. I was. [00:20:00] Being very active and had come to a place where, whether or not I got married again, I love my life and to me, I just wanted someone to share those memories with someone to make life a little bit sweeter.
And so I thought why not? I'm gonna put on here a little bit of romance. And so I put that on my planter. I didn't think a whole lot about it. I'd been on and off the dating apps many times and currently I was not on them. And so then when, after I got back home, I went back on the dating apps and I'm like we'll just, we'll see what happens.
But I was very much from this place of waiting for the right person to come to me. Like it felt very peaceful. I felt grounded. I did not experience all the emotional volatility. Of dating or dating apps that I had early on when I was doing those things. It just I felt I was in such a good place where I'm like, this is my life.
I love it. It's [00:21:00] amazing. I don't know, am I gonna meet someone? Maybe not. I would love to. I'm gonna ask to. And I told God okay, I am ready now. I'm ready to meet the person. That you might have for me. And so it felt so much easier navigating all the ups and downs of people who ghost you. People who start conversations and drop off people that you're like, oh yeah, this would never work out like it.
I always felt I peace and any time. That I might think there was someone I was interested in and it didn't work out, or I thought nope, this isn't my person. I just had that thought of oh, it's okay. It's just not my person yet. I just haven't met him yet. I'm just waiting. I'm just waiting, and I would end up meeting Robert and starting to talk to him just a couple of weeks after I started that process.
And so as I think about how quickly change can happen, two [00:22:00] years ago in May, at the end of May, I hadn't met Robert. I had never gone to Hawaii. I didn't even know if I would be married again, if I would be able to find someone or if God would send someone my way. And here we are two years later. I've met Robert.
I've been to Hawaii twice. I have been to multiple new countries that I've never traveled to. And we've had just such an amazing and rewarding relationship that has just I have felt overjoyed. I've also experienced some really tough times. I have a child that struggles with a lot of mental health issues and for their privacy.
I won't get into a lot of detail, but I will tell you as a mom, that is a giant emotional rollercoaster, and this child has been in an inpatient hospital psych setting twice. There have been so many times where I [00:23:00] question myself. I look for a place to place blame. I think about all the ways maybe I've messed up as a parent.
Like I've been in some really deep valleys as well over these past couple of years. I had a child who was in a car wreck at midnight and totaled out their car. We have experienced death and loss in the family, the last two years haven't been perfect and magical and just easy, like everything's been easy and I've been so happy.
But I really have developed a strong emotional resilience and ability to go through those hard times and go through those difficult times knowing I'm gonna come back up to the middle. I'm down in the valley, I'm gonna come back up to the middle. I'm gonna come back to a place that is grounded, that is peaceful, that is calm.
In the Bible, it talks a lot about how God can give us a peace that [00:24:00] surpasses all understanding, a peace that comes. We're like, I don't even know how I feel at peace right now, but I do. And so early on in my grief, I prayed for that often, and it's something that I continue to pray for because to me, God doesn't say, I promise that you'll be happy.
In fact, God promises that we're gonna go through suffering. More than he promises that we're going to be happy. I don't know if there's any Bible verse that talks about us being happy. It talks about us having joy and having joy in the Lord, but God does not promise an easy life or a life that's free from suffering.
In fact, he promises that we are going to experience suffering, but one of the things he does promise us. Is peace and the ability to move through fear and knowing that we don't have to be alone. All of those things. So to me, that's my baseline. To me, that's where I wanna get back to.
So as we think [00:25:00] about having a life that you love, the goal isn't to have a perfect life. The goal isn't to have a life that's easy or where you're just happy all the time. The goal in having a life that you love is that you have a full life. You have emotional resilience where you can hold big emotions that feel opposite, but true at the same time.
Like holding grief and holding joy, holding forgiveness and holding anger, like being able to hold things that feel like opposite emotions, but are true at the same time. If you've listened to this show very long, one of my favorite words is, and. I love the life that I had before my husband died, and I love the life that I have now.
We wanna think it's either or in many areas of life when in reality the answer is, and it can be both. In having emotional resilience, what I teach my [00:26:00] clients and what I work with them on is that things don't have to be perfect, but you get to decide how you're going to respond. And there's no finish line here with, oh, I've mastered emotional resilience, I've mastered my thoughts and feelings, and I have control of them.
There's no, the goalpost is always moving. So I share even within my own community when I've had struggles or challenging times or when I have thoughts and I still coach myself, but. Emotional resiliency is like any other muscle. And the more you practice, the more you use it, the more skilled you become at being able to use it and the more skilled you become at being able to decide oh, this is a hard time, this is a challenging, emotion, but I know I'm not gonna be here forever.
It's when you have that moment where. You have this wave of sadness or you are super frustrated about something that's happened. Instead of believing the thought oh my life's gonna be like this [00:27:00] forever. You're like, Ugh, this really sucks and it's not gonna be like this forever. We're gonna get back to our baseline.
So in having a life that we love, we develop emotional resilience and we also build our confidence. And confidence doesn't come from knowing how to handle everything or from having done things a bunch of times, but from a very grounded place that you can navigate the unknown. Okay, so I'm gonna give you an example.
When I was first a manager in the healthcare space, I was 23 years old and I had a team of eight people that all were all were older than me. Some were like twice of my age, right? And so I got a lot of, caught a lot of grief for that. I also, I wasn't super confident. I didn't really know. It was a brand new department and they were building a whole new team of people, a new software, a [00:28:00] new process.
Like it was just new everything. It wasn't like I managed a team that was established. They had never really worked together. They'd never worked in this computer system, and we had three months to go live. Yeah, I just thought, I guess that sounded like a great idea and I just dove in. When I started managing that team of eight people, it felt incredibly overwhelming.
I was navigating things that I'd never done before. I was dealing with people, and their problems I'd never had managed or dealt with before. I often had to ask people for advice. I often wanted to give up or walk away, especially when people were nasty or condescending or calling me kiddo. Like all of the things and I just wanted to.
Give up. But as I maintained re resilience and as I learned how to manage people, how to manage situations, how to build the software program, all of those things, [00:29:00] over time, my confidence grew. My confidence grew, and what I was doing and how I was managing people and being able to make decisions.
So over my 20 year career in healthcare, I grew from managing a team of eight people to managing teams of over 4,000 people. I. Multiple different states across the United States and even a team that was in a whole different country. I manage a team of physicians and nurses and even helped them design and develop their own proprietary software.
Now, what did I know about managing physicians and nurses and developing software and any of those things? Nothing before I did it. But confidence comes from a place of being able to navigate the unknown and knowing that it's okay. Like I've been here before. I've been at a place [00:30:00] where I didn't know exactly what needed to be done, but I know that I can be resourceful and I know I can bring the right people.
Together to the table to answer the tough questions. And I know how to manage people and I know how to build teams and I know how to build cohesion and camaraderie and all of those things like rally the people together. I know how to do all that. The other things are things that I'm just gonna figure out along the way, so confidence doesn't come from.
Knowing how things are gonna turn out or knowing what things are gonna look like, and this is another core concept that I help teach you and that I help build. In fact, it's one of the things that we track in coaching. How would you rate your confidence on a scale of one to 10 now and how you would rate it at the end of our six months of working together?
And it's always remarkable how people go from a three to an eight. From a two to a nine, from a four to a 10. [00:31:00] In growing their confidence. It's not because they've learned how to do everything, it's because they've learned how to navigate the unknown.
Confidence as well in building a life that you love is being able to move through fear. So I wanna share with you one of the excursions that we wanted to do in Hawaii. I had read about this excursion and we got to pick, two or three that we'd like to do and ultimately we got. Selected to do a sunset cruise and nighttime snorkel with manta rays.
Now, if you're like 90% of people I've talked to, you're thinking, oh, the manta rays, that's what killed that one guy, right? No, manta rays don't have stingers. That is stingrays. So before you tell me that I'm being reckless manager Rays have no stingers. Okay. But as I was getting hyped up, like I was so excited for this [00:32:00] excursion, I'm like, oh, sunset cruise on the boat.
That's amazing. It's gonna be great. And so I started just watching videos of other people on this excursion and I started seeing their pictures and I got scared because in these videos and pictures, people are in the ocean. At nighttime and you cannot see the bottom and out of the bottom of nothingness arises these, 15 feet wide manta rays that are swimming right up under your face.
And I started to question like, can I. Wait a minute, right? I knew this was at nighttime. This is a nighttime thing, but can I really get off of a boat in the middle of the ocean at nighttime and just stare at a huge abyss below me? Can I do that? And I remember the night before I was telling [00:33:00] Robert like I, I don't know if I can do this.
Like I wanna be on the boat. I wanna go on the sunset cruise. That all sounds amazing. But can I physically get my body off of the boat and into the dark water? Can I do this? And then you're supposed to swim out to this thing you're gonna hold onto while the manta ray come up and swim under you.
What if there's sharks? What if there's jellyfish? What if there's all the fears just start going. So having a life that you love doesn't mean there's not Fear. Doesn't mean there's not the unknown, doesn't mean there's not a point where you're like, I don't think I can do this.
And Robert's immediate response to me is you don't have to decide right now. Just get on the boat, go out there, and then you can decide if you wanna get in the water. And I was like, oh okay. He's you're really, you're hyping this self, this stuff up in your mind, like way more than it needs to be.
Don't psych yourself out, just get there and then decide what you wanna do. [00:34:00] Okay. So we're about to board the bus to go on this excursion and. The person getting us on the bus said, Hey, the captain of the ship called is actually raining, so I know you guys are gonna be getting in the water.
You're gonna be getting wet, but you're gonna be rained on the boat on the way out to this excursion. If you're not okay with that, just don't get on the bus. Just stay behind. It's fine. And. Robert and I are like, no, we've come so far. Where else are we gonna get to do this? I think they said, there's only four places in the world that you can snorkel with the manter Ray like this.
And so we're like, no, we gotta go. We just gotta go. We gotta get on the boat so it's cold, it's raining. We have the cheapest disposable ponchos. We have our bag of stuff that we're trying to wrap up in trash bags to keep that dry. And we get on the boat, it's raining, so no sunset cruise. Ah, disappointment.
So we're out on the water, we're [00:35:00] going out, the sun is setting, although we can't see it, this is literally raining on us. And we get out into the water and the captain says, Hey, normally we'd hang out here and watch the sunset, but since the sun hasn't set, do you wanna just go ahead and get in the water?
Interact with the manna ray and then we'll have dinner when you get back on. And we said, sure. And I realized I was very grateful because since the sun hadn't set all the way I could at least see on top of the ocean. So they hand us these wetsuit jackets. It's not even a full wetsuit. It's basically like a vest with half sleeves.
And a mask. And every time I get into the water with a snorkel, I have a couple minutes where my body just like freaks out, right? I'm like hyperventilating, trying to figure out how to breathe, how to make sure my mask is sealed up, how to like not be overwhelmed by these huge waves. When you're out in the ocean.
This is a Pacific Ocean. The waves [00:36:00] are just so big. So I know when I get out there, I'm gonna need just like a few minutes to calm myself down. But the way that they had us getting off the. Boat off this catamaran was we were climbing down the steps. They're like handing us the mask, we gotta hurry up and put it on.
We had this little pool noodle, no life jacket by the way. This little pool noodle for us to go down to essentially what's swim out to this like floating ladder. This is the best way I can describe it, and people are on both sides hanging on. And in the middle of this ladder there are flotation devices with black lights that shine down into the water.
The reason they do that is to illuminate the water that has plankton, so the man rays will come up to eat the plankton, and that's why they're coming up to swim right below you. So here we are on this catamaran that's just getting knocked around by all these waves. I'm like stumbling down, down these wet [00:37:00] stairs to get out into the water.
There's no time to slow down or stop. Everybody's just going single file. My heart is just pounding because I don't know what's in the water. I'm like, are the manta right there? Am I gonna step on 'em? What is it gonna be like? And. I almost turned around and was just like I'm gonna watch from up here.
But I didn't know. I was like, how could I miss out on this? So I go out, I'm holding onto the ladder and my arms hurt so much 'cause I'm so tensed up with trying to hold onto this ladder. It's like rocking in the waves. We put this tiny little pull noodle under your ankles so that you're laying flat like Superman style.
So the manna rays don't hit your feet and your legs when they're coming up, and plunge my face down in the water to see what I can see below. And for the first minute or two, I'm just like, ugh. Trying to breathe, right? Just trying to figure [00:38:00] out how to breathe, how to keep the water out of my mask.
Like my heart is just pounding and I'm just wondering did I make a mistake? Why did I decide to do this? But then I breathe a sigh of relief because it isn't pitch black yet. I can see the ocean floor maybe 20, 25 feet down. Which instantly puts me at ease because I'm not looking down hundreds of feet into the abyss where huge sharks are probably swimming around ready to eat me.
That experience I. I cannot describe how amazing and wonderful that experience was. Like as terrifying as it was to go out there to hold on to this wobbly floating ladder, to experience these giant manter rays like coming swimming down below you like floating ghosts. In the ocean and coming up and [00:39:00] doing this like big barrel roll, then they're swimming upside down underneath you and coming inches away from you.
And in a couple instances they like brush up against you and it's just breathtaking and beautiful and. It's just incredible to be able to watch that and I was so close to not ever having that experience. And the reason I share this whole big story with you and this whole big story about Hawaii with you is because so much of this is applicable in rebuilding a life that you love.
So I've tried to explain what rebuilding a life you love means. It's not that we're happy all the time. But we're building something that allows us to feel purpose and meaning and groundedness and calm, and to get to experience some of the most amazing. [00:40:00] Abundant things in life. And if we don't practice confidence, if we don't learn how to navigate through fear, if we don't learn how to take action, when we're afraid, when we're doubting, when we're second guessing our decisions, when every indication is no, I shouldn't do this.
This is gonna be a big mistake, then we would miss out on some of the most amazing opportunities that we get to have. I think back to my client, Karen, that I mentioned in the beginning, and she told me that after a few months of working together, she got to sit down with hr.
She got to sit down with her pastor. And her leader of the church, and, one of them apologized to her and said, I'm sorry, you haven't felt seen or you haven't felt heard here. And I'm just really proud of your progress and proud of the things that you've done. And just a few weeks [00:41:00] later, he made an announcement that after several years of having been there at the church that he was planning to leave and to go to a new place, and she had this whole realization of, Emily, if you and I hadn't worked together.
If I hadn't made these changes, I wouldn't have gotten to have this deep conversation with my pastor. And ultimately we might not have reconciled. The awkwardness between us, the tension, the frustration between us before he announced that he was gonna go somewhere else. And so someone that I've had, an employment relationship with a friendship with for many years of working at the same place together.
This whole experience of hearing him announce that he's moving on to a new chapter and that he's saying goodbye would've felt very different than it [00:42:00] did than what I got to experience now. A much more beautiful experience. And so when we practice confidence and we build up our confidence and we learn how to navigate the unknown, how to navigate fear, how to navigate things you've never done before.
When you learn how to do that, you get to experience amazing things that you wouldn't have if you were too afraid.
I know it's hard to describe for me to describe to you what that man Ray experience was like, but I can't imagine that I will experience. That again, I probably would never have chosen this island to go to in Hawaii. I don't know that I would've been the first one to sign up for this experience. And so I'm just incredibly grateful that I decided to move forward through the fear and be able to have that experience.
[00:43:00] So in having a life that you love again, you have emotional resiliency. You are have built up your confidence and you're learning how to navigate the unknown. When you come to that place in the road where you're like, I've never been here before. I've never done this, but what I have done is navigated the unknown before navigated when it was my first time taken action on something I was having to learn as I went along.
And that is where that. That feeling of confidence like wells up from inside of you is because you become skilled at navigating the unknown, at navigating fear of taking action. Even though you have doubts and worries and you sec, you want to second guess your decisions, you master that skill and that is where confidence [00:44:00] primarily can come from in having a life that you love again.
Ultimately, here's what I want you to hear. A beautiful life isn't perfect. It's real, it's grounded, and it's yours to create one bold, brave, scary. Breathtaking step at a time. I would be honored to guiding you through building a life that you can love again and being your coach.
Several people that I've talked to even recently, they're just afraid to take that next step. What if this doesn't work for me? I've never done coaching before. What if I don't like it? What if I can't do it? What if I'm like the one person this can't work for? What if something doesn't work out with my job?
What if something changes? What if? What if? What if? What if you can? What if yourself to death? Really? And it's not that when you build a life, you love that the what ifs don't happen. Just like last week [00:45:00] with the man rays, the what ifs come up. What if there's a shark down there? What if I can't see? What if I can't breathe?
What if I start to panic and I can't get back to the boat because there's people in my way. What if? So having confidence and having a life that you love isn't. An elimination of fear. It's not an elimination of the what ifs, but it's the strengthening of your confidence and your ability to do things in spite of fear.
To say, maybe when things aren't certain at my job, that's when I need coaching the most, maybe. When I'm still trying to heal, that's when I need coaching the most to help me with that. Even if I don't know what it's exactly gonna look like, I don't know exactly what it's gonna be like. I don't know, six months from now what my life could look like.
With coaching, I'm going to take a [00:46:00] step forward in faith and I encourage you to do that now for the month of June, I've actually added some additional time slots I don't normally offer for consults. So as out the first week of June, I'm actually gonna be out the last week of June because I am going back to the retreat that started it all two years ago. Two of my brave widow clients have gone through this program now and they are graduating.
So I am going to be the proud coach there watching their graduation. I'm also gonna be participating in this amazing retreat. I'm so excited. I can't wait to see everyone. So I really only have two weeks in the middle of June here. To be able to accommodate consults and calls and all of the things.
So I opened up some times later in the afternoon. I don't normally have available, and I opened up Friday the 13th and also Friday the 20th, which I normally do not do any consult calls [00:47:00] on Friday. If that time works for you, this is the perfect time to slide in and get that consult scheduled. It's a free call where I have a structured process where I walk you through.
I have questions that, no worries, you are gonna be able to answer the questions, give me the information that I need so that I can develop your exact next steps and your coaching plan of what would be the most helpful to you. There's never any pressure. There's no obligation. It's a service that I give to anyone who schedules a consult call because I believe so much in the value of what I.
This coaching program can help you achieve and in the difference that you can see in just a few short months. So to schedule your call, just go to brave widow.com and you'll see a link there to schedule your consult call. I look forward to [00:48:00] seeing you soon. And lastly. Remember our free live workshop on how to overcome loneliness.
The Widow's Guide to Beating Loneliness is happening Monday, June 16th. To sign up for that, go to brave widow.com/live, LIVE, and I hope to see you there.
If you're newly widowed and aren't sure where to start, you need the brave new widow's starter kit inside brave new widow. You'll find a starter guide to help you through your first few months. A quick start guide. You can share with family and friends so they know how to help you. And a collection of some of the frequent topics that widows want to learn more about. To get the brave new widow series.
Just go to brave widow. Dot com slash start it's free and you'll get instant access. That's brave widow.com/start S T a R T. See you there. [00:49:00]
