How to Handle Grief at Work and Beyond | Meredith Wilson Parfet | TED

29,426 views ・ 2025-03-21

TED


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My life has not been perfect,
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and I find that deeply annoying.
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For better or worse,
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I've faced crisis across every part of it.
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When it's personal, it's hard to know how to survive.
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When it's professional,
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suffering at work, not allowed.
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My boss used to say,
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"That big stall in the bathroom is for crying,
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because I don't want to see it."
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But what happens when you have to go back to the office
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after the death of a loved one,
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or in the middle of a divorce?
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More taboo,
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what if something bad happens at work?
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Bankruptcy, layoffs, a failed startup.
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Here's the thing.
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Our brains don't actually know the difference
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between grief at work and grief at home.
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It's all grief, all of it.
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Pop culture tells us, be resilient.
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Gritty.
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I don't know about you,
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but I'm more likely to show up with dirty hair
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a hangover in a bad, juicy jumpsuit.
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(Laughter)
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Thankfully, managing crisis is a skill set.
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It's something we can learn.
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But it takes tools.
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Practical tools, not toxic positivity.
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I'm the CEO of a crisis management firm.
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We work on capital C Crisis:
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fraud, scandal, industrial accidents,
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workplace fatalities.
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I'm also a hospice chaplain and a death doula.
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A couple months into my MBA,
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I was on the phone with my mom
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when she found my 23-year-old sister dead
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from an accidental overdose.
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This is a strange format up here,
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because then I have to say that a lot of other people died one after the other,
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and can't really go into the years I spent laying in the ashes of my life.
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I was in childbirth when a doctor cut my artery.
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Every time my heart beat,
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blood pumped into my abdomen for eight hours.
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Apparently, the human body holds 11 units of blood,
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and they replaced eight of mine.
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So suffice it to say,
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I had a few unanswered questions in my life,
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and I did what I thought every reasonable person would do
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in this kind of a setting.
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I got obsessed with death and dying.
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I read the Tibetan Book of the dead,
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did grief yoga,
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wrote my own obituary,
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laid like a corpse to see what it would feel like.
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It makes me very weird at cocktail parties.
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(Laughter)
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Professionally, I met crisis when I was the COO of a hedge fund.
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I was getting a root canal
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when I got the call that our largest investment
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had been raided by the FBI.
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It was a half-a-billion-dollar global Ponzi scheme.
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Painful investor losses.
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Bad guys went to jail for decades, and our firm went out of business.
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It was freaking out to one of my lawyers,
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like sobbing, when he said to me,
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"Get over it.
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It's not like someone died."
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I was like, I'm going to refute that point.
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It felt like someone died.
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I lost my job, my reputation.
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I lost friends.
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I lost my identity.
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I grieved.
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Crisis taught me that we live in two worlds.
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Our inner world is this loud,
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crowded place that's totally invisible to others.
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That's where we grieve.
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Our outer world is where we problem solve.
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I call it the land of logistics.
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That is what goes into chaos.
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The art of managing crisis
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is to give each world what it needs.
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Grief needs support.
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Chaos needs order.
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So let's start with our inner world.
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Crisis is catalytic.
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Think of it like a nuclear chain reaction.
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The first thing it triggers is our biology.
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We flood with adrenaline, cortisol.
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This is super useful
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if you've ever had to run away from a bear.
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But the thing in crisis
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is you're running away from a bear for years.
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That messes with your brain.
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Memory, cognition, impulse control.
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In hospice, we call this grief brain.
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It's that foggy feeling.
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Grief brain.
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So how do we cope?
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Turns out, not that well.
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Most of us take what's already hard about grief
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and just make it harder.
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We do this by either burying the grief,
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like nuclear waste,
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or by detonating it, like a bomb.
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And it's tricky to see these things in ourselves.
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So consider this.
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When all hell breaks loose,
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are you more likely to simmer in resentment
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or fire off a flaming email?
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(Quietly) Flaming email.
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(Laughter)
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Barriers.
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Barriers avoid messy emotions.
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But the grief leaks out like poison.
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At the times when we most need empathy,
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barriers, they're pretty mechanical.
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They're robotic.
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Barriers.
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Feelings are not weaknesses.
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And phrases like "stay positive" are not that motivating.
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Detonators.
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Detonators are volatile, excessive:
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overspending, overeating, overworking, over-everything.
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At the times when we need stable leadership,
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they just barf their feelings on everyone.
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My fellow detonators, I see you.
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Get a therapist,
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somewhere to put your big emotions.
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And when all else fails, just learn to say self.
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Self.
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The best tool for managing our inner world is self-awareness.
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It's not only about coping.
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It's strategic.
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These skills are leadership superpowers.
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All honed by grief.
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Now what about our outer world?
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Let's say someone's died.
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You have grief brain.
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Then you have to negotiate with the insurance company.
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Call the coroner.
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Cancel their mail.
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A doctor I work with in hospice calls this bureaucratic suffering.
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These are the times, either personally or professionally,
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where we need an operating system to organize the chaos.
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That operating system begins with four questions.
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First, what is the crisis?
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You'd be amazed how often people try and solve problems they can't define.
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Imagine you're in your conference room.
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Go around your team, "What's the crisis?
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What's the crisis?"
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You will get different answers from everyone.
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That's your starting point for building alignment
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and identifying conflict.
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Second, what are the tradeoffs?
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In grief, we go into denial.
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Wishful thinking.
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Use management frameworks,
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timelines, decision trees.
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Map it out.
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There are no easy choices and bad choices.
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There are no good choices and the right choices.
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There are only hard choices,
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so make them concrete and map them out.
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Third, what are your priorities?
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You cannot control the outcome of crisis.
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You can't.
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But you can control who you want to be.
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As a brand, in your company,
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be the best version of your brand.
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As a person,
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choose.
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Choose to grow.
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Try.
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See if you can prioritize things like adaptability,
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discipline, kindness.
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Finally, what is the next right thing?
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It's a Buddhist concept that orients us to the present moment.
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When things are in chaos, make a list
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and just do what comes next.
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That's it.
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Just what comes next.
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And sometimes you'll spend a lot of time.
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What's next, what's next, what's next?
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Crisis happens to everyone.
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It will happen to you.
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If you're brave enough,
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it will teach you lessons you can't learn anywhere else.
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Crisis has not always been my best look.
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But it brought out the best in me.
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There is, I promise you,
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a path from grief to growth
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if you choose it.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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Rachell Morris: Thank you so much for that, Meredith.
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You know, before you leave us,
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you talk about managing crisis as a skill set, which is so smart.
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In a work setting,
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when you learn that a colleague is experiencing a crisis
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in their personal lives,
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what is the best way to support them through it?
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MWP: I think step one is to remember that work setting, personal setting,
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doesn't make any difference.
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We are all humans everywhere we show up.
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One of the challenges of work
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is that we believe we are supposed to just fix things.
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The problem with grief,
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it's not fixable.
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So turn the fixing mind off,
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and turn on the idea of bearing witness
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and companioning someone.
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If you feel like,
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"Oh, I'm too scared to show up and say something wrong,"
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just say something kind.
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Often people will say, "Well, I didn't want to bring that up
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because it might make you feel sad."
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If someone's going through something hard,
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they're already sad.
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They know it's going to happen.
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So just show up, walk with them,
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sit with them in the darkness.
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Even if they're your colleague, it doesn't take much to just say,
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"Hey, you're on my mind.
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How are you holding up?"
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That's it, be human.
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We are humans everywhere.
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RM: I love that, such an important talk.
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Thank you so much.
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MWP: Thank you for having me.
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(Applause)
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