Expanding Your Capacity
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Hey, hey, this is a bonus episode of the brave widow show. This is an audio replay of a live event that I hosted called expanding your capacity to love your life. Let's dive in.
[00:00:13] Emily: Welcome to the Brave Widow Show, where we help widows find hope, heal their heart, and dream again for the future. I'm your host, Emily Tanner. After losing my husband of 20 years, I didn't know how I could ever experience true joy and excitement again for the future. I eventually learned how to create a life I love, and I've made it my mission to help other widows do the same.
Join me and the Brave Widow membership community and get started today. Learn more at BraveWidow. com
[00:00:48] /: So I can make sure, yay. So I can repost the replay. All right. So today we're going to talk about expanding your capacity. So what does that mean? Well, when you're a parent, you, let's say you have your, uh, hi Gina, you have your child, your first child. And you think, oh, I love this child so much, like, I love them with all my heart and I, um, I just, I couldn't love another child as much as I love this one.
And I even remember being pregnant with my second child and thinking like, oh, poor kid. I'm not going to be able to love him as much as I love the first one. And then what happens? We have our second kid and do you love the first one any less? Yes. No. Do you just stop loving the first child? No. What happens is when you've had your second child is you've expanded your capacity for love, your ability to love another human being as much as you love the first child.
Think about the Grinch in that movie, the Grinch that stole Christmas, right? Your heart is a certain size. And over time, you learn how to grow your heart, how to love more. And so, when we are moving through grief, and as we learn how to grow through grief, we expand our ability, expand our capacity to be able to hold things that feel opposing but true.
So, for example, I could say, I love my late person, I love the life that I had, and I love the life that I have now. Doesn't matter. diminished the love that I had for my life in the past. And it doesn't mean anything about my life now versus the life I had in the past. Like they both feel equally true that I equally love both parts of my life.
And so, as I was sharing this in the presentation yesterday, I realized that it's Been a while since I've taught this concept or since I've really talked about it and I thought this would be a great time to talk about three simple steps in how you can grow your capacity. When you're early on in grief, you don't have the capacity for much else, right?
Like grief is very overwhelming. It's very consuming. We turn inward. Everything just feels Big and overwhelming and like that's all we can focus on because our entire world has been turned upside down. We don't have the capacity for much joy, for much excitement, for being able to do anything else. So today I just want to share with you three simple steps for how you can expand your capacity to be able to love your life, to be able to love another person if that's what you choose, to be able to welcome new relationships into your life, whether it's friendships, family members you haven't talked to in a while, or just new people that you might meet.
So the first step in expanding your capacity is that you get to decide. Now, you might think, as some many widows do, that this is one of those things that just has to come with time, that time's gonna be the answer, time's gonna be the solution, and You just haven't given it enough time yet. But one thing that I love that I've learned from the grief recovery institute is that the key to recovery and grief is not time, but it's action.
So let me share with you a story. Hi, Judy. Uh, a story about a widow that I hosted on the podcast named Sobia. So Sobia was a young widow. She had two kids when her husband died who were ages five and eight. And she believed the myth that many widows do, which is time heals all wounds. And she believed that she just needed to be strong.
She just needed to go through the motions to, um, get through the day. And that at some point she would just start to feel better. That over time, she would just feel better. And that's what she would tell her kids. Like, Hey, I just need to get through today. But there will be a time when I'm going to start to feel better.
So that's exactly what she did for three years. After three years, COVID happened. And she found herself at home much more often and much more frequently with her kids. And they started to have. more real and honest conversations. And what she learned from her kids was that while they were so proud of her resiliency and her strength, and they were just blown away by that, they felt incredibly isolated and alone, just really disconnected from her as a parent.
And that was devastating to her. As she began to really think about where she was in life and how she was feeling, she even shared that. Three years later, after her husband had died, that she felt worse than she did at the time that he had died. So not only did she not feel better three years later, but she actually felt worse.
So she decided to make a change, and she decided to start through, um, meditation, through reflective journaling, through having, True connecting conversations with her kids, that became a very cathartic and healing process for her where she was able to start healing her heart. Several months later, Sobia is now a grief coach.
She helps other people through grief and she has a great close relationship with her kids. But the point is that while time is an ingredient in the recipe to grief recovery and to healing, time on its own isn't the only, it isn't the full recipe. Like it's not the only thing you have to decide that you are going to make a change and that you are going to take action, which perfectly feeds into our second step.
Oh, Patty. Thank you for letting me know. No sound. Hi. Hi. No sound on YouTube. I don't know why the sound is not working. All right. YouTubers. Hi Anthony. Anthony likes to join my lives on Instagram. Hi Anthony. I am just fixing a technical issue for the YouTube community.
If you're not Instagram, my son said, let me know if you need any help. Thank you. I don't know. I don't know. I've got the right microphone connected and I think everyone else can hear me. So I'm not sure what's happening. Um, so the first step in expanding our capacity is to decide, like you get to You want to expand your capacity and you're going to take the steps to do that.
The second step of our three steps is that you have to take action. So I love sharing Sue's story. Sue's been in the brave widow community, um, for over two years now. And when I first met Sue, she absolutely hated being called. a widow. And I totally understood that because when I was first widowed, I hated that too.
And to me, because I didn't really know any widows, a widow was like somebody who was 90 years old and a cat lady and just sad. Like it was just something that was sad and not something that I wanted to be associated with at all. Um, but over time I learned that widows are some of the most generous.
resilient and brave people that I had ever met. And so over time and working with Sue, she began to try new things. She began to go to new places on her own places that she'd never been before to feel worried or afraid or anxious and Do it anyway. And I'm so happy to share that now, uh, we highlighted Sue's story again on the podcast this week in honor of Valentine's day, but I'm honored to share that now Sue has authored one book and co authored two books in the past two years that have all hit various bestselling categories on Amazon.
Which is super exciting. I think another really beautiful thing about Sue's story is that her husband John died on Valentine's Day. And for most people, for that to hap when something like that happens, you that day is ruined for you. Valentine's Day is It's now forever ruined because that's the day that your spouse died.
But for Sue, this is where she's able to, she has expanded her capacity and she's able to hold these two things that are true at once, right? Which is one, yes, it's sad and it's, she misses her husband and she loves him so much. And she loves Valentine's Day, because it's all about love, and it's all about hearts, and it's all about the things that remind her of her husband, John.
And I just think that's such a beautiful illustration of how we can expand our capacity, and how we can grow through grief, so that things aren't always and negative. And, and those are the only things that we focus on. Okay. The third step that we have in expanding our capacity is connection. I read a statistic that widows lose 75 percent of their social circle within the first year.
And just anecdotally talking to people, um, I would say it's more like 90 to 95 percent of their social circle. In the first year, we lose a lot of people in our social circle. And there are a lot of reasons why that happens, and I don't have time to get into all of that today. But the reality is that that does happen.
That's just the sad reality of, of widowhood. And so, um, what we must do To grow through grief and to expand our capacity for including more people, for building up our social circle, is to start making new connections. So there are four things I teach widows to do in building up this area of connection and rebuilding up the social circle.
Okay, so number one is to think about and evaluate current friends and family that you've known, their existing relationships of ones that you want to reignite or ones that you want to, to nurture and to strengthen. Okay. The second group of people is that you need to find a strong community of widower, of widows, Or other grievers.
So having a community of people who understand in their own way what you've gone through. And the reason for that is because we want a community of people where we can talk and we can share what we've experienced without having to explain the impact, without having to really explain what it has done to us, how it has affected us.
Like when you talk to another widow, they just. Get it. Okay, the third type of people that we want to build a connection with is Is, um, new friends and new connections. So, um, these are people that are not comparing you to the past. They're not looking for you to go back to normal. Thank you, Shamar. She said, you are amazing.
I appreciate it. These people aren't looking for you to go back to the way that you used to be. They, all they know, is Is you and who you are and how you are now, and they're just accepting of you just the way you are. You're not broken. There's nothing wrong with you. And these people just fully embrace you as you are.
And then the 4th category of people is. are people who have similar interests, values, and goals. So these are people who may be on a similar path as you. Maybe it's people in your pickleball team. Maybe it's people at church. Maybe it's people who are in your line dancing group. Whatever it is, people who have shared interests, values, and goals.
And if you will build up connection and community with people from each of those categories, you're going to have a much stronger sense of connection and a reduced sense of loneliness and what I felt, which was just crushing isolation. Like I was just incredibly lonely and incredibly crushed. So I know I've covered a lot and it's only been 20 minutes, but when I think about how do we grow.
How do we expand our ability to hold these two things together to be equally true? Like how can, how is it possible that we can love the life that we had and we can also love the life that we have? It's through these three steps of making a decision, that's what we're going to do. of taking action and of building a really strong connection with people in various communities.
And that is going to help you go a really long way. Um, this is something that I coach widows on. Frequently, whether or not I coach in those exact steps. Um, but these are things we cover in the membership community. These are things that we cover in the Love After Loss Mastermind, and then also in the Brave Widow Academy that's launching later this spring.
So if this is something that you would love to learn more about, um, or something you have questions about, just send me a DM, leave me a comment, send me an email, whatever's the easiest way, and I will be happy to help you determine. How to like, what next step that you should take in order to be able to expand your capacity.
It sounds like this may take a lot of time. Well, here's the thing. It's not something that can happen overnight because it does take time to. Take action and to build new connections and to nurture relationships. And that's true. But as I mentioned early on, it's not time alone that's going to help you heal your wounds.
It's going to help you grow your capacity. And just, I think about in life in general, all the times that I've grown. To the next level. I think about it a lot in the aspect of even the career that I've had even when I went from Managing a team of 20 people to a team of 40 people like that seemed really big like I When I was managing 40 people I couldn't have fathomed What it would be like to be responsible for ultimately where I was was over 4, 000 people You That's huge.
That's a big change in capacity. And so when I was managing a smaller team, I didn't have the capacity yet to manage a team of, of 4, 000 people, which I was able to do and able to grow that capacity over, over time and, and be able to do that. And so you can as well. It does take practice. It takes those awkward baby toddler steps.
It takes being the weird person to ask someone to lunch or to ask someone for a coffee. Uh, it takes proactive planning. But here's the thing, no one's gonna show up and save you on your doorstep. There's no knight in shining armor. There's no knight in shining armor gonna ride up and say, okay, we're gonna save you and your life's gonna be great now.
You have, that's why the first step is you have to decide this is what you're going to do. And it's why having a strong. Connection in community and a strong social circle is so important so that as you're practicing growing your capacity, as you're practicing the new skills that you learn. As you're practicing how to manage all the negative thoughts, all the what ifs, all the thoughts, like, I would have the thoughts of, well, this is pointless.
Why are you even trying? Um, one of the stories that I share often is when I was first starting to try to, Uh, rebuild my life is I went on, I decided to take a day for myself. It was a school day for the kids. So I had plans for them to be picked up and taken care of afterwards. And I decided to take a day for me and to try to make, do something fun.
Try to do something fun. Um, this was a little under a year after Nathan died and I just, like, I needed something to focus on that was for me. And I, um, where I was going was on Tulsa. I was gonna go see Jordan, Dr. Jordan Peterson. And Tulsa hear him speak live. He's somebody I love his, his videos and his clips.
And I was excited about seeing him in person. And so I was on my way to Tulsa. I was about halfway there. So just over an hour from home and there, In Oklahoma, there's um, like a turnpike and a, and a highway and there's like one main gas station and restaurant there. So I remember I'd stopped there, um, halfway through and I was just, tears were just streaming down my face, like totally ruining my makeup.
Like, I just had this overwhelming wave come up inside of me that was like, You know, this is pointless. Why are you doing this? Why even try? You know, he's not here anymore. Who are you to go out and try to have a nice day and to do something for yourself? But I decided to just keep going because I knew that some of those thoughts were going to keep popping up.
So I continued the drive. You know, I, use my McDonald's napkins, okay, to like wipe the tears away. And, um, the best that I could, I went to Tulsa. I went to the mall there. It was in the afternoon. My kids were just getting out of school and one of my kiddos is just blowing up my phone. Text, text, text, text, text.
And, um, one of my kiddos struggles with mental health issues. And I was two and a half hours away. And so I'm coordinating, you know, support for that child and, and trying to respond. All those thoughts just kept coming up, right? Like, see, this is why you shouldn't try it. See, your kids need you. You shouldn't, you're out here trying to do something for yourself.
And your kids are back here and they need you. And so. At that stage of my journey through widowhood, I didn't have the capacity, I didn't have the skill set yet to say stop, you know, stop with the negative thoughts. It's okay. Like, yes, my kids need me and I already have the skills. Very well taken care of them through their child care and the coverage and having the right family member present.
Like, it's okay. Things are going to happen. Things are going to come up. We're going to get through this. I didn't have that capacity yet. So I was like a little toddler stumbling around trying to figure it all out and trying to figure out, like, What's normal? And, and should I feel guilty? And should I, you know, go back, turn around and go back home and just give up on Jordan Peterson?
And, you know, all of the things. And then there was dinner with, uh, a friend out there that I went to solo. And then I went to the show and it was in, I think, February of that year. And so it was cold and I had to stand outside in the line and I was all by myself and I didn't know anyone. And it was this really big convention center and it was just all the awkwardness and the weirdness and me trying to normalize doing things like that for myself.
All of that was practice. All of that was me intentionally stretching my capacity and my ability to grow to the next level and to be able to hold all of the emotions, all of the feelings, the sadness, the joy, the excitement, the wonder, the curiosity, the heartbreak of a child that's struggling, the, uh, Being able to hold all of those really big emotions at the same time, I had to grow my ability to do that.
I often think about it like a, um, I was looking to see if I had a rubber band, but like when you're pulling a rubber band and you're pulling it tighter and tighter and tighter until it feels like it's just going to snap, like it's stretched really, really thin. I've noticed over the course of my life when I am trying to grow to another level, I probably noticed this trend earlier on when I was growing in leadership because I grew quickly in leadership, right?
What I would notice is that I would start to feel like that rubber band, like I was stretched tighter and tighter and tighter and like there was tension, right? And there was going to be a moment, there was one more thing I was going to break. I was not going to be able to To continue life this way, like it was not possible.
And what I would notice is if I would just push through a little bit more, if I would stay the course, if I would meet that challenge head on and say, I'm gonna do this. This is not gonna break me. I'm gonna do this. All of a sudden, it was like the sense of relief, like it wouldn't take much longer past the point where I thought I cannot do this anymore.
I think there's something inside of us that happens when we come across those circumstances in life and we're at a crossroads. And we have to make a decision whether we're going to continue on or we're going to give up. And if we will continue on, on the other side, we find relief. We find peace. We find that now we can handle a lot more than we could handle in the past.
Me today, I can hold lots of big emotions. I can hold space for other people's emotions and I do it every day. When I'm on coaching call day and I have calls back to back to back to back and I'm Getting teary eyed hearing someone's story, or I'm sitting in it with them, or I am helping them try new things for the first time and honoring their pain and their frustration and their struggle and those things.
Like, not only now can I hold big emotions for myself, but I can hold them for other people. But it didn't happen overnight. But it also didn't take me 30 years either, right? So these are things that we can very much learn how to do, like growing our capacity and growing our ability to hold big emotions that feel, that both are true but feel very conflicting.
A lot of times if you've followed me for very long, I call it embracing the and, right? We can feel sadness for missing our person and we can still feel excited about something that's coming up in the future. Just because I'm excited about something coming up in the future doesn't mean I just forgot about my person.
And for a lot of people until they've expanded their capacity, they tend to think it's one or the other. Until you have that second child, if you only have that first child, you don't think you can love a second child as much as you love the first, or you just, you have a really hard time wrapping your mind around it.
Hmm, what would that be like? Like, that, that just seems weird. Like, surely I would love one more than the other. But once you experience it, it's like your eyes are open. You're like, oh, now I see. I see how I could love my second one as much as the first, and my third, and my fourth in my case. But now that I've gotten well versed at expanding my capacity, it gets easier to do that over time and to continue to grow.
There are still things I have to expand my capacity, and I have to grow through, and I have to recognize that I'm at a crossroads here, and I have to decide. Am I going to quit this progress or am I going to keep going forward? I would have, um, for example, there would be periods of time with Brave Widow when I was first publishing podcasts and there was like two people listening.
And especially then when I was just learning how, what I was doing, I was trying to figure it out. It took me forever. I was awkward and weird. I didn't know what I was doing. Um, it would take me hours to publish one podcast episode. And I would be so nervous because I'm a perfectionist and I want it to be great.
And then I would hit publish and just like wait. Wait for the millions of views. I don't want to be crickets. There would be times I would host training and no one would show up. There are times I host lives and people don't show up. So there are times that you get to decide that, that feels so defeating.
And I remember even working with one of my coaches for months and she would say, success is inevitable, just keep showing up, keep showing up. And I'm like, I've been showing up for months and months and months, and I'm just not making any progress. But had I done that, had I given up during that time, I wouldn't be working with the 20 ish new widows that I coach now that I wasn't coaching at the time.
I wouldn't be hosting a community full of amazing people. I wouldn't be hosting grief recovery classes. Um, this eight week series that we're doing with nine people, like, I wouldn't have met any of them if I had given up at the time when it felt like that was my only option, but I decided to embrace the pain.
I decided to embrace the challenge and that it would be hard and with the belief that it's going to get better. I'm I will see success on the other side. And now I just have the ability to hold all of those emotions and those experiences.
All right. Well, thank you guys. I want to thank you guys so much for joining me today and for talking through how you can expand your capacity to move forward. From grief to growth, I am going to be posting a replay. So if you didn't catch it all, or if you're having audio issues, for some reason, my poor YouTube peeps are having audio issues, then watch for the replay.
I will get that out soon.
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Just go to brave widow. Dot com slash start it's free and you'll get instant access. That's brave widow.com/start S T a R T. See you there.
