about me

 At the time, I was a single mother, desperately alone and not seeing a way forward. I hadn’t lost  a loved one, so my first thought was, “You are not allowed to grieve.” 

This felt light years away from the business leader I had been for 20 years. I could strategize out of any tough situation, but I couldn’t make heads or tails about 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. I didn’t know where I was in those stages, and I definitely didn’t see them happening as some sort of linear process. I also wondered if they even applied to me. I reached out for help from a counselor, but in my first few sessions, I left feeling weighed down and becoming hopeless. 

I had experienced over seven years of coaching, and I longed for a forward-thinking, goal-oriented approach, but I couldn’t seem to find it anywhere. 

As I slowly started to face my 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, the sadness, and the 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 coaching trainings and certification, almost all the clients I was meeting with were bringing up grief in their session. 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 corporates, and written well over 150 grief-related blogs. 

Grief Coaching can be a service in a way that even 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 the 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 your grief is attributed to hundreds of different unique factors. 

The grief response program I take clients through includes: 

• Preparation: Looking especially at the inhibitors of focusing on 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 leading 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 come to me 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. Don’t those that are grieving deserve to feel this way? 

I am proud to be based right here in the beautiful city of Richmond, Virginia, but I am equally excited to work with my clients in-person as I am to work with my clients located in three other continents!