about me

At the time, I was a newly single mother, desperately alone, and not seeing a way forward. I didn’t have any models of how to navigate the loss of marriage or know if it was even possible. 

This felt light years away from the business leader I had been for 20 years. Before grief hit my life, I could strategize out of any tough situation. But when my life flipped upside down, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what I was experiencing.

When I finally identified what I was experiencing as grief, I started to research what I knew to be true: 

“Okay, so I know there are five stages of grief, right?” 

The research sent me into a further decline. The five stages told me about the emotions of grieving, but I wanted to know what to do, how to process, and how to cope. I also was experiencing so many of the stages all at one time. It felt like there was nothing for me to follow, and I felt even more lost.

I reached out for help from a therapist, but in my first few sessions, I left feeling weighed down and hopeless. I was now diagnosed as “depressed” and “anxious.” Instead of feeling like I gained a helpful path forward, I felt further strapped down with titles I never knew to be true for myself.

I had been a life coach for over seven years when I wanted to try to turn my grief around, and I longed for a forward-thinking, goal-oriented approach. I just couldn’t seem to find it anywhere. 

As I slowly started to face the deep fears of what I was experiencing, I wondered: 

“What would happen if I took my own coaching abilities and created a space for myself to grieve intentionally?”

For months, I carved out an hour or two at a time in a room by myself and with my grief. I sat with the rage, sadness, and inhibitions, and allowed everything to come to the surface. I found a desire to create art in this space—something I had never done before. 

Little by little, the symptoms of grief began to make sense. The physical actions that came out of those first sessions with myself showed me a way forward with grief. This wasn’t a quick fix. This wasn’t a silver bullet. This wasn’t a touch from a magic wand. 

This was compassionate curiosity. 

Little did I know, this was the beginning of Positive Doing Grief Coaching. 

At that moment, I vowed I wouldn’t let anyone do this work alone if they didn’t have to. 

Two years later, after multiple accredited coachings, trainings, and certifications, almost all the clients I was meeting with were bringing up grief in their sessions. 

I welcomed all kinds of grief: 

• Death of a loved one
• Loss of a marriage
• Loss of a job
• Loss of a pregnancy 
• Loss of health
• Loss of a loved one’s memory
• Even retirement! 

Years later, I have worked with hundreds of clients, spoken widely about grief, offered trainings for corporations, and written well over 150 grief-related blogs. 

Grief Coaching can help people in a way counseling and psychotherapy cannot. Coaching can walk the excruciating avenue after an immediate loss as someone struggles to make sense of what is next. The structure and approach of coaching can be a safe space to both explore the inhumanity and injustice of what people face in loss and also be a service to help the individual clarify what needs to happen next. This can happen as someone is even navigating the difficult administrative repercussions following a loss (e.g., dealing with probate, searching for a new job, exploring treatment options for illness, etc.). 

One thing is for certain: people are aching for order in chaos. What I hear most of the time is:

“I just want to feel peace! Everything feels like it’s in a downward spiral.” 

Creating a space of trust and compassion is the only place to start. Just like I offered myself compassion in that space, I do the same for others. From this place, the Positive Doing Grief Coaching moves the client closer to the heart of their grief—to a deeper awareness—and begins the movement forward. Each person’s process is unique to them because their grief is attributed to hundreds of different factors. 

The grief response program I take clients through includes: 

• Preparation: Looking at the inhibitors of their grief
• Exploration: Observing symptoms and shifts in identity
• Experimentation: Using aligned grief response tools
• Acceleration: Working more and more independently in response to grief triggers

In the next five years, I hope Positive Doing will be a leader in the customer experience for grieving clients and lead the way for the rest of the mental health industry. Too often, clients come to me after not receiving a response from a well-established counseling business. They show up after exhausting all other options. I want to show what is possible when we make the experience not just flawless administratively, but also make the client feel like they have been cared for impeccably. I am proud to be based right here in the beautiful city of Richmond, Virginia, but I am just as excited to work with my clients in- person as I am to work with my clients remotely in three other continents!