Hello and welcome to Dear grief guide.
A podcast where each week I answer one anonymous letter from a listener feeling lost, stuck,
heartbroken or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.
My name is Shelby Fercitya.
I'm a grief coach and author and I'm here to help you create a life you love from the
life lost forced you to live.
Let's get to today's letter.
Dear grief guide.
Can grief make you lose the will to work?
My father-in-law passed away earlier this year and now my aunt who basically raised me
is about to pass from complications related to COVID which is currently surging in our
state.
These losses have shifted my focus entirely to spending time with family and friends.
Everything else feels meaningless.
I find myself staring at my computer for hours unable to concentrate or care about my responsibilities.
Before experiencing loss I was driven and ambitious, taking pride in my job and trying to climb
the ladder at the small data entry and analytics firm where I work.
Now everything feels pointless.
I can't summon the energy or the interest to complete even the simplest tasks.
My performance has plummeted and I worry about how long I can maintain my professional
standards before it starts affecting my job security.
I'm writing to you because I don't know how to start caring about work again.
How do I find motivation to do my job when everything except my relationships with people
I love feel stupid and empty?
How can I reclaim a sense of purpose and drive when my grief has drained all my energy
and enthusiasm for life, especially at work?
Any recommendations or strategies to help me regain my professional footing would be
greatly appreciated.
Signed, checked out corporate stiff.
Hi there, checked out.
I hear you.
I see you.
There are so many people I work with.
Hmm, work with who are like, how are a grief and work supposed to coexist and plot twist?
They are not.
I'm not sure where you're writing in from but especially for westernized, Eurocentric,
colonized societies where capitalism reigns supreme.
The structure and system of capitalism is not designed to coexist with grief.
Because capitalism tells you that what matters is money and gain and progress.
Growth is up into the right and everything else is failure.
And grief reminds you that what matters most is love and quality time and the relationships
you build with other people.
So too inherently by design, by nature are not compatible.
In terms of practical questions, I need you to answer, checked out.
Do you need to be working right now?
This is a question that comes with an enormous amount of privilege.
It is a luxury to not have to work in a capitalistic society.
Can you take time off?
Can you take time away?
Can you take a mental health break?
If you're in the United States, can you take something called FMLA, Family Marriage and Leave
Act?
You can look into this, especially if you work for some place that's pretty corporate.
Do you have the privilege and the luxury of stepping away from work even for a season,
even for a week or two, especially if you can take more than a month?
The other thing I have to say, if you cannot step away from your job at the moment, if you
can't afford to, if you're not in a place to, if it's a busy season right now, if you must
work.
What is the bare minimum of your role?
Please go back and look at your employment contract.
If you have one and dear God, I hope you have one.
What is the bare minimum of what you're required to do right now?
This is where it's enormously helpful.
And I do this with so many of my grieving clients, not just for work, but for day to day
and life after loss.
Like a half to list versus a could do list.
I have to do this by the end of the day in order to meet a deadline in order to be considered
productive by my boss and coworkers in order to satisfy a client need in order to complete
a project that I started.
That is the half to list.
The could do list is everything else.
This is the sprinkles.
This is the bonuses.
These are the optional extra miles you could be putting in.
The extra tasks, the extra hours, the extra networking opportunities that you do not need
in order to maintain the role you are in right now.
You say that your performance is plummeting.
How do you get yourself back to a baseline?
What does baseline maintenance of the position that you're holding in right now?
What does that look like?
I want to invite you to check down to consider job hopping when you have more energy to devote
to searching for a job because so many grieving people tell me especially those that continue
to be in the workforce after loss because many of the people I work with are still young.
And in this year of our Lord 2024, we still have to work in order to exist.
So many people in the aftermath of loss end up finding jobs with more meaning, with more
purpose, with more human connection than jobs they previously held prior to a devastating
loss.
My favorite example is somebody who was in my course life after loss academy.
And when she enrolled, she was grieving the death of her father and her mother was dying
from dementia in a nursing home during COVID.
So I imagine she would resonate very greatly with your story of caring for your aunt.
She approached management several times about what she needed in order to be able to take
care of her mother and to also grieve her father who was a very recent loss in her life.
But both parent figures, the foundations of her existence were either dead or dying.
Her foundations were crumbling underneath her and she needed more support than she was
getting from work.
And what they essentially told her was that her grief was not welcome in the workplace
and she needed to maintain the same level of productivity after that she had in the
before.
And this, I got to tell you, was exhausting.
It was not sustainable and it was not leading her to a life ultimately that she wanted to
build or to continue living after loss.
So what we worked on together and this happens in the established module of life after loss
academy.
This is the fourth out of five steps that I teach in the grief method, G-R-I-E-F, established
module.
That's where we talk about doing grief with others because grief does not happen in
a vacuum and those others include co-workers, bosses, managers and even people who are under
you.
If you have a hierarchical workplace, how do you orient to doing grief in the space?
Is this grief welcoming?
How do you make it more grief welcoming?
If it's not, how do you make an exit?
And one of Julia's requirements for finding a new job, she's like, I want to work with people
who know what it means to grieve and I want to do something that feels calming to my
nervous system because the place where she currently was was not.
And she sent me an email more than six months after she'd taken life after loss academy and
she said, Shelby, you're not going to believe it.
I have switched jobs.
I have found a workplace I love.
It's much more intimate.
It's just me and two other women.
But these two other women are widows.
So they know what it means to grieve and we, the three of us, together.
We're not in corporate.
We're not climbing ladders.
We're not trying to get a startup off the ground.
We are selling tea.
And one of her grounding rituals that we worked on together in the ground module of life
after loss academy, which is the first one that I teach in creating a safe place for
herself and her grief and her life.
One of the rituals she chose for herself was drinking tea.
And so to go from a place where she was forced to be productive, where her grief was not
welcome, where she was not given any human allowances for her loss in her pain.
To go from that to a place where her grief was not only welcome but embraced and to do
an activity that grounded her nervous system and connected her with her community and the
people around her.
It was a total life overhaul transformation.
That is what she learned and took away from life after loss academy.
And it is still impacting her positively to this day.
I heard from her less than a month ago.
So if a job switch, even to a role, even to a path that you may have never previously considered
is possible for you, I encourage you to look in that direction, especially if you can brainstorm
what your other gifts or what your other interests might be in the company of others who already
get your grief.
And so did friends, trusted family members, people in your life who see you for you grief included.
The last thing I want to offer you here is if you must stay where you are, if you cannot
leave.
If this is your reality right now in this season for the time being, applying those prepositional
phrases to it, it might be helpful when you're sitting at your desk to have some sort
of picture.
If you're allowed to keep personal items at work, some sort of post it note, some sort
of pop-up message on your calendar at the same time every day that offers you your why.
Why are you still in this job?
Why do you need to make the money you're making?
Why are you working with these people doing this role?
Day in and day out.
Do you do this for the barbecue with your family?
Do you do this for the game nights?
Do you do this for the family trips that moments where you do get to get away?
Do you do this so that you can take time off for funerals and memorials?
Do you do this so you can leave a legacy for family members or children?
Oftentimes leaning into the what in the hell am I doing here?
The why of it?
Can help the actual tasks feel maybe not more bearable, maybe not easier, but more purposeful.
And infusing your life with meaning at a time when everything feels meaningless is one
of the greatest ways to encourage yourself to keep going at a time when that can feel really,
really hard.
I totally hear where you are right now.
I am so sorry.
Just blanket statement to everyone listening right now that we are required to work in a
world where we inherently grieve and experience loss and we have no choice in the matter.
It truly breaks my heart is one of the great things that breaks my heart about being a human
on the planet right now.
And I hope someday that will not be true.
I hope that we make robots and AI smart enough not to write screenplays for us because we
have so many brilliant minds that do that but who actually do the work that needs doing
so that we can have more time with the people who matter to us and doing the things that
matter to our hearts.
I see you corporate stiff.
I'm right there with you and I hope these really practical tips and tools help as you continue
to navigate the workplace with grief.
That's all for this episode of Dear Grave Guide.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
If you're feeling lost, stuck, heartbroken or overwhelmed in the midst of your own grief,
check out my free workshop Grow Through Grief, three ways to stop feeling stuck and start
moving forward.
I'll give you three easy, actionable tools for navigating life after loss and show you
how you can create peace, stability and compassion right there in the middle of grief's confusion
and uncertainty.
You can find the workshop link in the show notes.
If this podcast helped you feel a little less alone in your grief, please subscribe and
leave a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening.
And be sure to share Dear Grave Guide with a friend because you never know what someone
you love is going through.
You can submit your anonymous letter for the show and find additional grief support at
shallbeforcithia.com.
Music for Dear Grave Guide is performed by Eddie Goldstein, editing by Ruth Spence of
Celebio.
Until next time, I see you.
I am so proud of you and the work that you're doing in the world and I love you because even
through grief, we are growing.
Music for Dear Grave Guide is performed by Eddie Goldstein, editing by Eddie Goldstein.