BW 201:
===
Speaker: [00:00:00] If you're a widow who feels like there has to be more to life than what I'm experiencing right now, this episode is for you. Welcome to episode 201 of The Brave Widow Show. Let's go. Guys, okay, we have so much going on this week. I feel like energetically I am on a totally different level.
I am like on a rocket ship out in the universe somewhere just helping to coordinate and making all of these amazing things happen, and I just feel so deeply grateful and excited about what's in store, what we have going on, and I'm, I'm bringing, I'm bringing the fire and the energy today, and I hope that you can see it, that you can hear it, and you can feel it deep within your core.
Now, the episode today [00:01:00] is not meant for the widow who's in deep grief. It's not meant for the widow who feels overwhelmed with life and who feels that life is raw and hard and overwhelming right now. If that's you, if you fall into that category, then I want you to know this message is not pointed at you.
It's not intended for you, and I'm gonna explain why in just a minute.. Everyone is welcome to watch and to listen and to take away the golden nuggets of things that they see or hear and that they want to apply to their life. And I hope that widows in all stages of their journey listen and engage with this episode, and if nothing else, think about, "If it doesn't apply to me right now [00:02:00] today, then I could be thinking about this for the future.
I could be thinking about when I'm in a different place what that will mean for me, how I can learn now something that will help me in the future." What I don't want widows to do is to use this episode as a weapon against yourself, as a way to create shame for yourself, as a way to say, "Emily, that message, you expected too much of people.
I'm just trying to survive. How do you expect me to do all of these other things, okay?" That is not the intent of what I wanna share with you today. Are your ears perked up? Are you wondering what I'm gonna be sharing with you today? Okay, if that is not who this message is intended for, because for widows who are in that stage, for widows who are in our foundations group or they're in [00:03:00] our free community and they're just trying to get their feet underneath them, my challenge for you is to find rest, is to heal your heart, is to bring in a supportive structure, which is everything that we are gonna be doing in foundations.
Okay? So those are the things that I would focus on if you are one of those widows or widowers. What I'm gonna talk about today is a little more advanced, so I'm gonna take a little bit of a risk here Because I know that things that I say could be misinterpreted or twisted or s- taken out of context or maybe received the wrong way.
So I'm just gonna give you a second here to check in with yourself and to make sure that you can hear with an open mind, that you can receive with an open heart, and that you can feel challenged [00:04:00] and called to rise up to a very different level maybe than where you've been in the past. So who is today's episode meant for?
This is for the widow or widower who feels stuck, who has a whisper or a nudge or something inside of them that says, "There has to be more than this. This can't be the rest of my life, right? Like, this is it?" This is for the widow who feels that life is happening around them and to them and past them, and they're frozen in time.
They're going through the motions. They're all surviving life but not really living life. This is for that person
I just had a conversation with one of my clients earlier [00:05:00] today, and she said, "You know, I've really been looking for resources to help me with rebuilding my life, and there's just not really much out there." And it's interesting that she brought that up, because over the past couple of weeks, I've really been thinking a lot about what makes Brave Widow different.
Why is it that grief groups are helpful, counseling is helpful, Grief Share is helpful, widow groups are helpful? And they're helpful to a certain point, but then it's like we're just dropped off. And we're asking this big question of, what am I supposed to do next? For me, that felt like an eternity. I...
Right after Nathan died, I went to counseling. I joined a bunch of different widows groups. I ordered all the grief books, listened to the podcasts, watched [00:06:00] the videos and the TikToks and the YouTube and all of that. And I felt like those things did help me. They did help me heal my heart. They helped me normalize what I was feeling and thinking and experiencing.
And then it got me to a point where grief wasn't overwhelming me. It didn't feel raw and like it was hanging over my shoulder all the time. But I just kept looking around going, "Now what? W- w- what am I supposed to do now? Like, is, is this just it? Is this as good as it gets?" And I noticed there was a huge disparity and a gap in the grief industry, which is why now Brave Widow exists in the way that it exists, especially with Brave Widow Academy.
Because, and this is why, my challenge for you today isn't going to be for the person who is still healing their heart, [00:07:00] who is still in deep grief and pain or overwhelmed. Because before they can rise to this next version of who they're called to be, they need a good foundation, hence why the program that I developed is called Foundations.
We gotta give them a solid foundation to heal their heart, to create calm out of the chaos, to navigate the overwhelm, to get their feet underneath them, to get to a point where they're not in fight or flight survival mode, but they can, oof, breathe again. And to the point that they're ready for more. When we're early on in grief, we're not ready for more.
We're barely just making it through the day, through the week, through the moment. We can't even think about the future. That's, like, unfathomable. Barely feel like we can breathe. But as we heal e- emotionally and process our grief and get our feet back um- underneath us, we [00:08:00] begin to find this sense of deep isolation and loneliness, or the sense that we f- are just living the hollow version of ourselves.
We're missing this sense of feeling alive and vibrant and full. And as I shared with the folks that are going to our retreat, we had a retreat prep call today, and as someone on there shared, like, going on this retreat is a way of tapping into this aliveness. And as I shared with them, for a long time, I didn't even know if it was possible to feel alive again.
If it was possible to feel joy or to genuinely get excited about something or to experience life where I felt it all the way to my core, to my soul. I didn't know. Because for such a long time, it just felt like I was kind of floating through life, and things were happening, but I [00:09:00] was frozen in time. And everyone else was just marching forward and had mostly just left me behind.
I didn't know if I'd ever feel like a whole or complete person again And so today what I wanna talk with you about is not settling, is not getting to a point where you've healed your heart, you've processed a lot of grief. You're now to a point where you're just, you want more in your life, but, but you're not sure what.
You're not sure who you are. You're not sure what a life might look like that you could actually enjoy again, but you do want that. You do desire that. Maybe you've tried to pursue that, but you get overwhelmed by grief or guilt or just the anxiety of trying new things and, and the fears and the doubts and all of that that comes up, and then you [00:10:00] tell yourself, "Well, this must be wrong.
If I'm trying something new, if I, I'm trying to rebuild life, and every time I do, I get all these bad feelings in my body, that must mean I'm not doing something right. May- maybe it's too soon. Maybe this just isn't meant for me. Maybe I'm just supposed to keep grieving. How long am I supposed to keep grieving?"
So if this is you, if you feel stuck and stagnant or lost or like there has to be something more, I'm here to tell you there is And I love grief groups. I've heard amazing things about Grief Share. You know I'm a big advocate for grief recovery method. I love church groups. I love counselors and the amazing work that they do.
And they are great for a season of our life where we're trying to unpack and process what has happened. We're trying to enter a community [00:11:00] of people who are experiencing some of the same things. We need validation. We need normalization. We need community. We need people to bear witness to our grief and what we've experienced, and to walk through these really dark days with us.
We need that. But that's just the beginning. Where grief groups end is where Brave Widow picks up, until foundations, enough foundations. Now foundations can take you from the very beginning all the way to getting you ready to start rebuilding your life again Start to finish So my challenge for you today, for those of you who will hear it, those of you who will rise up to it, is to not settle But to recognize that if you want a life that you can enjoy again, if you want a life you can even love again, it isn't [00:12:00] gonna happen magically.
It's not gonna happen by just giving it time. What you have today, the results you have today with time are time is going to give you more of what you have right now. The actions you're taking, the things that you're doing, if they're not giving you the end result of what you want, giving it more time gives you more of what you're currently doing.
So if you are someone who's early in grief or you're overwhelmed and you're working on processing your grief, time is a component, right? You can't just process your grief in one day and then you're healed and it's over and you're good now. You do need time to process grief, but you have a choice. You have a choice to process your grief, to talk with others in a similar community, to focus on healing your heart, and time will magnify and grow [00:13:00] that and give you a different result.
Or you have a choice to distract yourself from grief, to shove your feelings down into your body, to avoid talking about what's really hard, what you have really experienced. And if you continue to push down into your body, swallow your feelings, shove it down into your physical body, guess what time gives you?
More grief in your body. Unprocessed grief will manifest physically over time through illness, through injuries, through accidents, through ailments, many different ways. It will manifest physically if you do not process it, if you ignore it, if you try to avoid it. People say we swallow our feelings. You're literally shoving that emotion down into your body, and over time your body [00:14:00] wears down.
Over time, grief comes back up out through your body. So it's the same with building a life that you may want to live again, that you could enjoy again, that you could actually love again. If you are doing on a daily basis the things that you've done for a long time, time's gonna give you more of that So if your days look like waking up, eating, maybe going to work, coming home, going to bed, time is gonna give you more of that
But... I know, I normally say and, but this time I'm gonna say but. If you will choose, if you will rise up and choose to build a life with intention, to take the actions of being adventurous and exploring what life could look like, and if you [00:15:00] will learn tools along the way to help you, ways of managing your own emotions, ways of developing relationships with other people, ways of figuring out, like, what could light you up on the inside?
What could allow you to laugh and to feel light-hearted and breezy? What, what could allow you to get out of your own head sometimes and just really ground back down into your body? If you will do those things, then over time, time will give you more of that. More adventure, more laughter, more hope, more adventure, more curiosity, more playfulness, more wonder.
And through those experiments and, and trying new things and figuring out what, what really elevates you, time will also give you clarity [00:16:00] Because we have some widows out in the audience, you're watching or you're listening to this right now, and maybe I've already made you mad, and I'm sorry. But I'm not sorry.
I want you to get mad. I want you to get a little fired up about yourself. And if you need to be mad at me to do that, so be it. But we have widows out in our audience who believe that the answer is just giving it more time " Uh, my life feels empty. I feel hopeless. I really don't enjoy this, but I probably just need to start giving it time and then, then I'll feel better."
Why? Wh- why would time help you feel better Time can dull a pain that's really sharp. Time can normalize your new routine. Time can bring a sense of numbness and detachment. But time doesn't by itself build in extra [00:17:00] things
Time doesn't magically create a life that you could love again. If you don't do anything different, then how will you ever have clarity of what a life might look like that you could enjoy again? How will you figure that out if you don't try to figure it out? There's not a timeline where time just says, "Oh, you've waited two years now, so I'm handing you the plan to do these things, and if you do these things, you're gonna enjoy life again."
And again, I know that's not easy to hear. So I'm taking a risk here telling you this in a place from love and passion and desire for you to do something different. I would love for every one of you who's ready to rebuild life to jump into Brave Widow Academy. We start [00:18:00] in July. I would love for you to do that.
At the very least, you don't have to join Brave Widow Academy. . Maybe it's not what you feel you're being called to. But do something. Try something. Try something different than just giving it time. Giving it time is not building a life of intention.
It's allowing life to happen to you and just responding to the things that happen to you versus saying, "I will create influence in my life. I will work towards something. I will build something. I will do something." And I cannot control the outcome. I can't control what's gonna happen. I don't know what it's gonna look like.
I'm really go- stepping out blindly in faith that if I'm willing to do these uncomfortable, awkward things that sometimes feel really hard and get out of my comfort [00:19:00] zone, that the pain of that is going to be much smaller than the reward of having to start building a life that I can actually love and enjoy again.
When I would go to the symphony by myself, when I would take myself out to dinner, when I wanted to start dating again, I would dress up, hair, makeup, a nice dress, take myself to dinner, take myself to the bookstore. And for an entire season of the symphony, I had season tickets, I bought two. Because in my mind, I was focused on me and another person in the future going to the symphony together.
The pain, the awkwardness, the everyone's looking at me, the uncomfortableness of that entire season of going [00:20:00] by myself to the restaurant, to the bookstore, to the symphony, sitting next to an empty chair, what felt hard and heavy with all of that was minuscule, tiny, in comparison to the bittersweet joy that I felt the first time Robert went to the symphony and sat beside me
The joy I have in my life now, the love I have in my life now that just radiates from me, the energy I have to host a retreat for the first time in a state I've never been to, trusting someone I didn't really know that long who joined Brave Widow to help me plan the retreat, while also launching Foundations, a totally brand-new program, while also running a coaching certification program for my clients to become coaches, while [00:21:00] also purchasing a new rental and getting it ready to list on short-term rental websites, while also training one of my kiddos how to drive a car.
While holding and doing all of these things at the same time, to be able to say, "I have so much energy. This is amazing. I'm getting all this stuff done. It's not perfect. Things don't happen exactly how I want them to happen, but I love waking up every day. I love talking about grief, and death, and the hard journey of this, and how I, I will be able to help people.
I could talk about it all day, every day, and sometimes I go home, and at night I'm on TikTok live streaming about it." How is that possible? To feel the way I feel today, I would've done just about anything. I would've paid any price. I would have done all the hard, uncomfortable, awkward things a thousand [00:22:00] times over if I had to to be at the place I'm at now.
But the life that I have today never would have happened if I was where I was in the beginning of 2023, looking around and going, "How in the world will I ever get to a point where I can enjoy life again, where I can feel like a real human?"
It was almost two years before I even learned all of the things I'm gonna teach you in six months in the academy It took me two years to just start putting together these little pieces to start understanding that the journey of widowhood doesn't need to end when our heart stops bleeding
That, that we're stopping short of this journey of actually helping people. Grief completely shatters your identity. The loss of your [00:23:00] spouse changes your identity. This isn't about just healing your heart. This isn't just about helping you feel better. This isn't about just helping you function and get through the day.
That's the bare minimum. That's the minimum. We gotta help people rebuild their whole entire lives The social circle, the people they hang out with Things that will help their life feel full and vibrant. A calendar that reflects something that feels fun and exciting and enjoyable, not dull or overwhelming or empty
The deep loneliness that so many widows feel on the evenings, on weekends, on holidays, we gotta solve for that. You didn't just break a leg. You didn't just get the flu and then you get over it and you go back to the way you were But so many times we're just focused on helping widows get [00:24:00] their feet back underneath them.
And I am grateful that there are many resources to help people do that. There's tons of counselors, there's tons of grief groups, there's tons of support groups for people who are deeply grieving but in comparison, there are not a similar number of programs or resources available to help people know, how do I rebuild my life?
How do I make friends again? My family and friends, those relationships have kinda fizzled out. How do I reignite those? Why should I have to reach out? Shouldn't they reach out to me? Why should I do the heavy lifting? How am I supposed to go and meet people and make friends at my age? That's just weird.
Those were all the thoughts I had. I don't even know who I am anymore. How do I figure that out? How do I find myself? Well, here's another truth bomb, okay? Are you [00:25:00] ready? You're not gonna find yourself. I'm gonna help you in the academy decide who you want to be. And in the beginning, you may not know. And guess what?
That's okay. And my goodness, I wish somebody had told me that ' cause I kept looking to the past. I kept waiting to feel the way I used to feel. I kept waiting to show up as the person I used to show up as, and no one ever told me, "Hey, guess what? That's probably not gonna happen." When I would tell people, "I don't even feel like the same person I was," they looked at me either like I was crazy or with pity.
And they would say, "Oh, just give it time and you'll feel like your old self. You'll get back there. You'll get back to the way you were." No. I'm not the same person
Becoming a widow, losing what was the identity of us together, [00:26:00] I will not get back to that identity. How could I ever be the same? It has changed me to the core. Everything about life is different. Everything. When I brush my teeth, when I take a shower, what I eat for s- dinner, what time I eat dinner, events that I go to, who gets the groceries, who's paying the bills, who's mowing the lawn.
Everything has changed. How could I be the same? But that doesn't mean that I can't build a new life. I can. I can decide to do that, and you can too. So this is my call, this is my challenge to you to rise up, to decide that floating through life isn't good enough anymore That you are willing to answer whatever calling, whatever purpose that God has in store for you.
To rise up, to explore, to figure out what that is. To be [00:27:00] brave in trying different things. To being willing to go way outside your comfort zone Believing that some way, somehow, this journey is gonna be so worth it
Here within the next couple of podcast episodes, I'm gonna share a data analysis with you of, of all the people who have gone through Brave Widow Academy to date. And the reason I wanna share some of these statistics with you is because in our space of what we do, things feel very fuzzy. They feel very intangible. Like, how can we demonstrate someone's confidence improves? How can we prove that someone's sense of purpose is m- stronger now than it was six months ago?
How can we [00:28:00] show that in the beginning, I felt like a four out of 10 with relationships, and now I feel like a seven out of 10? How do we do that? Well, we track it every week inside of Brave Widow Academy, and that's why I'm gonna be sharing with you some statistics because I want you to understand that when you decide to start taking action instead of waiting for time, when you decide to do things with intention, to build life intentionally, to do things that are asked of you that feel very uncomfortable, how fast you can move on your timeline.
And this was a concept I really struggled to understand for a long time. My amazing coach, Dr. Betsy, in the faith-based life coaching school, would talk about our future identity. In the coaching world, if you're in the coaching space, you hear us sometimes say this is [00:29:00] the be, do, have model, which is like looking at our future self who has the outcome that we want, right?
So maybe we wanna be more confident. Maybe we wanna be more adventurous. Maybe we wanna be more joyful. Whatever it is. For me, at the time, it was me, someone who had never done life coaching, who thought it was kinda like a made-up job and not a real thing, and I was kind of embarrassed about it in the beginning.
Me looking at my future self who has a successful coaching business, who has a waiting list of clients, who is in demand. Looking at that future version of me and trying to pull that forward in time to be where I was today in that moment. So being in a place and time where I didn't know if I could be a successful life coach.
I didn't know if Brave Widow was gonna amount to anything. I [00:30:00] didn't know if people would actually pay me to help them, to figuring out, well, Dr. Betsy, how, how can I step into this future version of me as a successful life coach, someone who runs Brave Widow, a successful company that people want to join?
How do I do that now? Am I just, like, supposed to pretend? Like, how does this actually work because, uh, last time I checked my bank account, no one had s- paid me to do exactly this sort of thing yet. And she would say, "You have to step into the identity of your future self." If you will step into the identity of your future self, you pull that future self version of you forward.
You collapse the timeline, okay? So an example of this might be before I started investing in real estate, I thought about it for probably at least a decade, if not two. It was always [00:31:00] kinda like in the back of my mind or if I had downtime during the holidays, I would- Kind of look at some forums of real estate investing.
I just barely dipped my toe in the water. But I always kind of thought, like, real estate investing is for other people or rich people or, like, everyone else. It's not for me, it's for other people. So I didn't really learn about it. I didn't spend a lot of time doing that. A little under a year after Nathan died, I was thinking about, like, w- what am I gonna do in the future?
What, what are things that maybe I've wanted to try before that I've not ever tried? And, you know, what's something I can do to kind of get out of the house a little bit? And I saw there was a real estate investor meeting happening, um, not too far from my house. And I was like, you know what? I just really
I need to just see if this is something that I might be interested in, if it's something that I might like, and just [00:32:00] try it. Like, I'm tired of waffling about it. I'm tired of thinking about it. I either I'm gonna do it or I'm not, but I just wanna make a decision and just, like, test it out and see how it goes.
That was May of 2022. Four months later, in September, I closed on my first property as a real estate investor. Two months after that, November of 2022 Right before Thanksgiving, I closed on my second property of a multifamily property as a real estate investor. So even though this was something I kinda thought about off and on over at least 10 years, it's like, it was back when forums were a big thing, so it had to be many years, maybe even before then.
But it took me forward in time, my progress, the gap between me today and future me as a real estate investor, I collapsed that timeline down to four months. [00:33:00] Instead of if I just kept giving it time, how much longer would it have been? How, how would time have magically made me a real estate investor if I didn't take the actions, if I didn't step into that future version of myself, if I didn't go be around other investors, go learn from other people, if I didn't put myself in the room?
I tell a longer version of this story in other places, but when I went to that very first meeting, I was so anxious about walking in a building where I knew no one. I was by myself. I didn't even know if really there'd be other women there. S- I knew a lotta guys that were real estate investors, but I didn't know a lotta women.
I didn't know if the people were gonna be nice or if they were gonna say I didn't belong there 'cause I wasn't actually an investor. Can I go to these meetings? I don't know. I literally sat in the parking lot for 20 minutes trying to convince myself to walk inside. That's how fearful I [00:34:00] was about going somewhere new, about meeting new people, about putting myself outta my comfort zone.
And I almost drove home. But I had this thought that was like, "My house is 45 minutes from here. If I leave right now, I'm never coming back, and I won't ever know whether or not this might work out for me. So I'm here. I'm gonna go inside. I'm gonna participate, and then I'm gonna decide if I wanna come back."
And that was one of the single best decisions that I was able to make, was just to go inside, just to try to be really uncomfortable and fearful and not know whether or not this was gonna work out. But that price that I paid, that's nothing compared to now.
That price is so small compared to this amazing journey I've had, including being a real estate investor, including now the [00:35:00] confidence I have in looking at properties and renting them out or listing them on short-term rental sites It, it's minuscule. But if I had just waited for time to pass, then I would still have the same result, which is I still would not be a real estate investor.
I would still be just kinda hem hawing around thinking about it. It would be taking up space in my brain, but, but I wasn't gonna get a different outcome. Time was gonna give me more of the same, which is I'm still just not an investor. So I went from over 10 years of not stepping into that identity of being an investor, of not taking the actions, to within four months, bam.
Within four months, I was an investor So in the academy, in Brave Widow Academy, it's a long way of getting back to this. Probably lost a few of you. But if you're hanging in there with me, the reason I'm gonna share some of the statistics of people in the academy is because we have [00:36:00] people who have been grieving for years.
People that have been grieving for months, but also for years. Maybe it's been four years, five years, 10 years, 25 years. Yes, 20-plus years But the results that they get within six months, just six months, of intentionally rebuilding life, of showing up, of doing the uncomfortable things, of sharing their wins, of sharing their failures, of sharing the things that are hard, but deciding, "I'm going to keep stepping forward.
I'm gonna keep doing small, brave things," the results are really outstanding So I'm just gonna share with you a tiny glimpse. We have five categories in the academy that we rate on a scale of one to 10, okay? It's not scientific. It's go with your gut. How do you feel about your day-to-day routine? Are you overwhelmed?
[00:37:00] Is it boring? Do you love it? Do you hate it? Rate it on a scale of one to 10, okay? How is your confidence with yourself in making decisions? Rate it on a scale of one to 10. How are your relationships? How f- seen and connected do you feel? Rate that on a scale of one to 10. We also do one for purpose. How, how is your sense of purpose and meaning?
And one for direction and clarity around the sense of I have momentum, I am moving forward, I am taking steps forward. And in the data analysis podcast, I'm gonna share with you a much deeper breakdown of specifically all the different categories and where people tend to make progress on, where they...
What we're really seeing come out of the academy. But I'm just gonna give you this one today, ' cause I just talked about this on a consult. So you know who you are. You got, you got t- to hear us a little early. The average improvement of this [00:38:00] last group of academy that we held, in their ratings of rate this on a scale of one to 10, was 2.5.
So I just want you to think about that. Now, we had people that went from, like, a two to an eight. We had people from went from five to a 10. We had people from, who went from seven and eights to all 10s. We had people that went from four to five. We had people that went from two to four. Kind of depends on the circumstances of their life.
But if we collectively look at all the changes in people's score, the collective total, the collective average was 2.5. So I just, I just want you to think about what that means for a minute. Within six months, okay? Even, even if you've been grieving and you've been a widow for years, within six months you could be saying, " My sense of purpose went from a six to an 8.5."
How I feel about the [00:39:00] relationships in my life went from a five to a 7.5. My sense of routine is pretty good. I would rate it a seven. Now, in six months, I'm rating it a 9.5 I mean, just think about what all would need to change within your life to be able to say six months later, " I'm hopping on this call.
I'm rating things at a higher level than what I did in the beginning." And I'm not gonna go down that rabbit hole of all the details. I'm saving that for another podcast. We'll do a deep dive on that. But I share that as one way of sharing what's actually possible in the academy. I'm not promising you that you're gonna go in with all ones and you're gonna come out with all tens.
That's not the point. The point is to give you the tools. The point is to walk this journey with you where you are doing it as we go. You are rebuilding your life. You [00:40:00] are connecting with people to develop strong relationships. You're implementing boundaries. You minimize the people-pleasing that you're doing.
You boost up your confidence in navigating through fear, in making decisions, in learning how to get the stakes of decision-making from way up here to down here, and how to surround yourself with a board of advisors who can help you make decisions, who can help you in areas that you're not as familiar with Where you're learning where do we get our sense of purpose and meaning from, and how do I develop a sense of purpose and meaning that does not rely on my circumstances or the roles that I play
Even though my husband died, even though my children no longer live at home, even though I'm retired, I'm no longer working, that does not change where I get my sense of purpose and meaning. I [00:41:00] learn how to build that up so that regardless of what happens around me, I know how to dig deep and sink into my sense of purpose and meaning and what that means.
You are equipped with the tools to know how do I intentionally build a life that feels like it's worth living again? How do I push past all those horrible, yucky, terrible feelings and feel all the anxiety and the fear and the doubt and the uncomfortableness and just grow the capacity to be able to hold all of those terrible feelings together and decide to do something brave anyway?
Those are the things I want you to learn. Those are the brave small steps I want you to take. I'm calling you, I'm urging you to rise up and take. Whether or not you join Brave Widow Academy I want you to rise up for you. I don't want you to float through life. I don't want you to just go through the motions Because you're missing out on so much more.
[00:42:00] You can have a life that includes joy. And it's not saying that you'll never have a moment of grief, that you'll never miss your person, that you just forget about them and you moved on. No. I teach you how to weave your person into your everyday life and bring their spirit with you How to grow your emotional capacity to be able to hold these emotions that feel like they're opposing.
It feels like I can only be one or the other. Either I'm grieving and I'm sad, or I'm happy and I'm excited again. Well, no, you can actually hold both, can do both at the same time. It's kinda weird, I know, but you can do it. I will teach you how
I will be a mirror for you so that you can see all of the little thoughts that are sabotaging you, that are holding you back, that are keeping you small, that [00:43:00] cause you to shrink away. I will help you see all the negative self-talk that has been so normal and natural to you, you probably don't even realize it's happening. One of my favorite moments is when one of my clients will say, " I see now what I'm doing. I see how I talk to myself. I see how when this situation happens, I'm thinking all of these things and how that's actually hurting me." We have all these sneaky little thoughts and beliefs that pop up in our mind that sometimes we've had them for so long, we just believe they're true.
We just believe it And sometimes we develop beliefs that we create a lens that our mind looks through to find all of the evidence
Here's an experiment for you. Here's an activity for you
You can wake up in the morning [00:44:00] and you can decide today's gonna be an awful day. It's just a bad day. It's just gonna be awful. And you can say that all day long, and your brain will find every little thing to point out to you to say, "See? Told you it was gonna be a bad day. Ugh, I knew it was... Oh, this person cut me off in traffic.
I knew this was gonna be a bad day. Oh, well, you know, you were expecting something in the mail. It didn't show up. Of course not, 'cause this is just gonna be a bad day." " Oh, this, nobody's texted me. You know? Today was an important day. No one texts me. No one ever texts me. I'm just all alone. This is another reason why this is a terrible day."
Or you could have a belief that today is gonna be a great day. There's gonna be some great things happening to me today. And maybe when you go to the grocery store, there's a parking space that opens up right by the grocery store door Maybe you make a cup of coffee and you're like, "Wow, this is the best one I made in a while.
Like, this is such a great day. Just everything is working out for me. This is awesome." [00:45:00] And your brain will look for all of the evidence to support that. This, this isn't something you learn and you flip a switch and it just magically works all the time. It's something we actively do, but it's something that you may not even realize you're doing to yourself.
You're sabotaging yourself, and you don't even realize it And so again, whether or not you decide to step into something like Brave Widow Academy, my challenge for you for this week's episode, for the widows who want to believe there m- could be something more, who want to believe that life can be better than this, I want you to hear from me that it can.
And I can help you get there. So whether or not you wanna join Academy, join something. Participate in something. Get yourself in a space, in a room of other people who are also doing the same [00:46:00] thing. Proximity is everything Get yourself in a room where you have no choice but to become like those people.
If you surround yourself enough with other people who are doing the things that you wanna do or they're the kind of people that you wanna be, if you just go get around them, have them in your ear, see what they're doing, over time you're gonna become like them. It's like if you go to a foreign country, you may start to just naturally pick up the accent, naturally pick up the gestures, naturally pick up the way that they do things.
It's how we're wired. So even if you're not sure, even if you have some doubts, just go get in a room of other people. If you wanna enjoy your life, get in a room of other people who are enjoying life and are, who in- are building a life they wanna build I wanted to be an amazing coach, and so I did everything I could to be around amazing coaches.
I [00:47:00] listened to podcasts of people getting coached I watch videos of powerful coaches powerfully coaching other people so that I can learn, so that I can pick up things, so that I can absorb into my brain and my body what those people are doing so I can become more like them. We do this naturally So I just wanna encourage you, if you feel stagnant, if you feel stuck, if you feel just bleh
To rise up into the calling that is meant for you in this next season of life All right. I hope today that what I shared with you calls you forward, that inspires you to do something different. I believe you were made for more than surviving than existing. And we all know that [00:48:00] life is short. I made a decision at one point in my life that if I was gonna still be living, I wanted to live all out.
I wanna be able to look back on my life when I'm in my 90s and go, "Wow, I just went for it. Some things worked out, some things didn't work out, but I'm so proud. Like, I really went for it. I didn't care what anybody else thought. I didn't care when it was hard and I was on the verge of giving up. I just pushed through.
I kept trying. I kept going. I'm so proud that I stepped into that believing that it would be better or different, rather than telling myself it's never gets better, it's never gonna change." And I want the same for you
All right, guys. Our next cohort of the Academy, in case you're interested in joining and you're ready to start rebuilding your life, starts Monday, July [00:49:00] 13th. We're gonna be led by two of our coaches, Allyson and Nicole, who both have shared their story on the podcast. And they're gonna meet on Mondays from 5:00 to 7:00 PM Central Time.
So if you are ready to rise into the Brave Widow Academy, to learn more, you can go to bravewidow.com/academy, and there's a very short application that we ask people to complete just to make sure this is the right next step for you. I don't wanna put you in a container that's not gonna support you or that you're not, you don't feel that you're ready for.
But I would love to be able to support you in Academy, and I hope to see you there
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 [00:50:00] 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
