What about grief?

We're halfway through the year! So, in this episode, I'm giving you an update on the year so far. It has been an unexpected season of grief for me, so I'm sharing what I have learned and continue to learn!

Here are three thoughts to take away from today's episode:
1. Rest is important. Everything feels harder when you add grief to the mix, so prioritize sleep and restful activities. Then you'll be able to give your energy in the places and times that really matter.
2. In the good times, intentionally craft your life so that your home and routines actively support the life you love living. When grief hits, these will support you and keep you going in ways you could never predict.
3. When you set the right goals, you will unconsciously keep working toward them, even when you are consciously letting go of your achievement mentality.

For coaching inquiries: briellegoheen.com/coaching
To follow me on Instagram:  instagram.com/brielle.goheen

Transcript

Welcome to the podcast! My name is Brielle Goheen, and I help creative professionals get more done without losing their creative edge. I believe that creativity will change the world - and, in fact, it’s the only thing that can change the world. So no matter what field your creativity shows up in, no matter what its exact expression is, cultivating a life that supports that is one of the most important things you can do for yourself, for your community, and beyond because who knows how far the ripple effects will spread. I want to help you unleash your creativity with power so that you can see the change you seek to make in the world. I want to help you start planting seeds that will grow into that beautiful forest you see in your mind’s eye. It’s wild and wonderful work. So let’s get to it!

It has been a minute since I’ve talked with you all. I’ve been in a season of grief. And it has been quite complex grief. That season is beginning to ease - I can see flickers of light and joy beginning to peek through in so many places - and so I wanted to share a little bit about what I’ve learned in the process in case it helps one of you someday when you are going through a time of acute grief.

The first thing I learned was just how important it is to rest. Grieving takes up so much mental RAM. Just getting through the day and doing the most basic tasks feels so much harder. It’s like you’re moving through sludge instead of air and every single thing takes more effort. So it is really important to just slow down. To just allow yourself the time and space to sleep. To do things that feel effortless. For me, it meant spending more time with my two girls. They have a lightness about them that is contagious. Their laughs come easily and often that would help me to find laughter as well. They have the best stories and everything is such a big deal. They are discovering in real time the incredible miracle that it is to be alive and they’re becoming conscious of just how many little miracles there are in a day. It is such a beautiful energy to be with, and I have been so thankful for the way time with them helps me reframe my experiences. 

It also meant making time every single day to practice the piano. Piano is my secondary instrument. For those of you who don’t know, I’m a violinist. So you might think that I would pick up my violin to find rest and joy. But it’s actually the piano that I gravitate to whenever I’m feeling big feelings. Sometimes I like to rest by working hard at things that don’t matter to anyone but me. Organizing drawers that no-one sees. Reading and creating outlines of what I’m learning so I can absorb it better. And practicing the piano. I never perform or play for anyone. That instrument is just for me. It’s my heart instrument and I can lose myself for hours in the work of learning to allow it to sing. And so in this season, I prioritized sitting at the piano every single day. Sometimes for the rest of working at difficult passages, sometimes for the rest of just improvising and seeing what flowed out from my fingers, and sometimes even to express and get things out of me that are beyond words.

Resting for me also meant that I intentionally let things go. Back in January, I had a list of goals that I wanted to set out to achieve. I let that list go from my mind completely for several months. But the coolest thing, and I’ll talk about this in a minute, is that because I selected those goals really carefully - they were things that I truly desired from a very deep place in my being - they somehow still stayed forefront in my unconscious mind. What I mean is that somehow, subconsciously or unconsciously, I continued to work at each of the goals without consciously realizing it. And when I did a review the first 6 months of 2023 recently, even though 4 of those months had been in shrouded by grief, I was shocked at how much progress had been made unknowingly. I’ll give you a lot more detail about that, but I wanted to share a James Clear quote with you.

James Clear is the author of the book Atomic Habits. He said, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Your goal is your desired outcome. Your system is the collection of daily habits that will get you there.” I am so so thankful for all the systems I put in place over the last 3 years. I believe that these are the things that got me through this season. I had a system for cleaning - so even though I let some things go as I prioritized rest, it never got too bad because when I had space and desire, the system was there to support me so I didn’t have to spend mental RAM coming up with a list of tasks. I was able to do without thinking too hard. I had a system for several activities related to work. So I was able to keep going, giving everything that I had in each present moment with my clients. I had systems in place to continually declutter my mind, and this helped me to grieve with more clarity of what exactly I was grieving. And I think that helped me move through it. I had systems in place for my tech use based on my values, so even when I did spend time numbing out by scrolling on Instagram, it was a conscious choice. Even in the moment, I could see it for the coping mechanism it was and, over time, let the behaviours go in favour of restful activities that really aligned with my values. And I had so many systems in my physical space that I created to support me in the things that matter most to me at the more of myself. So, in this season, my home supported me. It made it easier to do the things that I truly want to do.

Looking back, I am just so incredibly thankful that the me of 3 years ago took the time to take a step back from the urgent, and do the important non-urgent work of intentionally crafting systems to address the various stuck points in my life - my mind, my physical spaces, and my tech use - and that I took the time to understand and begin to hack my habits and routines. This is what I now get to coach people to do themselves and it is such fulfilling work! But I don’t think I fully appreciated before just how important these systems are, not just for daily life, but also for the seasons when life gets hard. 

And, like I said earlier, these powerful systems which were created by a series of intentional decisions and combined with establishing values-based habits - when these systems met up with deeply personal or individualized or anti-mimetic goals, the force was unstoppable, even in grief. I had promised to give you a bit more detail, so here it is.

One of my first goals was to read 25 books and complete 5 courses by the end of 2023. I forgot to mention this when I was talking about rest, but reading was a really restful activity for me in the past several months. So, without any particular effort I’ve read 15 books so far. Some of those were real gems that I read multiple times. I have completed 2 courses only, but I’m really happy with that. It was information I really wanted to learn, and I wouldn’t be particularly bothered if by the end of the year, I only took 3 courses, as long as I continued learning and growing in the areas that I need outside help for.

Another big goal was to help my girls establish healthy habits. Back in April, I was mulling over how to help them do important things they don’t naturally want to do. One way is to make the activity more fun, but sometimes it’s hard to get excited about starting. So I created what I call the Ping Pong Priorities system for them. I’m really proud of this. I wanted to make their habits visual so they could easily see when they do something and when they don’t. I wanted to make it bright and colourful and for it to feel like something from a carnival. So I bought 100 ping pongs of various colours. We chose a handful daily habits for them to install - their morning routine, practicing violin, school (before the summer, of course), and an evening tidy task - and wrote them all on Ping Pongs, one task written in permanent marker on each ping pong. Then, each of their weekly routine activities got a ping pong - like going to violin lessons or karate. Brad and I each brainstormed a few habits we wanted to commit to with the family, and we wrote them down on our own ping pongs, all of these were organized by colour. We have the perfect place in our house to keep this Ping Pong system, which is part of the reason I designed it this way. I bought a giant transparent bowl that could fit all the ping pongs, 4 larger bins that could fit one person’s worth of ping pongs (which I called the “weekly” bins) and then I bought a few long, thin containers from the dollar store to be our “daily bins.” Basically, at the end of a week, the ping pongs are all gathered in the large bowl. I take them out, and put each person’s ping pongs into their weekly bin. These are the things we commit to doing each week. Every night after the kids go to bed, I put the next day’s ping pongs into each person’s “daily” bin. Then when the girls wake up the next day, they can set about to their tasks. Every time they complete something, they get to put the ping pong into the large bowl. By the end of the week, if everyone has done what they committed to doing and all the ping pongs are gathered into the large bowl, the girls get to choose something fun to do. One week it was to go to a Ninja Warriors play gym. Another week it was to go out for ice cream. Another week they wanted some cash to save up for a Nintendo Switch. This has been a really fun way for us to establish routines in a way that feels fun, collaborative, and intentional.

Another goal I had was to establish a non-negotiable morning routine of meditation, movement, journaling and basic make-up. I’m really happy to say that it kind of fell into place. I really wanted this to be the rhythm that started my days, and establishing this routine was a big part, I think, of moving through grief. Literally moving through it, and also doing the inner work of dancing with it in meditation and journalling. I can feel some ways that I want to continue to improve the routine throughout the rest of the year, but it feels incredible to have this firmly established now.

Another goal that has begun just naturally falling into place is posting daily in IG. In the moments when I was numbing out scrolling on IG, trying to avoid my grief, I gained a lot of clarity on how I want to show up on the platform and why. Weirdly, because I didn’t really spend any time on Instagram, I was only exposed to certain kinds of content. As I spent more time on the platform, the algorithm figured out what kinds of posts I was actually drawn to, and that has informed the kind of content that I feel really at home making. So, I think it’s too early to say that this is an established habit, or that it is truly 100% daily, but for the first time, it doesn’t feel like a battle.

I know I haven’t covered all the annual goals I shared with you before, but I’ll share more as the weeks go on.

What I really learned from this season of grief is that drawing back and taking time to rest is absolutely essential. Life happens. It gets really hard sometimes. And learning the skill of self-compassion (and I really truly do think it is a skill that anyone can learn); learning the skill of self-compassion is so important. Everything we do makes sense. It might not be helpful or healthy, but it makes sense. And when you can see that for yourself and hold that space of compassion and curiosity, you can begin to have that same grace for other people, too.

I also learned how important it is to create good systems in the good times. If you have powerful, unique systems that are hand-crafted to support you in the life you want to create by leaning on your values and desires and joys, they will be so resilient. And even though their power shows up in the good times, it really shows up in the hard times. Remember, we don’t rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems. So create strong systems in seasons where you have energy and optimism. Before things get difficult. As I am coming out of my cocoon of the last few months, I am feeling energized again to create even stronger systems. Because I know that this is not the last time that grief will swell and create a flood of chaos. And I want to be able to move through that next time a little better than I did this time.

I also learned that when goals are clear and really come from a place of true desire, not imitating something you “should” want, or you want to want, or that you see other people wanting, it has a way of taking care of itself. Maybe achieving goals is actually a lot easier than we make it out to be. Maybe it’s about choosing the right goals so that the path toward them is both inevitable and effortless.

I hope that this episode was helpful for you. If you are also in a season of grief right now, I hope you feel released to rest and just allow yourself to need what you need unapologetically. If you are in a season of ease right now, I hope you take some time to consider the habits, routines, and spaces that make up your life. The more aligned these are with who you really are and who you want to be and how you want to show up in the world and contribute, the more resilient it will be when grief comes. As always, if you want help with this stuff, you can do two things. The first and best way to get support is to reach out for coaching. I believe intensely in the power of 1:1 coaching. Even when I was learning to play violin, I was in 1:1 coaching since I was 5 years old. It’s the only way to learn a really difficult skill. The only time I didn’t have some kind of coach was the decade right after university, and that honestly was a bit of a bleak time, creatively speaking. 1:1 coaching just works. I have just a few spots available each month for coaching, so if you’re interested in joining the next time a spot opens up, join the waiting list at briellegoheen.com/coaching. It is my great joy and privilege to do this work and help people work through all the stuff that comes up on any journey of transformation. I’d love to teach you the steps of how to do this in a way that feels sustainable for the life you have now and the life you want to cultivate for the future.

If you’re not ready for a step like that, but you want to stay inspired throughout the week, then follow me on Instagram. I’m posting there more regularly now, like I said earlier, with lots of tips and hacks, questions to help kickstart your process, and inspiration to keep going as you craft a creative life you love living.

Thanks for spending some time with me today. If this sparked any thoughts in you, send me a DM on Instagram. I always love to hear from you. And, as always, go into this week remembering - The worlds we imagine are the worlds we build. So imagine the most beautiful one you can think of and get to work.