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I Used to Think Grief Healed Like a Broken Bone. I Was Wrong. | BW: 212

tips Sep 15, 2026
 

[TRANSCRIPT BELOW]

 

If you’re functioning on the outside but barely surviving on the inside, this episode is for you.

Brave Widow Resources  

 

 

After my husband died, I thought healing meant eventually returning to the person I used to be and the life I used to have. But grief does not work that way. Our old life is gone, and rebuilding requires a different kind of roadmap.

 

In this episode, I walk through the three phases many widows experience:

  1. Stabilize: Moving through the storm and creating a foundation for healing.
  2. Explore: Discovering who you are now and what kind of life you want to build.
  3. Rebuild: Creating a life you can love again while still carrying grief.

 

You’ll also learn why staying busy cannot help you outrun grief, how to grow your capacity for both grief and joy, and why being surrounded by the right people can change the direction of your life.

 

 

Chapters

00:00 When you look fine but are barely surviving
01:00 Phase One: Stabilize
03:00 Why staying busy does not heal grief
06:00 The Chaos to Calm blueprint
09:00 Building a foundation
10:30 Phase Two: Explore
12:00 Who am I now?
16:00 Experimenting with your new life
20:00 Grief, guilt, and learning to hold both
26:00 Phase Three: Rebuild
30:00 The “and” life
34:00 Why community helps you move forward
41:00 The three-phase roadmap and next steps

 

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If you’re new here, my name is Emily Tanner. I’m the founder of Brave Widow and Brave Widow Academy.

 

I help widows move from barely surviving their loss… to rebuilding a life they can actually love again without feeling like they’re betraying their person.

 

By day (and for 20+ years), I’ve led large teams and complex operations in the corporate world. 

 

After my husband Nathan died in 2021, just shy of our 20-year anniversary, I took everything I knew about leadership, systems, and change — and started applying it to grief.

 

Since then, I’ve:

Shared my story publicly to make widows feel less alone.

Launched the Brave Widow podcast, now with 180+ episodes and listeners around the world.

Coached hundreds of widows 1:1 and in groups, and talked with thousands more through the podcast, communities, and events.

Built Brave Widow Academy, a 6-month coaching program with a clear framework for moving from deep grief to rebuilding a life you can love again.

 

I don’t teach “just think positive” grief tips.

 

I teach widows how to:

Heal their heart.

Stop waiting on “time” to fix everything.

Take small, brave steps toward a life that feels meaningful again.

 

How I Got Here…

 

2021: My husband Nathan dies unexpectedly. I’m 4 kids in, overwhelmed, and drowning in paperwork, decisions, and pain. Therapy helps, but I still feel stuck with no roadmap.

 

2021–2022: I start devouring books, interviewing widows, trying grief groups, and studying coaching — desperate to find something that actually helps me feel different.

 

2022: I start the Brave Widow podcast, recording episodes while terrified and crying between takes — but determined that no widow should feel as alone as I did.

 

Year 1: I begin coaching widows 1:1. Word spreads quietly. The same patterns and problems keep showing up, so I start building frameworks instead of one-off advice.

 

Year 2: I launch Brave Widow Academy — a structured, 6-month coaching program with a step-by-step path: from deep grief, to stability, to rebuilding.

 

Year 3: Brave Widow has listeners around the world. I’ve personally coached hundreds of widows and spoken with thousands more through consults, lives, emails, and DMs. 

 

Today: My work is simple:

 

Help widows stop surviving each day… and start rebuilding a life that makes them genuinely glad to be alive again.

TRANSCRIPT:

 

Speaker: [00:00:00] There's a version of grief where you're not falling apart in public, you're getting to work, you're feeding the kids, you're responding to messages, and from the outside, people think you look great. But inside, you're just trying to make it to the end of the day. If that's where you are right now, this episode is for you

And if you're a little bit past that place but you still don't know what life is supposed to look like, you don't know what your next step is, then this episode is also for you. Today, I wanna give you a roadmap. Not a checklist, not a timeline, a map of the three phases that most widows move through and what actually helps in each one. Welcome to episode 212 of The Brave Widow Show

Phase one is called stabilize. This is the storm. This [00:01:00] is when you are reeling from the impact of grief You are in the middle of a hurricane, and think about mentally, emotionally, how it would be to be in the middle of a thunderstorm, a tornado, a, a hurricane. Like, the rain is pounding down. The wind is howling.

Your main priority and focus and all you can think about is finding safety from the storm. It's hunkering down. It's survival. Of course you can't see the future. Of course you can't plan what your next two or three years are gonna look like. You're concerned about getting through the storm

All you can think about is, "How am I gonna survive this? How am I gonna get through it? What's the next one thing I have to do? Oh, there's a, the rain's coming in my house. Part of the roof got torn off. I've gotta fix that. [00:02:00] Oh, what about, sandbags out in front of the doors and the windows?

I gotta take care of that. Oh, the electricity went out. Now I gotta take care of that." Like, all you can really focus on are things that you need to do immediately, like the paperwork, notifying all the companies, working with an attorney, planning out what the estate plan is going to look like, figuring out passwords, figuring out how to do some of the tasks that maybe your person used to do.

Like, that's all you can focus on. It sucks up every ounce of energy because you are worried about surviving. You're focused on just getting through this and surviving the day, the week, the moment, this particular season

Now as humans, we tend to deal with grief and to deal with this trauma and overwhelm in a way that we're taught, in a way that people speak to [00:03:00] us, which unfortunately aren't always ways that are really helpful. 'Cause as humans, especially culturally in the United States, we don't talk a lot about grief.

We are really shown some ways of dealing with grief that don't actually help us, that can prolong the emotional healing process. And so if these are some ways that you've been taught to deal with grief or that you've been using to deal with grief, what I want you to hear is that there's nothing wrong with you.

You're not broken. You're not doing things wrong. You are navigating a situation that with the tools and with the knowledge that you've had to this point. And until I did lots of deep study and learning about grief, I didn't know some ways that can actually help us in dealing with grief. So what are some ways people tend [00:04:00] to teach us or ten- things they tend to say to us that are not helpful ways of dealing with grief?

One might be you need to be strong or that you just need to power through, you just need to push through, you just need to get through this. Stay strong or you need to stay busy. You need to keep yourself busy. Keep your mind off of it. Keep your mind off of it and one day you'll start to feel like the old you.

Maybe you've learned that you don't have a lot of safe people around you where you can be honest and you can grieve openly because it makes them uncomfortable. It makes them sad. It, it has a negative emotional impact on them, and they wanna fix you. They wanna comfort you. They want you to feel better.

They want you to go back to the old way that you were. So you've learned that you h- need to wear a mask. You need to pretend that you're getting better, as if you're, like, getting over the flu. Like, [00:05:00] you're getting better. You're holding your chin up. Things are, are gonna be fine. And we just believe this great misconception that if we just give it time, we'll start to feel, quote, unquote, "normal."

If we just give it time, the pain will go away. If we just give it time, things will get better

I'm gonna give you a harsh truth, which is you can't outrun grief. You can keep yourself busy, you can go out every night with friends, you can throw yourself into work or volunteering or running errands or having a very active life, and grief is still waiting for you when you get home.

Still waiting for you in the evenings, on the weekends, in those times where it's hard to be at home. It's hard to sit in the sadness. It's hard to sit in the awkwardness of grief and, and unpacking that and [00:06:00] processing it But as they say in the coaching world, the only way out is through The only way of moving and rising beyond grief is to face it head-on, to process it, to work through the traumatic reality of what you have experienced, instead of trying to hide from it, or trying to shove it away, or trying to pretend like it doesn't exist.

And so one of the things that I teach all of my clients, regardless of if you're in Foundations or if you're in Brave Widow Academy, is, we have something called Chaos to Calm, the Chaos to Calm blueprint, and there are five things that I help my clients do to come down out of the overwhelm, to create a sense of calm in their life, to prioritize emotional healing, that I find it doesn't matter [00:07:00] how many years you've been widowed, it doesn't matter what things that you've tried, it doesn't matter if you have tried to do new things, if you've tried to build up a new life, if you have tried to go make new friends and do all of those things.

These five things are foundational building blocks that if one of them is missing or if one of these is an area that we're really struggling, it doesn't matter what other things that we've done that feel more advanced, we come back to these five fundamental building blocks. And I'll tell you what they are.

I don't have time to teach them all to you, but I teach them inside of Brave Widow Foundations, and then we also hit on them again in Academy, because they're that important. Okay? So the first one is having a routine, and not just a routine that gets you through the day, but a [00:08:00] routine that you can, that is supportive to you, that you can actually start to enjoy.

The second one is what we call self-care, and I know you might be rolling your eyes at the thought of self-care. This is really all-encompassing of things from taking care of yourself physically, nutritionally learning how to calm your nervous system and to let your nervous system heal over time, and lowering the expectations that you have for yourself.

Okay? Number three is help, so how to ask for help, how to accept help when it's hard to accept help. Number four is emotional healing, so that's a very important area that we focus on, and we work with some evidence-based tools in emotional healing because it's that important. And the fifth one is spiritual connection, so how do we wrestle with faith and God and all of the questions it seems like we shouldn't ask or we're wrong for asking, or the- [00:09:00] anger, the whatever it is that we feel, how do we navigate this very tricky spiritual connection while we're also wrestling with grief?

So these are the five fundamental building blocks that I use to help create a good foundation for people as they're healing their heart, and they're getting their feet underneath them. They're trying to stabilize. Okay, this is the first phase, the first thing when I'm talking with a potential new client, when I meet another widow who says they're struggling.

In my mind, I am looking for where are they in these three phases, the first one being stabilized. Do they need to stabilize? It doesn't matter if you're bold and adventurous and you're willing to try new things, if you don't have a good foundation... See why I named it Brave Widow Foundations? If you don't have a good foundation to stand on, to build your life on, if you're building your life on sand, [00:10:00] then it's gonna sink.

But you need a strong, solid foundation. You need that season of healing, of restoration, of renewing, so that when you're ready to rebuild this new life, you have a good foundation to come back to. When the grief waves hit, when life is hard, when you're trying to navigate all the uncertainty in this weird in-between season of life, you need a good foundation to stand on.

That's what I teach my clients, okay? So the first phase, the first, as I think about it, season that widows are going through our theme, our focus is to stabilize. The second phase is to explore. So now you, in the beginning stages of grief, you were in the storm, you were in the hurricane. The rain is just ceaselessly pounding down on you, creating all kinds of problems.

You are trying to survive. You're trying to keep everything intact [00:11:00] just enough to survive the storm and get through this day and figure out what you're gonna do next, right? So this next phase, the storm has passed. You're no longer in survival mode. Your feet are underneath you. You're more in what I would call maintenance mode, right?

You have your feet underneath you. You're starting to look around. Uh, you look at the destruction that the storm has brought. You look at your life that feels now that it's been shattered. The future that you had in mind is shattered. Your hopes and dreams have shattered. Like, everything feels like it's been destroyed and ruined.

By grief. And you're looking around like, "Where do I even start in picking up the pieces? And, and even if I could pick up the pieces and glue them back together, it's not gonna be the same. It's not gonna be the same." And this is a point [00:12:00] where a lot of widows tend to get stuck It's a, a place in life that's very disorienting.

You can feel untethered. The question that you weren't prepared to ask is who am I now? I, I never even knew that would be a question I would have. Who am I? Of course I know who I am, but now I don't. I know who I was in the past. I know who I was with my person. That's gone now. I, I don't... who am I now, now that I've been surviving this, now that I am not physically with my person?

Who am I? Who do I wanna be? What kind of life do I wanna have? Now we're starting to ask these questions that no one prepared us for. I knew if I was ever gonna be widowed, that I would miss my late husband, Nathan. I knew I would miss him, of course. I never knew that I was gonna be questioning [00:13:00] who I am, what kind of life I want to have.

Because to me, the answer would be, well, I don't want a life without my person I had no clue who I wanted to be without my person because I didn't want a life without my person

Okay? And the harsh truth in this phase of what we call exploring is not that you need to find yourself again. That's kind of the belief that we have, right? That we're gonna get back to our old self, that we're gonna find ourself again, that, that we're gonna go back to the way that we used to be. But the harsh truth is that you don't need to find yourself.

You're not lost. But now you get to decide who you want to be And there is this transition of I don't want anything to do with the future because I only want the past, and I'm holding onto the past, and I'm trying to go back to the past. And [00:14:00] for many widows and widowers, they come to a point where they're like, "Okay, I, I can't go back to the past. I see that. I don't even feel like the same person I was. I think I would... If I'm going to live, I would like to have a life I enjoy living, but I have no idea what. What now? What am I supposed to do next?" This is often where a lot of clients tend to find me is this whole point of, " I don't wanna live the rest of my life like this, but I don't know, like, where do I go from here?"

And maybe they've done some counseling, and maybe they've done a grief group, or maybe they've done some things to help them heal emotionally, and help them come out of the chaos, and help them come out of the overwhelm. And then they're like, "Well, now what? Like, is this just my life now?" That's depressing.

That's the point I was at. Like, is this? Is my life now this? Really? Wow.

What I help so many of my clients do is navigate this [00:15:00] phase of exploring to figure out who they want to be next. It isn't a question that can just have an easy answer most of the time. We start to explore, like, what is the type of person I wanna be? What do I wanna be known for? How do I wanna live out life?

I lived so many years of my life going 100 miles an hour, multitasking constantly, being on the phone constantly, in meetings, rushing here, rushing there, rush, rush, rush. I rushed everywhere all the time. And I recognized as I started building my life back up after loss, that I was defaulting to some of those same things of like, oh, I gotta juggle my real estate and my Brave Widow business and this business and working with these people and doing consulting work and contracting work and, and doing this and that, and my life's just busy.

Like, I was going back into what I knew, what was comfortable and familiar. And I had to come [00:16:00] to a place where I was like, I don't... I've lived that season of life for so long, I don't want my whole life to just be rushing around. I don't wanna be that person anymore. I don't wanna be the workaholic, the busy person, the person who's so important and has all these things to do and, and they're always so tired and they're always so busy.

Like, I don't want that anymore. It's not my badge of honor anymore. And if that's you, if, if that's what you want and who you wanna be, I respect that. That's your choice. It was just wasn't who I wanted to be anymore. So it's still something that I practice to this day of simplifying, of slowing down, of recognizing if I wanna take one thing and I wanna take it really far, it's gonna take me a lot longer if I'm trying to juggle 10 different things at the same time I'm trying to move everything forward.

Rather than if I slim things down, then I can really move [00:17:00] a few things much farther forward And so for you, it may be you wanna be someone who's adventurous, or you want to travel, or you wanna be somebody who's committed. Like, if they say they're gonna do something, they're gonna do it, they're gonna follow it through.

You will get to decide who you wanna be, and if you don't have it all figured out just yet, then congratulations, you're a normal human being who's gone through this process But that's what also makes this part of the process really hard. Because in this phase of exploring, where I'm helping my students, especially like what we're doing here in, um, Academy.

See this big, beefy book? We got all these worksheets. We're going and we're, we're figuring it out. We're talking about, okay, here, I'm talking about boundaries. Here, I'm talking about limiting beliefs that I have for myself. Here, I'm thinking about how I [00:18:00] can meet people and make new friends and be curious about those people.

Like, I am learning how to explore who I wanna be now, what kind of life I want to have, and I'm trying it. I'm trying like all these different experiments to figure out what is the right ratio, what's the right combination of turning this knob and flipping this lever on and trying this and trying that.

What do I love? What resonates with me? What do I really dislike? And I'm like, "I'm not doing that anymore." And how social do I wanna be, and how much downtime do I want? And what are the things that when I try them, they light me up on the inside, and I'm like, "Yes, I love that. I want more of that." Like, it's this phase, this season of figuring out what kind of person do I wanna be, what kind of life do I wanna have, where is God leading me in this next part of my journey?

And it's [00:19:00] hard, and it's awkward, and it's weird. It's hard to try something new. It's hard to navigate small talk when you're someone who maybe you're socially awkward. Maybe you just don't like small talk. You don't have the patience for it. Maybe you don't know, where do I go to meet people and make friends at my age?

That's so weird. How do I take myself out to dinner as like, and eat by myself? That's so awkward. How do I try all these things? And then on top of all of that, you have all of the guilt, right? The guilt of other people's expectations of how you're supposed to be grieving. The guilt of, oh my gosh, I watched a movie and I had so much fun.

I'm not supposed to have fun. I'm supposed to be sad. My person is gone, right? We feel like it's one or the other. It can't be both. And I teach you that isn't true. I teach you how to grow your capacity to hold both, which is I miss [00:20:00] my person, I love the life that I had, I love what my life looked like, and also Hey, there's some things about this life that I'm starting to enjoy.

Look at that. I am doing things that I wouldn't have been able to do before. I'm going places I wouldn't have been able to go because that wasn't really in alignment with who we were as a couple. And oh, I, I can laugh and feel like a real normal human again instead of a, a zombie. Like, what? How do I navigate the fears, the doubt, the insecurity, the overwhelm, the crushing guilt, the crappy comments from other people?

" Oh, you're just living your best life now, aren't you? Oh, look at you having such a great time. I wonder what your husband would have thought about that." Well, I don't know. I would ask him, but he's, he's kind of dead, so I can't ask him unfortunately. I'm being a little snarky, okay? That's not my recommended response.

But yeah, people [00:21:00] are gonna make crappy comments, and people are gonna have their own opinion. And guess what? If you put 10 of your friends and family around you and you ask them all their opinion about how you're supposed to be grieving, you're gonna get 10 different answers. What is the right time?

After two years, am I allowed to laugh? After three years, am I allowed to go do something fun? Like, for everyone else, time is passing pretty quickly 'cause they're living life, and for us, one day feels like a whole week. It feels like eternity. You're like, "It's only been three months," and it feels like an eternity already, like a lifetime without my person

So how do I figure out who I wanna be, what kind of life I wanna have, while also navigating my own guilt, my own grief, what other people are saying, what they're thinking, worrying about that, finding the courage to do things I'm afraid to do, finding the motivation to do it when I don't feel like doing it and I wanna give up?

When I have all these thoughts of like, "See, [00:22:00] this is why you don't try new things," or these waves of grief come, and then I'm feeling like I'm doing it wrong, or I feel like I'm starting over. I've gone back to square one. Like, I thought I was getting better in grief. I haven't cried in like three months, and then this whole week I've just been wiped out.

What happened? What am I doing wrong? Am, am I broken? Does this mean I'm never gonna be able to have a life that grief is not have a hold on me, grief doesn't have this power over me? Will I ever get there? Is this normal? What can I do when the holidays come? What can I do when it's the one-year anniversary, the two-year anniversary?

These are all the things that I help my brave widow and widower clients do inside Foundations, inside Academy. As we're rebuilding life inside of Academy, we first undertake exploring what are the possibilities, [00:23:00] and we do this even without knowing what the outcome is, without a guarantee. I can't guarantee that you're not going to have a hard life.

I can't guarantee that you're gonna reach the finish line and just know nothing but joy and happiness, and life's just gonna be easy breezy. No, life is hard. Without the grief, without having lost your person, life is also full of suffering and, and hardships and trials So we also undertake this journey with a belief in this exploring what this new life could be like.

It's like exploring a new world, like exploring a new country. We don't know what it's gonna be like. We don't know what it's gonna look like, what it's gonna feel like, what the language is gonna be, what the food's gonna be, what the temperature's gonna be. We don't know. But we believe that God has a plan and a purpose for us.

We believe that it could be something [00:24:00] better than we can imagine because right now we can't imagine anything good. We can't imagine, like, how would it be possible that I could enjoy my life again? How could it be possible that I would even love my life again? Like, that seems so far away. And so in this phase of exploring, of learning, of experimenting, of being adventurous, of figuring it out, it is really hard.

It's also simple So it's simple but not easy. It's hard, but it's not complicated

how we move through this part of the grief journey of figuring out who we wanna be, of building our confidence

Of building our relationships. So I teach the connection protocol, which is all about relationships, boundaries, communication styles, people pleasing, finding new friends, figuring out who has access to you and who you want in your inner circle and in your life, and being okay with the fact that not everybody has to get it, not everyone has [00:25:00] to understand.

Even your own family, it's okay, they don't have to get it. But here are the things that you need to be able to lean into when you have people around you who don't get it. Here are the ways that you implement boundaries so that you don't become a doormat.

Speaker 3: So in the academy, in the connection protocol, I teach my clients how to meet people, how to make friends, how to rebuild this overall social circle and decide who you want in your life. Who do you wanna build connection and relationships with so that you aren't isolated and lonely in your journey? We also walk through a framework called the Discover Your Purpose Plan.

This is where we really look at how am I defining purpose? How have I defined it in the past? Where have I seen it change? How can I think about purpose differently now? What are the things that light me up on the inside? And how can I build [00:26:00] purpose in a way that it can never be taken away from me? No matter what about my circumstances change, my sense of purpose and meaning cannot be taken away from me.

So if purpose is important to you, that sense of purpose, of meaning, of significance, then you're going to love what we do in Brave Widow Academy. And in fact, for our alumni folks, we are currently going through a 31 days of discovering purpose challenge right now. So we focus a lot on building that back into our lives.

All right, so we had phase one of rebuilding life, which was stabilize. We have to get stable before we can even think about exploring and figuring out this new life. Number two is to explore, to experiment, to be adventurous, to figure out and to get more clear on who we wanna be now and what types of things we wanna pull into our lives.[00:27:00]

And number three is to rebuild The harsh truth that I didn't learn for a long time after my person died is that our old life is in ash. I used to think that a hurting heart and grief, allowing your heart to heal was like allowing a bone to heal. That if we just give it enough time, and we set it up correctly, and it heals, then we can go back to functioning the way that we used to.

But that isn't how grief works. Our old life isn't there anymore. We can't go back to it. And I don't enjoy saying that. I don't enjoy telling people that, but when I learned that, it made things so clear to me. It suddenly made sense. Well, no wonder I can't go back to the person I was or to the life that I had.

That it doesn't even exist anymore. I can't go back. But I [00:28:00] can choose what I'm going to do next. If I can't go back to my old life, if I've been thrust into this new life, into this pile of ashes that my life has become, then I get to choose to rise up and build something new. This is why I teach a concept called Rise Beyond Grief, the four seasons of grief, and how we can rise up beyond grief.

Not to heal from grief, not to say that we've reached the goalpost, and we're finished, and we're done, and it's all in the past, but we rise beyond. We grow beyond just a life of grief. And so rebuilding is something where I see so many grief support or widow support groups just stop short because the goal is to help someone heal their heart.

It's to help them process grief. It's to help them stop [00:29:00] the, the bleeding and the hemorrhaging and, and the feeling that life is just never gonna get better, and to get them to a place of stability. And then we turn them back to the world and say, "Good luck." What is missing, and the reason Brave Widow exists to help fill this gap that I saw out in the grief industry, is not just grief recovery.

That is a component. It is the foundation. It's why we have a program called Foundations. It's a fundamental part of building a vibrant life in the future. So yes, we need grief recovery. It's, it is important. It is critical. And it's also just the foundation. We have a whole new life now that if we want a full and vibrant life, we must rebuild up out of the ashes, up on top of this foundation.

And so rebuilding isn't just about recovering from grief. It's [00:30:00] about setting up structures and the bones of this new life that we can enjoy again

Rebuilding is about learning how to grow, how to expand your capacity for what I call the and life. Okay? So often we think that life is or. I either have grief or joy. I either miss my old life or I love my new life I either loved my person or I love someone else. Like, it can't be both. There's no room for both.

It's only one. And in the beginning, we don't have the capacity often for happiness, for hope, for looking forward to the future. All we have the capacity for is grief and sorrow and what's right in front of us, and that's all we can hold. Can't hold happiness and joy and these other things. It just, it feels like too much.

It feels like it doesn't fit. It feels like it's [00:31:00] wrong. So we learn how to grow and stretch our capacity for both. Like, yes, I can wake up on Christmas Day, and I can remember my person, and I can honor them, and I can miss them. And also, I can have new happy memories that I've created, and I can be grateful for the Christmas I'm having right now, and I can be excited about some of the things that are coming up for the next Christmas, and those things.

It's not one or the other. It's and. It's grief and gratitude. It's sorrow and joy. It's who I was and who I am becoming. It's both. So some of the mistakes that I see people tend to make in the rebuild, and even sometimes in the explore phase, is playing small, shrinking back, burying their dreams here are a couple questions that I'm gonna invite you to consider. Are you making yourself smaller because [00:32:00] you're afraid of what it means to want more? Are you making yourself smaller because you're afraid of what it means to want more? Are you burying a dream because it feels selfish or wrong?

Are you burying a dream because it feels selfish or wrong? This is what I'm talking about with the and life. Learning how to navigate this whole new world, this world after loss, it feels, it can feel like we're put into a new country. We don't speak the language. We're not sure necessarily how to get around.

We're finding our, our feet underneath us for the first time. We're trying to figure out how to operate in this whole new world, and with this new perspective that we have on life. And we're also learning, well, what's okay? What's normal? Like, is it okay that I'm excited about something I'm pursuing? Is it okay that I enjoyed a [00:33:00] concert without them?

Does that make me wrong? Why do I feel guilty? Like, how do I wrestle with all of these things as I'm trying to rebuild life? And also the waves of grief keep coming. They look different and they start to feel different over time, but they don't just disappear. So how do I navigate that? How do I grow my capacity to hold all these jumbled up t- emotions all together at the same time?

And to be able to look at myself and go, "Wow, I'm, like, growing and learning and stretching, and I'm so proud. And also, like, this is crazy." But amazing So in the academy, I teach my clients something called the move forward method. This is really focused on building a life that you love, building a life that you are called for, that you are meant for that tiny little seed landed inside of you wants to, to be able to grow.

And one of the things [00:34:00] that just came up on a coaching call this week in one of our groups was... I talked about the power of just being in the room of other people who are on the same journey. You know, growing up, maybe you heard people say things like, "Oh, be careful of who you hang around. They're gonna rub off on you.

Be careful who..." You know, the, the type of friends that you choose because the people you spend time with are gonna influence you. They're gonna rub off on you. You're gonna become more like them. Which is true. And so I encourage my clients to use that to their advantage. For example, one of my clients on the call spoke up and she said that she...

We were talking about confidence, and we're talking about how do I grow confidence in something I haven't done much of, or I don't feel like I'm good at, or I've never done it before? How can I do it with confidence when I'm not [00:35:00] confident yet in that thing? And I asked the group to share some different areas that they wanted to grow their own confidence in, and this particular client was sharing how she wanted to grow confidence in the area of public speaking.

And I could tell there's some hesitation there, and she's like, "Well, I don't wanna be... You know, I'm not talking, like, a big public speaker. I'm just talking, like, small groups, maybe of other widows or other people or teaching. Just something in a very small capacity." And to you, you might go, "Oh yeah, that totally makes sense.

Like, she doesn't... yeah, just to a small group of people." But to me, when I hear that and when my mind thinks back on all of our interactions that we've had, on the emails we've exchanged, on the way she shows up on calls, on the way I see her engaged and asking questions and learning and growing, to me...

And I haven't [00:36:00] even told her this yet. But to me, I see this big picture of so much potential that she has. Like, how far she could take public speaking. Yes, she could improve her speaking skills if she desires, and she could do... have amazing impact in speaking with small groups. And also, I know that what often starts with humble beginnings, what often starts really small- small can grow bigger and bigger and bigger.

And I also know in Brave Widow, we elevate each other. We help promote each other. We help grow and give visibility to each other. So to me, it's only inevitable that she can do so many things with public speaking, with teaching, with inspiring people, encouraging them, making a difference in their life that she doesn't even see What all the potential [00:37:00] is.

And I don't wanna jump in and say, "Oh my goodness, you could do this and you could do that and, and you could do this, and like there's so much potential," because that might be really scary. "Well no, I don't wanna do any of that." That's what as humans we tend to do, right? We tend to say like, "I just wanna do this," or, "I think I'm, I'm called to this," or, "I think I can buy in that maybe I could do this.

Like that over there seems like a lot. I don't know about that. But this over here I could buy into that." And so one of the suggestions that I gave for her to consider is okay if you wanna improve public speaking, if this is an area that you wanna grow in and you're thinking about doing public speaking, go get in the room with public speakers.

Where are they? I'm sure they have Facebook groups. I'm sure they go to conferences. I'm sure they have masterminds or groups together and I even referred her to, [00:38:00] um, I have an amazing, amazing public speaking coach. Her name is Jen Gold. I'm gonna put her information here in the notes. But she's amazing.

She's an amazing public speaking coach and I'm like if you wanna seriously move forward in an area you need to get in the room. You need to get around other people who are doing the things that you wanna do or they're going where you wanna go or they're the type of people that you wanna be like.

Because even if you don't feel like you're making tons of progress or you're not sure about how far you wanna take something, if you're around other people they rub off on you. They influence you. You can't help but go in the momentum with them. It's like if you go to a f- a foreign country and you're there for a long time then th- maybe you start picking up a little bit of the local accent.

Maybe you start picking up some of the culture and things that they do because you're just around them. You just start picking up [00:39:00] what other people are doing. You start thinking like them. You start talking like them. You start evaluating things like them. An example that I gave was I thought about being a real estate investor for many, many, many years before I actually got in the room with other investors.

So I could think back at least- 15 years that I had thought about real estate investing, and I thought, like, "Well, I can't really do that. That's not for me. That's for other people. That's too hard. That's too risky. I don't know." Think, just, like, ruminate on maybe that's something I wanna do. And when I actually got in the room with other real estate investors, when I went to a local meetup, I purchased a property, and I became a real estate investor four months later.

So instead of spending 15 years thinking about it, within four months, I made it a reality by getting in the room with real estate investors. And this is why it's [00:40:00] so important to join a community, to join the room, the container, the space where other people are on a path that you wanna be on. Because even if you're like, "I don- I don't know.

I, I don't know that I have the capacity. I don't know that I don't have a lot of extra time. I don't know, you know, if I could really do some of these things that seem really big," just being in the room, just being around these people, you're gonna be in the current. You're gonna be in the momentum. You're gonna be just riding the coattails.

Like, you are going to move in the direction of the group just by being around them. They're gonna rub off on you. They're gonna influence you. They're gonna change the way you think. They're gonna change the way you speak. They're gonna change the way that you live the more that you surround yourselves with these types of people.

So who do you wanna be in the room with? This is why I love group programs like Brave Widow Academy. [00:41:00] Because I know if people will just get in the room, if they'll just show up, that over time, naturally, they're going to be taking steps forward. They're gonna be doing things differently. They're gonna start showing up differently.

Because by seeing other people, by building that community, by engaging with each other, they're rubbing off on each other. Yes, they're sharing struggles, and yes, they're sharing things that are hard, and also they're sharing wins that they've had. They're sharing successes, which is very inspiring and encouraging, that if that person can experience it...

And I saw how they were when they first came, and it was like they were not, they were struggling. And now they've had, like, some positive momentum. Like, now I can see how they're showing up on the calls. If they can do it, I can do that, too. I can start making changes. It's inevitable. It's inevitable for you to come and show up.

This is why I can offer a no widow left behind [00:42:00] guarantee. If you will just show up and be in the room, if you do nothing else, you will make progress. You will take steps forward. You will be able to see, like, oh, yes, I do see that I've made progress and I've moved forward, 'cause I'm surrounded by people who are also moving in that direction.

They're also taking steps forward and healing and learning and growing and expanding together

Let's recap our three phases in this roadmap of going from grief to actively rebuilding a life that you can love again. Okay, number one was stabilize, number two explore, number three rebuild. And here's what I want you to know about the map that I gave you. The map is free. The things I teach are free.

You can take them and use them right now. But the journey is hard when you're going at it alone, and when you're on your own and don't feel like you have direct guidance or you don't have that sense of [00:43:00] community. So if you are in the phase of stabilize and maybe even the first part of explore, I wanna invite you into our Brave Widow Foundations group.

This is the place where you can heal your heart, you can get your feet underneath you, you can come out of the, the chaos and the overwhelm into a place of peace and calm and get to the point where you're like, "I'm ready for more. I'm ready to build. I'm ready to add. I'm ready to grow into more." And that's really where we have Academy.

Academy is a six months program where I work with widows to actively start rebuilding their life up out of the ashes into something that they can actually start loving a- loving again

If you heard yourself in any of these phases today, I want you to note there is room for you. There is a place for you inside of Brave Widow

Our next round of Academy, for those who are interested in rebuilding, you're ready to start adding more, [00:44:00] starts in January. But we're doing a lot of stuff in the meantime between now and then. So if you decide that you would like to join Academy early, w- you wanna enroll early, you actually get access immediately to all of the resources that are inside of Academy.

You're also gifted foundations in the tools that we utilize in there, and in October, we start a live series that I teach called Brave Through the Holidays. Brave Through the Holidays starts in October with anticipating and coming up with a plan for how we're gonna make the holidays lighter, easier, and a little gentler.

We start in October, and our grand finale in January is creating a vision plan for 2027. You do not wanna miss this. Regardless of which program you're in, always time well [00:45:00] spent to start visioning the year and thinking about what we want more of in the year. And it doesn't matter. I know you might be thinking, "I'm early on in grief. I have no idea what I want for the year. I have no idea what my goals would be. I have no idea..." Like, your brain's telling you all of the things, and what I want you to hear is that it doesn't matter where you are in grief. Whether you're very early on or you've moved through each of these phases, like you're in the rebuild phase right now.

My process will help you walk away with at least one goal for 2027, and I would love to be able to help you do that. So if you're thinking about joining Academy, you would like support through the holidays, then enrolling early is going to be the best way for you to be able to do that. And so if you're interested in enrolling early, uh, I'm gonna put my consult call link in the show notes, and that's the best way for [00:46:00] us to connect, for me to learn a little bit more about you and where you are on this journey.

I have questions that I ask you that help me zoom in on that really quickly to see where I think you are and what would be the best fit for you. And if it looks like it would be a great fit, then I invite you to join Academy. You get access right away to our resources, our live calls that are happening already right now, and what we have coming up with Brave Through the Holidays, and you'll be good to go and set to start with us in January.

So, um, book a consult call with me if you're interested in joining Academy. If you're not sure, you can also just shoot me an email and let me know what questions you might have and which program would be the right for you. Whatever you decide to do, I just wanna encourage you to come back to these three phases, no matter what your experience has been.

We wanna start with stabilization, [00:47:00] then we wanna explore what is possible, have some experiments, some adventures, some figuring it out through all the awkwardness, and then we wanna focus on actively rebuilding. Not passively waiting, not giving it time, not waiting to feel like we used to. We are rebuilding.

Speaker 13: Hey, thanks for spending this time with me today. If you're listening and thinking, "I don't wanna do this widow thing by myself," I'd love to invite you into the free Brave Widow community. It's a private, faith-based space where you can connect with other widows who really get it, join gentle live calls, and get resources to help you take the next small step forward.

To join us, just go to bravewidow.com/free or click the link in the show notes. You don't have to walk this road alone. I'll see you inside [00:48:00]

 

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