Episode 8 - Grief

In this episode of the Women Doing Big Things podcast, Sarah Dusek and Mona de Vestel discuss the topic of grief. They acknowledge that grief is a difficult and often avoided topic, especially for women in business and leadership. Sarah shares her personal experience of dealing with a major disappointment and the physical manifestation of grief in her body. They explore the challenges women face in expressing grief and vulnerability, including societal expectations and the fear of being labeled weak. They emphasize the importance of doing the work to process and navigate grief, as well as the power of authenticity and vulnerability in connecting with others.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:53 The Impact of Unresolved Grief
• 10:50 Societal Pressures and Expectations of Women
• 16:01 We have to do the work
• 19:10 The Cost of Expressing and Not Expressing Grief
• 24:04 The Power of Being Authentic
• 28:49 Connection Through Grief

Transcript

0:00

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Women Doing Big Things podcast. I'm Sarah Dusek. And I'm Mona de Vestel. And we are going to talk about some hard stuff today, ladies. Seriously hard stuff. So hard that we don't even want to talk about the hard stuff. But we have learned if we don't want to go there, it's probably worth a discussion. we're to talk about grief. Grief today. How are you feeling about the topic, Mona? as soon as you said it, I started sweating and have an eye that's weepy. So I'm just saying But it's an important topic. I think it's a really, really important topic in all seriousness. I think that it's interesting. We're joking about how it's difficult, we're avoiding, but it's actually true that it is genuinely difficult to talk about. It's genuinely difficult to face and live through, especially I think as women. especially as women in business and in leadership. And I think it's worth the discussion because how difficult it is and because I think it's a very, very fruitful topic and a very fruitful process. Grief is generative actually, I think, I think for me, it's easy to put grief in a box and say, that's what you do when someone dies. And I think there are so many more levels to grief than just that box. That box is a big box, but I think we encounter grief. more than we realise. And I know from my own experience of dealing with massive disappointment, even in the last year, I have found myself grieving. And finding a way to give myself space and time to process that when dealing with a disappointment. And you and I, Mona, have talked so many times about, I'm actually feeling the death of something. Like, and it's a something rather than a someone. And how you navigate that when you're trying to do big things. How do you navigate that when you're trying to make things happen? Because it's the kind of emotion that kind of cuts you off at the knees. Yeah, I agree with you. I think it is, as you said, connected to what we might deem as failures or as something that we didn't reach or we weren't able to accomplish. It stirs up a lot of feelings that are connected to grief. Is there something that comes to mind for you around you said you've gone through some things that didn't go your way recently and that brings Can you tell us a little bit more about Yeah, in December last year, for about two and a half years, I had been working on closing a monumental, massive funding deal. It was huge. Massive amount of dollars, was big projects, trying to make big, really big things happen. And I had been working on getting this deal done for about two and a half years. And it had stalled a couple of times, hit some roadblocks a couple of times, three or four times and we'd overcome them and climbed through the mountain and you know, like they'd been up and down, but it had been a big, hard slog. And then finally in December last It reached the point of no return. It became glaringly obvious that this was not a rock. I could push, shove, move, go through, go under, go around. It just was not going anywhere. And the glaring facts of reality slapped me around the face and said, you got to pull a plug. It's time to pull a plug. It's not going to work. And it was devastating. two and a half years worth of work down the drain. And at the time I wanted to shrug it off and go, okay, no big deal. I'll, you know, pull myself together and like, we'll go again and it'll be fine. And then a few weeks later, my body went, I got shingles. And I was like, I have no idea. why I'm getting shingles right now, because I'm not stressed. I kept saying to the doctor, I'm not stressed. I do not know why this has happened right now. And then she said, well, has anything stressful happened in the last few weeks or the last month? I was like, no, definitely not. And then afterwards I realized nothing stressful, but this big monumental disappointment happened Maybe my body's grieving this, you know, maybe the whole, thing not working out and my own kind of inattention to it, not wanting to feel the disappointment and not wanting to feel the pain and angst and soul crushing loss of that not working out is now being manifested in my body because I didn't give myself any opportunity to grieve and feel it and sit in the sorrow of that not working out for more than five seconds. And my body's going, it manifested itself physically and it was shocking and a surprise. And when I owned it and realized, I realized there were actually a whole bunch of other things I was really sad about. And then it was like wave after wave of grief opened up. It was like the flood. Mm -hmm. It was rough, really rough. And I didn't want to feel any of it. I didn't want to sit with any of it. I didn't want to acknowledge any of it. I just wanted to say to myself, well, dust yourself off, shrug it off, try and carry on. But my insides, my soul, my body, everything else was saying, this is hard. This is hard. You need to feel it and you need it to pass through you and you need to go through this. Mm -hmm. And I think that's the reality of grief. It's like the sadness and the disappointment and the pain of loss of whatever it is, can't be just shrugged off and quickly moved on from. But you're talking about two, you made two really interesting points, which is shrugging it off. So there's that level of avoidance, which I want to ask you about. What do you think that's about for you? And I think for many women, and also you said something else that was interesting, which was you didn't even think that this was grief because it was like this business deal, but it seemed like it was connected to other grief, perhaps. or it stirred up at least some feelings. Do you think that all of these un dealt with grief sessions or feelings of grief kind of pool together and get stored up? I definitely think grief pools itself. I definitely think. I started to feel a whole bunch of sadness about a whole bunch of things that were all associated with some form of loss disappointment. And I think the reason for wanting to shrug that off is to feel a difficult feeling, not having capacity to sit with pain for five minutes, wanting to ignore pain and carry on anyway. But I think the interesting thing is, is how disabling grief can be. If you don't sit with it, if you don't give it its moment, if you don't allow it to pass through you And, you know, part of my life as an entrepreneur has been learning how to get back up after stuff goes wrong. I mean, that's part of the entrepreneurial journey is developing a little bit of a thick skin around. Well, that didn't work out. Okay. Let's find the thing that does. That didn't work out. Okay. Let's think, find the thing, you know, this constant like, you know, you're throwing stuff against the walls. Some stuff sticks, some stuff doesn't, and you have to keep going. But interestingly, think following on from our conversation about resilience, it's like the way you find resilience to keep going is by giving space to your pain and your angst and your disappointment and your loss and feeling it so that you can get back up without having to carry it all. Because I think what I have probably spent a lot of my life doing is not feeling it and shoving it down and then carrying it with me on my journey, on my next leg of my journey. And then you're weighed down. You're weighed down by the angst, the unfelt angst and the unfelt pain of grief. Mm -hmm. Yep. And I think, you know, your point about shingles when that came out in your physical body, I think that we should not underestimate the danger and the reality of what it means to stuff it back down and to not deal with these feelings because it does end up being somatized. It does end up being, you know, somatically expressed in our bodies. Like for me, I've had pneumonia three times in my lifetime and each time was linked to extreme grief. And so I think that that's something that's really important to think about is that that energy doesn't just disappear because we're not expressing it. It needs to go somewhere and do something. But I wanted to get back to the topic about stuffing it down or avoiding it. Why do you think, I guess I'll, you know, with you personally, but also for women on a larger stratosphere of like entrepreneurs, women doing big things, why is it that we women seem to have a hard time dealing with these feelings of grief. Well, I think part of the challenge is to be a woman doing hard things. You have to keep up with the rest of the world, right? So you're having to prove yourself a lot of the time. You're having to dig really deep and you're having to show up. we haven't had a lot of female role models to model this out for us, right? And so what we've got is a whole lot of testosterone in the mix. that is less feeling by its very nature, is less emotional by nature. And what we're shown and demonstrate is that you have to be tough. That if you're going to play with the big boys you've got to toughen up. And whilst that's true in part, that's not the whole truth, right? And actually, to be tough and show up and continue. to be able to do hard things, we also have to get real about our own pain and pay attention to it so that we don't end up carrying it with us constantly and give ourselves heavier loads in order to keep showing up than we've already got. And so I thought, I think partly it's to do with expectations about what it looks like to make it, what it looks like to be resilient. You know, and we've been watching Simone Biles at the Olympics watching her extraordinary physical, demanding, incredible performance. mean, honestly, she looks like she's competing against herself because nobody else is even as vaguely talented or as capable as she is. But yet she did us all an enormous favor three years ago at the last Olympics when she said, mental health's not, I'm not in a good place. got the twisties. I'm my mind and my body and not connected. And I got to pull out because I could actually give myself some really serious harm. And I was like, what an extraordinary woman she is. To recognize my mind, my body are connected and physically not going to be able to do the hard things I want to be able to do if my mind's not in a good place. One. And two, just this whole sense of how I thrive, how I succeed is sometimes I have to take a step back. If I'm going to be champion of the world, if I'm going to win Olympic medals, if I'm going to beat everybody else and be better than anybody else on the Sometimes I have to recognize to go forward. Sometimes I have to go back. I have to step back, I think she, she's an extraordinary example of that. And for other women of like this, this ladies, This is how you do really big things. You want to be Olympic champion? Okay. Sometimes you're going to have to say, I've got to stop. I've got to step I've got to deal with other stuff going on in my life in order to be able to pull that off And not know if you can come back because when she did that, she was like, this could be it. This could be how I leave and end my career. However, right now, this is what I need to do. I mean, really, honestly, she's extraordinary. But I think there is a challenge here for women in that our secret power, I think, and our edge over men is that we do have this vulnerable layer. and our capacity to feel very deeply and to express very deeply what we feel. But the irony and the challenge is that there's a societal pressure to repress that and say, no, no, no, no, no, just be a man in a female costume and just proceed and move accordingly. But actually, if we are able and we risk like Simone did, you stepping forward and saying, I am going to do whatever, you know, take a break, do this, do that, express, openly make myself vulnerable. Perhaps you're going to think I'm weak. And by the way, she got a lot of backlash. A lot of people said, she's so weak. She's so weak. Look at this. What is she doing? Throwing her career away. And then I just saw a picture of her with all her gold medals around her neck. like, how weak is she? I'm sorry. She's not very weak. But I think that's the challenge, right? So how do we take that risk? How do we take that leap and say, you know what, I am going to make myself extremely vulnerable. I'm going to express this and I'm going to take the space to do this work and come back to the table when my head and my body are back into alignment. It's a challenge. I think it's a challenge because the societal pressure is real. It's real. It's real. I love that phrase that you just said, Mona, which was, I'm going to do the work. And I think that's, that's the reality of women doing big things. We have to do the work on ourselves. We have to take the time. have to make the time to do the work, to rumble the thoughts, to rumble the distress, to rumble the angst, to rumble the pain, to feel the disappointment when it comes along. not just shove it down and shove it deep and try and carry on anyway, but take a moment to feel it. And if there's one thing that I am still learning, but I think I'm learning faster than I've ever learned it before. Like I'm remembering it, like when it comes up faster than previously. It's like the time I think I'm wasting by actually taking a moment to work through something. And it's easy to think that's a waste of time, right? you. now realizing that is like building yourself, stepping stones. It's like it propels you to the next phase. It propels you to the next level. That's taking the moment to work through whatever it is that we're hung up on or that we felt and we need to express or that we just need time to process something. And I know for entrepreneurs, we're experiencing disappointment all the time. And sometimes they're big and sometimes they're small. And sometimes, you know, they catch us and they hurt and other times they're easier to navigate our way through. But it starts with noticing, I think it starts with noticing the feeling and getting curious about the feeling and say, what is that? And if I'd have asked myself that last December, I would have noticed exhaustion. I would have noticed... I was tired from pushing really hard to try and make something happen. I would have noticed my own sadness about how sad I was at not being able to pull something off that I'd been hoping and dreaming about. I'd have noticed the sense of loss. I'd have felt my own frustration at having to go back to the drawing board again. I'd have noticed my own thinking that said, you are not good enough. are, that was too big for you to have ever attempted. Who were you? who even think that you could have done that. I'd have noticed it and I would have been able to have had a dialogue with it. And instead because it hurt so much. And I think that that's the clue for me. When something hurts really bad, that's an even bigger signal in the sky that says, just pay attention, pay attention for a and rumble what it is so that instead of those thoughts being disabling thoughts, you can harness them for your own power and your own strength. I think there is also that piece about running away from the cost of expressing grief as a female, as an entrepreneur. think intersectionality comes into play for me because not only am I identified as female, I'm a cisgender woman. but I identify as queer, I identify as black, I identify as a woman of color. all of these things that make being vulnerable in a public sphere or, you know, in a way that makes you appear outside of the norm even more than you already are. And by norm, I mean white male. I think that's really costly. I think there's a genuine cost. I know for me in my life, it has cost me in the past to step out and say, you know, this doesn't work or I'm feeling this or this is what I think. you know, whether it is that people will label you as the angry black woman or they will label you as the weepy female or they, whatever the things that happen that are very real and very costly and very dangerous and insidious. do we take care of ourselves around that? How do we move past it? How do we move through it? Because to move past it, you have to move through it. it's tough. It's really tough, right? I, again, I think Simone Biles is maybe a really good example for us there is like, you have to be true to you. And at the end of the day, you know, in an ideal world, you get to show everybody really that they were wrong and you were right. And you know, you doing you and navigating and coming out the other side was infinitely better for you to do than sucking it all up. but, but that's the risk. I think that's the very real risk of doing the work. It's like, nobody knows what the outcome will be of you doing work the ability for people to want to drag you down is constant. Right? I mean, that's So if we just take that as a given. and stay in our own lane, listen to ourselves. I mean, we have to get good at listening to ourselves rather than listening to anybody else. Nobody knows us better than we know ourselves, right? So it's like, how can we tune that out? Can we lower the volume on that and dial up the volume of listening to ourselves, being true to ourselves? Yeah, I think I had an aha moment just listening to you when you said, nobody knows what the outcome is of doing the work, correct, right? But we do know what the outcome is of not doing the work. I know what the outcome is of not doing the work it's like being sick, actually sick, like genuinely dangerously. sick Even if you don't get actually sick with something like a diagnosis, you're not going to feel right. I think for me, maybe that's the reminder. It's, know the outcome. So you might as well go for the risk of the expression and the work. I think it's interesting to also think about, okay, so we've talked about what the negative impact would be perhaps or has been in the past of expressing grief or vulnerability or being vulnerable in a public arena. But there's also the beautiful thing about how you could impact someone's life, how you could actually genuinely inspire someone or even save somebody from something terrible because they see your courage, they see your ability to take a risk and to come out on the other side and say, like Simone holding around her neck, like all these gold medals. Not that we're all gonna be Olympic athletes and win six gold medals in one round. Maybe, maybe not. But the point is, there's something that's beautiful and empowering and inspiring about that. What do you think? I think that's how we change the stereotypical narratives. I think that's how we get good at demonstrating what feminine leadership looks like. I think that's how we start modeling it and it's how it becomes more normal. And it's how we start changing that conversation between, that's weak to, wow, look how strong you are leaning into your pain. feeling your pain and doing the work to navigate your way through. Yeah, I think maybe modeling it and even being transparent and say to your team, this is who I am and this is how I operate. is how. something interesting there about being authentic too, right? mean, I think people who do truly great things cannot do that without being true to themselves. So I think there's something interesting about the connection between authenticity and showing up as you really are. And owning who and what you really are and what you need and building a capacity to do big things. And I think that's the interesting connection for me. It's like, well, actually, maybe I'm only going to get to do big things if I really show up as myself, if I really attend to all of myself and lean in to my emotions and you You know, this whole series, we've been tackling a variety of different challenging emotions that we may feel or not feel at various different points in time. And I keep coming back to this realization that, and you gave me this Mona, that they really are our superpower. They really are our fuel to propel us and move us and grow us into the humans that we need to be to be able to do the things that we long and dream to do. And that's a challenging brain switch, right? It's a challenging shift in our heads that say, these little emotions are my friends. They're not my enemy. They're not the thing that's going to take me out. They will take me out if I don't make friends with But actually if I make friends with them and I lean in with them, they have so much to show me. They have got so much wisdom. They've got so much revelation. They've got so much to teach me if I'll just listen. And even, even with this painful topic of grief, like there's so much, there's so much richness. There's so much to be discovered even with leaning into deep sadness, like really deep sadness. Feeling it so you don't have to carry it around is an extraordinary thing. And I think so many of us, so many of us, are carrying deep unresolved painful grief, things that we've not expressed, that we've not felt, that we've shut down. Maybe it was traumatic. Maybe it was something bad that happened to us. Maybe it was a painful experience. And so many of us have shut those things down because they were exceptionally painful, but just there's probably so many, so many triggering things for us because of that captured pain that easily triggers us and easily makes us less than we could be. And all of those things then become negative as opposed to becoming the thing that makes stronger, the thing that makes us more powerful, the thing that enables us to get where we're going to always tell my clients, I think the greatest currency of our time is authenticity. And that's, of course, in the context of writing a book, that's because if you look at any bestseller out there, you know, all of those books have one thing in common, and that's the author's ability to be vulnerable and authentic on the page. And that's how we lean in as readers and we say, my gosh, I recognize and I see myself in what I aspire to be or what I am already or whatever it is. It's the authenticity that connects us to one another on a universal scale and that allows us to all lean in towards one another. And I think that when we try to be surface and gloss over things, even in our content, whether it's our blogs or our books or whatever it is, or our leadership. I think that people don't, they don't lean in because they don't see themselves. Like all heroes are imperfect. There's a villain in there. There's a wounded warrior in there. There's all these levels of imperfection that we wanna see in somebody that we look up to and say, my gosh, You struggle too, you grieve, wait, you're scared. You're devastated that this deal didn't go through and you cried about it or whatever it is. I think that people can relate because it's a human thing. We see ourselves. And I think that's what we're longing for, We're all actually longing for authentic, real connections with other authentic, real human beings. And grief is one of those emotions that is unfortunately totally universal because we are all going to experience it in our lifetimes because people and things that we love, we're going to lose them. We are going to experience loss. Loss is a part of the human condition and that connects us, deeply connects us. We all have to go through it. We all have to experience loss in one form or another. And that's what we need. It's like, you know, the fuel, the fuel to connect us is partly fueled by grief, You know, if we can show up in the world in a way that says, I see you, I see you in all your reality and I want you to see my all my reality. That's what leads us into deeper connections. That's what leads us to our higher places. That's what leads us to being able to do extraordinary things. And that I think is, is part of the magic and the horror of grief all at the same time. I think that when we see other people experience that universality of loss, I think that we're able to, you know, find courage for our own experience. You know, whether we've already gone through that specific loss or we haven't, but we have, we have experienced a different kind of loss. I think that witnessing another human go through it and express it authentically. just gives us strength. I know for me it does. Well, you also find, you find people, right? You connect with other people because of, experiencing loss. I remember a couple of years ago, was sat around the table with some of my Enygma Ventures ladies who we have invested in. was probably about eight women around the table. We were having dinner together one evening. I don't know how we got here. I don't know how we would talk. We were probably talking about our kids and something, you know, and one thing led to another. suddenly we realized around the table at least four of the women had had miscarriages or stillbirths and two or three had stillbirths which was an you know it was a crazy high number of concentration of women around the table who'd lost babies but it was like one of those ladies had never even spoken about it openly hardly had ever at all And she just had another baby and she had not told any members of her family that she had had another baby because of the stigma of having lost a baby. mean, and so this conversation, it was wild because we were discovering things and we all knew each other quite well. We're discovering things about each other at a whole other level. started to be able to connect with each other in a completely different way because of having gone through a joint experience of losing a child. And just the extraordinary bonds that started to form right there and the openness that started to form amongst these women was just extraordinary and humbling and beautiful all at the same time whilst talking about very, very painful, deep, difficult stuff. And afterwards I was just thinking to myself, why did this, why did this happen? Why, why did this con, why did this conversation go like this? And I was like, there was something healing for everyone about that conversation. And there was something about solidarity with opening up about pain, loss and trauma. It was surprising for each and every one of us who said, I lost a baby. I lost a I lost a baby. That was suddenly, I'm, you're not alone. And that sense of, know, even with like, I've had breast cancer. Like, not alone. Not the only person in the world who's experienced that thing. And when we sit around tables with each other and we share our real stories and our real challenges and our real pain, there is something. beautiful about the connections that are birthed out of that and the strength that that provides because of building community out of real authenticity and real vulnerability. Absolutely. That's very touching and moving. So ladies, don't sit alone. Don't sit alone in your pain. Share your stories. Get around the table, physically with others and maybe virtually with us. We would love to hear your stories. We'd love to hear ways you've navigated grief, the grief that you have experienced in your life and how it has held you back or how it's propelled you. We'd love to hear your stories. We'd love to hear your questions. And we'd love to just build a safe community around this podcast that helps other women connect with other women who are trying to do big things. Yeah, and we can't wait to continue to connect with you all and deepen the conversations so we can continue to do big things. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much, Sarah. And I look forward to seeing all of you again next Thanks Mona. We'll see you all next time. Thanks for joining us everyone. Bye for you. Bye.