Listen Here:

In this episode, I discuss:

• Growing your business while grieving
• How to cultivate your own resilience
• What it means to give yourself “pockets” of emotion
• The gifts in building emotional intelligence

Additional Resources:

GROUP: Empath Leaders Membership

This monthly membership is healing for the healers of the world. Your impact will only grow as far as you grow yourself. Inside this container, we emphasize more embodied feminine leadership and less trying to fit into masculine molds. You will be invited to experience a breathwork session, a group coaching session, and a healing session every month in which I bring in my whole healing toolbox. You will also have access to all the Uncensored Empath courses and programs for 10 to 50% off.

COUNSELING: BetterHelp

Making professional counseling accessible, affordable, convenient – so anyone who struggles with life’s challenges can get help, anytime, anywhere. Visit BetterHelp for 10% off your first month of private online counseling.

COURSE: The Healing Activation Portal

This one-of-a-kind experience will help you reprogram your mind. It includes 30 days of energy healing that incorporates guided meditation, vibrational medicine, and deep soul work. The portal will guide you to shed your past programming, surrender to the healing process, overcome energetic plateaus, and open up a new doorway to what’s possible for you.

Episode Transcript:

Welcome to the Uncensored Empath, a place for us to discuss highly sensitive energy, illness, healing, and transformation. My name is Sarah Small, and I’m a life and success coach for empaths who want to create a thriving body, business, and life. Think of this podcast as your no-BS guide to navigating life, health and entrepreneurship. You’ll get straight to the point, totally holistic tips from me in real-time. As I navigate this healing and growth journey right beside you.

This is a Soul Fire production.

Hello everyone. This is going to be a training on growing through grief and cultivating resilience when you are on your business building journey. So often I hear people mirror and reflect this statement and question back to me, which is, wow, you’ve been through so much. How do you do it? How do you keep moving forward? How do you keep going? And oftentimes, my answer would be to these people, I don’t know. I don’t know. But I got asked this question again this week, and it’s recurring for me. And I decided that it was time to sit down and to really reflect on this question and what my answer is. And I posted something yesterday in the group that said, “Remember, it is not what you know, but who you are that is your best marketing asset.” And I truly believe this. You can be a genius and an asshole, and people aren’t going to want to work with you.

How to cultivate your own resilience

You can be trained in every modality and have a wall full of certificates, framed and looking beautiful. But if you show up out of integrity and disrespectful, people aren’t gonna want to work with you. So, one of the greatest assets in your business is simply who you are at the core, foundational level. And what I’ve seen reflected in my business is that, even though I got a lot of training and I do know a lot about a lot of things, it’s not what I know, but what I’ve lived through. That is what deeply connects to another person’s heart. I like to think that the resilience that I’ve built in my journey is a mirror for your own ability, for your own resilience. And like my favorite, Glennon Doyle says and reminds us, we can do hard things. For me, that has meant that I have gone from self-harm, self-hate body hatred, to owning every little inch, crevice, and crack, and wrinkle on my body.

And that has meant going from broke, $25,000 in debt to a hundred thousand dollar launches. That has meant going from heartbroken, devastated to this insurmountable loss, of the suicide of my brother. To inspire, to live differently, and to launch my business and leave my job. That has meant going through sexual trauma and feeling so unsafe in the world, to reclaiming my power. That has meant going from self-conscious of my skin to the point that I would not even leave my house, to showing up with you today, without makeup on. That has meant going from debilitating anxiety to launching my business anyways. It has meant going from losing my other brother, Joe, a week after my wedding, to not giving up on my life and my business. And there’s been other things, there’s been mold illness, a whole chronic illness journey with autoimmune disease, parasites in my brain, breakups, heartbreak, family trauma, fibromyalgia, chronic pain, autoimmune flares, all of it.

I know I’m not alone in this. I know you have a story of your own. I’m not here to tell you that it’s easy, or to make it look easy at all. I’m here to show you that you could do hard things too. That you can cultivate your own resilience.

I want to take a quick moment for you to just check in with yourself. If it’s safe for you to close your eyes, maybe you close your eyes, or you just put your hands to your belly or your heart. And take a deep breath, and I just want you to notice how your body’s feeling. We rarely stop to do this throughout the day. And for me, I’ve been doing this and reminding myself to do this a lot during quarantine, during social distancing. And as things reopen and then close again, and all these rules and all these restrictions. I have been really reminding myself to tap in and just notice how I’m truly feeling.

And I’ve noticed, in tapping into my own body and listening to my needs and my feelings that, I’ve been really craving an outlet to talk. To talk about everything that’s been on my heart, and on my mind, and in my body. And my weekly sessions with my therapist from Better Help have been so supportive, and so life-changing, and so necessary right now. That I know that I have is one hour every week, plus messaging in between our calls to just express myself. And to do that, check in with my body, check in with my thoughts and notice what layers of grief are coming up? What stressors are coming up, how was I triggered this week? What family issues are coming back up to the surface that are bringing up negative emotions?

And so, I just want to give you all permission. If you haven’t already given yourself permission to know that you are worthy and deserving of the support as well. And I’ve partnered up with Better Help to provide you accessible affordable counseling. It’s not a crisis line. It’s not self-help, it’s professional counseling that is done online and allows you to have that outlet, that platform, to get matched with a counselor, that’s going to be the best fit for you. And align with your values, to be continuously supportive. So, if this feels like a good fit for you, I want to give you 10% off your first month. Go to trybetterhelp.com/uncensoredempath.

So, I was in therapy, just a couple hours ago today, and my therapist and I were talking about how sometimes when people tell me, Oh, you should be more sad, or how are you so okay? That triggers me. It hurts me. And instead of thinking, who are you to say that, or judge me? I often revert to, Oh my gosh, are they right? Am I doing something wrong? Am I supposed to be more sad? And I feel that judgment.

One time in a grief and loss support group around sudden death, I was in the group and a woman told me that losing my brother was going to happen anyways, because he was a drug addict. And my first thought was, Oh my gosh, I’m not supposed to be here. My loss was inevitable, it’s not like their loss. My second thought was, what the actual fuck? Go fuck yourself! But my first thought was actually questioning, my own grief.

What it means to give yourself “pockets” of emotion

And so, my therapist asked me, does anything about your grieving process feel wrong or unhealthy? And I stopped to think about it, because I wasn’t sure. And as I sat in that reality and reflected, I said, no, no it doesn’t. What people don’t realize is that I am deeply versed in adversity. And when you have that much practice, you start to get really good at alchemy. You get good at being resilient. You get good at navigating the dark heavy waters of life. And my answer to the question, how do you keep going? How do you do it? Is no longer, I don’t know. Instead, it is I’m resilient, that’s how. I am, unfortunately, well experienced and the secret is not to throw yourself into tough situations so that you can become more practiced or well-versed. The secret is actually to give yourself what I call pockets. Pockets of grief, pockets of sadness, pockets of anger, pockets of rage. And it is in these pockets that I fully express myself.

I know that that’s not what you typically see from the outside. That’s not what you always see on social media. Even though I am pretty damn transparent and uncensored with you. But I can assure you that is what’s happening behind the scenes. One hour of breathwork, in which I scream and cry, ugly tears. And it’s not that my emotions then become restricted after that pocket of time or a breathwork session. It’s that I actually fully express them during that time, for as long as I need, so that it’s emptied. The whole bucket just got poured out. I did not restrain or hold anything back. So there’s no need to sit in it then, for the rest of the day. It doesn’t mean there are some days where it doesn’t linger, but generally, I don’t need to sit in it for the rest of the day. There’s typically no benefit to ruminating over it. And instead, it was fully, fully felt. And then, I’m able to continue to show up. Then, I can serve. Then, I can have my impact, hold my big vision and meet my goals.

The gifts in building emotional intelligence

And I have my brothers to thank for the emotional intelligence that I’ve been able to build in my life. I didn’t start the emotional intelligence journey from day one. I started that journey June 28th, 2015, the day that my brother Jordan died. Because on that day, my bucket of emotions was already so fucking full. I had become really good at shoving things down, hiding them away, and finding all the little cracks I could stick my emotions into. I was already in such a bad place in my life that when he died, everything poured out, all of it. It could not stay hidden and ignored anymore. It simply wasn’t possible. I had reached my threshold. And that is when my journey began.

I started to build the ability to feel again. After years of numbing, I started to learn how to reconnect to my emotions so that, in those pockets, I unleash myself. This is an active process. I unleashed myself, fully. There’s no more holding back. I am fully alive. I am fully expressed. I am fully authentically me.

Growing your business while grieving

So, to go back to that question again, how do you grow through grief, tragedy, challenge, and continue to build an abundant successful business? You give yourself pockets. You let yourself feel. You build up your resilience. You take off the chains and set yourself free. Who you are, not what you know, will reverberate throughout your community. It will be felt, and heard, and seen.

So, who will you be? Who will you be? To what capacity will you allow yourself to truly be? And that, my loves, is the key. It’s right there. It’s not over complicated. It’s simple. That is the key.

So if you’re craving these pockets of freedom, of expression, of emotion, and you can track your own tendency to stick things away in the cracks and crevices and let the bucket fill, and fill, and fill, like I used to as well. Then I really think you should come join us.

The Empath Leaders Membership is your container for self-discovery, for seeing yourself, for holding up a mirror, for giving yourself permission. And when you do that, and you practice that in your life, it will have immense ripple effects on your life, on your business and on the whole fucking world. There is no doubt in my mind.

So, I invite you to sit with that for a moment and see what the possibility of that feels like in your body. Because what I’m really asking you to do is be an embodied leader. To be a fully embodied leader. That makes me want to cry right now, for some reason. But, when I watch these women step into the true, empowered, embodied version of themselves and their leadership role, it is everything. It is fucking gorgeous. There’s a magic to it. It’s truly incredible. I don’t know what else to say about it.

And I want that for all of you. I want that for all of you because I’ve been able to see what that has shifted for me in my life. I’m just one woman over here, you guys. Growing through grief, building a business through hard challenging times is not something just I can do. Fuck that. You can all do that. I believe in you. Are you going to choose to believe in yourself today?

Love you all. I hope you have a really good rest of your day. And you take really, really good care of yourself. And maybe you start practicing giving yourself that pocket.

Connect with Sarah:

Instagram | Facebook Community | Pinterest | YouTube

Work with Sarah:

Online courses | 1:1 coaching | Send show requests to sarah@theuncensoredempath.com!

This post contains affiliate links. We may receive a small commission for purchases made through these links. Thank you for your support!