00;00;00;00 - 00;00;29;05
Well, welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voice and the host of Inside Personal Growth. And I have a special guest joining me from Aspen, Colorado. Is that right where you are today? Steamboat Springs. But Steamboat Springs, Colorado, the cowboy like younger sister city to okay. And it's Meredith Wilson. Perfect. And Meredith is the wife of a gentleman that I've done some work with.

00;00;29;05 - 00;00;53;29

And she is a powerhouse in her own right. And I want to keep focused on that. Because Meredith has a business, called Rei. Let me make sure we've got Raven Yard Group, and that's Raven Wired group. That's one place you can find her. The other place you can find her is just her own personal website.

00;00;54;02 - 00;01;19;11

Meredith Palmer, that PR ft.com up there, you can find out more about her. She's a chaplain. She's an MBA. She's really an interesting lady. She has a Ted talk, that you can find. All you gotta do is type in and YouTube. Meredith Wilson carved. It's going to pop up. And as she reminded me, it isn't Ted X individual.

00;01;19;11 - 00;01;44;12

This is the real direct. Okay. For those of you out there, it takes a little bit more effort to do that. So, Meredith, you know, you got an interesting, background, and the listeners are going to want to know, well, how did a chaplain with an MBA get in as Raven Yard and work with crisis management?

00;01;44;14 - 00;02;14;17

But you said in your bio on your website that after a family, tragedy and her own near-death, she learned that people don't have a very good, job talking about hardship. They have a tough time. So after a catastrophic business failure, she realized that we completely overlook the suffering that's caused, by professional and organizational crisis. And I would assume that I think people want to brush it under the rug.

00;02;14;17 - 00;02;40;04

It's a really tough topic to talk about. And from this was born the mindset about this complex intersection, she calls it of grief and crisis, which both informs and is informed by every aspect of her work. So I think why don't you set the tone for the listeners in the viewers out there that are watching this on YouTube?

00;02;40;07 - 00;03;14;06

About your life experiences that got you kind of to where you are and why you think this intersection is so important for people to really understand more about that. They're just kind of probably missing, or maybe not even just wanting to talk about. So one of the things I observe in hindsight is I never took a class in college and never took a class in graduate school called failure.

00;03;14;08 - 00;03;55;01

I never took a class called suffering. I never took a class called What to Do When Your Entire Life Blows Up. And yet I don't think I'm alone in in that being a component of my entire adult life. But nobody says this is how you're supposed to do it. This is how you're supposed to live through it. So I was in business school, one of the top schools studying finance, marketing and international strategy, competing with some of the brightest minds that I now watch, globally as CEOs and my younger sister died of an accidental overdose.

00;03;55;04 - 00;04;17;21

It was she had had a spinal injury. It was early in the opioid epidemic. And, no one thought the drugs were even dangerous. They were just handing out opioids like candy and thought, this is the greatest thing. And so one day she didn't wake up, and it was a Friday night that I had been on the phone with my mom and she said, oh, I'm going to go stop by and just check on her.

00;04;17;21 - 00;04;45;00

I haven't heard from her. And it was routine for all of us to talk every day. So it was weird that we hadn't heard from her. And I listened to my mom find my sister dead. I listened to her, dropped the phone. I listened to her. Call the ambulance. I listened to them arrive, and I was supposed to interview with McKinsey and Goldman Sachs and BCG and all the big name kind of places that Monday.

00;04;45;00 - 00;05;11;20

And this was a Friday and it derailed my life. It derailed my family. It was grief and trauma and catastrophe in ways that I couldn't contextualize or even make sense of. And that was this coming January, 20 years ago. And it began a journey for me in grief and hardship and loss and suffering and how you move forward.

00;05;11;22 - 00;05;45;18

And it's important to point now that amount of time has passed, because as we talk later about tools and frameworks and all the ways that you can survive crisis, this is 20 years of trying to figure that out. It's not been, I don't know, years. It's been 20 years and 20 years. And so when we ask you this January night, because you're a chaplain and you have counseled so many people, who are making, to the families, and the people are going to make a transition.

00;05;45;20 - 00;06;25;11

Do you think that there's something about dancing with death early that shapes how we approach a crisis later in life? Because, you know, this whole a talk about near-death experiences that people have and then come back for a lot of people, it does change them for a lot of people, it doesn't. But I think from a spiritual element, you had an awakening very early that was so impactful emotionally that you literally chose a different path.

00;06;25;13 - 00;06;49;07

Right. I've always been wired for spirituality and I don't know if that's an inherited thing, a karma thing. Accident of birth. I nearly died when I was born, so I was four hours old and the doctors told my 23 year old parents that I wouldn't live through the day. And I spent the first month of my life in the in the neck.

00;06;49;07 - 00;07;09;17

You and my parents always tell the story that they baptized me in the hospital because they thought I was going to die, and then they baptized me again, just for the for the party and for my grandmother. I believe you were baptized twice. You say was. I didn't know that. Maybe. But there was something about like a spiritual intensity.

00;07;09;17 - 00;07;32;18

Even from the moment I was born, my family was very religious. And, as a little girl, I remember sneaking up to the chapel while we were working on a soup kitchen, that we ran every Saturday. And, I would pretend to get sermons and pretend that I was, you know, somehow in the clergy. Fast forward a number of years after my sister died.

00;07;32;18 - 00;08;02;16

I was in childbirth and a doctor cut one of my arteries. And, I bled out. I nearly died, I had my own kind of near-death experience. And so it's so interesting to look at birth and death for me. Hold this potency and hold this kind of, alchemy of who could I become? Will I survive standing in the liminal, all of those things, and that there's been this spiritual intensity for me.

00;08;02;16 - 00;08;24;08

And so it was actually my own near-death. Not too long after that, a Buddhist teacher of mine said, you should try volunteering for hospice. You're obsessed with death and dying. Maybe you want to go and stand in that space and see what it feels like more frequently. Like the there's something about your life path that's calling you to this life and death arc.

00;08;24;11 - 00;08;45;22

Oh, explore it. And so I did. I became a volunteer and I loved it. And, I was like, well, what could I do next? I became a death doula, which is kind of supercharged death and dying. And eventually I went back to a small seminary, got a two year master's degree in spiritual care. Just so that I could be a chaplain for hospice.

00;08;45;22 - 00;09;12;16

And so it's been almost ten years of hospice work, always wanting to peer across the veil and see. And it's never boring. It's never routine. It is a mystery that has consumed my whole life in some ways. Well, it's it's noble work. It's important work in the sense that, you know, usually there isn't a lot of pay for it.

00;09;12;18 - 00;09;44;05

You know, as a chaplain, per se. I know from personal experience, I got involved with, Elizabeth Hospice. It's it's out here in California. I don't know if they're all the way across the United States, but pretty big organization. And like you, I've always had an interest in this. And I can't, tell you exactly why, but I realized many of the people were, they'd.

00;09;44;05 - 00;10;14;06

Wow. They'd want to listen to music. When they were making their transition, I had friends that had cancer that were going to terminal cancer and die. So I started the thing. If you remember the time when we used an iPad minis or, or what they're called Apple Minis, remember nanosecond. Oh yeah. And I said, okay, I'm going to give you this with all your music on it so that you can play it.

00;10;14;09 - 00;10;42;26

And then I want the family when you pass away to play it forward, take the iPad and then let someone put music on for their person that's doing it and just keep moving this little iPad thing forward. What it was a little mini that they put in their ears, right? This goes back a ways, right? I'm kind of dating myself, but it was a really cool program and Elizabeth Hospice embraced it.

00;10;42;28 - 00;11;10;15

And it was just an idea I had around music and people transition running through, listening to country, western or whatever they really liked. Right. So, it was cool and it worked. And I've always been interested. Now you, you also have had tragedy in other ways, not just, you know, having your artery nicked and almost bleeding out.

00;11;10;17 - 00;11;38;17

And they baptized twice, almost dying at birth. You know, the it's that's a lot of being surrounded with almost. Right, almost. But you said you were getting a root canal when you learned. And I know about this when when you learned the FBI had raided your fund's largest investment. And there's something almost absurd about learning life altering new news in a dentist chair.

00;11;38;20 - 00;12;06;14

Just like you learned about your sister's death, you know? So how do you help leaders prepare? This is a shift for my listeners because many people today face crisis in businesses, but they don't think they really manage them really well. Right. One of the things I happened to just see last night was the Carnival Triumph cruise.

00;12;06;16 - 00;12;43;25

There was a huge crisis, right? The whole ship was burning up and no electricity. And it was a nightmare for Carnival Cruises. Right. So my question is, when you go to these businesses and in life and you learned about this FBI raiding your investment fund, what's the best way and advice you could give to someone facing that kind of crisis to learn how to manage it, cope with it, understand it and deal with it, with family, business associates, everybody.

00;12;43;27 - 00;13;10;15

So it's probably useful to give a little bit of context that I work as a chaplain a couple shifts a month and that it's my passion work. But for most of my career, I've been in business and finance, and I had worked inside of hedge funds and private equity. And so was a CIO for a small fund, as you said, it invested in a fraud.

00;13;10;15 - 00;13;39;10

It was an hour fraud. We didn't know about it. But, these things are catastrophic. They're catastrophic for the investors. They're catastrophic for the people who lose money. And it was certainly catastrophic and life altering for me. The the guilt, the shame, the the sense of what should we have done differently to the loss of my entire career like that, that I'm a for, you know, me, I'm a perfectionist.

00;13;39;10 - 00;14;10;16

I want it all to be just right. And and and to have my life, my life's work shatter in front of me was so disorienting and. But it doesn't even make it a little bit more complex when, I'll just say that this was a family situation. This was just like, hey, this is a corporation. No, this is your husband, and you and other friends and other family members.

00;14;10;19 - 00;14;36;28

You you know that I talk about this a lot, and I never talk about that part of it, but I've been there. Look, I, I went through a bankruptcy myself, so I totally understand. And there's so much in the world's shame associated with it and the shame is like, oh, I don't want to do this because it's going to disappoint mom and grandma and dad and whoever else is around me.

00;14;37;00 - 00;15;00;21

But I, I didn't really have any choice of the matter, and I, I was advised by attorneys, hey, you waited way too long. You should have done this way sooner because you ran through all of your resources, right? Like you're like it because you always think it's going to get better. Some things are going to get better, and it didn't.

00;15;00;21 - 00;15;24;26

And in your case, it didn't either. Right? No. Yeah. It it collapsed our fund. As you said it was, it was Beau and a partner who started it. And both my husband and, that brought in a whole different dimension of complexity to it. It was at that point I'd been an established grievers for a long time.

00;15;24;26 - 00;15;49;12

I knew what grief felt like. And so the second I found out it wasn't it didn't take long to say, this feels like grief. This feels like such profound loss and heartbreak and concentric circles of loss, of friends, of community, of I. I had no lens for criminality. And no, I'd never met a criminal that I knew of.

00;15;49;14 - 00;16;15;19

And so to have been, you know, to to have had so much money stolen by the perpetrators of this crime, it was it was unfathomable. And to know that both Beau and I were facing this kind of loss at the same time, it was what I mean, it was what a lot of families face in grief that everybody's in it and everybody's doing it differently, and everybody has a different entry point into it.

00;16;15;19 - 00;16;49;06

In a way of coping or not coping or good days and bad days. And so all of that complexity of grief showed up there and in, in one of the questions that you sent me, you said, well, how did how did you know? Like, what was the moment that you decided that you needed a set of tools or a framework and the complexity of waking up the next day and having two very small children in this and knowing that I couldn't grieve the ways that I had done it before, that I.

00;16;49;13 - 00;17;19;12

I never grieved with high stakes of my family, of my children, and I've never grieved in a way that anybody would. You know, it was messy. I did all the things that people do in grief early in my in my experience, I was in my 30s when my sister died and I, I drank and I partied and I worked and I traveled and I did all the things to make that pain go away that anyone could do before I started any spiritual inquiry or examination of what this thing is.

00;17;19;15 - 00;17;43;16

This time I woke up and I said, I have, I think they were seven and four, and I couldn't do it the way I did before. I couldn't be messy and out of control and drop off the grid for 2 or 3 years. And it was this reckoning that said, how would I do grief if I had to protect my children?

00;17;43;18 - 00;18;12;09

How would I do grief to try and do everything I could to help our investors? But there were people relying on me in this grief to do my very best. And, you know, I felt a sense of deep, responsible with the investors to help the FBI put the guys in prison to help the SEC recover money and those feelings of accountability and responsibility were way different than times I had grieved in the past.

00;18;12;09 - 00;18;43;27

And that was the moment that I said, I can't I can't do it how he did it before. That was how you it sounds to me, is if you took an active role instead of a passive role in it. And and with that being said, I think many people out there listening to the podcast today who were either faced with it or have faced it before, you know, you know, it's this balance between authenticity and responsibility to kind of lead through uncertainty.

00;18;43;29 - 00;19;14;08

Right? And, you know, our whole life is uncertain. And, you know, you've dealt with a spouse who's lived his life on uncertainty, climbing Everest, doing crazy things, and even in your own life, because all of these things that have happened to you have created uncertainty. And I think in our world today, we have so much of it, people are trying to navigate it, and I'm not certain they're doing, or they feel like they're doing the best job.

00;19;14;10 - 00;19;39;25

What would you do to comfort people listening today that are trying to navigate this uncertainty, whether it's at a company level or a personal level? Because, look, you've been through a lot, okay? You've been through death in your family. You've been through financial crises, and yet God has a plan for you. You're still here, you're still counseling, you're still a chaplain, you're still out there and you're helping people.

00;19;39;27 - 00;20;12;19

And you know that your role. Right. So what, you know, speaking to the camera right in front of it, what would you tell the individuals in your heart of hearts how to navigate these emotions? You said so many juicy things. Where to respond. So I, out of the professional crisis, was born a business that is called Raven Yard.

00;20;12;21 - 00;20;54;18

Where we do crisis management for mainly organizations that get themselves into big trouble leaders, fraud, scandal, misconduct, industrial accidents, and. The genesis of that was this desire to have a better way of adapting to crisis, responding to crisis than the ones that I got. Because, you know, and I mean, the root canal chair I walk out and the options available to me are lots of lawyers, therapists and PR firms that said we should, you know, we should spin this.

00;20;54;18 - 00;21;24;23

We should write something. How can we help you? What do you need? And it was this chasm of me saying, I need tools, I need frameworks, I need a mindset, I need, I need actual support for crisis. Not just, you know, platitudes and and nice words. And so from that was born, I call it my laboratory of my life, that I started using my own experiences as a laboratory to say, well, what if I had this tool?

00;21;24;23 - 00;21;42;08

Would that be useful to me? Or what if I could do X or Y? And I was like a scientist testing and writing things down again. I was a pretty established driver at that point, and what I you just said something really important, which is I decided instead of to be passive in my grief and just let it wash over me.

00;21;42;10 - 00;22;04;20

What would it look like if I had agency? What would it look like if I said, maybe I get to choose how I'm going to be inside this experience, even even if it all goes to hell, even if everything keeps falling apart, who who can I be? And that was there's a grief expert named David Kessler, and he talks about the final stage of grief.

00;22;04;20 - 00;22;24;28

You know, the anger, denial, bargaining. We do all those things. The final stage of grief being meaning. And I kept thinking, I don't know how to make meaning of this. I don't understand what's happened, but I'm going to keep looking for it. I'm going to keep looking for what is my responsibility here? What is my agency here? Where does meaning live?

00;22;24;28 - 00;22;49;16

Inside catastrophic loss. It's not an overnight thing, but eventually when you when meaning becomes the guide, when growth becomes the guide, you do actually look at the experience of grief differently. And not to say I didn't have anger, denial, bargaining, you know, all the things I they're always there. But but clicking in to say who could I become?

00;22;49;22 - 00;23;08;27
Unknown
Who? What do I have to give back because of this? What responsibility do I have to stand in the darkness with people who are suffering? You and I and I just want to commend you. You did a wonderful job of working your way through it. But you describe this. I'm going to talk about the human element. Yeah.

00;23;09;01 - 00;23;34;19

And what happens inside of our brain. You call in grief brain. And how trauma, whatever trauma it is, whether it's the financial trauma you went through or the loss of a loved one, it hijacks the decision making capabilities. You said, and I would agree with that. It does it it it almost puts you in a frozen mode psyche.

00;23;34;22 - 00;24;18;00

I don't really know what to do. So there's a biological part going on here too, because there's all kinds of chemical releases that are happening. You know, like in, in your sister's case, even because of the overdoses, wanting to get that oxytocin feeling right. Explain to the listeners what's going on, even biologically and then critically, what they could do to get the hijacked brain back into a decision making ability, making logical good decisions about what they need or should do next.

00;24;18;05 - 00;24;47;14

I mean, people really, you know, people talk about being rational. Well, I wouldn't say that you're not really rational because I've been through this. On the other hand, when you look from the outside in, I always say, hey, look, if a camera was following me today and it if it, tracked my decisions in decision making. There's this gentleman I want to introduce you to, Doctor Jim La, high performance guy.

00;24;47;14 - 00;25;11;12

He's in Colorado, and he wrote a book just recently called Wise Decisions, and he calls it the Yoda Inside of us. Okay. In those ways, Yoda stands for an acronym for something. It's not so important. The point is, we all know who Yoda is. Yeah, but we actually lose our Yoda during these things and we need to keep our Yoda.

00;25;11;19 - 00;25;35;08

How would you tell people to keep the Yoda through this process? So one of the reasons I love your podcast is the focus on spiritual growth and spirituality. I always tell people, if you think you're going to pick up a really intense spiritual practice in the middle of grief, that's going to be quite hard, that the best way to prepare for any form of crisis is to start a practice today.

00;25;35;10 - 00;25;57;10

It not saying I mean, many of us have used grief as a as a catalyst for spiritual inquiry. But to truly prepare for it in any capacity, it's doing that inner work and knowing your own mechanisms of response before it happens, so that maybe you have the clarity of mind to be awakened a little bit in the grief brain.

00;25;57;11 - 00;26;19;22

So here's how everybody knows the kind of fight or flight responses our brains blood with cortisol, all adrenaline when that happens in a prolonged way. So over months and months and months, which is what crisis and grief are, it's not, you know, that immediate flood and then you run and then you're okay. It's I'm running and trying to survive in this new landscape.

00;26;19;24 - 00;26;47;09

So when that happens, it shrinks the prefrontal core or it it moves our thinking from the prefrontal cortex into that kind of amygdala hijack into that like back of the brain, reptilian thinking. It can impact cognition, impacts memory and impacts decision making and impulse control. So all the things that you need the most of in crisis are usually the things that just off switch as soon as it happens.

00;26;47;12 - 00;27;17;18

So so understanding that before we go into crisis understanding, oh, my brain is foggy for a reason. Understanding and might typically a fight I might typically a flight. Do I typically freeze like watching our patterns, understanding them, meditating, having a spiritual inquiry, understanding our trauma responses from our childhood or things that have happened to us all of that work is what lays the groundwork for us to be able to to respond differently when crisis occurs.

00;27;17;25 - 00;27;43;11

And I know that because eventually, after my sister died and my grandmother and my cousin and a number of other family members died in this short period, I eventually decided I should get therapists and coaches and teachers and and and attend weekend seminars and meditate and learn Reiki and do all these things. Enough of that was also the foundation that when the fund blew up, I could say, I've seen this before, I've done this work.

00;27;43;11 - 00;28;06;29

I understand my patterns. When I studied, pastoral care, we use trauma informed care as a way of doing work, especially with the dying. And so part of our training is to study. How do veterans who have had a lot of combat experience respond to trauma, and then what is required of us as the witnesses, as the counselors in those situations?

00;28;06;29 - 00;28;30;05

How do people that have experience violence, pattern after crisis, and what are we supposed to do? So there's huge bodies of of research scientifically, behaviorally about what the brain does. The more we know about that now, not in crisis, the better able when we are in crisis to say, oh, I remember that it's a pattern recognition kind of thing.

00;28;30;08 - 00;28;59;16

So you and you used a I mean, from a standpoint from Raven, you argue, you said practical application was this risk readiness process five steps. Then you said to do the next thing. Right, almost like a mantra. Right. So the question that some people out there might be asking is, well, what's right during a crisis, they can't determine between what's right or wrong.

00;28;59;18 - 00;29;29;03

But I do think it's about doing something. I think it's about getting the brain to reengage age, to not be frozen, to just take some action. So for somebody who is overwhelmed right now by a crisis, how do they identify what the next right thing might actually be is in your case, is it like this little window that opens up and you see something and you're like, okay, that's what I should do.

00;29;29;06 - 00;29;56;09

Or yeah, I know for me it was like you said, oh, I'm going to get together chaplains and counselors and psychologists and all these various people. So and after a while with this can coffee and people talking to you and you're like, oh my God, you know, I've heard this from this person in this room, this person in this room, this person in this room, this person, you're like, what in the hell am I supposed to like you?

00;29;56;09 - 00;30;20;13

You've been more than me. Didn't you say you've done this podcast for 18 years when you first 319. Yeah. You must have a thousand different, you know, voices. Oh, yeah. Voices from lots of places. But what I would say is the guru in the mirror is I'm the guru. And no matter how many people I've spoken to they have great ideas.

00;30;20;13 - 00;30;43;18

But in the end you're responsible for your own actions and the next step. And yet you know when I look in the mirror at me, there are times, as I'm sure it is for you that if somebody put a picture of me, it's right up here. You're just kind of going right on. You're just you're like, I don't even see who I am until I step away with the perspective.

00;30;43;18 - 00;31;10;28

And here's what I've learned. I think if I step back and I keep taking steps back, I can now see clearer because my perspective has changed. But in the middle of a crisis, it's like the picture is shoved up against our nose and it's noisy. Yeah, yeah. And we have to, like, pull the picture back, change and get a new perspective.

00;31;11;01 - 00;31;42;08

And for me, I'm just telling my listeners right now, shifting my perspective and my mindset is what worked me through. And it wasn't because all those other people that were feeding me sound bites, right? I was listening to all those sound bites. But then I was formulating my strategy. Right? I always say that the wisdom lives within all of us, and that the process of a life is the inquiry of what does that mean?

00;31;42;08 - 00;32;03;25

Who am I supposed to be? What does that mean? Who am I supposed to be on this loop? And yeah, who taken all these other inputs around you? But it's the the wisdom is in there in each of us in, in, in all of us. And part of why I love sitting with the dying is, is getting their kernels as they're waiting, you know, to cross over and thinking, what does this mean for me?

00;32;03;25 - 00;32;35;02

What am I supposed to become? How am I supposed to respond that that's the wisdom in all of us, no matter you know how we come to it. But you asked about risk readiness. So the process of the five steps starts with what is the crisis? And actually getting to what is the right next thing has to be, well, what am I defining this crisis as organizationally, what I see from companies or nonprofits that we work with is that they'll jump to, well, what are we supposed to say?

00;32;35;04 - 00;32;57;00

Or what are the lawyers say? And I'll say, well, what's the crisis? We'll say, what do you mean, what's the crisis? And in when you get everyone asking that question, well, it's 100 different things. Cool. The definition matters. How you decide to frame the crisis is going to be how you respond to it. And so that definitional phase is part of the rightness of it.

00;32;57;02 - 00;33;15;02

Then we say, well, what are your trade offs way, play it all the way out. Often you'll see this kind of knee jerk. Well, we've got to do this, you know, we've got to stand up and fight. And I'll say, great. Do you have a legal war chest of 1 to $2 million to do that? And if they'd say yes, I'll say, cool, do it.

00;33;15;02 - 00;33;37;05

And if they say no, then I'll say, awesome, okay, you can fight, but here are your consequences to that, because you can't do that, or you're not equipped to do that and that you're trained off might be that your organization fails because you were so intent on fighting and you didn't actually think it through. So traded off all the way to the end and then and then set priorities.

00;33;37;05 - 00;34;03;15

And this is probably the most important thing as a leader, as a human, as an organization is if you want to know what the next right thing to do is, what's your priority, what matters to you if the next right thing is if our priority is, we're going to win the legal battle. All right. Cool. That's your priority.

00;34;03;15 - 00;34;25;25

Then the next right thing. Get the best lawyer you can afford. Go fight, you know, identify your best legal strategy and go for it. Often that is not our actual priority. Often our priority is. I want to protect someone. I want to manage my reputation. It. I care about the outcome for my employees. I care about the outcome for my investors.

00;34;25;25 - 00;34;53;06

I care about the outcome for my children. When you set the priority about what actually matters to you, the next right thing is much more apparent. And you'd go back to those priorities over and over again. When our fund blew up, one of my priorities was to have integrity, even if no one could see it. And that meant that there were many days I got up and I worked on paperwork, and I worked on insurance, and I tried to work with the regulators.

00;34;53;06 - 00;35;17;00

It was invisible, but that priority told me what to do next. It said, whether you like it or not. So if you're going to get up and try and do something with care and attention, because that at the end of the day will matter to you no matter what the outcome is. So what is it that I think as a chaplain, you see this from a different element, which a lot of people don't.

00;35;17;00 - 00;35;39;17

There are a lot of people that just want to fight because they want to fight. But there's a there's something about self-love and forgiveness. And I'm going to throw in a little quick story here. You know, because I think it's relevant to what you just said. And then I want to go to the spiritual dimension. Right.

00;35;39;19 - 00;36;07;04

That we're going to talk about. So my brother in law is a Kim Kardashian's attorney. So, as we all know, just recently there was a trial in, I think it was Paris or Italy or wherever, where those guys gagged her to her jewelry. She was, basically naked, and she forgave them. There was like nine of them, nine of these guys who robbed her in her hotel room.

00;36;07;06 - 00;36;32;25

So my brother in law, you know, he's a fighter. He's an attorney. He's her attorney. She says, no, we're going to go over for the George, and we're I'm going to forgive them. Right. And he was all over the news. He was everywhere representing her TMZ, all that. And he was saying, well, you know, Kim has decided in being the attorney that is cameras decided to forgive.

00;36;32;27 - 00;36;56;02

But the reality is her life will never be the same. And that part was true, you know, because the impact of the tragedy of being bound, potentially being raped, stealing all your jewelry. Right? No binding, gagging. You would have baked some nine crazy people. Must have been just traumatic. And then he explained she can't go anywhere without being afraid.

00;36;56;04 - 00;37;27;17

She can't do certain things. She, you know, she this is just the way her life is. So he. But he wanted the world to know regardless of her forgiving them. Her life changed as a result of the event. Right. So that brings me to this thing that in your spiritual, point of view, it says, use this Carl Jung quote as you touch a human soul, be just another human soul in an ER.

00;37;27;17 - 00;38;01;17

We're leaders, we're going to talk about this are often expected to be superhuman. What does it mean to lead from humility instead of from our expertise? Because there's so many people out there that they just want to stand, because they want to stand, and they think it's so important and they don't want to let go. Yeah. And what would you say about letting going, loving yourself, loving someone else and forgiving, even if that grief.

00;38;01;17 - 00;38;23;07

I was talking to somebody the other day that was saying that, I was at a 4th of July party and this is another crazy story. The guy down the street, I didn't know he was living with his mother and with his 14 year old son, but at the time, his son was like 3 or 4 months old.

00;38;23;09 - 00;39;00;13

Her ex killed his wife and killed his father in law had planned it in orange County, and he was in the car with the baby at the time. Right. And as I'm listening to this man, just like you've done this many times, the story never leaves them. It never actually heals. I saw tears as he was explaining it this 4th of July party about this experience and the fact that he, the his son, never had a mother, never knew his mother.

00;39;00;15 - 00;39;30;14

Right. And you can see the grief that he's still carrying today. Right. And I bring this up is like, okay, you can't be a superhuman at some point. You've kind of have to let go. You got to forgive. You can't hang on to all that anger that's going to kill you. What do you advise people out there who think they've been wrong and are running around with tons of anger and can't let it go?

00;39;30;16 - 00;39;34;18

This is a big question.

00;39;34;20 - 00;40;06;09

And in 50 more years, maybe I'll know the answer. I think you know it now. I think anger is normal and reasonable and a response to things that outrage our sensibilities of justice. And I think the question I always admire people who say, I'm working on forgiveness. For me, it's can I hold my anger and my outrage with tenderness?

00;40;06;11 - 00;40;32;05

And can I also look at it and think, is it useful? And sometimes anger is fuel. It's the thing that gets us motivated to to act, to be activists, to stand up against injustice, which we need more of in this world. But it can consume us, too. And so I think that it's the question of the utility around the anger versus the I'm not feeling it anymore.

00;40;32;07 - 00;40;55;28

And the, the where does the anger live? I always, I always hold the hold. My hand is like my life. Can I hold that anger gently? Can I hold myself with that anger gently? And can I hold a bunch of other things at the same time? And can I ask myself questions about what to do with it and the grief never goes away.

00;40;56;00 - 00;41;24;01

It never does. You know, I, I watched my parents lose a child, and for them it was so catastrophic. Having almost lost me at birth, they carried this intense fear of losing a child with them until they lost a child. And then I watched them carry bad. And so I've had this window into their grief, and I've had a window in hospice into lots of people's grief.

00;41;24;03 - 00;41;54;26

Most of us carry it invisibly, and most of us carry it. And one of the more profound aspects of my work, especially with leaders and CEOs who we don't get to see as vulnerable very often. A number of times I was on a conference call with the pretty big time, like C-suite guy in New York a few weeks ago, and at the end of this kind of cut and dry, very, you know, logical call, he said, do you have five minutes to talk about grief?

00;41;54;28 - 00;42;18;27

And an hour later, we had gone through all of this loss that he'd experienced and the fear and the loneliness and the heartbreak, the gift of my work is that it's not invisible to me anymore. And I think that should be for all of us. Grievers no one would wish it on anyone, but there is the potential to say I can hold everyone's grief with tenderness.

00;42;19;04 - 00;42;43;19

I don't always think they're nice people. I don't always think they're nice humans. I never know who's going to be in my hospice bed when I walk in. And I've had people hardened criminals in that bed, you know, coming out of prison, living on the streets, coming to die in the hospice bed in front of me. And I can still hold their grief with tenderness because that is the piece of me that I tap into.

00;42;43;24 - 00;43;23;24

That is the piece where their anger makes sense, their heartbreak makes sense, and I feel like it is my job to bear witness to anyone who carries that, no matter for what reason. Well, the human connection that you make with people is truly something quite special. And the opportunity, and I think it's really around your ability to listen, you know, a chaplain has to be able to listen, and you encourage people not to leave things unsaid and to repair unresolved relationships.

00;43;23;26 - 00;43;58;18

Yeah. So in your crisis management work and in your chaplain work and in your death care and soul care work, how do you help people address long standing wounds? I don't care if they're organizational wounds or if they're relationship wounds, because really, even in organizational level, it usually comes down to relationships within the organization. Yeah. So either way, it's, it's relationships.

00;43;58;21 - 00;44;26;02

And I've, I've never told this story, but I've been through business breakups. Okay. Almost a marriage breakup. Yeah, right. Which many of us go through. And I remember I was standing in front of the office building that I used to work out of, and there was this green haired older man sitting there. It's a young man. Come over here.

00;44;26;02 - 00;44;55;27

At the time I was younger, and he took my palm, and I don't know how he knew this or he read it and he said, your biggest challenge in life is going to be relationships. Okay. And I was like and I was going right through a business breakup, a very painful business breakup with a partner who was demanding unreasonable things and all kinds of stuff was going on.

00;44;55;29 - 00;45;17;26

And I kind of was only like maybe 15 20s but he looked like a guy from and, you know, like Jesus Christ actually. And I'm standing there looking at this guy and he's like, okay. And then my heart fell into like, my stomach because it was almost like he was seen through my soul and seeing into my soul.

00;45;17;26 - 00;45;36;29

And so my question your has to how do you see into people's souls to ask the right question, for them to let go of some of the things they need to let go of those unresolved issues?

00;45;37;01 - 00;46;00;18
A couple of things. I mean, I would say when you've experienced large scale public failure and pariah status, because you get a lot, for grace or one of the people who've gone through and is status here. I mean, it was hard, like I lost I lost friends because of their judgments and their sort of, you know, failing big and publicly.

00;46;00;20 - 00;46;39;02

So part of what I do is try to be vulnerable about my own issues of loss and shame and fear and and not have it be this hidden, taboo thing, but just say what it is. And I also just try to create neutral space. Then we talk about holding space, creating space. For me, I just envision that there's a space that I invite people to walk into because I'm not afraid of whatever it is they're going to lay out in front of me that a lot of the time we don't let people in because we're where our fear is that blocker, and we want to say it's judgment.

00;46;39;02 - 00;46;57;27

But I think it's fear that to me, and this is a I promise I'll come full circle on this. It took me a long time to realize that it was okay for me to say that my sister had died, and that she died of an overdose, and that it was very traumatic and catastrophic. It took me a really long time to say I was part of a business that blew up.

00;46;57;27 - 00;47;19;22

I lost everything, and it was catastrophic. And I was humiliated and I failed. That gives the space to say, I'm not afraid of what you're going to tell me. I'm not afraid of your grief. I'm not afraid of your loss and not you can say the thing that feels the craziest and the like most out there. Step on in.

00;47;19;28 - 00;47;38;29

It's okay. And I'm not afraid of that. And I don't always know what to do with it. But I will create a space for you to set that down. Sometimes that is the only gift we need to give each other. Is this place to set something down I think about I don't I think about the book of job in the Bible.

00;47;38;29 - 00;48;04;11

In the Old Testament, job's tested, everything gets taken away, and in the end he's sitting on the dung heap, scraping his boils with a broken piece of pottery, lamenting what has happened. I always feel like my job, and I wish all of our jobs with one another were to say, I just want to sit next to job and be his pal on the dumb heap for as long as he needs me to.

00;48;04;14 - 00;48;25;20

Or she or they or what that like there's a word in chaplaincy called companion ING. We should just be each other's companions. There's no need to say, hold on. Let me clean up your dung heap for me. What is it like, man? You really screwed that up. Like. Oh, like here we just sit there and be like, this sucks.

00;48;25;23 - 00;48;48;03

It really does. Yeah. I'm here. Okay? Like, it's not actually that complicated. And yet we put all this stuff in front of it that makes it, like, just show up, listen, hang out, say, this is really, really awful, and I have, I have nothing but presents for you were part of that. Meredith is really the society moves at such a fast speed.

00;48;48;03 - 00;49;22;05

We don't slow down enough. We're distracted by so many things, and we're not paying as much attention to what's important in progress. And that's a whole other podcast that you and I could get into. But, you know, in wrapping the podcast up, what would you want individual girls, fathers, mothers, leaders to understand about a crisis when it comes along, whether it's death or it's financial or whatever it might be?

00;49;22;07 - 00;49;53;11

And when I say, what do you want them to understand? I said, is really, who would you advise them to become, as a result of this crisis in their life versus them going through it? How would you advise them to grow through it? So I always want to give a softness to people who are in the early, acute phases of grief or loss or crisis.

00;49;53;14 - 00;50;16;22

There's nothing to be done but survive and do the best you can and put your shoes on and trying, you know, eat a nutritious meal like there's nothing else to be done. Eventually you see glimmers, and when those glimmers begin to to occur six months, a year or two years, whenever it is, I always say that my mom is the wisest grief expert.

00;50;16;22 - 00;50;39;19

I know, she says, grieve now or grieve later. It will wait for you. And she has shown me so much about the inquiry, the turning and facing. You want to grow through grief. You look at it, you say, what does this mean? Who am I supposed to become? Why is this so awful? What is my reaction? That's the laboratory of it.

00;50;39;19 - 00;51;03;19

That's the the the it's not the question of why. Because there is no answer for why. Why do children die? Why do we suffer? I don't know, it's not fair, right? But what? What do we become? Who could we become? How can we do something? What kindness is there that's possible for us? What? Where is that meaning to be found?

00;51;03;22 - 00;51;46;02

Those questions make the grief not passive, but active. They make it something that we do and engage with. That's where the growth comes from. That is a great way to summarize this. And I think the other thing too, is, you know, because of your early experiences, both, as you were saying, having your own near-death experience, you know, when people really get an opportunity to contemplate finitude, their finitude, I think the perception of the picture of who they are shifts and they're able to move out.

00;51;46;02 - 00;52;27;27

And just instead of being a instead of being a doing being, they become a being. Right? And they engage in life in a different way. And I would just like to thank you for somebody who's a very, very special person in my life because I know you personally. And for the counseling and support that you're giving people through your chaplaincy work and also the work that you're doing inside of businesses when they reach crisis, because both of them are equally as important, because it's crisis and it's grief.

00;52;27;29 - 00;52;53;07

And it's a lot of emotions and feelings you're having to deal with. And I'll tell my listeners right now, go to Meredith Parfit, and that's PR t.com. We'll put a link in the show notes. The other website you want to check out is Raven Yard or Avi and Wired.com. There you can click on a link to how to Handle Grief at work and beyond.

00;52;53;10 - 00;53;13;26

It's her Ted talk. I highly recommend you go take a look at that and look at the rest of the website around crisis management. From the business side and on the personal side, check out what she's doing. She's got a book in process. It is online, and as soon as that book's done, we are going to have another interview.

00;53;13;29 - 00;53;41;14

But, Meredith, thanks for joining us today from Colorado and taking time away from your family to do this podcast. I truly appreciate you and Beau and everything that you guys stand for. Thank you. Greg, I, I'm teary listening to you. Which doesn't happen to me very often. You were one of the people that sat by us in that dark time and just the effort and the care.

00;53;41;14 - 00;54;07;09
I don't know if your listeners know how intensively you prep for your podcast, but I got almost four pages of single spaced questions and and you, you do it with such care and diligence, and you also walk the talk and you sat alongside me and just it it matters. That's the other piece of grief is when we show up for people they never forget.

00;54;07;12 - 00;54;23;00
So thank you. We are quite welcome. Blessings to you. No mistake, I was have a good rest of your day there in the mountains. Yeah. Love and blessings to you, both of you guys. Thank you, thank you. This was wonderful. I really appreciate it.