Episode 154
Embracing everything: From loss to aliveness
You probably know about 4,000 weeks. It’s what Oliver Burkeman suggests is the average time we all have on this earth. But do you know about 90,000 hours?
That’s how long many of us will spend working during our lives. And it's essentially a third of your life.
Life isn’t about work, but work can profoundly shape the quality of your life. So it can feel painful to be stuck in a rut in your work or career and not know what to do next. Especially after a profound loss.
Sue Deagle is a veteran c-suite executive, mother, and widow, rewriting the story of loss and vibrant living at the Luminist. She founded it after the profound personal transformation she went through following the sudden loss of her husband.
Sue’s personal journey from profound personal loss to a vibrant, purpose-driven life offers inspiration and deep insights for anyone looking to redefine success, purpose, and impact—even without having experienced a life-altering loss themselves.
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Transcript
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.
