4: Four strategies for overcoming grief and challenges

Today's episode is one of three that are speeches that I shared at the church that I belong to. And it's the Unitarian Universalist Church in Boston, Massachusetts, which is a place that Layden actually led me to. When I was eight months pregnant, her father and I were skating on Frog Pond. And he knows me well enough to know if he had asked me to stop skating, I likely wouldn't have. So rather than do that, while he was very nervous to have his unborn child skating around Frog Pond, he noted that there was a service at a church he had heard great things about that he would love to check out. And of course, wanting to support that, I took off my skates and we walked for the very first time into Arlington Street Church and haven't looked back. The congregation so welcoming, open minded, and when Leighton was sick, we were unexpectedly very close to the church. Boston Children's Hospital is just a couple of miles away from the church. So initially thinking we wouldn't be regular attendees, that quickly changed and we were able to receive a lot of support from this congregation. They came in and they did Leiden's welcoming ceremony, her dedication ceremony, and have been a part of this entire incredible grief journey. And the very first place that I began sharing about grief was there. I spoke at Layden's memorial service there. And then two years later, it took me two years, I got up and I gave a speech about grief. And I do it now every year around the anniversary of her loss. And it feels really symbolic to get.

Up there years after first speaking in.

This beautiful high pulpit at her memorial service, to now get up and hopefully inspire others from my stories.

So I hope that you enjoy these.

They have a special place in my heart and would love to hear your feedback.

When I was young, my parents exposed me to many different opportunities to develop, to grow, to explore, essentially to find myself. And one of the extracurriculars that they had me sign up for was piano lessons. I took lessons from somebody about a mile and a half down the street. She gave lessons to all of the neighborhood and kids in our town growing up just out of her house. And it was a great experience. I wasn't over musically talented or maybe even interested, but I did become very excited when I discovered that they had a competition and that at their annual recital, the student who had learned the most songs over the course of the year got a trophy. This was my motivation and I pursued it relentlessly. Challenge was accepted and I was successful in my pursuit. Each year that I was a student here at this particular place I did end up with the trophy for learning the most songs in a year. But I have to confess, I wasn't learning music. I really wasn't learning a whole lot about piano. I was mastering the skill of memorizing these songs to then get my trophy. And I realized after some time that I didn't actually love piano. My skill set doesn't necessarily align with that of the musical realm. All the power to you all and respect. But what I loved was the approval I got from the recital and from performing. I loved the challenge and the competition. Committed to myself and trying to see how much I could do and what new level I could reach. So my nine year old self had a bit of a midlife crisis when I realized that I was pursuing something that was meaningful to me. The challenge and the excitement and the competition. But in a realm, in a world that didn't necessarily align with my skill set and my own passions. This hit me again a few years later when I was at a much more serious format. I was enduring the loss of our daughter Laden. I speak on this particular weekend every year as it marks now what is the four year anniversary of my very first time speaking in this pulpit. It was at her memorial service and I didn't think I would ever speak up here again, nor would I be able to. And so getting up here now to share what my daughter Layden taught is truly a privilege. After she passed away, as you can imagine, the world made absolutely no sense to me. Life as I knew it was lost. Motherhood was taken from me and I pursued grief with the same relentlessness that I pursued memorizing my piano songs. I just wanted somebody to tell me exactly what I needed to do to get my trophy and get through grief. I did anything you could think of. I listened to TED talks, read book after book after book, joined parent groups, all different ones across the state. I even traveled outside of the country twice to hear world renowned grief speaker speak on the topic of managing and navigating loss. I was desperate for somebody to tell me the answer how I was going to get through this challenge. And I discovered a couple of things. One, there is no set answer, there is no cure to grief. Or the other challenges that we all may face in our lives. But I discovered there are strategies. There are strategies we can employ to help us navigate through in a way that's productive and progressive and offers an opportunity for growth. And the first of these is allowing for the coexistence of challenge and opportunity. I like to imagine a scale and on One side of the scale is the challenge that's present. We can't deny it. When we deny it or we evade it, we ignore it. We may think that we're coping productively, but we're really not. It just waits patiently or. Or manifest itself in different ways. So with that space, with the challenge and the adversity that we're facing, is it possible to open our mind to the coexistence of opportunity, of growth? Not catastrophizing about what we're facing, knowing that we will get through and we can get through, and also acknowledging that some days one side of the scale feels a little heavier than the other. I know I'm not alone in some days of facing a challenge, thinking that this is so heavy, I don't know if I can get through. And then another day feeling empowered, strong, clear, and determined. What can become exhausting is how those balance out. And so when we find the coexistence, can we just give space to not be too reactionary when they weigh more than the other and try to hold them tightly in the middle? The second strategy that I found to be absolutely imperative, I actually learned through a grief counselor. She's magical. Her name's Kendra. I always like to give her credit, and she said that there are four types of supports from people that we can employ when we're facing any types of challenge. I like to think of it in my athletic centered mind as building your team. And the first type of teammates are your listeners, the people who will listen very, very, very well. They'll let you go on, and they'll give you the space. They don't interject with how to fix your problem, how to solve your problem, or try to tell you that it will get easier after a year. The second type are the doers, those that can help you handle those tasks, whether it's planning a memorial service or a fundraiser or getting your grocery shopping done when you don't have the strength to get out in public. The third type are distractors, those who maybe aren't super comfortable talking about challenge, but they care about you and they want to be there for you so they can take your mind off of it. Maybe you go hiking or you get dinner, or you talk about a completely different topic or see a movie. And the last kind that Kendra taught me about was what she called the Xers. She didn't like to use profanity. And what she said about the Xers are that people that were drawn to the situation because they like the chaos or they like the Drama or they need to be needed, maybe just a lack of awareness. And she taught me about this kind. She said, you have to learn to establish your boundaries and keep them when they try to insert themselves. And one of the most important things that she empowered me to understand was that people, our teammates in our lives, can hold different roles. They can be a little bit of a listener and a little bit of a doer, or it could change based on the challenge that we're facing. But it's up to us to not have the expectation that the people in our lives are all going to be listeners and doers and distractors, know what the people around you can offer, what they excel at, and allow them to share their love for you in that way. The third strategy, which proved to be among the most challenging and the most meaningful, was becoming really clear on my values. And I read about this by author Mark Manson. And he talks about detaching ourselves from values such as a number in a bank account or a number on our scale or a designer label, detaching ourselves from the opinions of others or circumstances of our lives. Cars that we drive, houses that we live in, what our life looks like on social media. He talks about attaching ourselves to values that we actually have control over, such as curiosity, kindness, self growth, and service. For me, those were the ones that I chose that resonated the most strongly. And I found that even in grief, when I could attach myself to those values, I discovered that happiness is not circumstantial. It's not conditional. Through our greatest challenges, we can still be happy when we attach ourselves to those values that can steer us through. And the last strategy. After traveling out of the country two times and coming back feeling absolutely deflated, I was speaking with another grief counselor, facilitator of a group, and just feeling desperate. I've left the country twice. I've gone to all of these groups. I've run the marathon. I've done this, I've done that. I've. When does it feel better? And she looked at me and said, and I quote, melissa, you just have to sit with the shit. It's not easy sitting in the discomfort of our challenges and our pain. It takes patience, it takes faith, and it takes acceptance of the challenge that's in front of us, not denying it or running from him. And so I sat with challenge again. More recently, I thought that maybe I had checked it off my life to do list, going through it with grief. But that's not the way that it works. As I learned, I was facing Unsettling uncertainty. A job that I pursued with that same determination of mastering the piano songs to get to that next level. Well, after five years, there was an absurd clash of twists and the stability I had known was gone. It was scary, sad, overwhelming. And I realized that these four strategies that I had learned through grief were exactly what I needed to navigate through four years later. Allowing space for the coexistence of the challenge, right, of the fear of a change in trajectory to open the opportunity for assessing what I really loved. To become closer to my teammates, to call upon them, building those relationships, to sit with the discomfort. We'll say for me, this was a period of 10 weeks. But most significantly, it was becoming crystal clear on my values. The values that I had chosen after the loss of my daughter Layden. The way that I wanted to live my life. So I was no longer attaching it to circumstance, to actively mothering my daughter. Here I reattached to those other values and it was through challenge where I was really tested on these. And I think that is so true. It's easy to assert our values, but it's not until we accept a challenge that we can really test ourselves on them. And I realized that almost like when I first began playing piano, I had tunnel vision on a certain trajectory and goal, right? And it took a challenge to force me to check my own alignment. At 9 years old playing piano, I realized I was wired for working hard. I liked the chase, I liked having approval, I liked challenge and I liked progressing myself. But I didn't love playing that piano. And I realized that aligning myself with a way and a format that was more true to my authenticity, that allowed me to come alive, that allowed me to reach the hard work and the challenge and the self and all the things I loved, I could do it in a different field, even if it was leaving the trophy behind. 25 years later, in a similar midlife crisis, realizing that what I was wired for and what I loved again was the hard work and the progress. And now, at a more veteran age, teaching, leading, empowering. But was it possible to achieve those things without the cost of compromising my values that I had chosen, of curiosity, of kindness, of growth, was it possible to live in a way where I could align those things together in a way that better supported me and my dreams? So when I cleaned out my office, it was as if my 9 year old self had just gotten up from the piano and journeyed outside to the light, ready to get some grass stains and dirty hands, because that's just more of my fit See Challenge. It's an equal opportunity employer. It doesn't care about race, age, gender. It doesn't care about experience, how much you've had or how much you haven't had. When I think of all the challenges that we all face in our own ways, we all have them. Our greatest challenge and our most important challenge presents every single day. Are we living in alignment with our goals, our values and the endeavors in which we are fully committed? Are we in alignment in the relationships that we're in and the activities that we choose? It's not easy. It can be out of the box thinking and it takes courage to face the uncertainty if what we're doing is really what we should be doing. And I really find a lot of strength in author Brene Brown. She researches vulnerability and the power of it. And when speaking about courage, she says, courage is a habit. You get it by courageous acts. Just like you learn to swim by swimming, you learn to courage by couraging. And while there may not be a prescribed solution, an instant fix. As we search for the cure and the fix to all of the challenges that we face, there are strategies we can use. Can we employ the word and can something be very challenging and an opportunity? Can we really get to know and connect with our life teammates and celebrate the areas in which they can contribute and that we can contribute to them authentically? Can we become crystal clear on our values and when we can do that? Difficult decision making. Whether it's in your free time and if you want to play the piano or play outside, in your careers, in your relationships, in your priorities, clarity on the values makes those difficult decisions a heck of a lot less difficult. And finally, can we learn to just sit with it, to be patient in the process? Because it is a process to accept the challenge in front of us and to draw on our faith that we have the strength and ability to persevere through. If you love piano, go play piano. Become the best, most curious piano player that you can. But if you're wired around to jump on the monkey bars and get a little dirty from time to time, go do that. The very best advice I've gotten in years and years of collecting feedback from students with which I worked over 10 years, there's one that always resonates with me, said the best thing he learned was to do you to find a place where idiosyncrasies, passions, skill set and pursuits where they all meet. May we all find that space where we are fully aligned and go there relentlessly. Make it our gift to the universe and trust that the universe will give back. And when we do so, we'll find that we shine our lights, we shine more brightly. And truly, the world needs us to do so. The world needs us to face this challenge and find the courage to say, challenge accepted.