BW 170: From Chaos to Calm: Your First 5 Moves in Early Grief (That Actually Help)

[TRANSCRIPT]

If you’re widowed and feel like you’re drowning, this episode gives you a clear starting line. I walk through my RISE framework: the 4 Seasons of Grief (Rawness, Isolation, Self-Discovery, Empowerment) and the Chaos-to-Calm Blueprint (the 5 foundations I use with clients). 

You’ll leave knowing your very next step and where to get help, free or paid.

What you’ll learn 

•  How to identify your current season of grief using RISE (Rawness, Isolation, Self-Discovery, Empowerment)
•  The 5 foundations that stabilize you fast: Routine, Self-Care, Help, Emotional Healing, Spiritual Connection 
•  Why time alone doesn’t heal—and the action steps that do
•  Free ways to get support (Skool community, guides, quiz) and how to book a consult if you want hands-on help

Resources mentioned 

•  Free Grief Season Quiz: https://bravewidow.com (top of homepage)
•  Brave New Widow Guide + Family & Friends Quickstart (Newly Widowed → Start Here): https://bravewidow.com
•  Free Brave Widow Community (Skool): search “Brave Widow” in the Skool app
•  Grief Recovery Method (Tuesdays, 12–2 pm CT): accepting new participants through October 7; last time offering the $400 Earn-Your-Money-Back Bonus (show up for 7/8 calls, do homework, 1:1 closeout call, leave a review)
•  Book a free consult: https://bravewidow.com (Consult)

Chapters
00:00 Welcome + what’s new (Grief Recovery cohort + bonus)
02:15 Free support: Skool community, courses, weekly coaching
03:30 The RISE model: 4 Seasons of Grief (overview)
05:10 Season 1 Rawness: why everything feels impossible
07:40 Why I used to focus on Seasons 2–3—and what changed
11:15 Inviting beginners in: small, believable first steps
14:00 Time ≠ healing; action does
16:00 Chaos-to-Calm Blueprint: the 5 foundations
17:05 #1 Routine: reclaiming your calendar
19:00 #2 Self-Care: pressing the brakes (oxygen-mask basics)
21:10 #3 Help: asking + accepting support (lists + liaison)
23:05 #4 Emotional Healing: GRM, coaching, doing the work
25:10 #5 Spiritual Connection: honesty & vulnerability with God
27:30 Putting it together: your next right step
28:30 Book a consult (no pressure, real plan)

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Ready for more support? 

Book a free consult here: https://calendly.com/bravewidow/widow-consult-call

Download the Brave New Widow Starter Kit: A free guide to help you navigate the first steps of widowhood. → https://bravewidow.com/start

Grief Recovery Method Group: Tuesdays 12–2 pm CT, Sept 30–Nov 18, $400 (credited toward Brave Widow Academy or 1:1).

Brave Widow Academy: Next cohort starts in November.

I’m Emily Tanner.  I was widowed at age 37, one month shy of our 20 year wedding anniversary.  Nathan and I have four beautiful children together, and my world was turned completely upside down when I lost him.  

Now, I love my life again!  I’m able to experience joy, achieve goals and dreams I thought I’d lost, and rediscover this next version of me.

I did the work.

I invested in coaching for myself.

I learned what I needed to do to move forward and took the steps.

I implemented the tools and strategies that I use for my clients in my coaching program.

This is for you, if:

•  You want a faith-based approach to coaching
•  You want to move forward after loss, and aren’t sure how
•  You want to enjoy life without feeling weighed down by guilt, sadness, or regret
•  You want a guide to help navigate this journey to the next version of you
•  You want to rediscover who you are

•  Schedule a consult with Emily:  https://calendly.com/bravewidow/widow-consult-call?month=2024-08 

Find and take the next steps to move forward (without “moving on”).

FOLLOW me on SOCIAL:

Twitter | @brave_widow

Instagram | @brave_widow

Facebook |   / bravewidow  

YouTube | @bravewidow

TRANSCRIPT:

Emily: [00:00:00] welcome to episode number 170 of the Brave Widow Show, lots of things going on, lots of amazing things going on that I wanna make sure that you are aware of. So as of today today on September 30th, our. Next round of grief recovery method kicks off, although I am allowed to accept new people until October the seventh, which would be our second session. But we have grief recovery method, and last I checked, we had two spots available.

And if you're on the email list, you have the link If you are not on the email list. I will put the link in the show notes so you have that, but I would love for you to join us. It is happening on Tuesdays from 12 to 2:00 PM Central Time, and this is the last time people that I'm offering the Earn Your Money Back Bonus.

The [00:01:00] $400 for the Grief Recovery Method class. If you show up to seven of the eight calls, if you do the homework in between calls, if you do a one-on-one call with me at the end. If you leave me a review, you can earn your $400 back and keep the book on me, or you can apply that $400 towards the academy or towards one-on-one coaching.

Now I have heard from some people lately that they are looking for free resources or maybe they're not ready to invest yet, or they're on the fence, so I wanna make sure that you know what resources are available to you. So on the school app is a free app, S-K-O-O-L school. You can find the Brave Widow community.

I have three or so courses that are loaded in there. [00:02:00] I am in the community every day responding to people, answering questions, giving feedback, and we have a weekly group coaching call every single week. If you are looking for free resources or you know someone who is looking for free resources or just wants to dip their toe in the water and see what Brave Widow is about, tell them to join us on the school app, S-K-O-O-L.

It's the Brave Widow community, and I will also be posting that in the show notes. Okay, so over the next few weeks here, I wanna walk you through each of the four seasons of grief. You may have heard about the five stages of grief. I have created a framework called the Four Seasons of Grief, and I am gonna teach you about each of these four seasons over the next four weeks.

And also [00:03:00] what I teach widows to do when they're in. Each of those seasons. Speaking of free resources, this is episode number 170. So you have 170 hours of free podcast content, plus many hours on YouTube of additional trainings and webinars and things that I've done. So all of that is available to you for free.

And all of these are things that I actually teach my clients how to do. Let's start. This week we're gonna go through the Four Seasons of Grief, and for those of you that don't know, I worked with my community and also my own coach to rename the Four Seasons of Grief a few months ago, and we name them to match the acronym rise, RISE. so the four seasons of [00:04:00] grief, number one is rawness, two, isolation, three, self-discovery and

four. Empowerment. I Also have a free grief quiz that you can take [email protected]. It's at the very top of the homepage that just says, take this free quiz to find your season of grief. So you can take the grief quiz to see what season of grief it places you in, but also as you listen over the next few weeks, you can also determine which season of grief is resonating with you and sounds like the season that you're currently in.

And so the first season of grief we call. Rawness and this first season of grief is called rawness because it is this season of survival. I often call it. Being in survival mode, everything is so raw and real and [00:05:00] overwhelming that you're just trying to survive. You're just trying to get through the day.

It might feel like you're drowning or like you can't catch your breath. And so when you're in this first season of survival mode, you often struggle with things like brain fog. You struggle with being able to think clearly or make decisions or just function on a day-to-day level. You also have overnight inherited all of these tasks, all of these responsibilities that your person used to do.

You inherited all of that. Overnight. And so especially if you're trying to figure out how to do things for the first time or what that actually looks like, it can be super overwhelming. In this season for many people they describe it as like a blur. They don't really even remember how they got through it.

They just know that some way, somehow they were just [00:06:00] able to survive. And so this is our first season called Rawness. So overnight you have absorbed all of these additional tasks and responsibilities and like you are just trying to figure it out. You are just trying to figure out life. Now, initially, many of my clients, when I first started working with them were not in the season of rawness. They weren't in this first season of grief, and I thought initially one of the reasons for that was just life is just too overwhelming.

There's just too many decisions. You are exhausted. Your body is fatigued by grief. And so the thought of adding a grief coach and adding a grief program on top of everything else just felt overwhelming. That was a belief that I have had for most of the existence of Brave Widow. I've done many consults with people and when they're in their first six [00:07:00] months, sometimes when they're in their first year, it was always, that sounds really good.

Okay. And then I would be ghosted.

Or people would just say, I don't know. I need to think about it. This is just a lot right now and I just need to focus on surviving. And so I created something and you can, again, another free resource that you can download absolutely free called Brave New Widow. So this was a, it is a guidebook specifically for new widows who are just trying to get their hands around.

Everything, the checklists, all the gathering of the documents, the things that they need help with tactically around the house, things they want their family and friends to help with. It teaches them about getting a personal liaison who can help them through this first season of grief. That's so incredibly overwhelming.

And then I also created a quick start [00:08:00] guide, like a short. Guide for family and friends so that they can know how to show up and how to support widows and widowers when they're in that early season of grief. You can download both of those for [email protected] under the newly widowed start here tab.

So I used to have this belief that, oh, people who are newer in grief life is just super overwhelming that even like getting help, most people can stand getting counseling because they under, they understand or believe that's what they're supposed to do. But to add a whole nother program on top of that, or to add coaching, it probably just feels like too much.

And so really, I targeted. People who were in between seasons two and three of grief, and typically this would be people who were somewhere around their first or second, maybe even third year, is really where most of my clients tended to come from [00:09:00] until. I got coaching from one of my coaches that I invested in, and one of the things that she coached me on was this belief that I had that widows who are earlier on in grief are just too overwhelmed to make a decision about coaching or to invest and start a coaching program. And it wasn't like I had this thought just because a few people had not taken me up on coaching. It was because I believed, I had evidence that lots of widows that I talked to, lots of people that were getting referred to me. I would reach out or we would have a conversation and it would just go nowhere.

So in my mind, I had evidence that widows who are earlier on are just too overwhelmed with life to make any sort of decision. Like investing in coaching, investing in a program to surround and support themselves. And my coach, her name is Megan. She coached [00:10:00] me around this belief in that actually this could be a thought error

and that in some way I needed to welcome in the beginners and create a step for them. That felt easy. It felt manageable, it felt believable. And maybe the vision that I was painting was too grand. It was too big for someone to feel like it was believable to go from deep grief to loving your life again.

That just sounds like a pipe dream, especially when you don't want a future. You don't want to be happy in the future. All you want is your life back. You want your old life back. You want your past back. You want your person back. And so as I worked with my coach, Megan, something amazing began to happen. I decided to offer grief recovery method as a separate class and really frame it up for [00:11:00] people who were just starting on their grief and widow journey, and that has opened up just a whole new realm of possibilities and a whole new realm of people who are newer in grief.

Combine that with my becoming much more active on TikTok and reaching. Hundreds and thousands of widows, I would have 8,000 people join me on a TikTok Live, which may not sound like much to those of you who speak about it in the millions, but to me, 8,000 people joining me for a TikTok live about grief and widowhood.

Was pretty amazing. And most of those people are in the earlier stages of grief. And so for a long time I just believed that TikTok and some of these other things are just a longer term nurture until someone gets [00:12:00] to the point where they are ready to take that next step. But after being coached personally myself, after being willing to believe there was a different future and a different possibility, instead of just believing what I thought I knew because I had the evidence in my mind, right?

I had the evidence people, I couldn't get anyone to sign on who was earlier on in. But I decided to trust my coach and treat it like an experiment and just try it and see what happened. And I'm so excited to share that through Grief Recovery Method and even having welcomed some additional people to one-on-one coaching directly that I have clients as early as two months out in grief.

And my most recent client, she was three weeks out. From losing her person, just three weeks. And both of these individuals [00:13:00] immediately signed up for one-on-one coaching. They signed up for everything because they wanna feel fully surrounded and supported and guided through this process. So I share that example with you.

More so as a lesson of even when you believe that there is a future that isn't possible, or you believe you have evidence that tells you a future isn't possible, like the value of having a coach, the value of having someone point out your thought errors or challenge you to try something different can be completely amazing.

And so now I've noticed. That more and more people who are joining Brave Widow are actually earlier on in grief, and this is what I had originally started Brave Widow for, is for the person who is trying to figure it out, trying to understand the roadmap, trying to understand like what are my next steps as I go through this crazy confusing process.

[00:14:00] So when you are in a season of err rawness, it can feel hazy. You can feel like you are dead on the inside, like life is just kinda happening around you. But to you, time is you want time to sit, stand still. Your world is frozen, but everything around you is moving forward. Life is moving forward.

Around you and at times it feels like without you. So now as I am talking with hundreds and thousands of other widows. Who are just learning about Brave Widow, who are just learning about things like grief coaching, like the academy. I get a lot of questions around what people should start with or what people should do when they're earlier on in grief.

And so this episode is for you. I am gonna teach you some of the exact same things that I teach my clients one-on-one and that I teach them in [00:15:00] the academy. Anytime that someone is struggling in grief, it does not matter how long it's been. Okay. I wanna repeat that for the people in the back. It does not matter how long it has been for someone who's struggling with grief, who still feels heartbroken, who feels overwhelmed.

Or who has shoved their feelings down into their body over and over who has distracted themselves from grief, who has ignored or suppressed their emotions? Time is irrelevant. If someone has been widowed three weeks or someone has been widowed 10 years, I always start with the foundation. And the foundation can be found in the season of rawness because this is going to become our building blocks.

Because if you don't have a good [00:16:00] foundation, it doesn't matter if we work on the roof, the windows, the wall, the floor, the countertops, you could work on any of those things. And if your foundation is poor, the whole house will come crashing down. So I always start with the foundation. And the foundation that I teach is called the Chaos to Calm Blueprint.

Okay. And I'm gonna put some details about each of these components in the show notes for this episode. Again, if you've been widowed three weeks, if you've been widowed 10 years, when I'm first talking to someone and I'm getting a feel for where they are, what their challenges are, I am looking at five things to help evaluate where they have opportunity, where they might be missing a foundational building block.

Okay. So the number one thing we cover in the Chaos to Calm Blueprint [00:17:00] is having a routine. And so last week on the episode where I walked you through the consult sheet, you know we rated routine on a scale of one to 10, one being that you feel completely overwhelmed. You can't seem to get any projects done.

You can't seem to make progress. 10 being like, oh, I have a routine that supports me and I feel good and I'm able to block in projects and tasks. I start with routine because a routine. Helps get you out of the chaos if you don't have control of your calendar, if you don't have a good plan for when and how you're gonna tackle all of the to-dos.

If you're just reacting to everything that's coming your way, which we do in the beginning, that's all we can do. We gotta make the arrangements. We have to notify people, we have to collect documents, we have to get attorneys on board. Like all of those things, we're just reacting to [00:18:00] all the things that have to happen.

And so we're often in reactionary mode, fight or flight mode. And so where I start is in chaos to call blueprint of establishing a routine. Giving you some structure so that you know what your week is going to look like. And this can be anything from creating a simple daily routine. To having a weekly routine where we know, okay, Monday mornings we do this.

Monday afternoons we do this. Tuesday, mornings we do this. Tuesday afternoons we do this, and we have a template for you to fill out so that you can map out exactly how you want your routine to look like. For now, this is just stabilization. We're just trying to stabilize you here, right? We're getting you out of the chaos and moving you to calm.

That's why it's called Chaos to Calm Blueprint. Okay, so step number one [00:19:00] is we want to take control of your time back. We want to bring you a sense of structure, okay? Step number two of the Chaos to Calm Blueprint is what I'm gonna call self-care. And I know there are some of you who are rolling your eyes at the mention of self-care, but this is a very real thing.

This is the analogy where you're on the airplane and they're going through the safety briefing and they're telling you, if we run out of air, if there's an emergency on the plane, always put your oxygen mask on first before you try to help other people. This is your oxygen mask. Self-care is things like lowering the expectations that you have on yourself and what you're able to do.

Self-care is going into the opposite end of what we instinctively do [00:20:00] when we experience a loss. We throw ourselves into doing more because in the beginning we have to. We have to do all of the administrative tasks. We have to figure out all the passwords. We have to now take on all these tasks and responsibilities.

So we do more and more because it has to be done, it's required. And so as those initial few days and weeks start to slow down and less is being demanded of us from other people, we pull start to pull ourselves out of the chaos by pressing the brake. By slowing down, by finding moments of rest and complete calm, by focusing on the just the basics, nutrition, physical movement, sleeping patterns, which often are disrupted, making time for yourself where your body can have those moments where you can just let your shoulders down and you can just exist.

[00:21:00] You just do nothing. You just exist. You just relax and you exist. And whatever comes up. But we just exist. Okay? So we have routine, we have self-care. The third one is getting help. And this is mostly for tactical things, maybe around the house or that you might need help with your kids or pets or things that are going on around your house.

But this is like how to clearly ask for help. How to have a personal advocate and personal liaison to help you coordinate help. I give you a specific list of things to ask for help with. Because we're not thinking clearly 'cause we're in this season of rawness and we're just like out of ideas. We're like, I don't know.

I'm so overwhelmed by everything. I'm just paralyzed. I don't even know what I need help with. I give you a list to start with. How to accept help. Sometimes we're not even too the asking for help yet. [00:22:00] We can't even accept the help that is being offered. So I teach you how to do that.

How to just organize all the logistics that come with running a house or running a business, or running all of those things, but how we can be in a season of accepting help and asking for help. Okay, number four, emotional healing. Maybe this is counseling. Maybe it's grief recovery, maybe it's grief share.

Maybe it's working with me finding a grief coach, whatever that is. We want to carve out time specifically to focus on emotional healing. An emotional wound is just as urgent as a physical wound. This is one of the best things I learned with the Grief Recovery Institute is that. The key to recovery and grief is action and not time.

That's why there are clients and widows who have been grieving [00:23:00] seven years, eight years, nine years, 10 years, that have felt stuck for the last decade because they're just, they're waiting. They're just waiting. And as you may have heard, and they often say in the counseling space, the only way out is through.

So we want to be very intentional about healing emotionally, about focusing on processing what has happened to us, how it has affected our life on grieving not only our person, but grieving the loss of all the hopes and dreams and expectations that we had for the future. Okay. I use Grief Recovery Method as one of the main starting points, if you don't know where to start, let's start with Grief Recovery Method is an excellent program that actually gives you tools that you can use the rest of your life, the rest of your life.

Focusing on emotional healing is very important. This is where, this [00:24:00] is one of probably the biggest emotional, foundational building blocks that people tend to have an opportunity in that tend to have a missing piece is usually around emotional healing in some way. Okay. What I find is that people who have been to counseling or have been in grief shares, or have been very active in making this a priority, they may not have all the tools they will learn in grief recovery method.

And so what I will do is do grief recovery method in parallel with coaching or with the academy or with something else because. They could strengthen up that foundational building block, but the building block isn't missing. It could just be strengthened a little bit. So it won't hurt if we also work on other things in conjunction with grief recovery method.

And then there are other clients where I think we really like, let's start with emotional healing first, and then let's focus on some of these other things. And I think that [00:25:00] will set you up for success long term. Okay, so we have routine. Self-care help, emotional healing. And the last one is spiritual connection.

And everyone has a different reaction to faith and spirituality when they go through a traumatic event like losing a spouse. And so we wanna focus on reestablishing that spiritual connection. And in the beginning it's hard. For some people. For some people maybe your faith was strengthened. For a lot of people, they're in a weird spot and they don't know if God is good and trustworthy and they don't know.

What to think about all of this. And they don't know how, if God is a loving God, he allowed this to happen or why he saved some people and doesn't save other people, and why he intervenes in some cases. And for them he didn't. And it didn't matter. They prayed and they prayed and they prayed and they [00:26:00] prayed and they still lost their person.

And so there can be anger. There can be confusion, there can be bitterness. And so in spiritual connection, we really focus on honesty and vulnerability, which is having honest and vulnerable conversations with God to basically say, I don't like this. I hate this. I don't understand this. And also, I don't like feeling separated from you.

I don't wanna feel this way. God, I need your help. I need you to pull me out of despair. I can't do it on my own. And it's through repeated having these honest and vulnerable conversations and going to the places where we know that God will be, that we can start to reestablish some sort of spiritual connection.

Okay, so those are the five components of the chaos to calm. Blueprint one, routine two, [00:27:00] self-care. Three help. Four, emotional healing and five, spiritual connection. Anytime you're struggling, anytime grief feels overwhelming anytime, regardless of the amount of time that you've been grieving. If you feel that there are opportunity in any one of these five areas, that is where I would start.

And if you would like help figuring out your exact next steps and how I could support you more fully, how I could coach and guide you to a place where you feel clear about who you are and what you want, where you feel connected and no longer lonely, and you feel confident instead of uncertain and second guessing every decision.

Go to brave widow.com [00:28:00] and schedule a consult call. I will walk you through the process. I have a few questions that help me know exactly where I would start, if I were in your shoes and how I could help you get there. Go to brave widow.com and schedule your consult call today.

If you're tired of feeling lost, lonely, and second guessing every decision, my coaching program is meant for you. I help clients find clarity, create real connection, and build confidence up for good. Inside the Brave Widow Coaching Program, you'll learn real tools that you'll be able to use for a lifetime.

If you're ready for the next step, go to brave widow.com to book a consult. It's free. It's no pressure, and it can be your brave next step to healing your heart and building a life you love again. Go to brave widow.com today to book your consult. [00:29:00]