BW 171: From Isolation to Self-Trust: The 4-Part System Every Widow Needs (Season 2 of Grief)
Oct 07, 2025[
TRANSCRIPT BELOW]
Welcome to Episode 171 of The Brave Widow Show — and we’re nearly at Brave Widow’s 3rd birthday! Today we continue the Four Seasons of Grief (RISE) mini-series and go deep on Season 2: Isolation, that weird “I’m functioning… but I feel invisible” stage.
You’ll learn my Self-Trust System (the exact 4 components I coach on to help you move from anxious second-guessing to grounded confidence):
- Decisions — build your “Board of Advisors,” stop waffling, make informed choices.
- Self-Confidence — why action creates confidence (not the other way around); the Be-Do-Have model.
- Safety — how to create real-world safety nets so trying new things doesn’t feel like jumping without a parachute.
- Boundaries — who gets access to you, how much, and why that matters now more than ever.
You’ll Hear About
- What “Isolation” really looks like (losing 75% of your social circle, feeling untethered).
- Why your brain feels “hijacked” (amygdala vs. prefrontal cortex) and how to work with it.
- Real stories: riding a longhorn 🐂, lighting a propane grill for the first time, and building Brave Widow when no one showed up… yet.
- The mindset shift that collapses the timeline between who you are and who you’re becoming.
Free Resources & Links
- 🎯 Free Seasons of Grief Quiz: find your season + next steps — bravewidow.com
- 🧭 Book a Free Consult (no pressure): bravewidow.com
- 🧩 Programs & tools mentioned: Chaos-to-Calm Blueprint, Self-Trust System, Connection Protocol (inside Brave Widow Academy)
Chapters
00:00 Intro + Brave Widow turns 3
02:00 RISE overview + Season 1 recap (Rawness / Chaos-to-Calm)
03:30 What Season 2 (Isolation) feels like
06:10 “Untethered” story & why decisions feel high-stakes
11:00 The Self-Trust System overview (Decisions, Confidence, Safety, Boundaries)
18:00 Building your Board of Advisors (money, legal, health, home)
24:00 How action builds self-confidence (+ Be-Do-Have)
27:00 Travel, grills, longhorns: practicing confidence in real life
31:00 Safety nets for firsts (travel groups, buddy systems)
48:00 Boundaries that protect your energy
50:30 Your custom plan + next steps (quiz + consult)
Work With Me
If you’re tired of feeling lost, lonely, and second-guessing everything, my coaching helps you find clarity, create real connection, and rebuild confidence—for good. Book a free consult at bravewidow.com.
#BraveWidow #GriefSupport #WidowLife #Loneliness #SelfTrust #ConfidenceAfterLoss #FourSeasonsOfGrief
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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:
[00:00:00] welcome to episode number 171 of the Brave Widow Show
as I was reflecting on the topic for today and what I would be covering, I also was looking at the date and realizing that we are about to hit Brave Widow's third birthday, brave Widow was officially established in October. Of 2022 and the first podcast episode came out November of 2022, which is exciting and amazing and I think perfectly appropriate for what I'm gonna be sharing with you today.
The reality is that when we. See someone's highlights when we see their wins and successes or things that have worked out well. We think like they always knew that was gonna happen, and I try to be very transparent in sharing that, [00:01:00] whether it's Brave Widow, whether it was my journey in real estate, whether it's some of the other things that I've done that I had to take many steps forward blindly in faith.
Believing that either that was gonna work out or God was gonna redirect my steps down another path. Like I stepped forward in blind faith believing that God was going to open and shut certain doors based on where I needed to go. And so I'm gonna share more about that with you here in today's episode.
If you are new or you haven't been following along in the last episode or two, I am in the middle of a mini series, so we are covering the Four Seasons of Grief, and if this is your first episode, it's okay. You're not missing out. You haven't missed anything that's going to be vital to today's episode from the first one.
[00:02:00] But if you haven't heard it and you have the opportunity, I definitely encourage you to go back and listen to the prior week's episode where I talk about the first season of grief called rawness. And so we have an acronym for our Four Seasons of Grief. That's called Rise, RISE. Our first season of grief was rawness.
It's all about the devastation, the shock, the survival mode, and in there I walked you through the Chaos to Calm Blueprint, which is one of the systems that I use inside of Brave Widow and The Brave Widow Academy, and also with my one-on-one clients as well. If you wanna learn more about that and you haven't heard it or you haven't watched the video, I really encourage you to go back and watch the prior week's video.
All right. For today, we're gonna be talking about the second season of grief, which we call isolation, and the systems that I use to help widows who [00:03:00] are in this season of grief. Okay, so in the first season of grief last week, I covered the foundational building blocks that we need in order to be able to start to heal our heart and.
Rebuild our life. So now that we've got a decent foundation underneath us, we can start to put up the framing of our life, the framing of our house. And one of the first things that we work on in this season of grief is around confidence. So how would I describe someone who's in their second season of grief?
If you want to see how you are rating yourself and some of the key characteristics, you can find a free [email protected] and it'll say, take the free seasons of grief quiz here and it will tell you what season that you're mostly identifying with right now. And as I think about isolation.
Isolation is this [00:04:00] season where we're no longer in survival mode, right? We have our feet underneath us. We're in more of maintenance mode. We're in more in a mode of okay, I have my feet underneath me. This is my life and I hate it. Often. That's how we feel like, is this it? This is my life now like this.
It's hard to believe, like this is where I am right now. And we call it isolation because often what happens, the statistic is that widows will lose 75% of their social circle in the first year. And so as we're deeply grieving, as we are in survival mode, we tend to pull N word. We tend to focus N word because.
We're trying to survive. And that was the first season of grief. Now we are surviving. We're treading water, we're doing okay. It's not do or die every day. [00:05:00] And it's like we had hibernated in this cave and now we're trying to step out of the cave and we're looking around like, where did everybody go?
It's quiet. I feel invisible. No one knows. What's going on in my life? No one reaches out to me. No one invites me to things. Like all of the things that we can experience in this season of grief, we also can feel incredibly isolated and alone because we have changed as a person who we are now is totally different than the person that we were.
And so for me, as I thought about being in the season of grief. The word untethered felt very accurate in describing how I felt, which was like I was on this tiny boat in the middle of an ocean just floating around. And occasionally storms would come and big waves of grief would come and knock me [00:06:00] down.
But for the most part, I was just like floating on this boat in an ocean. And for maybe the first time in my entire life, I didn't know. Not only where I was or where I was going, like I didn't know which way to turn the boat. I didn't know who I was. I didn't have someone who was like anchoring me to my future and to who I was now and what I wanted for the future.
And where I was going, I had no idea. And everywhere I looked, it just all looked the same. Terrible, by the way. It just all looked terrible. And I was like, what is the point? It doesn't matter if I turn the boat. It doesn't matter if I try to move the boat in a certain direction. There's no guarantee.
There's no what is ahead? What is that direction? I don't even know. I don't even know how to tell if I'm headed in the same direction over time. What is happening? Like it was the [00:07:00] most unnerving feeling. To feel so untethered and so incredibly lost and alone. There was no one to tell me like, oh, yes, take this next step, or, you're headed in the right direction, or This is normal, or this is what you need to do.
Like it was just eerie and weird and hard. And now that you're in this like maintenance mode and this new routine, you're also having to maybe make some big decisions, whether it's things around the house that need to be fixed, whether it's about traveling, whether it is about, setting up your own will and trust and investing in things.
Now, there are a lot of decisions that you're starting to make that weren't in. Like the, I'm required to make these decisions, mode of the service and, the burning fires that like had to be dealt [00:08:00] with, the documents for the attorney. All of those things that you really mostly handled in season one.
Now, in season two it might be things like a leaky roof or car maintenance or buying a different car or whatever that is. There are other decisions that now you're being. Faced with, and you might find that you feel love, anxiety, and fear and that you waffle a lot on your decisions. You might find that your decisions feel really high risk, like the stakes are high.
If you make a wrong decision, your life is over. That is how it feels. And I remember just feeling a lot of anxiety around even. Our home, I invested several thousand dollars in an overkill over the top camera security system for our home because I have never lived as an adult on my own without kids, without another [00:09:00] person.
Like I've never. I went from living with my parents to marrying Nathan and living with him and to now being a solo mom of these four teenagers. And we lived out in the country and I was like, I just need all the security, just all of it. And so I invested in this big security system and I also just started piling up as much savings as I possibly could, like saving as much money and putting that in a pile as much as I could, because I just had this fear of I'm gonna lose my job and then we'll go bankrupt and then we'll be homeless and then my kids are gonna be screwed up for that was every day, just all of the fear and I thought maybe it was just me.
That went through this, but the more that I've talked with other widows and the more that I've interacted with people, I've realized that confidence and how our confidence has shifted really impacts many widows, not [00:10:00] all. I do have some clients whose confidence remains really high, but even for people who are super independent, even for people who are used to making decisions, maybe they're.
Their person didn't help them make decisions. What they often find is that it feels like the safety net is gone because now it's oh, I'm the only parent. I'm the one person left if something happens to me. My kids have no one and they have nothing. Or if I make a decision about parenting, I no longer share the responsibility of that decision with another person.
Like it's all on my shoulders. I really have to make the right decision, and I no longer have that thought partner. I no longer have that person to bounce ideas off of or to help make decisions with. So they're gonna just be a lot of fear and anxiety when we're in the second season of grief. So let me walk you through in today's episode.
The system that I use inside of Brave Widow is [00:11:00] called the Self Trust System. And for my academy students who started with me in late August we are actually in the middle of walking through the self-trust system right now. So every week. In the academy, I take a module that's underneath the course.
We walk through that, and then we do some real time coaching and decision making and action digging as part of the academy. And so right now we're in the middle of the self-trust system. So inside the self-trust system, there are four components. Number one is making decisions. Number two is self-confidence.
Three is safety and four is boundaries. Okay, so when it comes to making decisions, there are a few key things here that you can find really helpful when you're working on rebuilding your confidence [00:12:00] and. One of the reasons why I chose to focus on confidence with widows who are in this season of grief is because you need to learn what confidence actually is and how to rebuild confidence and how to make decisions, how to feel safe, and how to have boundaries before you move into that third season of grief, which is really around exploring who you are now.
Rebuilding your social circle, trying new things and rebuilding a lot of the inner workings of your life. That's really hard to do. When your confidence feels like it has just been shattered and you're battling a lot of fear and anxiety. So that's why we focus on confidence on top of the foundation we already built, which are the things that we covered last week.
So making decisions our first component here. [00:13:00] So making decisions again, really hard. It can feel like the stakes are high and we can waffle a lot. We can second guess decisions a lot. And one of the reasons why this is really hard is because when you have experienced something traumatic like the loss of a spouse, your brain rewires itself for a period of time.
The amygdala in your brain takes over. Some people call it like your brain gets hijacked, and so the amygdala in your brain, which is our fight or flight. Freeze Fawn. Like all of the instinctual responses, that part of our brain that keeps us alive, takes over the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain that helps you think clearly, helps you think logically, helps you make decisions.
Sometimes they call it like executive function, [00:14:00] like it just helps you. With problem solving, decision making, and thinking clearly. So you may have heard that people struggle with brain fog or widow's brain. That's where we get that term from is because it's hard to think clearly, logically, and to make decisions because the amygdala is overshadowing now and cutting off some of the functionality of that part of our brain.
So if it feels like your nervous system is on fire, if it feels like you're on edge a lot, if it feels like you're in fight or flight mode all the time, your body is actually working normally. And also there is hope for getting to a point where you can feel more confident and think more clearly here in the future.
So that is why it's difficult to make decisions and why underneath the surface we can feel a lot of fear and anxiety around making the wrong decision [00:15:00] or doing something that feels really unsafe. The second piece of that is that your brain's primary job is to keep you alive and safe, and think about it in the aspect that our brains like things that are comfortable.
Things that are familiar, things that are part of our normal routine, right? So if your brain had an option, it would just do the same thing every day at the same time, because it knows that's safe. Your home is safe, your workplace is safe. The way the routine that you drive to work is probably the same routine every time that you go, because that is safe.
It's when we think about doing something new or different or going somewhere new or doing something different, like maybe you used to always go to the grocery store with your person and now you're having to go to the grocery store on your own and your brain's whoa. [00:16:00] This is not normal.
This is not what we know. This is very different. I don't like this. I don't wanna have to do this. Now I have to scan for danger. Now I have to look for what is lurking around the corner. 'cause I gotta keep you safe, right? Like your brain really can become hyperactive with scanning the environment for danger, looking for risk, looking for things that might come out after you.
It really is not different from if you were walking out in a jungle and your brain is looking for tigers and snakes and other things that might hurt you, like that's how it feels inside of your body, is your brain scanning for danger. So when it comes to making decisions, when it comes to. Stepping out of your routine or having to do something that's different.
Your brain and your nervous system send up all kinds of alarms. That's okay. That makes you a normal human [00:17:00] being. And over time, we have ways of calming down your nervous system and rewiring your brain so that it doesn't have to be on high alert all the time, but in the interim, until you get there. We have some things that you can do to help boost your confidence when it comes to making decisions.
So one of the core things that I teach widows to do is to form a board of advisors. A board of advisors. If you're familiar with Dave Ramsey's program used to be called the ELP program. I think maybe now it's called something else. Basically it's his trusted group of service providers who can help you, and you're wanting to form your own trusted group of people who can help you with making decisions.
Now, one of the challenging things is that. There can be lots of different types of people in different service provider areas, so [00:18:00] let's think about things like financial planning, an attorney or legal assistance, someone who help you with your physical health, someone to help you with your spiritual health, someone to help you with home maintenance decisions or car maintenance decisions like we want people to have.
Different seats in this board of advisors, right? And so what I teach widows to do is to vet out people in these different categories. Even if you don't think that you need someone in a certain category right now, like maybe you don't need an attorney right now, it's better to have someone vetted out and ready to go.
So when you do need them, you've already done the work. You already have the resource, so let's take financial planning as an example. Let's say that you need someone to help you make decisions with investing, with saving, with budgeting, with all of the things around financial planning and investing. One of the things that I [00:19:00] teach widows here is that you really want to interview and vet out the right person for you in this category. There are lots of different financial planners and there are lots of different. Guides to investing and different philosophies. For example, I am very debt averse. I don't have debt in my life. I don't leverage debt to mortgage my home or other types of investments like I personally.
Don't like debt. That is not common in the real estate investing world. And it may also not be common sometimes in the financial planning world. It takes a little bit of work and effort to find someone who isn't trying to convince me that I need to go mortgage my house and put that money somewhere else and try to leapfrog how much my investments are, right?
Like I don't wanna have to go back and forth with someone [00:20:00] constantly on why. My view and my value is to be debt averse. I wanna work with a financial planner who also is debt averse or who also believes that is a good strategy. And that way I know their values are already aligned with my, so I might also look for things like how risky of investments do they recommend people.
Make, are they recommending crypto? Are they recommending index funds, mutual funds? What is their main investment strategy? I'm looking for things also like, as Dave Ramsey says, do they have the heart of a teacher? I'm not looking for someone to look down their nose at me and say this is what you need to do and why.
That's a lot of the people that tell me, I need to go mortgage my house. Why would I go mortgage my house if it's paid off? But there are people that are like that's not very smart. You need to do this. [00:21:00] I'm looking for someone who says, look, here are the op. Here are some options. You have three options here.
You could do this, you could do this, you could do this. Here's the rationale behind each of the three options. If you want X, Y, or Z, you would go down option one. If you want this, you would go option two. If you want this, you would go Option three, here's why I think option three would be best for you, Emily.
And so what we're trying to do is to learn not everything about financial planning and investing. We're trying to learn enough to form, make an informed decision. Okay, so we wanna work with someone who doesn't know more than us, know better than us, so they can tell us what to do, but so they can lay out like, here are the options, and you can go to them.
When your crazy cousin Kevin says, oh, you should be investing in this fund over here, and you can go to your financial [00:22:00] planner and say, Hey. My cousin Kevin said, I need to invest in this fund. What do you know about it? And they can lay it all out for you, right? They're not just gonna be like, oh, just ignore him.
Don't worry about that. Like you want someone to explain it to you enough to where you can make your own decision. You can come up with an informed opinion and decide what it is that you wanna do. So again, we're forming our board of advisors. We're looking for people in different categories. And even if you have.
Zero interest in real estate investing. I encourage my clients to join Facebook groups of local real estate investors or to join a local real estate investor group because the network and the connections alone are gonna be multiple times over whatever the fee is to join. Like groups may be a couple hundred dollars for the year for you to join.
But the money that you're going to [00:23:00] save with having a trusted network of people with getting recommendations for home repairs or. Quotes from other people, or just getting to meet people in the industry is worth many times over what I've paid to be a member. Like how valuable would it be to be able to go into a Facebook group and say, Hey, I need new gutters on my house.
Someone quoted me $12,000. Does that sound normal? And for other people to chime in and be like, what? How big is your house? No, that's way too much. Or, yeah, that sounds about right. Like it sounds like a reasonable quote. Like just to be able to get feedback from other people who do this on a daily basis is incredibly valuable.
So as we're making decisions, again, the goal is not for you to learn everything about every topic. It's not even possible. You want to learn enough, you want to hear [00:24:00] enough different opinions that you can make your own opinion and your own decision about what needs to be done. But you have a trusted network, a trusted board of advisors that you can go to who align with your vision, your values, your what's important to you, and they truly have your best interests at heart.
Okay. That was number one, making decisions under the self-trust system. Number two of as part of the self-trust system is self-confidence. Now there's a big difference between self-esteem and self-confidence, and I could go down that rabbit hole, but I won't. The key I think, with self-confidence is in recognizing that.
We get to sink into this acknowledgement and understanding that we do not control all [00:25:00] outcomes. We will not have all of the answers. We cannot know how everything is going to work out, and we can also expect that things are going to go wrong. When I was planning a wedding, it's oh, something always goes wrong at a wedding.
What's it gonna be? Not will something go wrong, but it is gonna go wrong. As someone who's traveled and flown for many years, I expect when I travel, something is probably gonna go wrong. It's not pessimistic. I'm hopeful that there are no delays and there's no issues, and I make all of my connections and everything is seamless.
But I just know after having traveled for years, if there's a delay, if there's a change in gates, if something happened with a rental car company, like it happens. And so my confidence doesn't come from, everything's gonna work out smoothly, and there's gonna be no [00:26:00] issues and everything's gonna be fine.
My confidence comes from I can figure it out. I am resourceful when something doesn't go according to plan. I am capable of figuring it out when I have to navigate through a situation that I've not navigated before. I can step through it confidently because I know I've not done that before, but I can figure it out.
I've not tried that before, but I can figure it out. So here I teach my clients that confidence comes from not waiting to feel ready, not waiting to feel confident, because then you'll wait forever and not having all the answers and the control confidence comes from. Feeling, the fear, the anxiety, the unknown, the just awfulness of those emotions and taking action Anyway, stepping forward Anyway, we call it Brave Widow, not Fearless Widow.
[00:27:00] Think about it this way, when you tried something new for the first time that you had never done before. You are probably really scared to do it like I was in Fort Worth recently with my dad and in Fort Worth they have the Longhorn cattle and they had this opportunity where you could sit on top of one of the Longhorn steers, cows, whatever they're called on a saddle.
You could sit on top of them and get your picture taken. And my dad also did this, which I thought was incredible. Okay. And when I went to go sit on top of this cow, I was like, wow, how is this gonna work? Am I flexible enough to hoist myself over the saddle? Is he gonna be moving around a lot?
Is he just gonna take off, off? I don't know. I'm not done this before. In fact, last year when I went, I chickened out. I did not get in the saddle. I just stood beside the cow [00:28:00] and had my picture taken. Okay. But this time I was like, okay, you can. You can do this. You can do it. I didn't wait to feel confident.
I didn't wait to feel ready. I just told myself like, no, you're doing this. Like you're not gonna be coming back to Fort Worth. Probably for a few years. So let's get up there in that saddle. And so I walked up the steps, put my foot in the stirrups, swung the leg over, sat up there, smiled, got my picture taken.
And of course when I sat down, he like started taking steps forward and I could feel his body moving under me, which was a little unnerving because I haven't done that in a long time. Ridden horses or cat. I've never ridden a cow before, but even riding horses, it's been many years since I've done that, and I was like, whoa.
It took me just a minute. But then when I got back off the cow and came back down to the ground, I looked and I was like, oh, yeah, I could do that again. Super easy. No problem. [00:29:00] I had confidence to do it because I had taken action to do it. So a lot of times. As widows, we want to feel confident to do the thing, but the reality is you must take action and do the thing to become confident.
The first time that I ever used a propane grill Nathan had a Blackstone Grill. And he also had a pellet grill and a smoker, and things that I have never used before. And so I remember having to spend a lot of time watching YouTube videos. I also had brain fog, so I had to watch the same video over and over, write down the steps of what I was supposed to do.
And I remember just being terrified, like I've not run anything on propane before. I'm like, what if this blows up? How do I know there's enough gas in here? Do I put the door open? Do I put it shut? Do I turn the propane off? Do I turn the grill off? What are all the steps? What am I [00:30:00] supposed to do? And I remember just being incredibly fearful to do it.
I could have watched 30 videos and I wouldn't have felt really any more confident. But. After I used the propane grill for the first time, then I felt more confident. After the second time, I felt even more confident. After the third time, I felt really confident, and then maybe after the third or fourth time, I never really thought about it again.
It was just something that I did. It wasn't something that I'm like, whoa, I'm using the grill. Everybody watch out turning stuff on, move stuff around. Now what am I supposed to do? Like I just did it. And so this has been probably true for you your whole life. Anything new that you have tried that you weren't familiar with, that you had to learn, like you just had to do it.
And the more that you did it, the more comfortable you became, the more confident that you grew. And so this is how we build confidence by taking action [00:31:00] while we're afraid and unsure and nervous. I also inside of this section, inside of self-confidence teach something called the be do, have model. And this is something you can Google.
I did not make this up. And I remember when my coach, Dr. Betsy taught me the be, do, have model. I thought she was crazy. Not really, but like I did it. It did not make sense to me at all. Okay? So when I was learning how to be a life coach. One of the things she would say, she would be teaching us about quantum physics and how time is not actually real and how what we have in the future.
We already have now, we just haven't experienced it yet. I'm like, what? What do you mean we don't have it Now? Of course we don't have it now. I don't. I don't have it now. I'm not experiencing it or have it. What are you talking about? And so she would say you have to embody the person that you want to become.
So the [00:32:00] version of you that you want and the future, you have to embody that person now. So if you wanna be a successful life coach, Emily, you have to be a successful life coach right now. And I'm like, yeah, but how do I do that? I don't have any clients. How can I say I'm a life coach and I'm not coaching anybody?
That doesn't make any sense to me. How, what does that even mean? And so as I think about this, one of the examples with the be do, have model that I like to use in my clients is around traveling. Just because traveling, once you're widowed tends to be something that several people want to do, but they're incredibly terrified to do it.
We often think it's have, do be, which is when I have confidence, then I'll do things like travel that confident travelers do, and then I'll be a confident traveler. That's what we think. When I'm confident, then I'll travel and I'll be a confident traveler. And so what we do is we, this model, we [00:33:00] flip it completely around and we decide.
In order for me to have confidence, which we think we have to have first, we actually have it last. Okay. First, we must become the confident traveler. What does that mean? That means that I envision the future version of me who's a confident traveler. Then step two, I do the things a confident traveler would do.
Book flights, make arrangements, step outside of my comfort zone, and then once I do that, I will have confidence. Okay. So instead of having confidence, doing confident things and being a confident traveler, we flip it and we become. We embody that future version of ourselves. We become the confident traveler.
We do the things that confident travelers do, and over time we then have confidence like we truly become that future version of ourself. Very [00:34:00] quickly, we collapse the timeline to this future version of ourself. Okay. Another example, being a life coach, being a coach for a business owner for multiple businesses, including Brave Widow.
So as Bessy would try to coach me like, oh, step into this version where you are a successful life coach and you make a great salary from life coaching and helping people, and everyone loves your podcast and people refer people to you and. You're just really out there doing God's work and helping people like just be that person today.
And I would say, but I can't, I don't have the clients. I don't have the income. I don't have a successful YouTube. I don't even, I would do webinars and people wouldn't even show up. Guys. You know how hard that is. Do you know how hard it is? For over two years, I invested my [00:35:00] own money into Brave Widow to keep it alive.
I invested money in coaching to help me grow and become better.
And Betsy would be coaching me and saying, you gotta step into that future version. You gotta become that successful life coach and entrepreneur of the future. You gotta do that today. And I'm like what does that mean? Because I don't have clients, I don't have people coming in web, my webinars I can't sell.
Like when I started, I sold a year of access to all of the courses, all of the content I had for $7 and I sold. Two,
I'm talking hours and hours of my life, and two people were willing to pay me $7 for all years. Insane. Okay? I would spend hours creating content for webinars and pay for the software to schedule 'em and show up, and there would be no one, or there would be one person. So how could I [00:36:00] step into that future version of me, that future version of being a successful life coach and entrepreneur when I didn't have the things that successful life coaches and entrepreneurs had?
I didn't have a team. I didn't have social media. No one edits my podcast. It's me. It's me doing all of that. I don't have all this stuff, but I chose. To do everything I could to embody that future version of me, which meant I created podcasts every week. This is episode 171, which means I've created more podcasts than one a week for three years, so I've exceeded that.
It meant that I showed up to webinars and I delivered my heart out like I was delivering it to a hundred people. And when no one had questions, I just had questions I thought people would have, and [00:37:00] I would say, oh, let me answer these questions. I would sell my heart out and no one would buy. I would spend hours creating content and posts and get no likes or get two likes, no comments.
I would send an email every single day, five days a week. Crickets. I had I don't know, it seemed like I had 30 people on my email list for forever. And I would continue to pour money into this company and pour money into this company and pour all of my time and energy and resources to believe that it could be possible and that it would be possible.
And I had people who would say oh yeah, it's just too bad. Like maybe this thing. Maybe this is just gonna be like an it's just a thing that you do to give back to people. It's not, you're gonna have to do other things to bring income in. And so I thank God that I did [00:38:00] have my real estate investment. . I did do some leadership coaching and consulting on the side. I did do other things to bring income in because Brave Widow was not bringing it in, and yet I had to sit in front of this camera and do my best to show up as a life coach who is in demand as if people were willing to pay whatever it cost.
To learn and grow and transform their life as if there were thousands of people watching my webinars, engaging with me on lives and asking questions and doing all of those things. I just had to keep doing it. I had to keep doing it. And by doing that, I started to create, I created clients, I created consults, I created.
People who actually paid for services. I created the [00:39:00] academy. I created a community of widows and people who have been with me for now almost three years, like amazing. And now I get to experience some of the things that almost three years ago, it just felt like a pipe dream, like. How are people gonna feel about charging widows?
Aren't we just supposed to give away everything for free? Oh gosh. She's taking advantage of the widows. Like all of the doubt, all of the fear. How do I go from being a senior vice president with thousands of employees and hundreds of locations across the United States and in other countries?
And be in an executive boardroom for a multi-billion dollar company and post on my LinkedIn that I left that prestigious exclusive career that was hard for women in healthcare to get to become a life coach who does that [00:40:00] life coach isn't even a real job. That was literally what I thought. I was embarrassed to tell people.
Now is a whole different story. I'm so proud. I'm so proud. And yes, there are still people who don't understand how I left a job making a salary. Most people would just dream of to operating a company that I'm having to fund to keep it alive for over two years. Refusing to give up, refusing to believe that it's not possible to keep showing up like I am a coach and I am an answer to people's prayer.
That was Betsy's number one thing is you as coaches are an answer to someone's prayer, and I wanted to believe that, but I was like, I don't know me. How am I gonna help these people? I'm not sure. But she would reiterate over and over, you're the answer to someone's prayer. You're the answer to [00:41:00] someone's prayer.
You're the answer to someone's prayer. And I cannot tell you, I cannot express how humbling and how deeply rewarding and fulfilling it has been even the last six months to talk with you. To talk with my clients, to talk with widows who get on a call with me and say, I keep praying about what I need to do, and I just keep seeing Brave Widow.
God just keeps bringing me back to you or for one of my clients to say on a podcast, this has been an answer to a four year long prayer. What? What? I could barely conceive in the beginning as being possible, as being real, as being certain I was so uncertain. I'm living it now every day. I have the best job in the freaking world.
[00:42:00] I have the honor to walk with people. In their darkest and most difficult times. I had messages and emails from clients over the weekend about other tragedies that have happened, other deaths in their family, other just difficult moments where they're like, I just don't know what else to do other than just send this all to you in a message or an email or a voice message.
I don't know what else to do. The incredible honor to be the lifeline for that person to feel like I am there to sit with them in those horrible moments of sorrow and sadness, and their world feels incredibly dark and I know that I will be a witness to them. Experiencing days that are brighter, experiencing moments of joy, experiencing something that in the beginning they could barely believe [00:43:00] would even be possible.
And as I told two of my clients from over the weekend who had sent me messages, as I told them, it may be hard for you to believe that this is even possible. So I will believe it for you right now. But what we're gonna continue to do is continue to step forward. I'm not letting you quit. I'm not letting you give up.
Giving up might feel like it's the easy answer, but giving up leaves you in the hard because it's hard to live with no hope. It's hard to feel like things are never gonna get better. It's hard to feel like you have no purpose. Now it's easy to give up. It's hard to live with what giving up gives you.
So my confidence and my ability now to coach people, to help people is through the roof because I have done it now with so many people. But in the beginning. [00:44:00] Three years ago, I had no clue. That's why I joined Betsy's program because I remember telling her one of our first calls, like I know what helped me, but that doesn't mean it's gonna help other people and other people have other issues and challenges that I don't know if I can help 'em.
I don't know if I can do this, but I took action anyway. I embodied that future version of myself, and I did the things that I would do as a confident coach. I coached people, I worked with them, my mind. Saw the evidence that built that over time. Yeah. I can help people. Yeah. Their lives are improved when they work with me.
Yes. We, I can do this. So when I talk to someone around grief or widowhood or they come to me and they're like, I don't know if you can help me with this. It's yeah, I absolutely can. I see the challenges you're dealing with. I can do this. I have already done this. With someone else, or I've done it with myself.
And let me tell you about that story of what [00:45:00] happened. And my confidence is through the roof. I am a legit life coach. This business is able to keep itself alive and to allow me to invest back into coaching for myself and invest in other things. Like it's working, it's happening, it's going really well.
But if I had waited to feel confident, I would not be here. I need you to hear that the reason. That the Brave Widow website exists. The reason that November of 2022 is when the third podcast came out is because Betsy told me I've signed you up to be on someone else's podcast, and when that podcast comes out, you need to be ready.
What website are you gonna send people to? What you wanna do a podcast. You wanna get on her this other lady's podcast and tell 'em about your podcast? You wanna be able, like what resources are you gonna give to people as calm? Lead magnets, right? Like free, [00:46:00] downloadable resources. What are you gonna give away?
You need to have that ready by November. And so I felt like I was just propelled, like I had to make this happen if she had not. Instilled that deadline, I don't know how long it would've taken me. The website never would've looked good enough. The Canva images never would've been good enough. The post wouldn't have been written enough, like I would've just perpetually put this off for how long and then how much longer would people had to wait for me to be able to help them.
And so confidence doesn't come from feeling ready, from feeling confident, from knowing that you have the answers and you know how it's gonna look. Brave Widow today does not look how I thought it was gonna look. And that's okay. I love it more. I love it more. Now the way that it is, I had no idea it could be the way that it is now.
I hoped it would be great. I didn't know. And so for you too, I share all that vulnerably with you. Not to say, look at me. I'm so amazing. I did a great [00:47:00] job. But for me to say, look, I'm not perfect. There was no perfect plan. I didn't know how this was gonna turn out either, and I still did it. And look what happened.
If I can do it, me, if I can do it, you can do it too. Okay, so we have making dec, I need to, I know I need to wrap it up here. We're in the self-trust system. That was a lot making decisions. Number two is self-confidence. Number three is safety. And so when we are working with students in the academy, and when I'm working with clients, we work on ways of battling self-doubt on how.
Fear and feeling of a loss of physical safety shows up in real life and some things that we can do to combat that. So for example, with travel, okay, maybe you don't wanna travel. On your own the first time. There are lots of widow travel groups, solo mom travel or solo women travel groups, adult only travel groups, like [00:48:00] organized groups that you can go with or you could travel with a friend.
There are a lot of different ways we can set up safety for you in trying new things without feeling like, oh, I just have to jump off the cliff with no parachute. So safety is all about. Identifying what causes us to feel unsafe and how we can create as much safety as possible to reestablish that safety net under our decisions or under what we're doing to try new things.
And then the fourth component here is boundaries. So we will work a lot with boundaries here. And then also in the next module, you'll get to hear about next week, which is around relationships. So boundaries with who gets access to us, how much access they have, how we allow people to treat us, how we allow people to show up for us or how we wanna show up for them.
How we navigate guilt and all of the shoulds. I should do this for someone, [00:49:00] or, oh, this happened and I feel bad if I don't do that. Like we need boundaries. A lot of times we have resistance to boundaries, or we feel guilty or we feel bad. So we cover a lot of that in the self-trust system for people who are in typically that second season of grief.
And again, in these seasons of grief and in these systems and modules that I've developed, it's meant to be building blocks, right? So we're building some boundaries in now so that we can come in and refine them again in the relationship. Section, which is called the Connection Protocol. So I hope that you have found these examples helpful as you're thinking about what to focus on in different seasons of grief.
Again, I have the free seasons of grief [email protected], and if you would like to work with me. And you're not really sure what your next step should be, go to brave widow.com to schedule your [00:50:00] consult call, and I will help you in a very no pressure way, identify where you are in the seasons of grief, what the right next step is for you, and I send you your customized plan.
So whether you decide to work with me or not, you have your plan. You know the top things that you can be focused on over the next few months or over the next year, and you can start to make some real change in your life. All right, head on over to brave widow.com. I've got tons of resources there for you, and I would love to be able to talk with you on a consult call.
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 [00:51:00] 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.
