In this issue:

What happens when life doesn't go the way you've planned, when your plan A is no longer part of the picture? It's hard to embrace plan B, and maybe we don't like it at all, but resilience has a lot to do with how we frame our thinking. In this issue, we talk about facing adversity, finding hope, and discovering resilience.

 

 

Podcast

Inspired Life: Facing Adversity and Grief

The heart of my writing and speaking is helping people discover gems in the midst of life's difficulties. Life is hard. Sometimes, circumstances outside of our control leave us on a path that looks nothing like what we had planned. A loss of any kind is a blow that can change the course of our future. Sometimes we can be so resilient and other times we feel powerless, and whenever we have a challenge, our resilience might not be immediately evident. It's really a process of getting to a place of joy again after a terrible loss.

I recently ready the book Option B, by Sheryl Sandberg. (Keep on scrolling to find the link to it in the resources section below.) Sheryl's story moved me. She was on vacation with her husband and a bunch of friends, when he collapsed and died during a workout at the resort gym. Life as Sheryl knew it stopped. In the book, she writes about her journey through grief and how she learned to live again after losing the love of her life.

If you haven't experienced adversity and you aren't grieving right now, this is your opportunity to learn how to be a good friend to someone else. Sheryl talks in her book about how some friends responded with her husband Dave died. Some were helpful. Some, in their awkwardness, essentially abandoned her. Some said unhelpful things. Her loss was the elephant in the room in so many situations after Dave's death.

Sometimes others expect us to act a certain way after a loss, and I want us all to examine whether or not we have let others process their loss as they need to. Have we let them experience the support they need, rather than judging, or blaming, or ignoring their struggle?

If you're in the middle of a difficult time, remember that others might be so busy with their own life that they don't see your pain. Heartbreaking, but true.

We need to speak up and ask for help. I know, that's hard. But it is important to be real with people about our feelings and our struggles. That might mean we have to reach out to them. Yes, in a perfect world people would notice our pain and reach out to us. But let's give them grace in their own overwhelm and see that they might not have the margin in their lives to even notice our struggle. Let's all be human!

Be real with our struggles.

Be honest about our hurt and pain.

Mutually love and support one another in our grief.

That's the path to resilience.

 

Life, Repurposed: 3 Ways to Process Plan B 

If you're living plan B, or as Sheryl calls it Option B, let's look at some tips for finding repurposed life, or resilience. I like to do fancy writer stuff, like use acrostics, so let's make it the ABCs.

A - Acknowledge your feelings. Be honest about how you feel! Stuffing it down is not resilience. That wound will reopen every time someone says the wrong thing, or your thoughts drift to pain. Journaling can be a great way to process your feelings. I talked about Mary Potter Kenyon's book in episode 2. Mary's book,