How do you proactively grieve as a busy person? This week, Lindsay and Cait are joined by licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Mekel Harris, to discuss how you can address grief from a body-mind-spirit perspective. They dive into how understanding grief helps us better pinpoint how it shows up in the body, how grief impacts our personal growth with entrepreneurship, and simple & actionable tools you can use to begin to process grief.
Mekel offers training, consultation, and supervision services to organizations around the world and holds an advanced certification in grief counseling, and has presented at over 30 domestic and international conferences. She focuses on pediatric, family, and community health issues, including grief and loss throughout the past 10 years. She is a TEDx speaker, FOX13 Memphis mental health expert, blogger, magazine and podcast contributor, author, and course creator.
Show Notes:
-Mekel’s story - starting her career in the 90s, working with children in developmental differences, and she started working with parents who were grieving their kids’ physical losses.
-In Dec 2012, her mom died, and she started to make grief and loss her main focus.
-Grief shows up in situations that you don’t anticipate - we can identify it as an emotion like irritability, anger, and sadness.
-Spiritual questions also come along with loss - how do I make sense of this loss in my life? What does this say about me? What does it say about my belief system?
-We associate grief with the physical death of an individual, but there is “hidden grief.” This is the loss of experiencing joyful times, and we can be grieving different routines.
-We can widen our scope when it comes to understanding grief which helps us better pinpoint how grief shows up – both when it’s obvious and when it comes in a more subtle way.
-Steps to take to grieve:
1.) Name it (as to not bypass an emotion)
2.) Claim it - owning your current reality to explore what’s happening around me and within me
3.) Don’t shame it.
-Lindsay shares her experience navigating grief when a good friend & colleague passed away and how it manifested as “buzzing” at nighttime and how it affected her sleep.
-Grief can live within the gap between what we envision for our lives vs. reality.
-Simple tool: Cast a vision for yourself each day. Name and process the reality & tension that exists between the two. Move into action to address any grief and emotions that come up.
-Anticipatory grief: proactive steps we can take to prepare for any future grief, loss or shifts/changes in our businesses
-Set a 5 minute timer & ask yourself these 4 WH questions:
1.) Where are my thoughts taking me?
2.) What do I notice in my body?
3.) What’s happening around me?
4.) What can I do to help myself at this moment?
-We have 50,000 - 80,000 thoughts per day (and most are “negative”).
-We can utilize self-compassion and self-care as tools to address grief and be proactive about processing it.
-As entrepreneurs, we grieve financial losses, expectations around launches, and other losses; we toggle between vision casting and reality.
-Mekel has been an entrepreneur for 3 years, and the reality of ALL the freedom is that we also deal with loss of expectations, and understanding this is a step towards self-care.
-Schedule self-care: Full Focus Planner: offering you quarterly goals that break things down into goals - “What can I do for myself?”
-As entrepreneurs, we may pivot and find that our original passions don’t match the outcome of our vision and we experience great loss as a result - we can allow ourselves to pivot.
-If you have not reached quarterly goals at the end of 2022, look at your calendar, and spend time anchoring into your needs with Mekel’s resources.
Resources:
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-Visit Dr. Harris’ Website
-Visit Dr. Harris’ Facebook
-Dr. Harris’ Instagram: @drmekel
-“What’s Happened To You?” By Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey
-Find the Full Focus Planner here
-Visit the Vital-Side Homepage here
-Sign up for the Rewire: The Vital-Side Membership
-Lindsay’s Instagram: @myvitalside
-Visit Lindsay’s Website
-Cait’s Instagram: @caitrossco
-Visit Cait’s Website
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