When the weight of the world feels like it's on our shoulders, happiness can seem like a distant dream. That's why Samantha Powell and I open our hearts to you, sharing our personal struggles with stress and the pursuit of joy amidst life's tumultuous waves. We don't just talk about the dark times; we shine a light on how to navigate through them, armed with problem-focused coping strategies and the often-overlooked support systems like Employee Assistance Programs. Our conversation is a beacon for anyone feeling adrift in the storm of life, guiding you toward a place where thriving is possible, even when adversity strikes.
Amidst the ebb and flow of emotions, we also uncover the silver lining of post-traumatic growth, with valuable insights from Brené Brown illuminating the journey. My own path through the anguish of losing a child becomes a map for others, charting a course from surviving to thriving. This episode is a testament to the human spirit's resilience, an invitation to rise above our circumstances and set our sights on higher goals that do more than just honor lost loved ones—they transform us. Join us for an episode that doesn't just speak to the heart—it speaks to the soul, encouraging growth, resilience, and a happiness that endures.
Connect with us on our LinkedIn page School of Thoughts . We also value your reviews, subscribing, and sharing our podcast "What's On Your Bookshelf?" on Apple and Spotify.
When the weight of the world feels like it's on our shoulders, happiness can seem like a distant dream. That's why Samantha Powell and I open our hearts to you, sharing our personal struggles with stress and the pursuit of joy amidst life's tumultuous waves. We don't just talk about the dark times; we shine a light on how to navigate through them, armed with problem-focused coping strategies and the often-overlooked support systems like Employee Assistance Programs. Our conversation is a beacon for anyone feeling adrift in the storm of life, guiding you toward a place where thriving is possible, even when adversity strikes.
Amidst the ebb and flow of emotions, we also uncover the silver lining of post-traumatic growth, with valuable insights from Brené Brown illuminating the journey. My own path through the anguish of losing a child becomes a map for others, charting a course from surviving to thriving. This episode is a testament to the human spirit's resilience, an invitation to rise above our circumstances and set our sights on higher goals that do more than just honor lost loved ones—they transform us. Join us for an episode that doesn't just speak to the heart—it speaks to the soul, encouraging growth, resilience, and a happiness that endures.
Connect with us on our LinkedIn page School of Thoughts . We also value your reviews, subscribing, and sharing our podcast "What's On Your Bookshelf?" on Apple and Spotify.
Welcome to what's On your Bookshelf with your hosts, denise Rousseau and Samantha Powell. Hi everyone, welcome back. It's another episode of what's On your Bookshelf. This is a Life in Leadership podcast where we are living out loud the pages of the books that are on our shelves. We've actually taken this book off of our shelf and we've been walking through it together. This is the book the how of Happiness, and we are about midway almost halfway, I guess through this book at this time. My name is Denise Rousseau. I'm here with my co-host, sam Powell. We've been pursuing topics on how to elevate our happiness, and today's going to be a deep one, friends, because this is a chapter that we almost questioned about. How could this chapter possibly be in this book? Because it's the antithesis of happiness. It's about managing stress, hardship, trauma and developing strategies for coping around that. So, sam, I know this might be a little bit of a tougher chapter for us, but I'm sure glad to be walking through it today with you.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, me too, and this is what I think like as we start out, we need to caveat with if you are really struggling with something, you need to go get professional help. I've been there. I've had my share of therapists in dealing with trauma and things like that. So it is important that if you are really working through trauma, hardships, things that are really pulling you into the negative, into depression, go get professional help. There's a lot of good avenues nowadays to make that happen and to get the help that you need. So, while we will be talking about this, this is in the context of activities that make you happier. If you are really dealing with something, go get the help that you need.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely, and if you have a job and you have health insurance and you've never taken advantage of your EAP, which is Employee Assistance Program, I would highly encourage you to look into it, because there's some great things that plan can offer to you. Not only can you get perhaps a couple of sessions complementary with a therapist, you can also get access to legal advice. You can get access to information that will help you find even after school programs for your kids. If you have younger kids, you can get access to just resources, and so I actually had always just sort of passed by the EAP, never thinking I would need it for any reason. And then there's been a couple times in my life where I think to myself man, I really wish that my insurance offered such and such. And then I think to myself oh, it does. It's through the EAP and it's very confidential, it is very private. In fact, not even your own jobs, hr department, whatever, even know that you're accessing these resources. It's a benefit provided to you. So if it's something that you need, please do as Sam suggested to go get the assistance you need.
Speaker 1:
I'll kick us off with a quote from this chapter that really inspired me to have a positive mindset on this chapter. And then, sam, I know that you've got quite a few thoughts that we can learn from you today. The quote says that we deem those happy who, from the experience of life, have learned to bear its ills without being overcome by them. That struck me just from thinking through my own personal experiences, because I think I step outside of some of my more traumatic or stressful situations and come through that with less emotion than some people do. In fact, I think if we look at the disc scale, if I'm not mistaken, more than 80% of all people live more on the emotional side of life. I just so happen to live more on the other side, so this chapter may very well be a really important chapter for you listening.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And the very first line of this chapter is no life, if we live long enough, is without stress, adversity or crisis. So when we go through things that are traumatic, when we go through hardships, when we go through setbacks, when we go through losses, that's part of life, that there is no way to go through life without experiencing those things. Do some people experience more than others? Yes, life is not fair. That is just a fact. Situations are not fair, but they come at us.
Speaker 2:
This is again. These are the things that you can do to increase your happiness level. This is really about the strategies on learning how to cope, not if bad things happen, but when bad things happen, because they will Part of. You've got to put this in the context of what are we doing here with this book and what are we exploring. It's what activities can increase your happiness level and learning how to cope and getting good strategies, good skills. These are skills in place to learn how to cope with hardship. We'll make you happier because when those things pop up, you will be able to get to thriving. You're not going to be stuck in surviving. You're not going to be stuck in that. I've just got to get through the day period forever. There will be a period where maybe you are in that, but you'll be able to get back to a life that is happy, that is meaningful to you, if you learn how to respond to these hardships.
Speaker 1:
I think what's important is to think about that life is full of hills and valleys. I think it's John Maxwell that says that everything that's worth while in life is uphill, meaning you know there has to be a climb to get higher than where you are today. Now, sometimes you have situations that bring you a little bit down the hill, but then you can go back up the hill again. A couple of the things that the author talks about in this book that are strategies. There's varieties of coping. I just mentioned, for example, that I'm a less emotional person and more practical person.
Speaker 1:
The very first thing she talks about in the book is that you could have problem-focused coping. As the name implies, this is about how do you solve your problem. It's very practical. There's some examples in the book that talk about how do you practically work through different problems. You can concentrate doing something else. You can just focus on taking one step at a time and keeping your eyes forward. You can come up with strategies. You can make action plans. You can put aside other things. You can try to get advice from someone. It takes the emotion out of it. The second one, sam talked about emotion-focused coping. I know you've shared quite a few times with me some stories around, some things that have happened in your life where there were very high emotions, of course, with what you've had to endure. I'm curious if you could teach us a little bit about either the combination of or where you focus in on either on the problem-focused or emotion-focused coping.
Speaker 2:
Emotion-focused coping comes very naturally to me. I'm a problem-solver, I'm analytical. It's like, okay, I'm going to break down this hardship or this setback into what can I do about it, what action can I take to get to the other side. That's a very natural space for me. Emotion-focused coping is not natural for me, but it is something I have worked very, very hard on to build the skills with. I'm still learning and still growing and absolutely far from mastering this area, but it became necessary for me as I lost my son and walked through that grief journey, because there is no problem to be fixed. You cannot fix the death of someone that you love. It's not that it categorically does not fall in the direction of what I could handle from a coping perspective. I had to learn the other side of this, which was the emotion-focused coping, really understanding how do I get myself out of a spiral of whatever negative emotion I'm really really in or whatever state that is, and how do I step out of that. How do I move into a space that's going to be neutral or positive or something like that.
Speaker 2:
I think that the thing that emotions are hard a lot of us are emotional people, but I hear us talk about this all the time. It was in a women's networking group not too long ago. It was a women's leadership roundtable thing. We were talking about emotions as if they were something right. Women are quote-unquote emotional, so it comes up in women's circles and talking about it. It's this great superpower that we have that we're able to be emotionally intelligent and use our emotions and things like that. We also so often look at them as a problem to be dealt with.
Speaker 2:
I think that when you think about emotion-focused coping, you've got to change that perspective. Our emotions are not a problem at all. They are our guideposts. Right, like Bernay Brown does a ton of work in this space around shame and guilt and you know things like that. But she's got that was one of the things I learned from her years ago of just that.
Speaker 2:
You know, our emotions are those little flags that pop up that's like, hey, you should pay attention to this situation. Right, we've got a threat. We've got something. We've got something good. Right, when we think about our lessons and atomic habits, right, we are. Either we are only ever doing two things moving towards pleasure or from pain and our emotions are the things that are telling us which direction is what, and so when you reframe what emotions are and what emotional coping really is, it's not about dealing with the problem of emotions Like are these pesky emotions must get out of my way and I must learn how to squash them and get in total like locked control. It's not what it is. It's about writing it out. It's about asking yourself and turning introspective on what is the, what's the flag that's being thrown right? What danger is coming my way or what good thing is coming my way that I need to tune into right? Our brains process stuff much faster than we're able to consciously think about it.
Speaker 1:
You were saying something a minute ago, Sam, about how, in your situation with losing your son, that that wasn't a situation that could be solved, but something about the book shares about post traumatic growth. So I'm curious for you what that means. Like, can you get post past the trauma and be able to grow from it? Like, how, how do you grow from from that? I think, when I think about that. I'll share one story because I want to hear your take on it personally.
Speaker 1:
I recently was watching a film that I had a great opportunity to be an investor in, and the film is called the Shift, and this film is like a modern day version of the story of Job from the Bible and but it's like a modern twist, it's like sci fi, it's got, it's really awesome feature film in the movie theaters right now, and so it actually features a bunch of people that you might be familiar with. There's some Hallmark Channel stars in the movie, but also you said you'd like that, Sam but there is Sean Aston. So if you're if you're young, you'll know him from Stranger Things and if you're older, like me, you'll remember from Rudy or the Goonies. He's the main, the main star in the show and, in any case, in this particular movie there is something traumatic that happens that the main character has to grow through, and in the in the real life story of Job, terrible things happen to that man.
Speaker 1:
I would recommend that's definitely a book that's probably been on your shelf all of your shelves that you've likely either never read, don't remember reading or only remember part of it. And if if you take that book off the shelf and read it again in here and read through what a horrible circumstance that man had to go through. He lost his entire family, everything he owned, and was to the point of despair and dying and sick and unhealthy. And he had to come through that and had significant post-traumatic growth which ended up resulting in his book being included in the Bible. And so this movie, though the shift, walks through a modern day interpretation of walking through. How can you possibly have something so bad happen that you could ever find something good, especially when the bad thing that happened can never come back to you whole again?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah, job's an interesting, it's an interesting story to me. But, yeah, I, I think that you're right. It's like you said about post-traumatic growth and she talks about right people who Kind of go through these trans. You know, you go through these experiences and come out really viewing them as transformative. Right, they say things like they've got Like renewed belief in their abilities and that you know their ability to prevail. They have improved relationships. They, you know, feel more comfortable with like intimacy and really connecting with people in those darker, harder spaces and they develop deeper, more sophisticated Like philosophies on on life too. And like.
Speaker 2:
I read this list and I was like this is check, check, check. Like this is how I feel post, post, you know, three and a half years out from losing my, losing my son. And there's an illustration in this book. It's a Talks about people who who experienced this transformation. I said to you, as we were prepping for this, I was like this it's on page 159 for those who have the book this is a picture I could never put into words until I saw this. I was like this this is the thing that I could not Explain to people. And so I had this moment Post losing my son.
Speaker 2:
Well, I had a couple of little moments post losing my son where I talked to people who've also experienced loss. Or I joined some Facebook groups of Other, like grieving parents or, you know, people who've lost their sons, like a bunch of different groups, just because, like, I Needed to know what the other side looked like. Right, like I needed to know what ten years out was like. I wanted to understand how do people like my I, like I was only, you know, in my mid 30s when I lost my son like have a lot of life to live? Like what, what could I expect? What does that look like? And so I joined a lot of these groups. I found a lot of these spaces and some of these people.
Speaker 2:
It was ten years later and they were still in it. They were in the darkness in the space and I was like hi, can't I, that is not what I want for my life. That cannot be the answer. And so, in this graph that we're talking about, they talk about, like your levels of Functioning, like overtime is essentially it, like that you know the axis is our, you know levels of functioning going up and time going out, and so it talks like this event happens, this challenge happens and you all drop everybody drops down into survival mode. Right, like I can get out of bed in the morning. I'm dressing myself. You know I'm hitting the bare minimum requirements for survival, right. And when you experience something really traumatic, when you experience something, those things that cannot be fixed, really or sometimes they can, but they don't feel like in that moment that you hit survival mode.
Speaker 2:
And then over time some people just stay in survival mode. Right, there's the category, and those were the people I was seeing and just had this visceral like I don't want to be, that like, right, it's this rejection of that stasis and I just don't want to sit there. And then the second thing here is, like you know, basic survival. And then some people get back to recovery, where they come back up to their baseline. Right, they get back to a state where, like, they're functioning, kind of like they were, right, that grief is there, they carry that, that trauma is there, they carry that, but they're, you know, recovered, essentially from a functioning perspective. Right, these are levels of functioning. But then there are other people and these are the people who, just describing that bullet, that bullet checkpoint list, are the people who get to thriving. They're the ones that take this experience and do something with it.
Speaker 2:
And it was after sitting with somebody one time and they were explaining to me. They were like, oh, you know, I feel you and it's like they were, I don't know, maybe like a decade out of their longer, of their loss, and they were right back in it, like, and it wasn't even hard for them to fall back into the absolute survival mode. And I was like I, I understand, right that this journey is going to be up and down always, right, there are moments where I get smacked in the face with grief, and you know those things happen, but overall this experience cannot like to me. I was like I can't waste this experience, right, like it happened, I went through it, I learned so much. I can't like, I just can't do it. And so it went in like I really did go through this of like how do I get beyond recovery? Right, because I am forever changed, I'm forever different. There is no fixing, there is only incorporating this experience and this grief and this space and so that in doing that and doing that purposefully and learning how to you know, emotionally, emotionally focused coping and things like that, it is possible to get to thriving. And we see that in the research that she's got. And I saw like I was like, I thought I saw this challenge and I was like, oh my gosh, here it is in black and white. Finally, the thing that like puts this into words for me, because I didn't have the words for this.
Speaker 2:
And you know, she really finishes up this part of this chapter saying that the higher you aim in terms of how you cope with trauma, the more you will achieve. And that was that, was that decision point for me that I wasn't going to eat, I was absolutely not going to aim for survival, but I didn't even want to aim for recovery. I wanted to, you know, aim for something bigger, something more meaningful, and that's the path that I found myself on right. That's the path that I could speak to. I could talk to you all day long about all the lessons that I learned and how I'm a very different person, because I think my husband would say the same thing For sure. Like right, we went on this journey of we want to get to thriving. We don't. We're going to aim much higher than just getting through the day, than just recovering back to the baseline, because back to the baseline doesn't even feel right, right Like. It feels like it's dishonoring the experience, it's dishonoring our son. We've got to get back to something more than that.
Speaker 1:
If you're someone that can live through these lessons to get to the point of thriving. That's the essence of what this book is saying. I can tell you so many examples of people, and I know we're almost out of time for today, so I'll just leave it by saying that there are people that I know in my life that have said I'm I'll never say I'm glad that thing happened, but I'm a better person for it having happened. I'm much more self-aware, I love people more, I invest my time much more intentionally. Now I have a bigger awareness of the world around me and the goodness of God, despite the circumstance, and so I hope for you that's listening. If this chapter is something that you're struggling with, as Sam suggested, to please find a way to get help. There are suggestions in the book even around how to get with social circles, how to use creative writing as an outlet, and some other tips as well.
Speaker 1:
This is a tough chapter, and next week is a tough one as well. So next week we're going to be talking about learning how to forgive, and sometimes we have to forgive when the person on the other end isn't even asking for the forgiveness. So I imagine next week is going to be another toughy. So buckle in, friends. Thanks for sharing your time with us today. I know this was a heavy topic and, sam, thank you so much for being transparent and sharing such a personal experience that you've endured on your way to going from surviving to thriving, and it's been a joy as well always to be here with you. And even though this is a book about happiness and this is a chapter that makes it really hard sometimes to find that happiness that the happiness is somewhere.
Speaker 2:
It's just needing to be realized- yeah, absolutely, and I think that what this chapter really teaches us is that it's in our response that really gets us to the other side of it. Right, things do happen, like we started out saying here, like it is not a matter of if something bad happens or if a setback comes along. It's when those things come along and it is right her research backs up that it is in our response that can bring us back to recovery. It can bring us to thriving on the other side of some of the worst experiences in our life. It is what you do with the experiences that really, really matters and some of the things that she suggested here, like you said, the writing and thought, disputation and talking with other people and thinking like you've got to find the things that work for you, that help you cope in that space.
Speaker 2:
But there are lots of options. There are lots of things that you can do in what you do and in how high you aim. Right, and you talk about this, denise, all the time right, your beliefs and your thoughts turn into your actions, turn into what you do and those ultimately affect your happiness and affect the type of life that you live. And so it is possible, right. She's telling us it is possible. So I hope that people leave this chapter and leave this episode with hope, more than anything else, that there is thriving on the other side of bad things happening, of really traumatic things happening. If you respond correctly and that's what John Maxwell calls the if factor in his sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, which is one of my favorite books on my shelf, because that's it is about. This can be good if you respond correctly.
Speaker 1:
Absolutely, sam. Thanks for your time today. Listeners, thanks for your time, scott. Thank you for being our great producer behind the scenes. Friends, please share these episodes. If you're not already subscribing, we invite you to do that as well, and if there are things that you'd like to share with us that you're learning, we always love to hear that as well. Scott has ways for you to contact us in the show notes. This has been a wonderful time of sharing and learning and growing together. Thanks for joining us on this episode of what's On your Bookshelf.