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Grief Might Be the Cure You Didn’t Expect To Get Your Creativity Back After A Hard Season with Shelby Forsythia · Values-First Marketing

• 0:00
  Unknown: Welcome to the copywriting for coaches podcast.
• 0:02
  Unknown: My name is Megan catchin, and I am obsessed with having your brand actually sound like you on the internet. We help you write all the things that you've been trying to articulate about your business but have never been able to put into copy. We're going to go deep to uplevel your business without adding more to your already full plate. We'll keep it simple and sustainable.
• 0:22
  Unknown: Sound like a breath of relief.
• 0:22
  Unknown: Let's dive in. Grief and creativity might seem like opposites, but they can actually work together to fuel your growth. As entrepreneurs and creatives, we often face losses, whether personal and or professional, that challenge our ability to stay inspired. We are all dealing with loss of some kind. It could be a loved one or a significant life change, but very likely, it's all the micro griefs that come with running a business. It's the identity shifts that occur as you grow and the expectations of the life or business you thought you should, quote, unquote, have by now. Micro griefs can also look like friends, not knowing what you do or how to support you, who you believe to be the perfect client, and realizing it's actually not a good fit.
• 1:17
  Unknown: Invoices not being paid, clients ghosting or evolving and things you lose as your brand gets bigger. Yet these very experiences can unlock new layers of depth in our work.
• 1:31
  Unknown: These griefs or micro griefs don't have to silence your creativity and lead to burnout.
• 1:34
  Unknown: Instead, it can guide you toward a more authentic and powerful expression. I certainly never expected to have a grief coach on this podcast, but I haven't stopped thinking about our conversation since we hit record. Shelby Forsythia is a grief coach for over eight years, and she helps people from all walks of life navigate life's hardest transitions and begin to move forward. She guides her clients to create meaningful lives that honor and include the heartbreaks that they've experienced. Her work has been featured in Huffington Post bustle and The Oprah Magazine. She guides us in exploring how grief in all of its forms can reveal your core values and inspire creativity.
• 2:20
  Unknown: You'll discover how to integrate these emotions into your creative process and navigate grief while reclaiming your creative spark. By the end of this episode, you'll see how embracing grief can lead to more meaningful content, deeper connections with your audience, and a renewed sense of purpose in your work. Let's dive into how you can harness this grief and creativity to build something beautiful from your experiences. I thought today's conversation was going to be a sad one, and I certainly never expected to have a grief coach on a copywriting podcast, but I am here with Shelby today, who has been a grief coach for more than eight years, helping people from all walks of life navigate life's hardest transitions and begin to move forward. And we are talking about how you can work with grief of any kind to get your creative spark back.
• 3:15
  Unknown: How does that affect us and our writing and our language? How does it change us. And first, I just want to start with grief can come in various forms. You noted that it can be death, yes, but it also can be divorce, diagnosis, other major transitions. And then we also talked about what you called micro griefs, or quiet griefs.
• 3:35
  Unknown: And do you want to talk speak a little bit more to what that could look like, especially in the business aspect.
• 3:43
  Unknown: Yeah, 1,000% I tell people, when they ask me how I support people in grief, I tell them I work with the three Ds, death, divorce and diagnosis, but then everything that comes with that.
• 3:54
  Unknown: And I'm really excited to be here, because this is one of the first podcasts I've ever been on that is explicitly for coaches.
• 4:01
  Unknown: And as a coach myself, there are so many griefs that inherently come with the reality of being a person in the coaching profession. One of my biggest one is the grief of my friends not really knowing what I do or how to support me as a coach, because none of them are coaches, none of them are entrepreneurs, even and so understanding what it is to be in my shoes, the things I worry about, the things I struggle with, the ways in which I'm working on myself, even the ways I'm celebrating, they're like, Yes, I'm so happy for you, but I don't really know what that means. And there's a grief of that disconnection there. There can also be griefs as a coach of interactions with clients, if you're somebody who works with clients, there are griefs of knowing that you know exactly how to help people, but not sure how to reach them. There are griefs of having who you believe to be a perfect client, and then realizing, oh my gosh, this is not a good fit, and having to construct a goodbye and to be the person who's who's kind of in charge of the breakup for less. A better phrasing, there's the grief of not being paid, of invoices falling through, of clients suddenly ghosting. And especially if you're in the grief and bereavement space, there's also a fear of clients suddenly ghosting like I hope they're I hope they're okay.
• 5:12
  Unknown: Emotionally, I have I've worked with people for more than eight years now in a one on one and a group capacity, and there are people who I have welcomed and formed very strong relationships with and never heard from again.
• 5:22
  Unknown: Whether their lives got too busy, they experienced additional losses, and despite multiple reach outs, I I've not heard from them again, or I'll see them on social media popping up and I'm like, for whatever reason, they chose to end and coaching abruptly. And that can be a grief that we face as well, whether we're copywriting coaches or grief coaches. Of you know, suddenly people pivot or change directions, consciously or unconsciously. And having those be kind of these small, micro losses that we don't necessarily have a ritual for or have like a place to put them.
• 5:59
  Unknown: Societally, there's no place.
• 5:59
  Unknown: There's no place. There's no place for that. And so there are griefs we carry all the time.
• 6:04
  Unknown: There are griefs of your business evolving, the things that you lose when you get bigger, when you become more well known. I know, for instance, in the very early days of my business, I talked about my personal life a lot, and now that I've gotten a lot bigger, and a lot bigger and a lot of people know where in the world I live and who I'm married to, I'm sharing less of my friends pictures on the internet. I am sharing less about it may be diagnoses or illnesses or things that I'm personally going through, or I'm waiting a lot longer to share sad or hard news when I get it for myself, because I have to now be prepared for 1000s of people to respond to it. And there is a joy in that, and a celebration of, oh my God, look how much I've grown. But there's also a grief and this loss of intimacy and privacy that comes inherently with growth, this need to self protect. And so I often tell people that loss is an event that happens, like crossing through the threshold of a doorway and not being able to go back through so anytime you cross a threshold and can't go back the other way, that's a loss. And then grief is everything that comes after.
• 7:06
  Unknown: It's not necessarily sad and it's not necessarily all bad or all hard or all suffering. Grief can also include joy and nostalgia and memory making and meaning making and all these things that come after it, but things that society portrays as good or beneficial, they also have losses embedded inside of them. So when you celebrate a graduation, you grieve never being in a college community or on a college campus again. One of my favorite trends that's going around on Tiktok right now is women in their 20s and 30s talking about getting married but never again, living with a house full of best friends or roommates, and the grief of girlhood and kind of mourning that sisterhood, the grief of the celebration of having a baby is the grief of kind of this single it's just the two of us or just the one of us life.
• 7:57
  Unknown: Suddenly, I will never be without this child again, and that's a wonderful thing. And also I'm grieving the loss of that life that that I had before. There's doorways that we walk through, whether we choose to walk through them or forced through them by other means that are just these points in our lives where there is something to grieve here. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is worth noticing.
• 8:19
  Unknown: Yeah, yeah. That is so insightful, I think, to just acknowledge the other side of the coin that we often don't talk about, or don't want to talk about, or don't know how to talk about, and so it's, I feel like one of the number one things, why entrepreneurs typically feel so lonely, right?
• 8:39
  Unknown: That's like the number one complaint, like the entrepreneurial loneliness, because we don't talk about thing these things. And I'm so glad that we're having this conversation today, and that it's going to lead us to talk about creativity and copywriting, but also business in general. And we are not painting this over with any sort of toxic positivity. But how can we really allow these griefs, whether that's grief with a capital G or these micro griefs, and in your work, you talk about how heartbreak and disappointment can actually be an indicator of our biggest values. Can you speak to that piece a little bit more? Yeah, this is one of my favorite tools to share with clients, and that is when we're grieving something or when we're broken apart by something. One of the examples I use the most often is like a divorce or a breakup.
• 9:29
  Unknown: Oftentimes, the thing that we can pinpoint that we're sad or grieving or heartbroken about, insert issue here. If we can ask, what is the opposite of that, or what is the other side of the coin, we can often see a direct correlation with something we value extraordinarily highly. So for in this example of I am a coach or an entrepreneur, and I'm feeling more alone in the world than I ever have. That's the thing that breaks my heart.
• 9:58
  Unknown: Nobody understands what I do.
• 9:58
  Unknown: I'm sitting. In my house, day after day, typing a laptop, hoping anybody I'm shouting into a void, hoping anybody knows who I am, or anybody gives a crap about what I do. The opposite the flip side of that is perhaps you are a person who deeply values connection and togetherness, and that could lead you to some sort of action, like joining an entrepreneurial community, listening to a coaching podcast, like any sort of thing that helps you feel more connected or less alone in the world. A lot of times, going back to the example of a divorce or a breakup, in instances where people are grieving something like a betrayal, oftentimes, the other side of the coin is that you highly value loyalty and commitment, and so to have that to be blindsided by a betrayal of some kind. Another way of saying I'm so heartbroken and I feel so betrayed is my one of my deepest core values is commitment and communication and openness and transparency. And so it doesn't erase the fact that you're feeling betrayed and heartbroken over that betrayal, but it does highlight part of why that is is because something really, really significant to you was taken or stolen or lost, and to say, I am heartbroken about this, not because there's something wrong with me, not because I am bad, not because I'm too sensitive. So many of my clients come to me saying, everybody in my life is telling me I'm too much, I'm grieving for too long, or that I'm too emotional. The other side of that is that you are deeply feeling about all these extraordinarily positive traits that that you grieve not having access to because of some kind of grief or some kind of loss.
• 11:30
  Unknown: Yeah, yeah. And I think in copywriting, we often talk about like, well, what are your big values? What are the values that we want to make sure we are communicating in your copy, and this deep work can be a great way to access what those values are. And obviously we don't wish any grief upon anyone, but inevitably, you know, it is there in some form or another, and it is so cool that like, hey, we can use this to Yeah, to be an indicator of those big values and to share with people what we are really about.
• 12:12
  Unknown: Yeah. And a great example of that, if you struggle to understand or put your finger on, like, what are my values as a copywriter or as a coach who has to write their own copy regardless of which camp you feel you sit in. Because sometimes I'm like, I'm a coach who copyrights, and some folks like myself, I'm like, I am a copywriting coach. I'm a grief coach, but I'm also a copywriter by school and by trade. So I love writing as a part of my work, one of the funniest, or maybe cleverest ways you can point to your own values through like a grief lens, is like, what would you be insulted if people said about your writing? So if somebody pointed at my writing and said, That's so cheerful, it sounds fake, then the other side of that is like, I value authenticity and sharing of deep heart emotions. So if, if you would be insulted if somebody said the grammar in this is just trash. You could say, I value, you know, good, solid communication, grammar, punctuation, I value consistency in my writing. And so you could you're like, I'm struggling to come up with the word consistency, but I know what I don't want to be called and or how I don't want to come off in writing. And to use the flip side of that to inform what are your values as a copywriter and as a coach and what you're putting out into the world. So question for coaches, especially if you're coaching people about how to write, or if you're coaching yourself about writing better, is to say, what do I not want to be known for? And then the other side of that, the flip of that coin will be your values on the other side of that heartbreak, or on the other side of that insults? Yeah, that's so good. Use these insults to imagined insults. I hope, I hope nobody's actually putting down your writing. But it would, it would absolutely break my heart if somebody said, This is so cheerful, it feels so positive, it's fake. And so I'm like, ease off in the exclamation points, because I'm a person who is inherently like full of joy. I into a lot of emotion. I wear all I'm such a theater kid, I wear all my emotions right on my face. But when I write, I am very careful, because I know my audience is grieving. Person to put those all caps things and all those exclamation points very few and far between, because I am meeting people in this place of great emotional pain and suffering and so short sentences, lots of suitable emoji use, like, no skulls, no coffins, no knives, no guns.
• 14:28
  Unknown: Like, I'm not using things that could activate people's grief.
• 14:30
  Unknown: Like I have essentially in my brain a whole copy rules of how I do and don't communicate online with people who are grieving. And it's it comes from this place of what do I not want to be known if I don't want to be known for being insensitive or cruel, I don't want to be known for being long winded. So I keep things short. I keep things mindful. I keep things well written and not overly exclamation, pointy, happy, transformation, positive. I get down in the trenches with my writing, and I think, I mean, it really shows through whether I'm writing a text message or whether I've written a book, like it comes through all of it, yeah, yeah. Clearly, clearly it.
• 15:10
  Unknown: I mean, because of your not just your success, but even just the way you carry yourself. And yeah, it comes through just like I appreciate your thoughtfulness in the way that you communicate, and even in all of those little nuances down to the length of your sentence, the emojis you will or will not use, yeah, that is that is powerful, and I hope that is also written down in a messaging guide I should that's, yeah, yep, um, okay, so let's shift the conversation to also talk about creativity. Here, you mentioned that grief robs us of our creativity, but how can we get it back? Yeah, I love this question because it's one of the most frequently asked conundrums that many of my clients face. They're like, Yes, I'm grieving my dad, but the thing I'm grieving almost even more than that, is I have had, I've had no desire to sew anymore. Yes, I'm grieving my brother, but I feel like I can't paint. I Yes, I'm grieving my child, but I feel like every time I sit down to journal something and an activity I used to love staring in a blank page just absolutely wears me out.
• 16:53
  Unknown: And I do not know how to get this desire to create, to produce, to to take things from inside of my body and put them out into the world to like, generate a thing. I do not know how to how to retrieve that, and I fear it may be lost forever.
• 17:08
  Unknown: That's kind of the implied prepositional phrase at the end of that sentence is. And I fear it may be lost forever is when, when creativity is gone. Because often the loss is permanent. The fear is that the death of creativity is permanent too. And so many times my challenge to or my invitation, I don't want to make it a challenge. There's even copy there. I don't challenge. I don't have five day challenges. I have five day invitations when we're grieving, because I'm like, I'm being challenged enough, the world is kind of rolled over on top of me. I don't want to be challenged. But my who are struggling with what they perceive to be or in actuality, of living is a death of creativity is. How can you make your creativity inclusive of your grief? And this might be a really big concept to grasp, so usually I'll do one of two things. My first one is a word tool that I teach my students in life after loss Academy, which is a group coaching program that I lead, and it's essentially to every activity you do in your day, add while grieving. I'm taking out the trash while grieving. I am writing an email while grieving. I am watching Netflix while grieving. And what this does is it reminds your brain and your heart that everything you used to do before loss, you are now doing with the added weight of grief. And you can start as you fold this into a daily or an hourly practice, I'm drinking tea while grieving, I'm doing a podcast interview while grieving. I'm watering the plants while grieving. You can start to ask as you move forward, in the form of a question, how can I return to journaling while grieving? How can I paint again while grieving? Or does my grief even want me to paint again like you can fold grief into these things that you used to do. What does sewing look like while grieving, that all these creative pursuits that we have? What does running look like? What does kickboxing look like? What does rock climbing look like while grieving? Maybe it's taking things slower. Maybe it's doing smaller projects. Maybe it's shifting from something that felt extraordinarily difficult and technical to something that feels kind of stupid and fun, or just like point pointless, heavy, heavy air quotes on pointless. And so a lot of times, acknowledging the presence of grief in the room is how can I do this while grieving is all that you need to start, but start differently. One of my favorite authors, Christina Rasmussen, talks about how grief is made up entirely of second firsts. You're doing everything again for the first time, but now through the lens of grief. I call it wearing grief glasses.
• 19:38
  Unknown: So it's like you're approaching creativity, but now wearing grief glasses through the lens of grief. So how can you meet your creativity with this? You know, with this weight that you now have to carry for the rest of your life, whether you've experienced the death of a loved one or a major diagnosis or a geographic move or bankruptcy, however, this thing has changed your life. How do you approach your creative work now and maybe practicing it in small ways. If that resonates with you first, a lot of people aren't ready to let their creations while grieving be public yet, and so kind of rehearsing or practicing creativity while grieving in the privacy of a room in your home or a corner of your journal or something like that before.
• 20:20
  Unknown: Introducing it to the world. I think there's a lot of pressure in this day and age to show people your rebranded, grieving, well, creative self immediately, right away. I certainly have have felt that pressure myself, and I've, I have pushed things into the world, I think, before they were ready to be seen by others eyes, and so giving yourself permission to let it be a private practice before becoming a public thing, but adding while grieving to literally everything you're doing, you a acknowledge the weight of grief in your life and that you carry it everywhere and everything you do, it also kind of gives you compassion for how hard you're trying. I'm brushing my teeth while grieving before.
• 20:56
  Unknown: I was just brushing my teeth then this loss happened. Now I'm brushing my teeth while grieving. My mind is wandering to their final minutes and hours. I'm thinking about all the crappy things they said when the divorce papers were signed while brushing my teeth. I didn't used to do that. Now grief was in my life, so now I do that. So just acknowledging all of that. So how do I practice creativity? Continue to identify as a creative person while also identifying as a grieving person, because it has changed your life. And then the the second thing I like to remind clients of, and then kind of see where they go with it, because I can't, I can't control where they go. I can plant an idea, but then where they go is absolutely up to them. Actually comes from one of my favorite spiritual teachers, Rob Bell, and he says that oftentimes great loss or great tragedy is like a constrictor or like a narrower downer. I know these aren't real words, a narrower downer of possibility. Maybe before loss, you had limitless energy, you had a whole lot of time. You had a bunch of resources, financially, otherwise, at your disposal to make stuff or to write stuff or to think about stuff. The robbing of focus and concentration, especially is really big when you're grieving.
• 22:03
  Unknown: A lot of people call it grief brain. And he talks about this constriction. A lot of people see it as I have lost access to all these things I used to need, and that's a bad thing. And he frames it as you have lost access to so many things. So what will you do with what remains? Because if you can only focus for five minutes a day, if you can only hold a pencil for so long, or read three pages of a book or paint a teeny, tiny square of Canvas, like, what are you going to do with that level of constriction? For a lot of people who are grieving and who are in a place where they must write for their job, I have a lot of different recommendations based on what I've done myself.
• 22:40
  Unknown: One of my favorites is to write smaller, to write shorter. And actually that benefits you in this day and age where so many people are like looking at pictures or looking at images, and they don't really care how long copy. It breaks my heart, because I love reading long form copies still, and I love reading long form books, and that's true for a lot of people, but especially when you're grieving.
• 23:02
  Unknown: Instead of telling the whole story of digging into people's pain points, and here's the three things I'll teach you, and come to this workshop at 5pm I could say I'm leading this workshop at 5pm the results are this, this and this, here's where you can get tickets like it. And it may not be pretty and it may not feel like it used to, but guess what? You're doing it while grieving. And so shortening copy is a phenomenal hack, I guess. If I can call it that for for being creative while grieving or writing while grieving, especially, I have definitely leaned on tools like like chat GPT, for analyzing how I've written in the past and helping me write that way in the future. So a lot of people, including myself, I have very mixed opinions on chat GPT as a resource, as an author whose work is out in the world and can be crawled and used for for other things. So I'm like, I have a lot of I don't love that part of chat GPT and of part of petitions and movements to be like, pay us if, at least if you're going to use our work.
• 24:01
  Unknown: But the other part of me too, as a podcast creator and somebody who's constantly putting things out on social media in order to speak to potential clients and write emails and things like that, something that's really cool that chatgpt does is you can upload transcripts of podcasts or copy and paste what you write on social media, and it will say things like you tend to have an introduction that's Two sentences long, with three laboratory points in the middle, and then a summary telling people where they can go to find more. And even just knowing that about my writing, I didn't know that before. I just wrote like that, but for someone else, whether it's a human or a robot, to come in and analyze my writing and say, you write this, this and this, now my brain has a step by step framework to follow for everything I write, and I don't have to think about it. It's it's the IT. IT banishes the blinking cursor on the page. Now I have a framework when I didn't have a framework before, and that's a phenomenal way to keep writing when you're grieving. Another thing to do, and this the last, the last tip I'll give about if you have to write while you're grieving is, can you make it fun? Must you stick to the rigidity or the structure that you used to have before. If you're a podcaster, can you do replays of old podcast? You always have to be innovating something new. If you're somebody who posts short form writing on social media, can you try a month of haikus or something? Can you? Can you? Can you do something that says, I have been through this thing, and so this is going to get weird for a second or. This is going to get I'm going to go sideways or do writing through the back door for a little while, just to to figure out where I am with this and and see what happens. One of my favorite exercises that I wrote about in my book your grief your way, which is a non religious daily devotional for grief, is if you're struggling to draw forward memories of a loved one.
• 25:41
  Unknown: Because a lot of people, they say as the years go by, I'm so afraid I'm going to forget everything I know about them. Is to go online to like a random word generator and ask it to produce only nouns and to give you a list of 52 nouns, one for every week of the year. It could be breakfast, tree desk, like, just whatever, and then whatever memory comes to you first related to your loved one. About that word, write about it. And so to let these like random generators for numbers or for objects or for nouns help you spark bits of your writing, it's like, how can, how can you and grief participate in the writing process together, as opposed to feeling like you have to shove your way through grief or set it way over there. People can't see me, but I'm like putting my arm way over to the side and ignore, try to ignore grief the best you can, and just keep your head down and do the same work you were doing until grief snakes up on you and you're so exhausted you can't do it anymore. I think there are ways for sure, to work with grief and still call yourself a writer.
• 26:42
  Unknown: Yes, yes, absolutely.
• 26:44
  Unknown: And thank you for those very tangible like, what can I do, yeah, um, yeah, um, I feel like a lot of my audience would relate in the way of like you said, grief brain, but like, also Mom Brain, um, some somewhat similarly and, yeah, maybe the grief of, I mean, as you mentioned before, like what we have capacity for now versus, like what we had capacity for before, kids versus now when we have little ones. And yeah, capacity is just so much different.
• 27:21
  Unknown: And they have seasons of it your life where, yes, in this season, I am a mom to a newborn. In this season, I've gone back to grad school. In this season, I'm figuring out a divorce. There's another prepositional tool that I use with people, is in this season right now, for the time being, add that to the beginning or the end of any thing you're going through at the moment, and it just helps you remember a that this is temporary. What you're facing is temporary and that you need special accommodations for right now that that and it's okay to have that. It's like in this moment, in this season, I got one hour a day I used to have five. So how can I how can I get creative and innovative and clever in in one hour where I used to have five and grief over there, talking to grief, writing to grief, I do voice memos with grief sometimes. How can you help me with that? Or what do you need most from that? Or what can we let go of from that? Maybe there's stuff that doesn't need to come with us or can be put on the back burner for now, practices. Maybe we don't need to send five emails a week.
• 28:22
  Unknown: Maybe we can send two or maybe we don't need to post on social media every day. Maybe once a week is enough just to let people know we're still here and we still have offerings on the table. Maybe it's time to take an offering off and then only offer something else, or say I've don't have this at the moment, but I have a wait list.
• 28:36
  Unknown: I'll get back to you in October, or whatever the case may be. I think there are so many ways to invite grief, to be a part of the conversation, as opposed to shoved off to the shadows when you're trying to be creative in whatever season you're facing right now. It may not be a devastating loss. That's where I so happen to work and specialize in, but it may be something that feels hard, especially during covid, coaches during covid, copywriters during covid. How is your work changing in this season? What are you writing about what feels like it matters, and to audit that and to let whatever comes out just have permission to exist and to not be judged by the standards of what was before? Yes, yes, yeah. I think just the permission slip that it's okay to need special accommodations.
• 29:22
  Unknown: Like, that's not necessarily a bad thing in this season right now for the time being. You know, with that caveat there of just, like, really honoring where you're at and, yeah, allowing your writing to flow anyways, and working with the grief. And I love that you said, like, make it fun. Make it fun, while not denying you know that it's there, but participating together in it, I think it's really, really great. So thank you for that, and let's go into you have a five step grief framework for returning to life after loss. So how can we start to move forward now that we have experienced this thing, walked through that threshold where there's no going back?
• 30:12
  Unknown: Yeah, for sure. And I love that you framed that question that way. So full disclosure, the grief method is the thing I teach inside life after loss Academy. So if you want to know more, you can come find me there. I. Um, I had to, here's where I had fun with it. I was like, I need a five step acronym. What should I call it?
• 30:26
  Unknown: And I was like, let's call it the grief, because we're getting through grief together. So I made the letters fit and it it is the most comprehensive map through loss that I have ever seen. And part of this is totally me too, at my own horn.
• 30:43
  Unknown: Part of this is also me now, having grieved my mother's death for more than a decade, I honored 10 years this past December, and having seen and taken and read about and studied so many other people's grief frameworks. And there's, of course, I haven't studied all of them, but in so many of them, it's like, yes, that's helpful, yes, that's interesting, yes, that's powerful, but it felt to me incomplete. And in years and years of working with grieving people, I started working with grieving people, like, four years after my mother's death, I never thought I'd be a grief coach, but it happened, I started writing and speaking about grief online, and everybody I knew in my personal life was like, You should do something with this, because I was just posting things to friends and family turned into a full fledged business. That's a story for another day, but I everything I found felt like it was missing one of these. And so this is the first place that I've seen on the internet that puts all five of these steps in order together and shows you, step by step, how to build a good life from the life that loss forced you to live. The first 1g, is ground, and this is essentially practicing things that help you feel safe in a world where loss has taught you anything can happen at any time to anyone. And that's a very like nervous system, holy crapping experience to have, depending on the weight or the bigness of the loss you faced.
• 32:04
  Unknown: But I think inherently too all of us having survived covid, being in the middle of an act of genocide at the moment, watching an election unfold here in the United States, we know anything can happen to anyone at any time for absolutely no reason at all, and to ground, whether in your creativity or in your sense of self to feel safe even for 10 minutes, in a world where all of that is true is the very first step. Because what that does is it gives you a place from which to build everything that follows on top of so many people say I got I went to therapy after this loss, I joined a grief support group, but everything I was bringing up was so raw and so emotional, and I felt like I didn't have a place to put that.
• 32:45
  Unknown: This is the place to put that, because then our release is where we do talk about, here's all the things that can no longer come with you as a result of loss, including maybe the person you lost, the relationship you lost, the person or the version of yourself you can no longer be any ability, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, otherwise that has gone as a result of life, belief systems, values, maybe even physical possessions that have had to leave as a result of loss. Maybe you had to move. You had to sell your house, anything that you have lost as a result of loss, this is the space to grieve. It.
• 33:18
  Unknown: In the release module, we put a name to everything that you're grieving and create rituals to release them individually. So for example, if you're grieving, no longer sharing a closet with your husband because of a divorce, maybe the ritual for that is rearranging the closet.
• 33:37
  Unknown: Maybe that's the thing that resonates with you, some sort of physical expression of releasing an emotion. We talk about the emotion. Of course, we cry through it. We rage through it.
• 33:45
  Unknown: We talk about the role of guilt and anger and all these really heavyweight emotions. But then you must do something physically with it to complete the stress cycle of what it is you're going through and in a world that only gives us a ritual for death and for nothing else, divorce, diagnosis, loss of self, loss of creativity, creating rituals that let us grieve those things and then begin to move forward again. Is such a vital step in being able to get unstuck when we're grieving and go somewhere else with grief, as opposed to telling ourselves the same story or ruminating on the same loss over and over and over again with no way out. The third step, pardon me, I is integrate, and this is so many people's favorite module in the course, because it talks about, how do we weave loss into our lives?
• 34:29
  Unknown: This is where we talk about seeing through grief glasses.
• 34:32
  Unknown: Everything you will ever do from this point on is informed by grief. How do I see a medical professional while grieving? How do I apply for jobs while grieving? How do I date while grieving like and just applying that lens to everything. It doesn't have to be the only lens you see through, because, of course, you're going to see through other lenses of your life experience. You could see through a horoscope lens, through an attachment style lens, through a I'm the middle child lens. You're seeing already in your life through so many different lenses, but now you're adding the lens of grief.
• 34:58
  Unknown: It's kind of like those little eye Toggler things at the optometrist. Now you're seeing permanently through the lens of grief that one's been super glued onto your face. And so how do you weave these people that you've lost, these relationships you've lost, and these intangible things that you've lost into your life? You could choose to see signs and symbols.
• 35:15
  Unknown: You could start to measure progress through journaling. And these are all tips and tools that I give people. But it's like, how do you make grief a part of your day to day? So. Not so scary or foreign or something that we feel like is taboo or needs to be pushed away from our existence. How do we fold it into literally who we are? The E number four is my all time favorite, because this is where we get sassy, and this is where we start setting boundaries.
• 35:37
  Unknown: It's established, and this is where we establish relationships that are grief honoring with everybody in our lives. We take an audit of our friends, family, co workers, neighbors, people we see on a regular basis, and we ask, Do I feel safe sharing grief with this person? Do I feel safe some of the time they can kind of handle my grief without saying some annoying or cliche or hurtful stuff? Or do I feel not sharing? Not safe at all sharing my grief with them?
• 36:03
  Unknown: They tell me to get over it.
• 36:03
  Unknown: They judge me for grieving. They disappear entirely. They only talk about it on social media.
• 36:07
  Unknown: They compare losses. They try to one up me. They try and fix me with essential oils, like whatever the case may be. And there's different little tropes, toxic grief tropes, that people fall into so like, the nuisance nurse is always trying to cure you of your grief. The judgmental jerk is saying, haven't you gotten over it? Yet?
• 36:23
  Unknown: The objectionable one upper is saying, Well, you think that's bad. I lost my whoever, whoever, whoever, in the war of 1942, and they never came back. And then I had a baby through but the they wanted, they want to just suffering Olympics, you everywhere, and to figure out how to write scripts where copywriting comes in in life after loss Academy and set boundaries with the people in their lives that say, when you said this thing, it was really hurtful. I would love if instead, we could do this or talk about this, or focus on this. And if people change, great, if they don't now you have that information, and if they're kind of on the fence about it, it's something we can put a pause button on and revisit later. But so many people express the secondary loss under a big loss, like a big whatever you would consider primary loss. A lot of people consider it the three Ds, death, divorce and diagnosis. One of the biggest secondary losses is the loss of friendships, people who do not know how in the hell to be there for you after something really awful has happened. And so this is a section in the course that takes grief out of just being a you problem or a you circumstance, and says, Yeah, we do grief by ourselves, because we are the people who are grieving, but we also do grief in community.
• 37:30
  Unknown: Grief never happens in a vacuum.
• 37:33
  Unknown: And so how do we make our relationships or surround ourselves with people who are grief honoring? And then the last module, probably my other I have many favorites. I wrote them all, but this is, this is the one that I felt was missing from so many books, podcast, resources, grief support groups.
• 37:50
  Unknown: Is Foster, how do you foster a lifetime partnership with grief?
• 37:54
  Unknown: Because grief isn't just a thing that happens once, then you're over and you never think about it or or speak about it, or remember it or practice it again. Grief is a long term relationship that you enter into, oftentimes not of your own free will. Loss happens to you, and so you are forced to essentially live with grief in the house, a room that you never invited to be here. But how do you live for the entire rest of your life with grief in tow, with grief attached to you? And so I encourage clients, how do you see grief as a living thing?
• 38:22
  Unknown: Is it an animal? Is it a spirit?
• 38:22
  Unknown: Is a Is it another person that you imagine lives with you? And how do you take care of each other? How do you talk to it? Do you do you speak the same language? Because that would be step one. How do you start talking to this entity that's entered your life? How do you collaborate with grief instead of fighting with it? So we talk about, how do you write grief a ceasefire letter, if I'm committing to stopping trying to get rid of you. I am I am stopping trying to push you out of my life or make it so that you disappear. I am welcoming you into my space and into my home. And the invitation letters that people write to grief, they absolutely break my heart in the very best way. I literally melt when I when I see people write their letters, and then we do a lot of dreaming in this final module too. Is what does a good life with grief look like to you? And so we talk about, who might your grief role models be?
• 39:10
  Unknown: One of mine is Betty White from the Golden Girls. Her husband died prior, I think, to the Golden Girls, but she honored him a lot through her performances in theater and on the stage, and allowing that grief to come with her and inform her creative art of acting is like one of my favorite things in the world.
• 39:27
  Unknown: And so who are your grief role models? Are they in your family?
• 39:29
  Unknown: Are they ancestors you've never met? Are they celebrities? Are they authors or people you've never, never known? And then what does it look like for things like peace and joy and purpose to return? Because just like you, peace, hope, joy, purpose will have been through grief, and so joy will not return feeling the same.
• 39:45
  Unknown: Happiness will not feel the same. Either, hope will not feel the same. Feel the same. Either, I say, Hope has seen some shit.
• 39:50
  Unknown: We have gotten beaten up. They they know the fragility of what those emotions are now and those life experiences. And so how, with the presence of grief, can those things come back to you also? And so G, R, I, E, F, ground, release, integrate, establish, Foster. This is that five step map to moving through devastating loss, whether it is a person who died, which is how most people join the course, but through any doorway you have crossed through that you can't go back through, and you know that you are grieving. So it's not based around time it's been a year since your loss. So this will get you through it in 10 months. It's very much a map that you can use over and over and over again, especially as you grieve new losses or new information about old losses.
• 40:31
  Unknown: You find out some sort of secret, or you get more information about how they died, or something like that. So many people return to the course again and again and again to use the tools to grieve new information or new losses that show up in their worlds. And it's really such a beautiful map and community of people who are there supporting each other through grief.
• 40:52
  Unknown: Yeah, this is so good. It feels so thorough and comprehensive, like you said to like, really care for yourself and all aspects after this loss, whether big or small, and even small can feel big, yeah, yeah. And I think it is so essential to go through this. I mean, obviously, just for your own health and happiness and your own sake. But bringing it back to copywriting, I mean, I've worked with clients who I didn't realize, maybe did not go through this, this grief process, and then here I was trying to do their copywriting, and yet also, you know, trying to be half therapist when that is not my role, that is not my lane, and I certainly wish I had, you know, full credibility in there. But yeah, this absolutely affects, I mean, how you express yourself and copy is obviously a huge part of that.
• 42:06
  Unknown: And so, yeah, it's just so important too. I mean, we know as entrepreneurs like your business can't outgrow your level of personal development.
• 42:13
  Unknown: And another way of saying that is, I never worked so hard on myself than when I started a business.
• 42:22
  Unknown: Yeah. Yeah, right. All part of it, and we just want to push the grief off in a corner and and we can't, if we really want to grow to the level that we say we do. So I really appreciate the full. It feels like a very full, fuller perspective and scope of what it looks like, what it feels like, and then also just the tangible like. Here's what we can do to bring our creativity back when it feels so hard and so far away, and I feel like even people not grieving are like the blank cursor, ow. And then how much harder when, when that grief is stealing our focus, our attention, our energy, our everything, it can feel like sometimes. So this was such a good conversation. And I feel like, so helpful. Again, it's really apply that grief to like, any one thing like that, no one, no one listening to this. Like, no one over the age. Like, what is it like? If you're like, over the age of 10, then, like, you've probably experienced grief in some sort or another.
• 43:41
  Unknown: Like, we're not immune to it in any capacity. So I appreciate the grief. I love that the G, R, I, E, F, map that we use over over again, this is not, you know, I know in copywriting, it's great to say, put a time frame on things. You're going to heal in 90 days, 10 months, whatever it is. But the honesty of like, that's not how this works is really refreshing.
• 44:08
  Unknown: Yeah, well, and that's a going back to what we were talking about at the beginning. That's definitely a value of mine is like, I'm not going to promise you perfection, healing all your woes will be gone in in 10 weeks. You could certainly zoom through the course in 10 weeks, but everything that you need to practice, everything that you need to know, is just a thing that's constantly happening, whether it's the focus of your life or whether it's happening under the surface. That's up to you. But for sure, something I'm extraordinarily transparent about is, yes, you could get through the course in 10 weeks, and that's how I've designed it to be dripped out. Is every two weeks you get a new G, R, I, E, F module. Some very, very ambitious or students, maybe that don't have jobs or lost jobs as a result of their grief, or they have the financial means through some sort of inheritance to Yeah, I can sit down and zoom through a course right now to get through it, but then they're coming back a year later, two years later, three years, I've lost somebody else, or now I'm going through a divorce or moving house, or I just need a refresher of what it's like to do these things. And one of the biggest compliments I get as a coach in this group, and this goes back to my schooling as a marketer and copywriter, is one of the biggest bits of feedback I get from from students in the course, is you put words to the thing I didn't have words to before. Or like the relief in knowing that there's a word for that. Or one of my favorite things too, is when people critique the words that I use to describe grief. That's a funny thing. I had a student once who had experienced the deaths of both of her parents, a breast cancer diagnosis and simply going through covid But she didn't join the course until she lost her job, and her job was such a huge part of her identity. She's like, now I know I'm grieving. She had these losses before she could have called it grieved. She's like, I really didn't I didn't feel like I was at my proverbial breaking point, however you would define that for yourself. But she lost her job unexpectedly, and her identity with that just crumbled. And she was like, now I need this. And she joined, and she, I don't know if you know anything about the Enneagram, but she was an Enneagram one, which is known as a perfectionist. And she taught me so much about the Enneagram. She was my very dear friends now.
• 46:13
  Unknown: And perfection in her lens is not necessarily getting things right all the time, but just this. I often metaphorically compare it to the picture frame is slightly crooked on the wall, and she just, she just tips it so it's fixed, so that the entire esthetic of the room is now righted. And she took the first module ground. And I talk about feeling safe again in a world where anything can happen to anyone at any time. She's like, I'll never use the word safe. You gotta. You gotta give me a new word for that. I have never felt safe in the world. I came into a home of parents who definitely didn't like each other. We were moving around a lot like every every life circumstance she ever had. She was like, I have not once felt safe in my body in the world.
• 46:52
  Unknown: You have to give me a different word for that. And so together, we brainstorm this entire list of like, 13 words, peaceful, grounded, sheltered, calm, stable, secure. Which one is it that resonates with you? And so now I've created this whole like little bonus work worksheet or work shop inside the course of like asterisk. If the word safe doesn't feel right for you, watch this and it's 10 more minutes of Here are other words you can use instead, because for some people, in some circumstances, the world will never feel safe, and that's important to acknowledge when you're grieving. So instead of me, just gloss. Instead of me just glossing over it, saying safe is the word I define for this, and we use for this, and so just suck it up and deal with it. It's like, what other word are you going to use instead?
• 47:32
  Unknown: And that matters when you're grieving, to identify so hard with the word that it feels like it's it's true in your soul. I'm getting touchy feely in this moment, but like, can you align with it in a way that enables you to heal instead of keeping you stuck. Because if I had insisted, she'd just use the word safe and come along with the rest of the group, because we're we're on a time, time schedule here, time's a ticket.
• 47:52
  Unknown: She would quit. She would have gone somewhere else. She would have said, well, then this isn't right for me, because I'm not being seen or acknowledged for all of who I am as a Griever and everything my grief means. My grief may never feel safe, but my grief can feel grounded. My grief can feel calm, my grief can feel secure, and so acknowledging the role that words play when you're grieving too. Are you angry or are you feeling resentful? Are you full of rage or cynicism? Is it the weight of unmet expectations, or is it numbness? What is it that you are facing? Because those are all wildly different things when you're grieving, but being able to wrap words around something that often is so wordless is such not only an empowering thing, but like a visible thing. It's like people feel as if I have been seen. I know who I am and what I'm feeling as a result of pinpointing the words to describe my grief experiences, and there are just not enough corners the world that do that for us.
• 48:48
  Unknown: Yes, yes. Oh, those are such good nuances. And words are powerful. Words are powerful.
• 48:53
  Unknown: Oh, man. Okay, so if our listeners, which I'm sure they are, are like, Yes, I need to dive more into this. How can they connect with you? How can we keep in touch? Yeah, for sure. Because grief brain is real, or Mom Brain, or whatever else brain you have. Sometimes I look at my wife, I'm like, ADHD brains real loud today, you can find me very simply@shelbyforcythia.com I won't give you socials. I won't give you YouTube. I won't give email, nothing. Shelby forsythia.com and everything I do is there. So you can find me on social. From there, you can watch. I have a free workshop that has three tools from inside the course if you want, like a little sampler. Before you sign up, you can do that. You can work with me one on one. You can hire me to speak at an organization. I'll come on your podcast for free if you're listening, if you're listening and you have a podcast, I just love talking about grief through all lenses, through all capacities, because it really is everywhere, but that's not a bad thing. I think naming it is important, but having it be in the room with us is is not a threat. Again, it's an invitation. It's not a challenge. It's an invitation.
• 50:00
  Unknown: Yeah, yeah. Thank you for such an empowering conversation. Again, something I was not necessarily expecting to say, but this is so good, and I will link your website and the free workshop in the show notes as well, so people don't have to worry about spelling it correctly, because I know I have a last name that is also difficult to spell, just make it easy for. Listeners to just connect and click down there. Yeah, you don't want to miss it. It's it's definitely super, super helpful. So thank you so much for such a wonderful conversation today. Appreciate it.
• 50:32
  Unknown: Thank you. I'm so glad to have been here. Thank you for tuning in to the copywriting for coaches podcast.
• 50:38
  Unknown: If you've been enjoying these episodes, let me know that you're listening and what you love about it by clicking on the copywriting for coaches show in Apple podcasts and leaving me a review. Be sure to subscribe while you're there so it's easy to catch new episodes every week if you want digital resources to finish that copy project you've been working on, the links are all waiting for you at copywriting for coaches podcast.com you.