BMP214 Shelby Forsythia ~ How to Move Forward from Grief in Business

Today’s Guest

About Shelby

Listen to this episode

  

What You’ll Learn

• What grief actually is (Shelby’s definition of this is really eye opening)
• How Shelby handles fear of oversharing when telling her story
• The one thing that helps Shelby to open up online and be vulnerable when she shares
• The three elements you need to help you to come back from grief in business and in life
• How to build your resilience muscle

Things We Discussed

• Eckhart Tolle 
• Wayne Dyer 
• Stephenie Zamora 
• Elizabeth Gilbert 
• How To Love Yourself Through Grief 

Connect with Shelby

• Website
• Podcast
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Youtube

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly:   Hello and welcome to the Business Mindset Podcast episode 214. This is your host Holly Worton and I am here with today’s special guest, Shelby Forsythia. Shelby is an intuitive grief guide who gives people the tools, space and support to come back to life after loss. Her mum’s death in 2013 sent her on the path to becoming a life-long student of grief; and she uses what she learns to equip others with the knowledge to heal and to remind them that they are not alone. She is a certified grief recovery specialist; reiki practitioner; and host of the weekly podcast, Coming Back: Conversations on Life After Loss.

I am super-excited to have Shelby on the show because I was just a guest on her podcast and we really enjoyed connecting, so welcome Shelby, I am so excited to have you here!

Shelby: Hi Holly, I am so stoked to be with you as well.

Holly:   Yay! So, we have heard a little bit, a tiny bit, about your background here in the bio, but can you tell us a little bit about your business journey and how you turned your grief into a business?

Shelby: Oh yeah, that’s actually a really interesting story! Well, my mum died when I was in college, so, this was in 2013; I graduated in May of 2014, which was less than six months later and I had this whole plan for my life as most college graduates do; I got a degree in advertising, and had all these plans to come to Chicago to join one of the big agencies to make my way, to get the corner office to be like a…can I swear on this podcast?

Holly:   Oh, of course!

Shelby: ..to be like that badass CEO boss lady.

Holly:   Yeah!

Shelby: …and I just had all these plans going for me; and then my mum died. And it wasn’t necessarily that my future went out the window, but everything kind of shifted in terms of priorities…I didn’t realise it until later. I had applied to a bunch of places before I moved to Chicago, after I graduated, and the one place I started was a marketing agency. And, I stayed there for a while, and then my dad was in the hospital for some other things, and I had this moment where I heard this voice in the back of my head, that was like: ‘you need to quite your job’. And I was like: what? Because this was like the first time that had ever happened to me, ever. Like hearing, I don’t know if you want to call it the voice of God, but some internal voice, some consciousness was really screaming at me one morning. It was like: you need to quit your job, and I was: I love my job nothing’s wrong with it. I love everybody that I work with.

                        So, that happened and I went back to work and I was like: I have something to tell you, and I am leaving and I don’t know why. They were quite understandable taken aback, but I did it with such an expansive timeframe; I said I am leaving in the next 2-6 months, that we kind of had time to prepare for that. And then the next job that kind of slid into my life, was working at a flower shop, with a woman who had been a friend to me, and one of my first mentors in Chicago, and she was like: “I know you know nothing about flowers, but one of my girls is leaving to go to med school, and I love your personality; do you want to come learn about flowers?” And I said, “yes, absolutely.” I always dreamed of, I had this pipe dream of being a florist.

Holly:   Wow!

Shelby: I don’t know if every little girl does, but I would always get flowers and stuff from…and flowers for plays and shows that I was in growing up; and I would be: I really wish I knew what to do with these, like how do I arrange them and how to make them look beautiful. And so I spent a little over a year in her presence, and kind of honing in on, and studying, in my life, my grief. The nature, and the natural aspects of that job, and the fact that it was kind of a job that you don’t really take your work home with you, gave me a lot of free time to study what I was going through; because in the aftermath of loss I was not really…I was a functioning person, but I was not a thriving person. And so, when I say that my mum’s death made me a student of grief, I was literally reaching for every article I could, every book that I could, every reading…I have an aunt who is an intuitive out in California…every reading that I could with her. Like energy work, reiki, yoga…I was reaching for anything that would give me some kind of grounding in: what the hell is this that I am going through? And so, I was doing some study and I was doing so much studying that I started writing about it: this is what I am learning and this is what I am feeling; and people kind of started latching on to it. And this was while I was at the flower shop as well and this owner would have conversations; like totally esoteric, about when you die and all about the spiritual nature of grief. And, as I started working there I got this urge to do something else to do something with myself and with my message; I felt: I need to get this to a larger audience of people. So, I was on the train one day and I was reading another book about grief {laughing}

Holly:   {laughing}

Shelby: And I heard that same voice again that had come before that said: you need to quit your job. And I was reading this book, and I was just looking down and I was like: I don’t know what my future looks like, I don’t know what I am going to do. And the voice said: well, why don’t you do this. It was just this little, tiny, quiet voice; and I am like: I have that option? I didn’t even know that going into business for myself and about grief – something that was literally consuming my life with its importance, not necessarily with its despair, but with its importance – could turn into a business for me. And, so, I went back to the flower shop, I said to my boss, “I am going to start my own business about grief and loss; I don’t know what it’s going to look like, but I am going to write a book, I am going to become a speaker, I am going to do something with it because what I am learning, and my personal experience, is not just helping me but it is turning out that it is helping other people.” So the first thing I did was get certified in the grief recovery method, which you mentioned in my bio. And ironically the day that voice came to me was the last day to do early bird registration.

Holly:   Oh wow.

Shelby: …to be a specialist. And so I literally, that was the last day that you could save I think it was like $1000 or $1500 registration or something and the next day it went pretty high. And so I took that trip at the end of the summer, which was about two months later; and also ironically, it was held in the city in Illinois where both of my parents were married, so there was a connection to my mum there as well, which was really cool. And I just, the process of working through this grief, and getting this information on grief with this room full of other people, just so inspired me.that everybody needs to experience this at some point. And I literally I came home, I took a business course, through one of my favourite coaches who I actually interviewed on my show – her name is Stephanie Zamora – and she has a program called: Your Passion-Based Business and it is a 12-week plan for totally staking out your entire entrepreneurial journey; and I had worked through it once before and didn’t like what I had created, and so I kind of tabled it for later, and then I manifested this and I was like: this is is really what I want to do. And, I finally got into the logistical aspects of filing for business licence and opening a bank account and what have you; and just last year, I think it was right after my birthday, so: August 17th of 2016, is when I officially launched as Shelby Forsythia. And the name Shelby Forsythia is a play on my name which is: Shelby Forsyth – and I added the i and the a, because Forsythia is a yellow, blooming bush. That comes around every Spring, it is very affiliated with Mother’s Day, it is very affiliated with renewal; and I just had loved working with plants and flowers so much, in my regular working life, that I needed to incorporate it into my business, so much so, that even my tag line is, “even through grief we are growing”.

Holly: Oh lovely!

Shelby: And so, it is just this…my whole life has been a full circle, even if I have this weird aspects that pop in, I am like: ah, still a full circle, still adds to it.

Holly:   {laughing} I love that, I love that. So, as you have been building your business over the last year, around grief; have you had any fears, or blocks, or limiting beliefs, or mind crap pop up for you, that you’ve had to deal with?

Shelby: Oh sure! The biggest is, and honestly what I feel a lot of entrepreneurs fear is: I will not be able to support myself with this – it comes from the financial and logistical money aspect of it all. So I have had to remembrance the mentality that I am working in the world and I am working for myself at the same time. And there is this whole mindset – Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this, she says, that there is this belief that if you are not working for yourself, and its your sole source of income, then what you are doing doesn’t really matter – and, I struggle with that a lot; because it is like: am I just sitting here saying some stuff for free, and like, maybe some people will see it, and maybe they won’t but what I really do “is what I do to make money”. And that’s not real, it is definitely the other way around, what I am saying, when I am speaking, what I am talking about in my “free time”. {Both: laughing} In my free time is actually my work, and what I do for a living is actually just what I do for a living.

Holly:   Yeah, and it supports you! It supports you, and it supports your business.

Shelby: Right! And it is a net for my business so I have to, literally, it is almost a daily – I don’t want to use the word battle…but it is almost a daily practice to reframe that for myself in my brain; because, literally, this is how I spend my “free time”, but I absolutely adore it; I can’t tear myself away from it, it is another job but it is not even a job, it is a vocation, it is a calling. Like, I have to do this, or I will go crazy. {Both: laughing} that’s been one of the big ones.

                        And another one – I think we talked about even before we started recording – is the fear of over-sharing: because, grief is a business that you go into with the knowledge that you are going to have to open up your heart to literally every client that you meet; whether it is on social media in some form, whether it is on a blog, or a video, or whether it is through these face-to-face in person interactions. And so, I have had to come to terms with the fact that my family might not like what I have to say about them; my relationship partners might not like what I have to say about them; my co-workers might not like my perspective on x, y or z. Like, people might not like the words that are coming out of my mouth, or the story that I am telling. But, everything that I do tell, has been true for me and in my life and so, kind of sometimes in all honesty, sometimes I am like: fuck it, I have got one shot to tell the trust about my life so here I go. But at some times I am more fearful than at others, and I do hold onto stories for a longer than I feel I “should” for that fear of not seeing it the right way, or people not appearing in the best light.

Holly:   And yet other times, you are really good about spontaneously, as you did in your recent podcast episode — 11 I think it is — share what you were going through in the moment; how is it that you find the strength to do that? Because I think what you did in that episode is something that a lot of people are fearful of doing.

Shelby: Ok well, I don’t know the word for me necessarily is strength; the word that is coming to the forefront of my brain right now is: connection. And, I just felt like what had happened in my life was, I was experiencing an immense overwhelm of heart-break and in the midst of heart-break I find through my work, that the main thing that people want, and what I want for myself, is to be seen. The first thing I was thinking after this happened was: I don’t have the focus to put a podcast together this week, I don’t have the energy to do a podcast this week; I don’t even have the wherewithal to sit in front of a computer and edit this interview that I did; which is usually an “easy process” to sit there and delete and put things together. I was like: I don’t even have the strength to do that. I was looking at myself and I thought: how can I possibly pull myself out of this? And then it turned to, actually my room mate helped rephrase this for me, she was like: “what’s he minimum you could do? What’s the worst that could happen even if you don’t release something?” And I was like, “no I’m going to release something,” and so at the end of this crying spell, this period in the morning I just turned on my mic and it actually ended up…this is the very first time I have gone off-script, off-book, off-plan, of what my podcast was supposed to be, and it felt like I was doing what I do when I transmit reiki; it is like what I do when I am sitting in a room with a client and I am literally listening to and making space for their story, I literally felt like I was channeling. Like, I said all of those words and then I didn’t remember what I had said. I turned off the mic and I was like: I just said something really profound, I think, but I don’t remember what I said!

                        And I went back and I listened to it because I did do a little bit of editing for it to broadcast, and I had to upload it of course to the various channels that it is broadcast on, and I was like: this is what I feel like in the midst of my heart-break; holy crap! Like, this is awesome! {Holly: laughing} I am not trying to toot my own horn or anything here, but if this is the truth that is coming out of me right now, there is absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t hare this. And yeah, I was sniffing my nose a lot, and I was crying, and I was coming off as if my heart was totally broken. Just like, totally, there were no pieces dangling there at all; it was just totally severed. But I don’t necessarily know where the strength comes from, it is more of a need to connect and more the inspiration that: I am going to walk the walk, if I am going to talk the talk…if I am going to have a podcast about grief, I have to let people see me cry…I have to let people see me cry, or else what good am I? I never want to be that representation that people put on a pedestal of: she’s got all her shit together.

Holly:   Yeah!

Shelby: Because that’s so incredibly false. {laughing}

Holly:   Yes.

Shelby: I never want to lead people down that road. And because of my degree in advertising and marketing and stuff, I present very polished online and things like that, like, minimal typos; but in this reality of hearing my voice, and hearing my experience, I want people to know that this grief just looks like this sometimes! It just totally flattens the crap out of you.

Holly:   And that was unfiltered grief, it was…

Shelby: Unfiltered!

Holly: Yeah…wow, that was a very intense episode, I highly recommend…if you are listening to this episode, please head over and listen to episode 11 on Shelby’s podcast; it is short, and very intense.

Shelby: Thank you. Yeah, it is literally just five minutes stream of consciousness; whatever came out of…I didn’t take any phrases out, I didn’t put any phrases in; I just turned the mic in and turned the mic off. I have never don’t that before, usually there are some flubs in there that I edit out, but oh my gosh it was just…I couldn’t believe that I did it, but those are those moments that..they matter.

Holly:   And, as you said, your business has to do with grief, and that’s a side that you need to be showing – if you were all sparkles and unicorns every day, it wouldn’t be consistent with the work that you do…

Shelby: Well right, and nobody would take me seriously either. They would be like: are you sure that you are qualified to talk about grief, it sounds like you have never been through anything.

Holly:   {joking} It’s all right, I am all perfect now! {laughing}

Shelby: Yes, I will bring my roommate in one more time, she looked at me after I ha stopped crying, this happened on I think like Monday of this week, and it was right after I recorded the podcast, and she said, “you know who you look like?” and maybe this isn’t he right time to say it, but you like like that angry mascara-dripping, matchmaker from Moulin. And, I was like, “I know, I almost wish that this was the picture of people that people could show up seeing, when they came to my classes, when they saw me online, everything like that; because, that is what grief looks like!

Holly:   Yeah!

Shelby: Sometimes you just have these days where you don’t look pretty; grief is not attractive. It is an interesting dichotomy to present grief and to present a viable business.

Holly:   Mm; yeah, yeah; and I think this is a good segue into the topic of how to move forward in grief and business; and I think this is something that is so important to talk about, because so few people are talking about this. Business is not a straight shot to success, it has got ups and downs: you make good decisions, you make bad decisions; you split with partners; you split with business partners; you split with clients; there is failure and all kinds of good stuff…and, difficult stuff. But a lot of times we don’t talk about the difficult stuff that helps us to get to where we are today and there are so many kind of low points in business, before we bounce back up again. So, Shelby, what would you say are your top tips, or suggestions, on how entrepreneurs can move forward from those deep, dark, moments of grief in business, that no one is talking about, so it is really hard to share?

Shelby: First of all, I absolutely love this, because I think it brings so much humanity to the practice of business; we see business as a cold, kind of transactional, entity in our world; but because we create businesses out of our selves, they literally are pieces of ourselves and so, as we build businesses, especially as we build them for ourselves, they include all of our strengths, but they also include all of our weaknesses. So, any time that we experience grief in a business; whether it is a failed relationship with a client; or we lose a lot of money; or something becomes unstable, or like we lose all the backups for our files; things like that, it doesn’t just effect our business but the decisions that we have made and the person that we are that made those decisions that leads up to it. So, there is this personal element of your business losing pieces of you, taking pieces of you as you lose things through business.

                                    There is a video I did, this is one of the things that I wrote down for this show, and it was for one of my episodes on self-love, and I did this show mostly on self-love through grief events: the thing that you mostly wish you could change about the past, so the mind-circling of, “I should have done this, I could have said this, I wish I had never done that,” like, all of that takes the sting out of it a little bit, it doesn’t change the fact that you are going to think about it, but the sting of the pain goes away. So there was this video I did, that was a Facebook live, called: How to love yourself through grief, and you can find this on my Facebook page which is Shelby Forsythia, the Intuitive Grief Guide; or on YouTube, also under Shelby Forsyth The Intuitive Grief Guide. It is a seven-step process of literally sending this love letter to the person that you were who made these decisions, who lost these things, who botched these relationships, who totally screwed up their presentation. It is literally the process of looking in a mirror with your past self, with yourself in this life – so you are not regressing into past lives or anything like that – but you are looking at yourself in this life and saying: yeah, this happened and it totally sucked, but I see you and I hear you, and I understand why you made the decisions that you made and I forgive you for making the decisions that you made; and thank you for teaching me x, y and z about all of these decisions. And then moving forward and beyond that. But the very first step in that process is to acknowledge, to be seen. A lot of people think that if they blaze through their grief, if they blaze through their losses, if they pretend that it didn’t happen or try and cover it up, or even just keep themselves busy despite it, that somehow it will fade into the distance. But what happens if it never gets seen, it will keep cropping up for you; whether that’s in new situations or if it will just continue to be the last thing that you think about before you fall at sleep at night.

Holly:   Yeah, and I think it can be…negative, difficult, challenging, painful…business happenings can be so painful, that often we try to sweep it under the rug, or think: I have got to move on from that now; and we don’t give it the time and the space to actually experience that grief. Grief and business are not two words that I have probably seen in a sentence before we started talking about having this conversation, because people just don’t give it the space that it deserves in business. It is like: you have got to pick yourself up now…and you don’t.

Shelby: And people think that grief is limited to…most people think that grief is limited to death but what I learnt in my work and in my studies, is that grief is a host of 40-45 events now that are considered grief events: everything from death, divorce, major diagnosis, a major move, business loss; career change; birth of a child; death of a child; birth of a pet; death of a pet. All these things that we don’t consider are losses, at any time that your norm, or like regular pattern of behaviour is ending, or has drastically shifted, that’s a grief event. Something is happening and you are mourning something that no longer is, and you have to embrace or deal with.. (accept is not the word that I want to use) but you have to manoeuvre your way around what a new normal is for you, no matter what the shift is that is happening in your life. So, any time there is a colossal shift, even if it is a really good one, even if you get promoted, or you pass a milestone, or what have you, you can never go back to what was before. I will never be a small business sitting in the dark, so now everything I do really matters, or I just make this amount of money so I have to pay a lot more in taxes, which is a different kind of grief. {Holly: laughing} But, it’s every time a shift happens.

Holly:   That is such a completely different definition of grief, than I think 99% of people have; and I think it is so important to recognise that any kind of major life shift involves some amount of grief, because, even if you are not recognising it because you are so focussed on celebrating the new good stuff, it is kind of a death of the old way of being.

Shelby: Yes, yeah, and there is the knowledge that you can never go back to it: I think that is also really key. Because a lot of times people are like: I could go back there, I could go back to that, but it will never be in the same incarnation, as it was the first time, there will always be things that were just a little bit different about it.

Holly:   Yeah, definitely. So, how do you recommend that entrepreneurs recognise, give space to, the kind of difficult or challenging sides of business? How can we honour that grief?

Shelby: I think in a big way…there are three principles that I like to teach in my work, I would like to teach these more but they are still kind of in development in terms of classes and things like that; but I would love to share them with you, and grief changes how they look. And the three are: time, participation, and support. And you think they sound really easy when you say them out loud, but as a cornerstone these three are what gets you through. And the first one is time and people think, ‘oh, time heals all,’ and of course I’ve got that check-boxed off; but that is such a major grief myth that is circling around: if I just like sit with it and keep doing what I am doing time will heal. But, there is a visual from one of my favourite book: time does not heal all, if you have a flat tyre and just like pull over a chair and looked at it, time is not putting air back into this tyre…time is not healing the fact that your tyre is flat, you have to take some kind of action, within the span of time to work on your grief to heal the problem, to fix the problem. The thing about time, also, is that it is space-making; to make time for negative/challenging things to happen; people are often blind-sided by losses, and, if we could factor in the fact that loss and change is going to happen, this is more than just creating a safety net, this is actually creating mental space for setbacks. I love how that sounds! I am going to say that again: creating mental space for set backs; because of course when we plan our businesses, we expect everything to go smoothly; of course when we start reaching out to those first clients everything is going to go x, y, z: they are going to have these questions; and I am going to have these answers. And that’s not always how it flows: you get dealt difficult clients, your bank changes, you lose all of your data; all of these things happen that we don’t expect, so coming into entrepreneurship, and coming into business ownership, with the idea and mentality that maybe even 80/20, or 60/40, part of everything goes exactly how I want it to and then part of it doesn’t, even just creates that time an space for you to acknowledge that this is going to happen; because acknowledging is one of the biggest things.

                        And also, within the realm of time, there is creating time to: “deal with it” and this is where participation comes in, because with participation and time working together, we have to participate in our acknowledgement, in our own healing of these griefs. We cannot be a bystander to our businesses, especially when they experience loss. In this way, I like to visualise my business as a separate entity from myself, for as much as I am tied to my business it is also an extension of me, so it is a separate thing that exists out in the universe somewhere; and to leave our businesses, or to ignore our businesses when they are in times of crisis, is like abandoning another version of ourselves in a way, it is like abandoning a friend. Or, telling a co-worker: oh that’s too hard, I don’t really want to look at you right now. And that’s not fair, that’s actually really rude! To express that energy to our businesses that: this is too hard, I am not going to look at it, or I’m going to breeze right by…is to ignore the pain that is coming up, to ignore what’s difficult. And if you ignore pain, and you ignore difficult for long enough, it manifests in another ways where you feel like you can’t get past the ceiling in your life; or there are blocks in your business, or with clients, that you can’t work through, or you have these fears that things that happened in the past in our business are going to happen again: I am going to get stolen from; this client that comes in is always going to be really difficult; I am not allowed to set boundaries. You always start telling yourself these new stories, has this loss happened to you because you didn’t address it? It is going to hinder how your business operates in the future; those blocks that you asked me about earlier, yeah, those are all from loss events. They were in my life before I even started a business and I carried it into the business with me, or because of things that happened initially, in the first couple of months or weeks of my business. So, participation in the active uncovering and recovering of those stories that you are telling yourself about the losses that have happened in your business is vital.

And that leads me to the third leg of all of this, which is: support. And, I find that support is best found in communities; so whether it is through something you create, Holly, in your work, whether you have a community of female business owners that are all together and sharing those stories? Or, if you find a one-on-one mentor, or somebody who really tells the stories of their failures. So, it is really tempting, especially when you are building your business, to draw on yourself and align yourself to these business owners that have everything together. And they are really shiny and their websites look great and all the packages are at awesome price points, and you are like: I am going to do that one day! And…this huge client list and they are like: how to build 10,000 blah, blah, blah, in your first few weeks and things like that; and they are really inspiring and they have their purpose; but then there are also these business coaches who are like all of that and I was broke for three years. Or, all of that and my dad died during this, so my business fell apart so x, y, z. Like, to find these people who have the successes and who are also super vulnerable with those stories has been such a great support for me in my own business. Even names as big as Marie Forleo, who tells stories of failure and setback in her own life, on her YouTube channel, has just been monumental for me, because I see her and it takes people off their pedestal and puts them across the room from you.

I see you too, so you see me too; and we are kind of supporting each other through this life; because if a business looks perfect on the outside, it is not, it is just not. It is not trustworthy, it is not authentic and it is not real. And, I think part of that support too, is that community helping you reframe, that what is ultimately best for your business is to be real with it; it is not to treat it like it has to be this perfect money-making client-finding machine all the time. It is a living, breathing, organism just like you are, and is going to have points in time where it is literally soaring, it won’t touch the ground because it is so awesome, and fantastic. And there are some times when it will crash and burn, and we do that too. There are whole communities out there of supportive business owners who are like: I am struggling right now, what can I do? What should I do? What did you do? And to just glean that wisdom from other people is just a really big help in that.

So: time, participation and support, are what I have for you.

Holly:   And I think that is an excellent triad of elegance to help get us through these stages of grief in business. And, I think it is so important to, as you said, time and space, give it the time and space that it needs and sometimes I think it can be so frustrating when we are those kind of dips in the business cycle…

Shelby: Because why would you want to give it time and space, it is not fun!

Holly:   Yeah! You just want it to get it over with: great, so I am in the dip, when is the peak coming back? When am I getting out of this? And you don’t know. There is no time limit, you cants say: oh well, by next Tuesday at 4pm you will be fine, you will be coming up out of this. So you don’t know; you have to just trust the process and trust that you are going through this kind of dip and that you are going to be coming back out of it.

Shelby: And honestly that sucks.

Holly: Yeah.

Shelby: I have experienced it and it sticks, and I have trusted in the process. And there is no way to sugarcoat that, there is just not. But the best part of that, is that when it happens once and you come out of it you live to see another peak; and then the next time happens, and it might darker or deeper, and you are like: okay I did this once, maybe I can do it again; and there is this muscle of resilience and faith that gets built in all of this.

Holly:   Yes.

Shelby: That’s a little ridiculous, but by the time you are maybe five-ten years into this mentality of: loss has happened and I come back, that whole thing, then you muscle is really strong, and when things happen you are like: okay, this sucks but we can do it! And, yeah, there is just this muscle that gets strengthened and there is almost an invincibility in that, because even then, even setbacks can’t set you back. I don’t know a better way to phrase it than that, even the setbacks that’s do come, you are like: okay, we’ve done something similar to this before, just hold strong with it and you come in with that knowledge.

Holly:   I love that. Thank you so much. So, where can people find you online?

Shelby: Oh, let’s see, the best place that is kind of a central hub for all of my information is: http://shelbyforsythia.com and there you can find tabs at the top to the podcast, to online courses I have created, I am adding a new tab soon where you can find me live, if you are in the city of Chicago; I do one-on-one classes in Chicago. There are also links up there to a blog that I update about twice a month, there are YouTube videos which are totally free – you can find that YouTube video: How to Love Yourself Through Grief, over there. You can find me on Facebook which is my preferred method of communication as well as Instagram. And I actually have a private Facebook group called: The Grief Growers Garden, which is a supportive community for anybody going through loss, or anybody looking to support others going through loss. And it is not really a space to vent: here is everything bad that is happening, my life sucks, what have you; but it is like: here is everything bad that is happening, I need space to hear it; let’s figure out where to go from here. And it is very much a place lately where people have been sharing stories of their loved ones, I actually talked a little bit in depth about what was happening when I recorded that podcast a couple of weeks ago. People have post like: doodles, comments, anything that is related to how they feel about grief on there, and it is just kind of a really neat community of people who come from all over the world: I just had somebody from Ireland join and I am so excited.

Holly:   Ooh!

Shelby: People finding similar losses and finding like a sisterhood or brotherhood; a connection in that; it is very neat. It is small but growing.

Holly:   Excellent. And how can people work with you?

Shelby: Oh, most quickly, you can probably bounce into my inbox which is: [email protected]; there is also a contact page on my website. But, what I offer within the city of Chicago, unfortunately the method that I do requires that I be in person with people.

Holly:   Okay.

Shelby: For now. I hear that’s changing In the future but I haven’t confirmed the details yet; but they can find me at contact page, and I run seven-week one-or-ones; and these are deep dives into breaking down the myths that we tell each other about grief that we learn from our parents, that we learn from society, that we learn from the media and then really working on one specific loss in their live, usually the heaviest one. If you ask people what their heaviest loss is, they can usually point to one for sure.

Holly:   Yeah.

Shelby: And, we work through that one, but it also gives everyone you the framework and the tools to work through subsequent losses; because grief is cumulative through time; so that’s a process that I can work through with people, and it’s a seven-week in-person – they choose the date and time and it is two hours per session. But, it is just wonderful and it is super-connecting, not only to work with people through these tools, but to just literally have another person sitting across from you hearing your story. There is something very cathartic in there. But, I do all kinds of losses: I do death; divorce; diagnosis; career loss; major moves; abusive childhoods, literally, if it is a loss, I can do it.

Holly:   Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us today and talking about grief and business; two words that aren’t usually spoke in the same sentence. So, thank you so, so much for your really insightful reframes and kind of expansive definitions of grief and how that applies to our business.

Shelby: Thank you Holly, this has just been so much fun.

Holly:   Yay!

            Thank you, and thank you for listening and remember to visit hollyworton.com/214 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you.