We kind of got to know each other through the do community
Speaker:sort of online community thing that's kicked off this year.
Speaker:and you attended one of our exercise strategy, well you watched the recording
Speaker:one of our exercise strategy workshops.
Speaker:There was like, there's a kind of a confluence of ideas based on a very
Speaker:similar, I think, set of values.
Speaker:Uh, for me, the set of values was really about this, um, idea of
Speaker:purpose, day of meaning, idea of like, and you call it aliveness.
Speaker:Uh, and, and we call it excite excitement, excite strategy.
Speaker:And this, this thing about the energy we bring to our lives and our work, and.
Speaker:We come at it from a very specific idea of like starting a new business and
Speaker:this idea of a pivot to go from meh to meaning purely about the money, to
Speaker:doing something very kind of impactful and purposeful and all in the while
Speaker:making sure that that is in service of ourselves so we don't burn out.
Speaker:and on that journey, there's this transition that we feel that
Speaker:people just become more present to what's important in their lives
Speaker:and what's, what's meaningful.
Speaker:And then there's your story and your journey and, and how that's
Speaker:evolving as I understand it.
Speaker:And it's been a longer journey.
Speaker:which I don't wanna give more details because I'd like to give you the
Speaker:opportunity to share more of your story.
Speaker:So, For us, it's a meeting of communities, our community that's
Speaker:very much based on entrepreneurs and startups, trying to do
Speaker:something meaningful and purposeful.
Speaker:Your community of people who are navigating big challenges
Speaker:and transitions in their lives.
Speaker:Some of them are people who are in corporate careers
Speaker:thinking about what's next.
Speaker:Um, and so that's where this connection came about.
Speaker:and to continue that, I'd love Sue for you to start off by just sharing a bit
Speaker:more about what you're doing at the moment and how you got to doing that.
Speaker:And I just wanted to, on, it's a very particular day for you and so I dunno
Speaker:if you wanted to share that story.
Speaker:Yeah, perfect.
Speaker:Thanks so much.
Speaker:Just really appreciate it.
Speaker:There's so much overlap, like Carla said about, you know what my.
Speaker:Purpose and mission are and, uh, and what these two are up to.
Speaker:So I'm, I'm thrilled to have a conversation with you all.
Speaker:So, I live in the woods of northern Virginia, about 30 minutes outside
Speaker:of Washington, DC Uh, and um, I've lived, uh, I've lived here for about
Speaker:30 plus years and I'm an empty nester.
Speaker:I've got, uh, two kids at uni.
Speaker:One.
Speaker:Uh, after I'm done with this call today, I'm driving up to Northern
Speaker:New York to see my son s singing an acapella concert tonight.
Speaker:Wow.
Speaker:And another, my daughter is in New Orleans, Louisiana at Tulane.
Speaker:So you couldn't, couldn't get more varied.
Speaker:Um, so that's our life today.
Speaker:How did we get to where we are?
Speaker:Uh, so, I was married to a fantastic human being.
Speaker:His name was Mike for 18 years.
Speaker:I met him, uh, in the typical corporate America way at business school.
Speaker:Got our MBAs together back in the nineties, and, uh, we had, you
Speaker:know, one of those go, go, go lives.
Speaker:We, uh.
Speaker:You know, both had high powered jobs.
Speaker:We had our two kids and then one night in 2016 I woke up
Speaker:to find him unresponsive.
Speaker:And he was a super healthy guy, always doctor going.
Speaker:And, uh, like I say, I'm gonna get super fast at this, the rejoin,
Speaker:it's gonna be like a light.
Speaker:so, so my hu so the long story short is my husband in 2016, he died of a
Speaker:heart attack and he was 50 years old.
Speaker:So, uh.
Speaker:You know, it is a death like that is more like a disappearance.
Speaker:Someone just disappears off the face of the earth.
Speaker:Life is, you know, it disappears.
Speaker:It's just a, such a tremendous breaking of everything that you
Speaker:thought your future would be.
Speaker:And, uh, that breaking I. We are so afraid of loss
Speaker:in any way, shape or form.
Speaker:Especially the death.
Speaker:Especially death, because we just don't talk about loss.
Speaker:We talk about the like the tough times or, or even the good times,
Speaker:the times we're at the top of the podium and the medals around our neck.
Speaker:But we never talk about the times when we go through losses
Speaker:and I mean the catastrophic losses to the smallest losses.
Speaker:So what happened whenever I lost Mike, is people expected less of me.
Speaker:So there was so much like, how are you like, oh, you know, and even a year
Speaker:or two or three years later, people were still expecting myself and the
Speaker:kids to be smaller instead of larger.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:And that just wasn't the experience that we went through.
Speaker:We had a terrible, terrible experience.
Speaker:It was, you know, again, this love of my life, the kid's dad just boom, gone.
Speaker:But we.
Speaker:Put one foot in front of the other and just try to move
Speaker:ahead as best we could and.
Speaker:That's frankly like what we're made for as human beings,
Speaker:like we're part of nature.
Speaker:When the forest fire burns through the forest, the shoots,
Speaker:the green shoots come again.
Speaker:When the caterpillar goes into the chrysalis, he becomes soup
Speaker:right before the butterfly arises.
Speaker:So that's a little bit.
Speaker:Kind of cliche, but the cliches are real, right?
Speaker:We are made to heal and talking about healing, spending time in nature,
Speaker:spending time with other human beings and being honest about an experience
Speaker:is what gets you through from the most giant loss to the small losses.
Speaker:So what I found over time is just like I was having an experience of
Speaker:loss that was different than what society was expecting of me and.
Speaker:There's a, one of the great ways that I got through, uh, my healing process
Speaker:was, you can see all these books behind me was reading like memoirs.
Speaker:And first I would read memoirs of people who had, you know, lost a
Speaker:husband or lost a child because.
Speaker:That when you're trying to get a courage infusion, like
Speaker:that's a great place to do it.
Speaker:You're reading a story, you're not reading out like these are
Speaker:the six steps through your loss.
Speaker:You're reading like, oh, look how Joan Didion did this, or Look how
Speaker:one of my favorite Bruce Springsteen.
Speaker:So in Bruce Springsteen's memoir, born to Run, like you would think,
Speaker:is that a memoir about lost?
Speaker:No.
Speaker:But his entire life.
Speaker:You know, we have losses throughout our lives.
Speaker:That's another thing we, we try to hope isn't actually happening.
Speaker:No, maybe that's for other people.
Speaker:But no, you lose parents, you lose band mates, you lose, uh,
Speaker:hopes, dreams, opportunities.
Speaker:So one of the things, uh, Springsteen says in his memoir is death's
Speaker:last gift to those who are still alive is to remove the veil of
Speaker:the ordinary from their eyes.
Speaker:And that, I think to Carlos's, uh, introduction here, that is the
Speaker:gateway to aliveness, right when the veil of the ordinary is removed.
Speaker:In my case, it was removed.
Speaker:It was like ripped off.
Speaker:But that allowed me to see life differently, right?
Speaker:And to see that these societal expectations that people were,
Speaker:you know, waiting for me to just still be small or the kids to
Speaker:be small, just wasn't accurate.
Speaker:Like, that wasn't my experience.
Speaker:And honestly like, you know, I know we're talking about loss, which
Speaker:is like a very heavy subject, but I think, I think one of the keys
Speaker:to aliveness, like I think about.
Speaker:The breaking experience I had.
Speaker:Um, and that change of like what society expects of you and that veil of the
Speaker:ordinary, like Bruce Springsteen says there is, so there is actually humor
Speaker:and you need humor so much in life.
Speaker:Like, one of my, one of my favorite stories about like in the days after
Speaker:my husband died, my kids were 11 and 13 and my husband was, uh, very neat.
Speaker:He, you know, kept the house very neat and, and we had
Speaker:these squeegees in our showers.
Speaker:You know that we have glass, we had at that house glass in the shower, and,
Speaker:and Mike liked the shower to be clean.
Speaker:So we all had squeegees and we squeegee our shower.
Speaker:So then a couple of days after he died, one of the kids said to me,
Speaker:I didn't squeegee my shower today.
Speaker:And I was like, me neither.
Speaker:I think we can throw the squeegee away.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And, and again, like that's, that's, we're still honoring him and
Speaker:loving him, but we're like, okay, like this is like, we can have a
Speaker:little laugh about the squeegee.
Speaker:And I think a lot of people used to say to me, you know, I can't do what
Speaker:you, I could never do what you did.
Speaker:I could never survive that.
Speaker:But they are mistaken.
Speaker:There's nothing special about me or, uh, the kids.
Speaker:It's a mindset thing is I think what I was saying.
Speaker:So, you know, It's been, and, and to Carlos's point before we blink out,
Speaker:let's, we'll do a serious moment.
Speaker:Today is the, uh, is today is the eighth anniversary of my husband's death.
Speaker:But the opportunity to do a talk like this is like his legacy, right?
Speaker:Like mm-hmm.
Speaker:And I told the kids whenever, uh, he first passed away.
Speaker:I always get this confused because in America we have a
Speaker:ground floor and a first floor.
Speaker:When I go to the uk I'm like, am I on the first floor or the second floor?
Speaker:But mm-hmm.
Speaker:You know, I always used to say to them, uh, listen, daddy built the foundation
Speaker:of your, the basement of your house and the first floor of your house.
Speaker:We're just gonna finish off the second floor without him.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:But you are already, you, you are who you are.
Speaker:And now that he like lives in us after eight years, You know, that second
Speaker:floor that we're building is like such an honor and a legacy to him.
Speaker:And I consider this work that I do to change the conversation around loss
Speaker:part of the way that he lives on.
Speaker:And, you know, what a, what a gift to be able to do that, um, and to
Speaker:be able to kind of raise the kids.
Speaker:Into thriving young adults, you know, after some incredibly,
Speaker:very difficult years.
Speaker:You know, it's tough to be a teenager and it's tough to be
Speaker:a teenager who lost their dad.
Speaker:Um mm-hmm.
Speaker:But now I think one of the things we don't think about about loss
Speaker:as much is like how empowering it is to survive the worst.
Speaker:I, I think to myself, yes, of course, like more bad things will happen because
Speaker:loss has a cyclicality to it, right?
Speaker:But I'm like, wow, I survived one of the worst things that could happen to you.
Speaker:And instead of that making me wanna kind of retreat to my cave, it made
Speaker:me wanna come out into the world and.
Speaker:Why that is, is because like in some ways you're trying
Speaker:to get outta your brain.
Speaker:Like, get me out of this monkey brain that's suffering so much.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And the way you do that, you know, we are, and we're
Speaker:talking about transitions.
Speaker:about five or six months after Mike died, I actually took a
Speaker:new corporate job and people are like, oh, kind of aghast.
Speaker:Like, oh no.
Speaker:Like, but I needed to go somewhere where I was not defined by being a widow.
Speaker:Where I could just do a great job.
Speaker:And people weren't like, oh, there's Sue.
Speaker:Let's kind of treat her, you know, differently.
Speaker:And that job gave me a part of my life where I could just be
Speaker:myself and be what I was good at.
Speaker:And you know, that transition was super important to me.
Speaker:And I went from like a super big multinational, just a smaller,
Speaker:publicly held company and.
Speaker:That job that I had, I left in January gave me so much meaning
Speaker:and purpose because it helped me not be sue the widow all the time.
Speaker:It just helped me be Sue the senior executive.
Speaker:Um, yeah, I would say, I don't think it's on a level, but you
Speaker:can't compare grief, I guess.
Speaker:But yeah, my, my dad passed away seven years ago.
Speaker:I was very close to him.
Speaker:well, I, both, me and Carlos actually lost a very good friend
Speaker:of ours about 15 years ago.
Speaker:So there was five of us.
Speaker:We were friends from school, like literally for, uh, since we were like
Speaker:teenagers and, uh, we're still close to this day, but one of them we lost
Speaker:15 years ago to, to, um, leukemia.
Speaker:Um, and yeah, that changed me, I think.
Speaker:In terms of just, I felt like I grew up then really felt like I was, uh,
Speaker:appreciative of his journey, that he'd been through this illness for a long
Speaker:time and, and in our eyes without owning it and, and sort of letting us know.
Speaker:So we dealt with a loss.
Speaker:And then I think probably like you found, like grief had,
Speaker:like you said, goes in cycles.
Speaker:So when my dad passed away, then it gave me a deeper feeling and
Speaker:a deeper experience of grief.
Speaker:And yeah, so much of what you talked about in your talks and
Speaker:blog resonate because Yeah.
Speaker:I too have had the same experience of life since my dad passed away of
Speaker:feeling more emotional, you know, both the, the lows and the highs.
Speaker:Um, but I wouldn't change it for a second.
Speaker:You know, the feeling of, I heard someone on the radio talk about
Speaker:this the other day, like you just cries at things now that you
Speaker:wouldn't have cried at before.
Speaker:And I'm just saying it could be a song, it could be someone,
Speaker:uh, experiencing pain, some.
Speaker:Situation that I just get a lot more emotional than I ever did before.
Speaker:But I don't see it as a bad thing.
Speaker:I feel like I'm more open to the emotions of life and the rollercoaster
Speaker:of life than I ever was before.
Speaker:So, yeah, that's where I think this idea of grief and death is.
Speaker:So for a lot of people it taboo, right?
Speaker:They, they fear talk about it 'cause they think it's, you know, sad feelings.
Speaker:Well, who would wanna be sad rather than actually by closing down the
Speaker:door to that they can close down the door to the, the joy of life too.
Speaker:I always say that I wanna talk about loss because we can
Speaker:suffer less if we talk about it.
Speaker:You know, because we're in community and we realize we're not alone.
Speaker:Uh, we can console better, like we can figure out how to reach
Speaker:out to each other, even if that's just a arm around the shoulder
Speaker:or an, I'm thinking about you.
Speaker:And then the third is we can live a more vibrant life because of that
Speaker:veil of the ordinary, because being removed, because of our emotions.
Speaker:Being accessed and that that's a breaking, but people don't
Speaker:wanna have the emotions.
Speaker:And if you don't have the emotions, it's gonna be pretty tough to have aliveness.
Speaker:It's gonna be pretty tough to reach into that.
Speaker:And, you know, there were moments in the year after Mike died that like,
Speaker:I would be out walking in the forest near my house and I'd be like, oh,
Speaker:everything looks like technicolor.
Speaker:Like, like it has an electric outline.
Speaker:Everything just looked so alive and, and, uh, you know, we just lost
Speaker:all the leaves on our trees here.
Speaker:And I have a little stream, um, that runs through my backyard that
Speaker:I can't see during the summer.
Speaker:And, and, uh, in the springtime and whenever the leaves fall from the
Speaker:trees, we always think to ourselves, oh no, the leaves, all the beauty
Speaker:of the green and lush is gone.
Speaker:And, and I was just looking out my kitchen window yesterday
Speaker:and, uh, you know, there's not a leap on the tree left.
Speaker:But now you can see every branch, every bird, and the
Speaker:little stream that's below.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:Like, and that's what I think sometimes loss.
Speaker:It like removes the veil of the ordinary, but what's there is
Speaker:even more spectacularly beautiful.
Speaker:It's, it is a moment to pause.
Speaker:I think it's reframing
Speaker:Um, but anyway, and also Lawrence, I did wanna say one thing about,
Speaker:about comparing griefs, right?
Speaker:So we, and I'm just writing a post that comes out tomorrow,
Speaker:a post about, about our pets.
Speaker:Like when we think about our pets, like pets don't have the
Speaker:lifespan that we have, right?
Speaker:So if you've ever had a pet or you had a pet when you were young, you already
Speaker:have a little bit of practice at loss.
Speaker:Hmm.
Speaker:and of course we, we say, well, I wouldn't wanna compare the death of a
Speaker:human to a death of a pet, but like, there's no hierarchy to suffering.
Speaker:Like comparing losses is kind of, kind of bullshit because you, you know, if
Speaker:we compare a loss and we say the loss of your pet is small, then you don't share
Speaker:that loss with us and we aren't able to console you and help you suffer less.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:So I, I really am pretty.
Speaker:Severe about not comparing, uh, our losses.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:They all matter.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And they all shape the going forward of us.
Speaker:And, and I, I just like people to think about the fact that, you know,
Speaker:they've been through some losses in their lives and they've gotten their
Speaker:way through, so they already, I.
Speaker:Have a little bit of skill and you don't have to have gotten
Speaker:through it with like pirouettes and super, super gracefulness.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:You got through it like, and you figured out what worked and didn't
Speaker:work for you and that's tools in your toolkit for next time.
Speaker:Even though we say like losing a pet or you know, losing an opportunity
Speaker:or, you know, aren't that big.
Speaker:No, they are like, they all add up.
Speaker:To your empowerment and your skill and your ability to access your
Speaker:emotions, which is where the action is.
Speaker:And, and you know, I like to say like I grew up in Western Pennsylvania's
Speaker:like steel country, football country, American football country, and you
Speaker:know, we never felt our emotions like that wasn't part of the game.
Speaker:And so I didn't come from some like, oh yes, we're all sitting
Speaker:around hugging trees as kids.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:Like literally Mike's death.
Speaker:Taught me to feel emotions because before that I was like, well, if
Speaker:I felt an emotion then I couldn't be, you know, strong and powerful.
Speaker:No, it's like actually the opposite.
Speaker:Um, yeah, I'd like to explore a little bit this idea of, uh, fear of emotion
Speaker:or fear of loss and that combined, and I'm gonna connect it and I'll be curious
Speaker:to hear what your thoughts are on this.
Speaker:Uh, fear of collapse.
Speaker:Fear of the emotions are gonna be so intense that I'm no longer
Speaker:gonna be able to function.
Speaker:people are afraid of despair.
Speaker:They think that once you hit rock bottom, you won't be
Speaker:able to come back up again.
Speaker:And actually, uh, so the, so David White, is this a poet?
Speaker:He's Irish in English.
Speaker:He's got, you know, constellations, I'm sure many people are, loving
Speaker:his work as I am in constellations.
Speaker:He, you know, uses words and he defines them.
Speaker:So he has the word despair as, as one of his words in that book.
Speaker:And the first constellations.
Speaker:'cause I think he's coming out with constellations too, with
Speaker:more words in the next few months.
Speaker:And he says despair is a resting place.
Speaker:Like you will go to despair for a while.
Speaker:And then you will know when it's time to come back out of despair.
Speaker:And on a personal note, there would be times where I just would be just
Speaker:filled with despair, like I like to say, like crying on the bathroom floor.
Speaker:Like, and I would, I would let the kids see me upset and crying,
Speaker:but I would never let them see me.
Speaker:really, really sobbing because I don't wanna scare them.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:I want them to know emotions are real and they should feel them too.
Speaker:But you don't want the one parent that you have left to
Speaker:appear out of control like that.
Speaker:And that was, so, that was always sort of a.
Speaker:Line in the sand.
Speaker:So I would go into my bathroom and I would shut the door and I would be like
Speaker:really, really sobbing on the floor.
Speaker:And the feeling you get after you are done and you have really
Speaker:cried it out is like, is space.
Speaker:Like your body has the space, your brain has the space.
Speaker:And that was a, you know, something that I did on repeat.
Speaker:Whenever the sadness would really overcome me, and
Speaker:then I would be shocked.
Speaker:I was like, oh my gosh.
Speaker:Like, I feel so much better after having, you know, really sobbed it out.
Speaker:So that fear of despair.
Speaker:Carlos, I think is like one of the, I. Really big things that holds us back.
Speaker:I just think, again, as like part of nature, we were meant to go through
Speaker:that cyclicality and go to your depths.
Speaker:You will come back out and, and not to get like scientific about it, but you
Speaker:know, of course in the bookshelf here, once I had finished the memoirs or you
Speaker:know, been through a lot of memoirs, then I wanted to read the science.
Speaker:Like I wanted to be the science of grieving.
Speaker:And there's a, I think he's an NYU professor, uh, George Bonano, and
Speaker:he wrote the other side of sadness.
Speaker:And the end of trauma.
Speaker:And he's actually has like the statistical facts about that.
Speaker:80% of us after the loss of a loved one after a year or two
Speaker:years are back to baseline, right?
Speaker:So that's a very scientificy term, but it also just helps us understand, know,
Speaker:like this has actually been studied.
Speaker:And again, that's back to the point, my point, which is like that's what
Speaker:we were built for and meant for.
Speaker:So despair is a place we should go and you will come back out of it.
Speaker:It reminds me of the term, my son's doing biology at the moment, and he
Speaker:use talks about the term homeostasis.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:And so how our bodies, whether they get too hot or too cold, in this case, what
Speaker:he was learning, they, they do something to self-regulate and get them back.
Speaker:To where they were before.
Speaker:Love that.
Speaker:And this is like a natural biological process, homeostasis.
Speaker:And so when you're talking about despair and fear of collapse, there's this
Speaker:element of like, if we look at this dip, so what's going is like, you kind
Speaker:of like cling on to just the normal.
Speaker:So you don't wanna go to the despair 'cause you think if you're
Speaker:there, you never gonna end or you dunno what's gonna happen.
Speaker:So there's like the homeostasis working on, ah, I need to go onto
Speaker:the, don't let me go off the edge.
Speaker:Versus letting yourself slip because you trust you'll come back up.
Speaker:Because that's just part of a human experience.
Speaker:And, and, and I'm, I'm trying to connect this to this idea of a liminal period,
Speaker:a liminal space, a point of transition.
Speaker:It sounds like despair is this point of transition from a loss
Speaker:to, let's call it a aliveness, but to g getting back into the world.
Speaker:And, why I relate it to kind of some people that we work with is this,
Speaker:when you're in that space of chaos.
Speaker:Transition, you are wanting so much to get out of it, that potentially
Speaker:you just prolong the chaos and the transition as opposed to
Speaker:letting it take its natural course.
Speaker:that's so well said.
Speaker:I think I was.
Speaker:I was talking to someone about the fact that, okay, so if you, if you
Speaker:get a, a cut on your arm, you know, you say to yourself, is that cut bad
Speaker:enough to go to the er and you're like, no, you know, lemme put some
Speaker:butterfly bandages on that, or, you know, some bandaid and plaster,
Speaker:whatever, and you don't do that.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And then forever you have a raised scar.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Or you have something that impacts your mobility because you didn't do at the
Speaker:moment what you needed to do, which was go to the ER and get some stitches.
Speaker:That's not that bad.
Speaker:It's not a big deal.
Speaker:I don't need to, or like you're saying, I just wanna cling onto this place I am.
Speaker:If I actually went, then I would realize how bad this wound is.
Speaker:I have, I just want nothing to do with this thing, so I'm just
Speaker:gonna clinging to where I am.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Rather than.
Speaker:Going through the pain of going to the emergency room and getting the stitches,
Speaker:and then having your wound heal better.
Speaker:So whenever we're clinging and not wanting to go into the emotions,
Speaker:it's like we're not wanting to heal our wounds in the best way possible.
Speaker:We're not wanting to take the dip and.
Speaker:You know, we're not comfortable in the dip, and we're not a society
Speaker:that's used to feeling our emotions.
Speaker:We're not encouraged to feel our emotions.
Speaker:We're like, you go over there and feel your emotions.
Speaker:Um, and when you're ready, you can come back and I'll be like, when are
Speaker:you gonna be, are you better yet?
Speaker:Are you better yet?
Speaker:Are you better yet?
Speaker:No.
Speaker:Like, that's this, these are kind of the myths that we wanna break
Speaker:down about people, whether it's a loss or whether you're just going
Speaker:through chaos and transition.
Speaker:You have to be.
Speaker:Like that's where the transformation happens.
Speaker:It doesn't happen on the victory laps.
Speaker:It doesn't happen when you win the big deal.
Speaker:It doesn't happen.
Speaker:You know, when you've gone from 10 million to 20 million to a hundred
Speaker:million, that's a happy, good feeling.
Speaker:But the transformation of ourselves happens, you know,
Speaker:at a different point in time,
Speaker:I'm reminded of, um, what I understood that when you talk about
Speaker:aliveness is an idea of presence, being so present with mm-hmm.
Speaker:The moment, the experience, what is, and that's in a sense, when you're in
Speaker:that pit of despair or that transitional moment, and, uh, you can argue that's
Speaker:all there is, is the present moment.
Speaker:If you want to get super deep on it.
Speaker:There is another way of people can, or I find myself thinking you either
Speaker:regretting the past or trying to cling on the hope for the future.
Speaker:And so you're never really experiencing what's happening
Speaker:now and doing what's needed now.
Speaker:Like you said, go to a and e er depending on the continent and
Speaker:get address the matter at hand, as opposed to, I'm just gonna
Speaker:ignore it or I'm gonna resist it and it's gonna cause a scar.
Speaker:It's gonna cause pain.
Speaker:And the other bit about the scars that I found quite interesting is, you know,
Speaker:you said, all right, there's a scar.
Speaker:It's gonna affect mobility and so it will have an
Speaker:impact further down the line.
Speaker:That that's, I think, is a really interesting analogy.
Speaker:Not only in terms of US emotionally, how we then, because we haven't dealt
Speaker:with this thing, it just plays up again.
Speaker:Our lives, whether in the relationships or whether in our businesses.
Speaker:Businesses and relationships, kind of for us, the same thing.
Speaker:You know, you haven't done with it, and so it limits you in
Speaker:some way or gets in the way.
Speaker:So this whole idea of aliveness and presence for me, not only in the
Speaker:moment, feels amazing, but also is, is part of just working through stuff
Speaker:the thing that's coming up for me is just, uh, vulnerability really.
Speaker:I think, idea of showing our emotions, owning our pain, and our.
Speaker:Despair or discomfort.
Speaker:Um, if we're not used to that or we've not modeled it or seen
Speaker:it modeled to us how pain or how that can feel like a weakness
Speaker:or it can feel like, um, unsafe.
Speaker:I dunno if you've found this building your community or doing your work in
Speaker:terms of giving people permission to open up to the full experience of life
Speaker:and what might be seen to be a weakness, but actually seeing it as a strength.
Speaker:Yeah, I, I think I say all the time about Mike's death, I lost 10,000
Speaker:things, but I gained a thousand.
Speaker:And one of the things that I gained was sort of like a attitude, about
Speaker:what's really important, which is like, if someone's gonna judge me
Speaker:for my vulnerability, then that's their deal and they probably won't
Speaker:be in an inner circle with me.
Speaker:And, you know, and they can go on their merry way.
Speaker:so I do think sometimes, and especially like when I started my, uh, newsletter
Speaker:and two years ago, I started it on the sixth anniversary of Mike's
Speaker:death because I'd like to do like strong, bold things on these days.
Speaker:I invited my work colleagues, my, uh, corporate America work colleagues,
Speaker:but the way I had led at that corporate America job was different
Speaker:than I had led before because it was post Mike's death and it was more.
Speaker:Connected to human beings more just engaged, you know, not, I wasn't trying
Speaker:to, you know, read a management book and say, well, when you lead people,
Speaker:you, you are interested in them.
Speaker:No, I genuinely was like, I genuinely was interested in them.
Speaker:So kind of going down that path and being engaged with people, I
Speaker:was always the first person at work to say, I don't understand this.
Speaker:We're in a group of, you know, 30 people.
Speaker:The CEOI was the, you know, I reported to the ceo O was the
Speaker:highest ranking woman in the company.
Speaker:We would be going over some p and l thing and, and the CEO would say,
Speaker:does everybody understand this?
Speaker:And I'd be like, Nope, Don't get it.
Speaker:And like, I knew other people in the room didn't get it either,
Speaker:but I was like, who cares?
Speaker:Like who?
Speaker:Who cares?
Speaker:Listen, my husband died.
Speaker:So I can't imagine getting embarrassed in this corporate
Speaker:meeting means much of anything.
Speaker:Like mm-hmm.
Speaker:We're, you know, our, our, our impressions of what matters and
Speaker:what people think of us is quite twisted from how they're really
Speaker:perceiving us in the five seconds they're actually thinking about us,
Speaker:which is really not much at all.
Speaker:So I was freed from what, thinking about what people thought.
Speaker:So I would be vulnerable.
Speaker:And then as the years went on at leadership conferences, I'm standing
Speaker:up in front of a hundred people.
Speaker:I would tell my story.
Speaker:I would relate it back to management experiences.
Speaker:So that vulnerability, it's my superpower because I am, everybody
Speaker:knows I'm exactly as I present myself.
Speaker:There's no gaming going on or manipulating going on.
Speaker:And they can either like that or not like that.
Speaker:You know, we always say in management, don't you learn as much?
Speaker:You learn as much about how, who you wanna be like 'cause who
Speaker:you don't wanna be like right.
Speaker:When you see your leaders act.
Speaker:Mm-hmm.
Speaker:So I think.
Speaker:That's easy for me to say, right?
Speaker:Because I'm eight years into this, like, hey, whatever, uh,
Speaker:you know, I'm just gonna execute my life to however I feel it.
Speaker:But I think for most people, taking smaller steps, taking
Speaker:the next right action, even if it's just a vulnerable right.
Speaker:Action, or like setting yourself up to try some vulnerable,
Speaker:Yeah, what, what struck me is this idea of, well, the way I'm gonna
Speaker:phrase it, a sense of perspective, it's like when something, so I,
Speaker:she hear, oh, can you hear us, Sue?
Speaker:I think she's gone.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Okay, this is like just trying to build the tension, the anticipation
Speaker:of the answer and the question.
Speaker:Well, I'll, I'll set up the question for me that I wanted to, to ask
Speaker:Sue was this, she has gone through an experience, that has really
Speaker:reset from my perspective what's important and what basically to give
Speaker:a shit about what's gonna affect.
Speaker:It's really just what matters.
Speaker:That's what matters.
Speaker:and that's been quite profound, world shattering, painful experience.
Speaker:And the question for me is around how that, do you have
Speaker:to have that experience in order to have that insight?
Speaker:Or is this something, are there other ways, like she was saying
Speaker:small steps, but you know, what could those small steps be?
Speaker:How do we experience that?
Speaker:Um, a sense of perspective shift.
Speaker:While we're waiting for Sue, let's, um, what we got from this at least
Speaker:experience other than a bit of some palpitations and, and tech fury.
Speaker:Uh, well, for me it feels like you, there's a, a window into Sue's world
Speaker:and the work she does is, is inspiring.
Speaker:Obviously a story is super inspiring.
Speaker:I think for anyone that's been through loss, I think the things
Speaker:we didn't get to cover were grief in other ways, like grief in
Speaker:business, grief in day-to-day life.
Speaker:These little griefs in some ways that we don't give ourselves.
Speaker:credit for, to explore.
Speaker:'cause I think like we see there's, there's grief of a business that
Speaker:didn't work or there's grief of a career that we didn't have, or a lost
Speaker:opportunity or a working relationship.
Speaker:So I think like Sue touched on understanding what grief is and actually
Speaker:how it plays out in our lives, not just something big seismic like Sue
Speaker:went through, but yeah, understanding these smaller, smaller griefs that can
Speaker:teach us something about ourselves.
Speaker:Yeah, there's one I'm curious to hear and maybe to explore is, this
Speaker:idea of loss aversion, which seems to be a fundamental human bias,
Speaker:but what I'm hearing from Sue is when you experience or your, you.
Speaker:I'm not only used to it, if you experienced loss in multiple times
Speaker:and you've worked with that loss well as opposed to just, I don't
Speaker:know, just block it out or just keep on going without really, processing
Speaker:it in, in, in a, in some way.
Speaker:If you can use that or when you, when you get not conditioned
Speaker:to that loss, but really make friends with loss, I should say.
Speaker:Then.
Speaker:I'm wondering, does that make you less fearful of loss, which then makes you
Speaker:feel more bold, uh, more creative, more present, and you know, with a
Speaker:Happy Startup School, more happy.
Speaker:And I'm not saying happy in the, oh, everything's great, but just
Speaker:like, you're just thing you, you're not resisting life as much.
Speaker:cause my, my, my thought is like, no.
Speaker:Well, my hope is if I didn't resist life as much, it'd be much more joyful
Speaker:because you're not wishing, oh, it should be this, it should be that.
Speaker:You're just like, going with everything and, and pursuing, pursuing plans.
Speaker:Not meaning that you just let go of everything and everything
Speaker:just happens as it is.
Speaker:But not worrying so much as to whether they will work or not committed to them,
Speaker:but not gonna be devastated mm-hmm.
Speaker:If they don't work.
Speaker:And what that means in terms of what Yeah.
Speaker:What we can create.
Speaker:So, um, uh, more, I'd love to explore more with Sue, I think,
Speaker:and giving her her wisdom and wealth of just lived experience as
Speaker:opposed to just book experience.
Speaker:'cause that's the other aspect of this is like, you can read stuff in
Speaker:the book, but unless you actually live it, it's totally different.
Speaker:Um, uh, different type of, value in terms of hearing what's said.
Speaker:It's coming from Exactly.
Speaker:Of really knowing it.
Speaker:So, uh, uh, next time we will talk more about that.
Speaker:We'll talk more about Luminous and just dive in a bit more into how we can use
Speaker:this, uh, these, these experiences.
Speaker:Well.