Do you ever feel uncomfortable or lack the words to respond appropriately to someone who has experienced the loss of a loved one? In this episode, Jimmy, and his special guest Amy Florian, discuss the most appropriate methods of responding and coping with grief and other challenges of life and aging.
Episode Keys
- The emotional and physiological causes of grief and what you can do to cope as well as become better through the process.
- Why you never should attempt to squelch someone else’s grief with common statements such as “you’ll get through this”!
- What are the signs of cognitive impairment and senility.
- When you should offer assistance, and how, to a person that is grieving.
- Why it is vital that you maintain your own mental and physical health.
Podcast Transcription
JW:
Good morning! You know, this is one of those days where the sun is always shining in my world, but if you’ve been a follower and a subscriber to Live a Life By Design, you know my entire year is that same way. Hey, this is Jimmy Williams with Live a Life By Design, your Monday morning moments of motivation. Our only goal in life is to help you become bigger, better, and bolder the way you desire. Today has been a wonderful day for me. I rose again this morning at 5:00 AM, but the problem is the sun didn’t. It’s that time of year where I go outside and it’s dark. Now, most of you that have listened to this podcast know my personality quite well. I’m a very optimistic, the sun is always shining kind of person. When you go to do your run first thing in the morning, and it’s a crisp 39 degrees, and the sun’s not shining, it is a little more daunting for me to overcome some of that lack of sunshine, but I just hit the tread and start running on the road and life begins to open up for me. And I hope you’re starting off your fall in that same manner. Today, it is particularly important that I introduced to you someone, a special guest and friend of mine, that I’m going to give you a little background first on this person and tell you how much she has impacted my life and how she and her team will impact yours if you only seek them out. This has been a wonderful topic to address during this time of year, particularly with what we’ve experienced over the last couple of years. You know, I first heard our guests speak at a conference as a keynote. And to be honest with you, I was just blown away by her grasp and intellect of the subject of grief. The information she provided in that one keynote address whet my appetite to learn more. I just had to understand a lot more that I didn’t know to help our clients, to help my family, and to be very frank with you, to help me through times of difficulty. I attended a three-day course on grief and the strategies we could learn to help our clients through the process with dignity. And that’s the key here. We don’t want to go in and not know how to respond, how to react or support those that are going through the grieving process. And today our guest will teach us some things and just share with us some methods that we can use. You know, one of the great things about this is our team and our clients have benefited tremendously now, being able to accommodate the area of grief for them. COVID has caused many premature deaths over the last couple of years. So this is very much a time sensitive message that we bring to you today and share with you, these ideas, her life, like many of ours, was impacted tragically at a very young age. At the age of 25, she became a widow. That’s right. She’s going to tell us a little bit more about that in just a moment, but what unfolded during that time of her life has now come to bloom and the full presence of a company that addresses these areas of life, such as grief and bereavement to the benefit of thousands in our country. So with that, I’d like to welcome today, my friend and wonderful professional in her own right. Welcome to the podcast, Amy Florian.
AF:
Well, good morning, sunshine. It is a delight to be here with you. Even up here in Chicago, where I live, the sun is shining today, but like you, when I got up, it wasn’t yet. So we make our own sunshine. We make our own sunshine. And it is truly a privilege and an honor to be on here with you Jimmy, to spread the message and to just talk a little bit.
JW:
You know I’ve got to tell you, Amy, and I don’t want to embarrass you, and folks, this is audio only, but I’m probably going to make her face a little red now. But she tolerated – and that’s the term I will use – my presence in a Zoom three-day conference and her her entire team was gracious beyond comparison. And so I’ve just got to say, thank you, Amy, for that. That educational process, it was phenomenal. And I want to mention a little later on in our podcast that how you can get some of her resources, her book, we’re going to talk about her website and so forth here in just a little bit, but Amy, tell me a little bit about how you got into the business of grief and bereavement counseling.
AF:
I backed into it. I never intended to do this. I grew up in a little rural farming community in Iowa, third of 10 children, by the way. Yeah, there’s advantages and disadvantages to being in such a large family. There’s no privacy for one thing. But I married a dairy farmer when I was 19. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life on a dairy farm, or at least in a small town. I mean, in my twenties, I worked with my dad. He was an insurance agent. And despite the fact that we were on it in a very small town, he grew to some prominence and was traveling around the country, teaching other insurance agents. He was also very involved in the community, built a school, ran the fundraising drive for the hospital, served as mayor. I worked with my dad in my twenties and I thought maybe I would end up doing that the rest of my life. But I would certainly just be in this little farming community with the typical expectations of that world. As you mentioned, however when, well, first of all, John, his name was John. The dairy farmer was named John and we loved each other very, very much. We lived through two very difficult miscarriages and then a period of infertility. And when our baby boy Carl was born, we felt like the luckiest people on the face of the earth. Carl was seven months old, we were both 25, when John was killed in a car accident. I don’t think I need to tell you that I was absolutely devastated. Just impossible to describe. And nobody in this little farming community in Iowa, nobody knew what to say to a 25 year old widow with a seven month old baby boy, nobody knew what to do. People really loved me. I’m third of 10 kids. They really loved me. They wanted to help, but they didn’t know how. I had to heal by the grace of God and the seat of my pants. About five years after John died I went to a seminar on grief and loss that a man was teaching, but he had never been widowed. So I talked to him a bit afterwards and he said, “Amy, I need your voice. You’ve been through this. Would you work with me on some seminars?” I said, “Sure, happy to.” So I found my calling because as soon as I started working with him on seminars, then other people wanted me and other people wanted me, then they started asking me my credentials. So I went back to school. I went back to school, not only because I thought the credentials would help me to spread information about grief and grief support, but also because I wanted a language to describe my experience. And I felt that I needed the academic backing the research behind it, to understand better, to be able to make it more applicable. Because one person’s story doesn’t fit. All people grieve differently. Their experiences are different than each other. Even if it’s a similar loss, if they both been widowed, oh my gosh, there are so many differences in people who’ve been widowed. So I wanted that broader background, the language to speak about it, the backing behind it and the credentials that would allow people to hire me to go out and talk. So that’s how I got into it. Really, it’s been my career ever since it’s been my mission. It really is my mission in life to help people heal.
JW:
Just a courageous story though, Amy is my point and that sadly, I’d like to say that that’s your life, but that’s not sadly because you have grown through this process with great dignity and formed a very successful career and helping others face this. And I love the fact that you do something that we encourage in our office, as well – don’t run from the challenge, run to the challenge. And you, you just said, “Hey, I need more education. I need to understand this better so I can understand myself.” Now you got a degree and I’m goin to probably butcher this because I haven’t seen this before in my limited the expertise in the business world, but you hold a master’s degree and you’re a fellow in thanatology.
AF:
That’s right.
JW:
Explain thanatology for our listeners.
AF:
Thanatos is the Greek word for death, -ology is always “study of”, you know, biology, psychology, physiology. So in limited sense, it means study of death. It’s a subset of psychology in the broader sense though, we don’t just study death. I’m an expert in death, loss, grief, aging, and transition. So as you found out in class, Jimmy, I teach a lot too about the aging process and dementia and things that we’re more susceptible to as we age about terminal illness, about getting things in place ahead of time, about a really broad range within that topic area. But, that’s the origin of thanatos in thanatology. In fact, if any of you listeners are Marvel comic fans, if you’ve seen one of the latest Marvel comic movies, who’s the bad guy? Thanos. Why? So now you have a little bit of trivia that you can impress your friends and family with because that’s the origin of the word.
JW:
Amy, I have just endeared myself to you as a friend, but now since you involved and invoked Marvel comics in my world with this episode, you are escalated even higher, my friend, because I’m a big fan of all those Marvel and Stanley. I’ll go back as a kid collecting that first Spider-Man comic book when I was probably five or six and I was just hooked, you know, and this, and we’re talking like 70, 1970, right? And I mean, early days. So, tell me, tell me this a little bit. You helped me recognize some of the signs, for example, of people that may be aging and having some concerns with cognitive impairment, for example, or living alone. No one’s there to assist them in making good decisions that as we age may find ourselves not using the best judgment, what are some signs that we need to look for? If our listeners have an aged parent, for example, that lives alone, or maybe a couple of the both parents are doing a little more difficult in life than they’d like, what would we look for?
AF:
Well, the signs can start showing up 10 years, 15 years before a diagnosis. The thing is there’s signs. And what we look for is a conglomeration of signs that get worse over time. Everybody has the experience. And how many times did you walk in a room and then think, why did I come in here? Or you misplace your car keys or whatever the case may be. Those are it. Sometimes I call those sometimers, not Alzheimer’s, because those are not dementia. There’s also a certain degree of forgetfulness that is normal for age. As we get older, our neurons and synapses age too. And there’s things you can do to try and keep them younger, if you will, or more active or build more of them. But over time, our neurons and synapses do age and we become a little bit slower on the uptake. A little bit slower in recall, older people. It’s not true that older people can’t learn the way younger people do. They can, it just takes a little longer. I like to think there’s just more stuff up there.
JW:
Yeah. You know, I tell people I’ve got all this stuff in my mind. It’s just that the long-term memory retrieval takes a little while to get farther to the back, you know, than it used to.
AF:
That’s right. Your brain is really full.
JW:
And let’s talk a little bit about the elephant in the room. Amy, if we could, our listeners in the past two years have been subjected to so much change, of environment change, maybe of their mental capabilities, merely from the standpoint of dealing with more emotional versus more fundamental issues of life. Talk to us about how can we come out of this pandemic because you know, at Live a Life By Design, we’re not here to tell you what happened. We’re here to tell you how to make things happen. What should we be doing to come out of this pandemic with a better attitude and learn from this?
AF:
Yeah. Well, first of all, be patient with your grief. All of us are grieving. There are so many triggers of grief that have come into play in this last 18 months to two years, there’s a ton of relationship loss, of course, 750,000 COVID deaths in the US alone, but also the relationship losses where people have become so polarized, we’ve lost the ability to listen to each other or the relationship loss of lockdowns, in isolation, not being able to be together. There’s so many ways relationship loss has happened. Role changes where we’ve had to accept new roles like becoming in-home teachers to the kids or a natural caregiver becoming a care receiver. Or if somebody does die, it’s not just the loss of the relationship. It’s the loss of your role in association with them and the loss of your future with them, the loss of dreams, plans, visions. That’s also been a part of this whole experience. What happened to Thanksgiving last year? What happened to the lavish wedding that had been in the works for over a year? What happened to the vacations people planned this past summer? Or did you have tickets for a cruise? Was college what you expected it was going to be? So many plans and dreams evaporated. Plus the loss of faith that in our systems. You know, how many of us believe that everybody we elect and send to Washington, their number one goal is the common good of the American people? I mean, we don’t think that anymore. We’ve lost faith in our government. Many people have lost faith in the healthcare system, have lost faith in science, have lost faith in the justice system, because justice isn’t always served. And we lose faith in our own personal assumptions that our life is supposed to be fair, right? “Wait a minute, this isn’t fair. This isn’t right. It’s not supposed to happen this way. We’re good people. We’re people of faith, we don’t deserve this, why is this happening?” You know, all kinds of things. So many levels of grief and grief does… Our brain gets flooded with cortisol and grief pushes down our normal ability to make rational decisions, to think, to concentrate. It just pushes us down to survival level when you’re really grieving. You’re just wondering how you can put one foot in front of the other, how you can breathe. So how do you come out of this? First of all, recognize your grief and allow those emotions. Emotions have no morality to them. They just are. They just come up. So allow your emotions, allow yourself to cry, to be angry, to be pressured, to be worried, and then share that with somebody. When we share our emotions together, instead of, “Oh, don’t worry about it. It’ll be fine.” Well, that doesn’t help. “I’m sorry. I’m still worried,” or, “Well, you shouldn’t be angry about that.” Well, that doesn’t help. “I’m still angry,” or “Aren’t you over this yet? Why can’t you put it behind you and get on with?” “Well, I’m sorry, I’m still sad.” We need to share those with each other and support each other through it. We need to take care of ourselves. I mean, you’re hearing this all over the place. Everything from eating well to stomping your feet as hard and fast as you can for 10 seconds, it’s amazing. That’ll get a good bit of stress out of your body that you’ve been storing in your joints and bones. Just stomp your feet as hard and fast as you can for 10 seconds. And that that’s a physical release taking care of your spiritual life, your inner life, even collect the things that bring you comfort and strength, whether that’s mantras, scripture, verses, inspirational sayings, put them on sticky notes all over your house and then never pass a sticky note without reading it to yourself out loud.
JW:
You know, I’m a prolific journaler, Amy. And I’ve got to tell you, after I took your three-day course, I would have went back and looked at some of my journal entries during the time of COVID versus the times before COVID and I’ve got them for years. So I’ve been journaling since I was about 21, 22 years of age, when life got a little challenging for me after undergrad and busy and all this stuff. And I look back and you are absolutely correct that we are not aware until we review what we’ve written or done to know what state of mind we’re in. Now, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but my point you made there was excellent because you said, you know, we need to understand where we are in this process of grieving and challenge that we have in our world. That’s awesome. Fantastic stuff.
AF:
Journaling is really helpful by the way. And it could be a great sleep aid because what people experience, there’s two ways that sleep is affected when you’re grieving or stressed. Either it is so exhausting all day, at the minute, your head hits the pillow, boom, you’re out. But then you wake up at two o’clock in the morning and you can’t go back to sleep. Or the other thing that happens is that you lay your head on the pillow and you cannot shut that brain down. You just can’t go to sleep for your life. A journal really helps with both writing your journal. 15, 20 minutes before you go to bed, get out all the hamster wheel stuff, everything that bugged you today, everything you’ve got to remember to do tomorrow. And when you have it all out on the paper, then you say, okay, there it is. There’s everything I’m concerned about. It’s safely written down. I can put it over here on the bedside table. It’s not going anywhere. I’m going to see it as soon as I wake up in the morning, but it can sleep over there so that I can sleep over here.
JW:
Excellent advice. I call it a brain dump. So right before I go to bed about nine o’clock, I don’t go to bed til about 10, but at nine o’clock I’ll pull up that journal, which is private to me, my own wife of 35 or 34 years does not know what’s in those journals because I have to have a place to go to talk to me real quick and about to our listeners about how critical it is to know thyself.
AF:
It is important to know yourself, to have boundaries. You know, I work with grieving people, dying people, sad people all the time. If I took that all into myself, it would literally eat me from the inside out. So I have developed everybody in my field, developed coping strategies, a support network, being able to understand yourself. And by the way, it’s never a sign of weakness to go to a counselor. That’s a sign of strength because you want to understand, you want to get better. You want to be more whole, you want to be healed. A wise man that I know said that pain that we do not transform, we transmit. If we don’t transform our pain, we transmit it. We don’t want to do that. So counseling, journaling, using other arts, you know, if you’d like to draw or color or do music, music can be really therapeutic. And even things like soaking in a hot tub and meditating, mindfulness, any of these things, we need to take care of ourselves and become as healthy and whole as we can be so that we can honestly help other people instead of acting out of our own need and our own pain and just transmitting our own hurts.
JW:
Which one of those coping mechanisms did you feel helped you the most when you were seeing me for 24 hours straight three days, eight hours a day? What did you use, Amy to say, “Oh, okay. I can get through this.”
AF:
I love you, Jimmy.
JW:
So, you folks, laughter to me is another coping mechanism sometimes to deal with… You’re wonderful Amy, thank you for your kindness there. But let’s talk a little bit about my daughter. I’m going to use a personal example here because we’re all open here on this show. My daughter’s going through her freshmen and sophomore year. She’s now a junior at the university of Oklahoma. And by the way, doing quite well, never left the Dean’s honor roll. Most of the time on the President’s. Doing well, puts really a lot of pressure on herself to do well, and for her own good. But my point here, I’m asking is, she went through COVID and all I hear from her is, “Dad, I’ve not had a college experience anything like what I thought I would, that my sister had, that you told me I would have. Why can’t I just have a normal college experience?” What do I tell her through these times?
AF:
First of all, ask and listen. What people need is to tell their own story, not to be talked out of it. So, “Okay, what stories did you hear about your sister’s college experience that you wish you had had? What do you most miss? What would you like to have? What was the hardest thing for you about your college experience so far? What’s been easier than you thought, or maybe a benefit to it? Where are you? What have you experienced? I want to understand you.” You ask those questions and let them tell their story. Sometimes they will come to their own conclusions then. “Oh yeah. Okay. So maybe it wasn’t as bad as I always say it is because there were some good things. Maybe not.” Whatever, but then your next questions would be, “Since you couldn’t have the college experience you wanted, what I hear you saying is these things were the most important to you. Is there a way to find other ways to fill those same things? Can we think out of the box to say, ‘well, okay, you wished you had this, you couldn’t have it. I know life happens. This is life.’ But when life throws you a curve ball, then find a way to hit it. Let’s look at other options. How could you, to the greatest extent recover some of those things that you wish you had had, what can we do together? How can I help you? How can I support you?” That’s a much better protocol to follow than to, “Oh, well, honey, nobody had the college experience they wanted to have. Stop it,” or, “Well, of course COVID happened. What do you expect?” Or, you know, “I’m sorry, but it’s the way it is.”
JW:
Yeah. “Suck it up and move on” doesn’t work with girls. You know, my dad… So I’m the youngest of six. I can relate a lot to your background. I was raised in rural America on a farm. Dad had a bi-vocational job like your father as well. So we had cattle and crops, but he also had a logistics company. So he was gone a lot and relied up on us boys to take care of the farming need. And I’m the youngest of the six. So three girls and three boys. And I’ll never forget. My dad has a sixth grade formal education, but he has a PhD in what I call life. I mean, he can tell you, “Hey, here’s what you don’t do. Been there, done that. If you can avoid that good things happen.” And so it was so funny we’re going through this COVID and I’m checking on my dad. He had 27 days, and this was before the vaccines came out in 2020. He had 27 days in the COVID ICU unit that we just prayed every day that he’d get to come home in some form. And they never put him on a vent, thank goodness. But, when I talked to him one day near, oh, about day 24, I guess it was something like that. If I recall it was his birthday. So he was turning 81 years of age in the hospital with no family, no one around, everybody’s wearing white or some kind of scrubs. He got all of these people around him that are just dressed as if he is some kind of hazardous waste that they don’t want to touch, you know. So, imagine escalating the whole process and denigrating by thought, right? He’d been there so long. He is getting depressed. I’m talking to him every day and I can sense this. And I called him to do what I always do, and I have done since I was born 56 years ago, when I could start talking at the age of probably one on me. But anyway, I called him. I said, “Happy birthday, dad!” Just in my most cheerful exuberant voice I could. And my dad that has my personality, I gained it from him. He said, “Thank you son. I appreciate it.” Now, how depressing does that sound? I knew I was in trouble. And I will tell you, I I went back to your book out to be, to be honest with you, I had bought your book prior to taking your three-day course and it’s called No Longer Awkward. We’re going to put it in the show notes. You folks can go look this book up, it’s on her website. We’ll give you that here in a few moments, as well as on Amazon. And this book is just loaded. I call it my grief toolkit. I mean, it’s got everything I need to help respond in a way that’s giving dignity to these people. So anyway, I carry on the conversation, but quickly I said, dad, listen, you are getting better. I talked to your doctor before I called you. He says your breathing’s better. Your oxygen levels are up. It’s looking better that we may get to go home. And he said, well, son, he said, I need the phone number for Jim Cook. Now, Jim, Cook’s a family friend of ours, Amy, that owns a funeral home. And I said, well, dad, why do you need Jim Cook’s phone number? He said, well, son, apparently I’m not going to make it out of here and I’m going to die.
JW:
And I said, oh dad, no, you’re getting better. I said, what makes you think you’re going to die? He said, today’s my birthday. And I said, yes, sir. I just said, happy birthday. And he goes, they brought me for my birthday son, green jello. If that’s not the sign of death… Who gets green jello on their birthday? And nobody eats that stuff. So anyway, a very poor comedy. But my dad had a little sense of humor still during this difficult time. Tell me on your perspective, if you would, what is it that we can help some of our more elder friends, family, and so forth that that maybe could be some way we could interject some positive framework in this process for them to see a bigger picture?
AF:
In some ways, Jimmy, that’s the same kind of thing I recommend for your daughter. Especially elderly isolated people, need to talk. And even if it’s a story they’ve told you 20 times before. Have I told you this before? Well, yeah, you have, but every time I hear it, I hear something different. Go ahead. Tell me again. They need to talk about their experience. Why, what… Just like your daughter. What do you most miss? What do you wish you had? Okay. What can we do to try and provide some of the things that would bring you some joy to the greatest extent possible? Make sure you’re giving them some of their comfort foods. If it’s not a healthy comfort food, just in moderation, but give them some comfort foods, have plants and flowers. Bring life into their home. Maybe a water feature, get them out of the house if you can. And now, you know, now that’s more possible than it was before. Get them out of the house. Nature. Sunshine walking. Try to go for a walk with them outside. That’s all healing stuff. But just as you’re doing all of this, listen and listen and listen and ask more questions and listen again. All of that must be hard. Yeah. I can see that. I can see where that would really be tough. Okay. So what do you need today when you, when you greet them, when you walk in, ask, what kind of day is it? Is this an up day or a down day or an all over the place day? Where are you today? And let them talk. Don’t say, how are you? How do you think I am? Or right, fine, fine, thanks. No, get them, get them talking. They really need that support. They need that love. They need attention and they need some signs of positivity in their life. If they can’t bring it to themselves, then do whatever you can to bring it to them.
JW:
Oh, that’s great advice. So let me dig a little bit into Amy Florian. So everyone will know a little bit more about you and hopefully they’ll go to the website we’re going to provide as well as look at your books, which I feel in this field are some of the best I’ve read. And I’m not just saying that because you’re here before me today and my friend, it’s just really very good material and information that we all need to learn in this area of grief. Tell me, who are your mentors? I mean, you’ve been such a great leader for me in this area. Who gives you inspiration?
AF:
Well, I’ve had a lot of mentors through my life. In terms of speaking skills and presenting skills, my dad was a huge mentor for me because he was outgoing. He was a really good teacher. He began his career as a teacher, actually teaching Spanish and math in high school, went into the insurance field and then was, was teaching other people how to sell insurance. He was really a good teacher, a good presenter. I learned a lot from him. Then I also started comparing notes with my brother, Joe, who also goes out on the speaking circuit and is on stages. He teaches about insurance, not about grief, but presenting skills apply across the board sometimes because we’re both in the financial field as well. We’d be at the same conference. We’d watch each other, critique each other, give each other comments and oh, you could do this. You could do that. So speaking skills mainly have been my dad and my brother in terms of grief support, that’s been, I’ve had so many people, who’ve mentored me, everybody from the people that I have met, who have taken the difficulties of their lives and turn around and make something positive happen about it. Those have been mentors for me. There’s a lot of names. You wouldn’t recognize people. I studied with William Warden, Treece Rondeau, Bob Niemeyer, people that have influenced me and encouraged me in everything that I have done. My biggest mentors, I think just are the countless widowed and grieving people who have taken that choice. There’s an element of healing. That is a choice you have to choose to heal. You have to choose to face it. You have to choose to allow those tough emotions to resolve them, to accommodate your life, to the loss, to assimilate the loss into your life, to have the courage, to never put it behind you or forget, but to take it forward and honor that person, by the way you live now, joy is possible. Healing is possible. I was taught that not only by my own experience, but also by so many people who have inspired me.
JW:
That is just awesome. And I will tell you, I have a speaking coach as well. It’s so good and how she nurtures the areas I need to improve. I’ve been speaking professionally for 25 years or more, and I’ve been on stages all across the United States with different groups, associations, and so forth. And I thought I was good and that is in most humility. I thought I was very good. My ratings were always excellent. Five, 4.8, whatever, up to five being the highest. And then she got a hold of me. She said, Hey, you know, you’re good, but do you want to be great? And I said, well, of course, you know my personality by now. So one thing Amy, you know about me is Jimmy’s not into mediocrity. I don’t like to stay with the just okays. I like to be on the mountain top. You know? So tell me this. I need to know one of the things from you. If you could have any other career, besides your current consulting business, any other career in the world, what would Amy Florian be or do?
AF:
Hmm, that’s a really tough one because I have a hard time imagining doing anything other than what I do. I suppose the natural choice would be some sort of people facing or client facing role. Maybe even clergy someplace where I’m building relationships with people, inspiring people, helping people heal over the over time, doing those kinds of things that basically doing the same kinds of things I’m doing now, but in a different capacity, if you actually crazy choice crazy out of left field choice, theater or acting, wow, I know that actors have a very wide reach and I’m a natural onstage. I have a really good memory, as long as I believed in what I was doing. And if I was in that field, I would never accept a project that I didn’t think was going to have a positive influence on the people who watched it or participated as long as I believed what I was doing.
AF:
I think that I could be very effective at the same time. I don’t want all the garbage that goes with being an actor. I don’t want the paparazzi and the lack of privacy and all of that. I don’t want any of that either. I mean, overall, I’m just very content to be where I am and what I’m doing. And in some way I will be doing this as long as I live, even when I stopped being on public public stages and things like that. I’m a teacher and a healer at core it’s who I am. It’s the gifts I’ve been given. And I want to use those gifts to the greatest extent possible with the very limited time that I have on this earth,
JW:
Your unique ability, lady, is teaching. And you have such a grace about you when presenting as well as a great understanding of your audience’s needs. Because you always address them before I ask questions, I go, Nope. She covered that. Okay. She covered that. So if in fact you were to say, see a Broadway play, come out in the next couple of years that’s, you know, The Book of Grief starring Amy Florian… Can I get copyright or do you go, are you going to take that? Because I just thought of that. And you know, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m here to help Amy. So there you go. So let me ask you a couple of questions. As we get ready to close this out. If you could leave our listeners with just one statement of advice, about grief, dealing with it and so forth, the challenges we face on a mental, emotional, and spiritual basis every day. What would that one statement of advice be?
AF:
One statement of advice. I suppose the one statement of advice would be choose healing. Healing is possible. Joy is possible. Even when you can’t see it, no matter how black the night, how despairing, it seems some way somehow good can come out of it. You can survive this. You’ve got what you need. You need to find it and do it. I tell people live your life as fully as possible. Every breath you’re given love fiercely with your whole heart and soul and live your life to the greatest extent possible. So that if you had died last night and you could have that, you would have died with as few regrets as possible. That’s a meaningful life. Life happens, you know, it’s going to. It’s not fair. It’s not right. It’s always too soon when it’s someone you love, but life happens. That’s not our choice. And I don’t want this to have happened. It happened. What are you going to do with it now?
JW:
Yeah. You know, at the end of the day, Amy, you just hit the nail on the head for the real purpose of this podcast. And that is what we do is to make the day, as you wish, we’re all given the same hours. Why is it that Elon Musk, may design a rocket ship in one day and we just go back and forth to work and argue, but the traffic on the highway of which we can do nothing about right, but we can make the day what we wish it to be. If we purposefully look at it and seize the day, you’ll Carpe Diem, seize that day and make it our own. Hey, you have been a wonderful, wonderful guest. And I thank you. And I count you as a dear friend now. I don’t know if you know that, but once you’re in Jimmy’s network, you’ve never had, it’s like that cult of love. Okay. You just never get out. But thank you so much today for being with us. We appreciate your guidance. And I am going to say to our listeners, please look at, and by the book no longer awkward, it is an outstanding toolkit, final words.
AF:
I would like to add that No Longer Awkward is the professionals version of it. So financial advisors, estate attorney, you know, professional people, the regular person’s version is called A Friend Indeed: Help Those You Love When They Grieve. That’s also available on my website or on Amazon. But for most of your listeners, the, a friend indeed, would be the book about grief to help them know, to help them understand their own grief and help them help other people too.
JW:
So both of these books will be on our website at livealifeby.design. It’ll also have a link to Core Genius. That’s C O R G E N I U S.com and where you can buy them on Amy’s website, as well as you can find them on Amazon. Either way, get one of these two books, depending on the role in life that you lead. And always remember that each of us can help others. If we simply use the tools and the abilities we have in a positive way, Amy, is there anything else I can do to make this Monday morning magnificent for you?
AF:
You have already made it magnificent Jimmy. The similarity we have is that we want, choose, and strive to use the gifts that we’ve been given to help other people and to build a meaningful life. And it always is a pleasure to connect with people who feel that. So it’s really a joy to be here, Jim.
JW:
Well, thank you so much. And Amy, with that, I want you to have the most blessed of weeks, enjoy yourself and do what we ask here on this website and live a life by design. Thank you for joining us.
AF:
You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.
JW:
Are you experiencing a difficult time due to the COVID or are you experiencing the loss of a family or friend due to COVID or any other reasons? This episode today was merely the tip of the iceberg on what Amy Florian and her team at Core Genius offer to those that need support education, and simply someone to listen so that they can move forward in life. Her books will be available in the show notes as well as on our website in Jimmy’s Top Reads. I encourage you today to think about your own, your own existence. Think about where you are today in this world, in your life and where you wish to be the critical thing this week. And I challenge each of you to seek out an opportunity to process your emotions and your approach to dealing with grief and disruption. Your eyes will be opened in the world. We’ll seek your counsel and support. I assure you because everyone’s looking for someone that will listen, go out, make the world a better place by using your gifts and your talents. And most certainly a hope that you live life by design.
