Speaker 1: 0:11

Welcome to Unfazed Under Fire, a podcast designed to elevate your leadership and amplify your impact. Each episode offers valuable insights to help you transform your vision into reality, cultivate high-performing cultures that attract top talents, and navigate the complexities of today's uncertain, chaotic world with confidence and clarity. Now tuning into your needs, here's your host and moderator, seasoned executive coach and leadership alchemist, david Craig Utz.

Speaker 2: 0:51

Welcome back to Unfazed Under Fire. I'm David Craig Utz. Welcome back to Unfazed Under Fire. I'm David Craig Utz. I'm your host and guide on this journey of cultivating impactful, resilient leadership. This show is dedicated to empowering executives to strengthen their leadership, impact and resilience, enabling them to thrive amid today's uncertainty, disruption and chaos. Here we champion breakthroughs in how leaders and organizational cultures are developed, aiming to create workplaces that uplift and reward while igniting the best in others, all in service to the greater good.

Speaker 2: 1:18

Now, at the heart of this show is a call for transformation in the leadership development profession. The challenges of our time demand an evolution, an approach rooted in the truth that human beings already possess the resourcefulness to rise above adversity with grace and purpose. Leadership development, therefore, must go beyond merely building competencies and must focus on unlocking and enhancing this innate potential that lies in wait in all of us. True leadership transformation begins by upgrading one's internal operating system, much like a software upgrade unlocks new applications. When executives tap into their inner resourcefulness, their birthright, they unlock the foundation for self-mastery, and self-mastery is the cornerstone of leadership that inspires and drives real impact.

Speaker 2: 2:11

Without such mastery, especially in today's complex environment, leadership becomes a struggle, confusing at best and effective at its worst. This show is here to help you master your inner world, equipping you to lead with clarity, strength and purpose. Now let's dive in and explore what it takes to lead with resilient and ignite extraordinary outcomes. So, on today's show, we're joined by a special guest, ashley Jones, ceo of the Memento Foundation, who has a very powerful story and mission to share. Ashley, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3: 2:44

Thanks so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Speaker 2: 2:47

Yeah, great.

Speaker 2: 2:48

Well, I want to share a little bit about you and then we'll jump into the questions that I'm really looking forward to having this conversation with you for some time.

Speaker 2: 2:55

So Memento is a nonprofit organization revolutionizing how we navigate grief and healing, and, after the heartbreaking loss of her daughter at just 21 months old, ashley embarked on a deeply personal journey of healing and transformation, and this journey led her to create Momento, a remarkable organization that offers free services for families facing terminal illnesses, diagnoses and grief, support for individuals and communities, and workplace training to foster empathy and care for employees who are navigating loss at work.

Speaker 2: 3:28

So, through innovative programs, including memory preservation sessions and corporate empathy training, meto is not only reframing how we see grief, but also empowering people processed through the pain and unlocking the healing in profound ways. So actually, again, I want to thank you really so much for joining us today. It's a very powerful subject, this process of grief and what we go through when we have a loss. So I would love to have us start, as I do with all my guests, just by hearing your personal journey and what inspired you to create Memento, and you can share a little bit before the illness and devastating loss of your daughter and then you know through that process and then bring us to present day and whatever way you want to do that.

Speaker 3: 4:15

Okay, great, yeah. So as a young kid I always wanted to do something to make a difference, right. I wasn't sure what that was going to be. I didn't know if that would be. You know, as a kid you just see like famous people making the differences right, so it's like singer, actress, model, whatever. And then as I got older I was like maybe a doctor, right, because, uh, I love science, this is really cool. And I actually was on the researcher doctor path through high school, went to to camp biotech like was full nerd mode into science and research. And I got to college and realized that even if you wanted to be in a lab or you know, doing radiology just looking at x-rays, that you still had to cut on dead people. And I was like I'm out deal breaker.

Speaker 3: 5:03

I will pass up. Pass out or throw up, or both, right Like that's not for me.

Speaker 3: 5:08

So I accessed the other side of my brain, which was full creative mode, and did a background in graphic communications and I share this because so much of that journey kind of led to what I'm doing today and helped me be the best mom for my daughter and also the best founder, because my husband and I when we were 25, we had our daughter We'd only been married a year. We got married young. The pregnancy was a surprise and it was like, okay, we're going to be young parents and that's okay, right, we got excited about it. And at one month old we noticed something wasn't quite right. Her right arm was coming up like a chicken wing and I would slowly pull it down and then it would slowly come back up and I could tell she wasn't really controlling it. So I knew neurologically something was off, but I still was thinking like, you know, physical therapy or a surgery or something could fix it. Right, and then at two months old we got a devastating diagnosis of SMA, which stands for spinal muscular atrophy, and that is a genetic condition very similar to Lou Gehrig's disease, where muscles degenerate and there's no cure, and so this was a terminal illness. We were told we'd be lucky to see her first birthday, and at this point she's two months old, right? So best case scenario, we have 10 months left.

Speaker 3: 6:29

And so, at 25 years old, you know, our whole world just came crashing down. And when we were looking to the adults in our lives for guidance, everyone kind of shrugged right Like what do you do? And I just realized that there were so little resources for knowing what to do with grief. I looked around and saw, you know, the prototypes of flying cars and you know, spaceships for space travel and you know, like, all of this amazing technology. And yet when I was trying to find grief support tools and resources and books, it felt like everything was just stuck in the sixties and the eighties. You know. It was like where's the research for this, where's the innovation for this? Right, like we've been dying for thousands of years, right?

Speaker 2: 7:20

Like this is new yeah, that's crazy. Right, like this is new yeah, that's crazy.

Speaker 3: 7:24

And so what I realized was it was just, it's not because we lack the intelligence or the tools or the resources to come up with the innovation Right, it's just that it's such a hard topic People don't want to deal with it, and it's not sexy, it's not the shiny object that gets the attention Right, it's the thing that we hide in the closet that we don't want to deal with.

Speaker 3: 7:55

So, anyway, as I you know, my husband and I tried to really make the most of our time with our daughter, skylar, and one of our friends had gifted us a professional portrait session to preserve memories and, with the help of a researcher, skylar made it to her first birthday, um, and we didn't say goodbye until she was 21 months old.

Speaker 3: 8:10

And those photos were such a gift, not only in the moment while we had her, but then, even more so, after she died, and not just in the way you might think like obviously they were like a treasure, right, because they froze time and memories that I can't get back or can't redo. But what I realized in sitting with them was that I had a safe place to ugly, cry and let snot pour out of my face. You know, I had a safe space to continue that relationship and greet her every morning by looking at a photo and saying good morning, sweet girl. I had a way to hold her when she wasn't here to hold through a photograph. There are so many things that those photos did that were so crucial in moving forward and healthy ways and healing and when I say healing I'm not talking about like returning to who you were pre-loss right.

Speaker 1: 9:11

Is that possible Right?

Speaker 3: 9:13

But healing in this returning to wholeness in yourself where you can be authentically you and experience the depth and the expansion of life in the highs and the lows right, and still be fully present through it all. And so the photos gave me that space to stay connected to myself, to my emotions, to really feel them and process them and let them move through me and to create that continuing bond with my daughter and allow her to still take up space in my life and to share her with others. So that really led me after that first year of navigating my grief with those photographs, I wanted to give that gift to other people Because I had done my background in more creative work of graphic design, graphic communications. I ended up becoming a photographer right before I had my daughter and in the aftermath, once I kind of gave myself a year to move through things, I started my own photography business and just volunteered sessions to anyone I heard of facing a terminal diagnosis.

Speaker 3: 10:18

So that's really what led me to start the nonprofit, because my husband came to me and was like honey, I love you and you're giving heart, but you've got to stop giving it all away Like we're going to go bankrupt.

Speaker 3: 10:28

You know we have our own bills to pay. And I was like, okay, I hear you, but also we were there right, like we know how insane medical bills are and funeral expenses and like everything that you just don't even think about, that you need to pay for. And so I was like I'll find a way to give it away. And so I launched Love Not Lost as a nonprofit. We've since rebranded to Memento Foundation, but yeah, that was nine years ago. On November 19th what would have been my daughter's sixth birthday I gathered my closest friends and family who had supported us through the depths of our pain and just said, hey, I've been volunteering these sessions for a couple of years now and I really want to keep giving this away. And I think there will be enough people who believe in this work that we're doing to support people in grief, that we can do this officially as a nonprofit and serve as many people as we can.

Speaker 2: 11:22

And so that's how it all started profit and serve as many people as we can, and so that's how it all started. And how long have you been meant to have been founded in business, so to speak?

Speaker 3: 11:35

Yeah, so we were founded in 2015 and then I launched the website and everything on January 1st of 2016.

Speaker 2: 11:41

Congratulations on that. Thanks, and you've talked about going back to the grief process. One of the things that struck me in our conversations. As you said, you talked about sitting in the suck of grief.

Speaker 3: 11:53

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 11:53

I love. I mean I love it from a point of view, but. I really appreciate when somebody's real about something.

Speaker 3: 11:59

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 12:01

And in a loss. That's what happened. You just go into this pit right that like you don't even know how to get out of you know, it's kind of like that, right, and there's no way. So it's kind of like so you have to almost you're forced to surrender to it, right? What does that process mean to you, and why is it such a vital part of the healing journey? If you could just talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 3: 12:23

Yeah, I healing journey. If you could just talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, I think so often because our society is uncomfortable with pain. We try and numb it, avoid it, run from it, stay busy, not feel it. All the things right.

Speaker 3: 12:35

And so I think, by allowing yourself to sit in the suck of it, right that you're acknowledging, like, how awful it is. Right, like I just lost the person that I loved or the pet that I loved, or you know, whatever the situation may be, and there's a permanence to that right. And so there's this deep ache and heartbreak that we experience through death specifically, but other losses too right, like job loss or divorce or a diagnosis or whatever. And I think when we acknowledge it and we sit with it and we feel it, our bodies are able to work with us to give us what we need. Our, our body truly believe our bodies are designed to heal. And this goes back into my love of science, right, and it's like there are certain things that can't be healed right, like a genetic mutation, unless we can develop the science.

Speaker 3: 13:37

Some we've we've gotten close on some of them right. But, for example, when you get a paper cut, right, you can get a paper cut and be like how that hurt and then two days later you forget you even had it. It's gone. Right, your body completely healed but you didn't have to do or say or think or thing. Your body just took care of it. But sometimes, like, if you're, you know, you fall your femur bone sticking out of your leg, right, that's not necessarily going to heal itself, right. Like we need a doctor to like reset the bone, stitch us back up, maybe staples?

Speaker 2: 14:09

whatever, take care of the rest from there, yeah.

Speaker 3: 14:11

But then, yes, our body will step in and be like, okay, thanks, that was the help I needed, I got this now Right. And then our skin repairs and our bone grows back and it's a beautiful thing. And so, you know, it's so easy to see that physically, but I truly believe the same thing happens emotionally, right. Like sometimes someone says something and you're like, ow, that hurt, that was kind of like a paper cut right, and you feel it. You're like, you know, your body just processes it and takes care of it. But sometimes we need the surgeon, right, we need someone to help us put the pieces back together. And then our body comes in and takes care of the rest.

Speaker 3: 14:48

So, in grief, sometimes that loss is the huge break, right, like a heart shatters into a million pieces and it's too much, right.

Speaker 3: 14:58

And so sitting in the suck is less about, you know, trying to fix anything and more just acknowledging the reality of, hey, this is a lot and I don't think my body can manage this fully by myself, right.

Speaker 3: 15:13

And so I need to feel things. I need to sit with my pain, acknowledge it and then listen. Where is my body telling me that I need support? Where do I need the extra love and care and attention. And then how can I give myself that Right? So it's like if you need an ice pack for swelling or if you need stitches for a wound, right. It's like those things happen emotionally and internally but we just aren't taught how to recognize those messages and then how to take care of them. So that's a lot of you know. I wrote a book that's a trauma informed guide to surviving a significant loss and that's a lot of. What I dive into in the book is like just learning how to sit with your pain Right, how you sit in the stuff and then listen to your body and work with your body on your healing journey.

Speaker 2: 16:08

Yeah Well, I mean you said a lot in the answers of the first two questions, you know I want to kind of tie together. One of the things you said is when you were in the process of your own grief there was, everything was outdated in how to process it. Nothing about trauma informed was there for sure, I'm sure. Yeah, it was the stages of grief and what they are, so you can identify what you're going through.

Speaker 2: 16:30

But it's still like it labels it, but it doesn't necessarily help you with the process of dealing with it, right.

Speaker 3: 16:35

Well, yeah.

Speaker 2: 16:36

Yeah, and the other side of it is you touched on that we are built to self-heal and I think that's you know. We've gotten, so we get, and it goes back to we get so enamored with labeling what's wrong and then figuring out a way to mask or over or paint over what's wrong.

Speaker 2: 16:59

Put a fresh coat of paint on it, if you will. You know you gave us some of the pharmaceuticals out there is that's kind of what it does is kind of takes away the symptoms but doesn't take away the problem. Right, that's right. So, and that's that's another symptom of this, that we don't honor and respect our ability to self-heal. And how do we take care, first of all, the body, to do that? I just actually had somebody on the show we talked about that, which is almost a perfectly second. Now that's emotionally right. And the other thing you said is that we do not like negative feelings. What?

Speaker 3: 17:24

we call negative feelings. No, our whole society is taught to avoid pain Right. If you listen to any, most commercials it's all advertising to help you avoid pain Right.

Speaker 2: 17:36

Social media is a way to look good to avoid really looking real and authentic to people.

Speaker 3: 17:42

Yes, yeah, and one thing too, I want to mention because I think it is really, really important. So when I was looking for research, right of like you know, we got the pamphlet on the five stages of grief and to me it didn't make sense because I was like, I mean, it made more sense when I was facing my daughter's diagnosis, but once she died it was one of those things where I was like this, I just don't feel like this aligns. So let me go to the research. So I went to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's research and this is again where, like my science brain kicks in, because I'm like I want to see the research, I want to know what the study was, I want to know how many people she studied, how authentic this, you know, can this be applied to everything? And this, you know, can this be applied to everything?

Speaker 3: 18:27

And what I found was fascinating, because her original research was called the Five Stages of Dying and it was a study that pretty much just looked at people facing their own death, and so that's where she came up with the five stages from was people facing their own death? And when I saw that it was like a light bulb, I was like, oh my gosh. That makes so much more sense because there's a progression to an end point, which is death. Right yeah, and you get there, you don't. But either way, the reality is you're dead, and so you're going to accept it, even if it's against your will dead, and so you're going to accept it even if it's against your will yeah.

Speaker 3: 19:07

The body's going to accept it, right, right, exactly, and so that really freed me up to explore grief and grieving and healing without these misconceptions that you know were. It was still beautiful research that she had done and very, very helpful, but it's just been wrongly misapplied to all grief and to all situations when it really wasn't her. I believe it wasn't her original intent for that to happen and so, yeah, so there's a there's a lot that we're still learning researchers who's doing awesome stuff with neurology and grief is Dr Mary Francis O'Connor, who wrote a book called the Grieving Brain, which is just fascinating for people who want to dive into the science of it.

Speaker 2: 19:57

Hey, great. Well, you know you're talking about the misconceptions we have about grief and you touched on that just a moment ago, and maybe you've already mentioned it but what do we have to do to have a healthier relationship with loss?

Speaker 3: 20:12

I mean, I think the first thing is just getting comfortable with being uncomfortable, right, including ourselves. Oftentimes, the unhealthy suggestions that are offered or taken action on are are actions that we do to avoid the discomfort or the pain. And so, for example, you know, a common phrase we hear is just stay busy. Right, just stay busy, you won't have to think about it, you won't feel it. But that doesn't make it go away, right, it just like delays the inevitable.

Speaker 3: 20:52

And I think you know a lot of addiction, a lot of suicide, a lot of really unhealthy coping mechanisms doom scrolling, binge watching, you know lots of different addictions come out. Because it's a way to escape, right, it's a way to numb, it's a way to distract, it's a way to avoid, it's a way to distract, it's a way to avoid. And so healthy grieving is really getting comfortable and sitting in the suck of it, right, of just being okay with pain and to say you know what? This is a part of life and this really sucks, right, I don't want this, I don't wish this on anyone else either. And yet this is a part of life. We suffer.

Speaker 3: 21:54

And yet another facet of healthy grieving is not allowing yourself to stay in a victim mindset. I think a lot of times people will feel pity for themselves or say poor me, poor me, why me? And I think that's natural. It's a natural response when things first happen. But the problem is how long you stay there, right? And so can we look to the future and see the opportunity and the brightness. Not to ignore the present right, but just to see that our present reality is not the final reality, that even in the depths of the darkness, when we can't see any light around us, knowing and having faith that as our eyes adjust, the light will appear from the most unexpected places, right.

Speaker 2: 22:36

You know. That's that that's really a good point, and you would never say that, like there's a great phrase life's not happening to you, it's happening for you, right? And a loss like your daughter, or a loss, any loss we face, that feels like it's happening to us, like it's unfair right.

Speaker 2: 22:53

Oh yeah, and I think it's probably a natural course to be angry about it, to go through a process of anger about it, but at a certain stage you're right. If you stay in that place, what you draw to you is eventually, people worn out from your victimhood and you having less and less places to turn within yourself.

Speaker 2: 23:12

And that tends to become like its own thing, and what you did with it. At a certain point you decided to externalize it through service and that you recognize that by that insight you had about the photographs of your daughter. I'm wondering what happened when you started taking pictures and creating those memories for other people. What happened to you with? Your grief as you begin to process it that way.

Speaker 3: 23:45

Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of people who meet me and know me and will ask like you know, how do you do what you do? Right? My response is always like I don't. I think I do have a a strong sense of empathy, um, that I developed from my own trauma response. Right like empath typically don't get there through good feelings, and so I think I was at a level of feeling pain and wanting to help other people.

Speaker 3: 24:21

The first time I did a session it was for the Hill family.

Speaker 3: 24:24

It was a dad with stage four melanoma cancer on his face, two young kids, wife in the thirties Her name was Rachel and I did multiple different sessions with them before he died and I ended up being there when he died.

Speaker 3: 24:42

I photographed his last day on earth and spent that the next couple days with his family and I remember just sitting there feeling like my heart was breaking all over again for Skylar because it felt like such a similar situation. Right Of like God, like why is there suffering and why do we have to be present through it? Right, like why can't you just like take someone super fast and no one has to labor through breathing and you know the death rattle and all the things that you experience when you watch someone die. And I think what I realized is like pain sucks right, like pain is so hard and so uncomfortable, and so I mean painful right, but it can also be a portal to so much more and I think, if we live a life trying to avoid pain, we live a very shallow life, and I think pain really allows us to reach the depths of what's possible in this human experience.

Speaker 3: 25:55

Yes, depths of what's possible in this human experience and for me, every time I show up for a family, there is an overwhelming sense of privilege and gratitude that I get to enter into this family's life, to preserve their memories and give them this gift. But that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. You know, there have been some sessions where I've just driven home sobbing because you know I connected with the family and I'm just heartbroken for them. Or it was a session where the person was on hospice and it just brought up so many emotions of my own Right. So yeah, I mean, I think doing this work is challenging, like it's not easy and it's really freaking hard to fundraise for it too, because no one wants to talk about death or money, right, Two subjects we avoid.

Speaker 3: 26:49

Right, and so I'm like that's really hard, and there are years where I'm like maybe we're going to have to shut down right, because donations just aren't coming in. And then in the 11th hour they do, but that's I mean, I think there's just so much of my life that's been enriched by the work that I'm doing and showing up for families and then also creating tools and resources. So that's like another program that we launched as community support. And then the third program is corporate care, and so, you know, we started showing up for families just offering the portrait sessions, but then we saw all these other gaps in society where it was like no one was showing up, and it was devastating to see the impact of what happens when a leader goes into the workplace and operates without any understanding of grief and empathy, especially when there's a crisis and I think a lot of people saw that in 2020, right Through the pandemic where it's like, oh my God, this is really, really important and no one's teaching it.

Speaker 3: 27:56

So we developed the corporate care program to bring leadership training to leaders and teams in the workplace to help them know how to navigate grief at work and create cultures of caring that will not only impact their bottom line but improve employee retention, make people feel good going to work, make people feel cared for and truly build a community in the workplace. And then the community support is more for people outside of the workplace to show up for other people and to find education, support and resources again, because we're not really teaching those things Right. I would love to see, of course, course in elementary school on mindfulness and identifying your emotions and those types of things. And then we get into high school like have a, have a whole section class, whatever, on navigating hard things right. It's like these are the things that we, yeah, and in high school because I think, yeah, it's.

Speaker 2: 28:56

it's like the whole thing about everybody wins on the softball team and and we're like we, we cushion kids so much, and then they hit life and they go. What do I do? I guess I go home and live with my parents or something like that.

Speaker 2: 29:08

Cause I can't, we really. And we, because it goes back to what you said and one of the things I speak about over and over again. You know, the journey to knowing yourself is an inner journey. Yeah, and if you're constantly looking outside to either be saved or avoid, you're avoiding the inner journey, you're avoiding the treasure house that's inside us. Yeah, treasure house is like, as we all know. You know through your own experience, momentum wouldn't have been formed if you didn't process the loss of your daughter in a certain way and decide not to be a victim, to sit in the suck of the grief and to discover what that was.

Speaker 2: 29:49

The gifts that come from it through that portal are you know? Life is a contrast, so you might have deep moments of wow I'm feeling this family's loss and maybe equal moments of joy. When you feel joy, yeah, or when you feel awe when you see a sunset.

Speaker 2: 30:08

Yeah so there's this and you're talking. I think that maybe there's a depth you're talking about is that life becomes broader and deeper and more connected and we are life itself. That's the other thing. People don't get it. I say that all the time. You're not like this thing, walking around separate from life, and you're looking at life and complaining about life. You are life itself.

Speaker 3: 30:28

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 30:29

If you're not having a relationship with nature, if you're not having a relationship with the internal world. That is sometimes very stormy.

Speaker 3: 30:37

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 30:37

And you don't know, you avoid the storm at all costs. You're actually weakening yourself.

Speaker 3: 30:44

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 30:45

And from a leadership perspective. Going back to what you just said, you know leaders that are all about just getting the results, the profitability and all this. It's not that those things aren't important, like yeah. That's why I always make this excuse Like yeah, those things are't important. Like yeah, that's not going to make us excuse Like yeah, those things are still important. I'm not trying to tell you it isn't Right, but you have a breadth and depth and that's leadership. Leaders are broad and deep. The best leaders get it Right. So I would like to ask you on that point of view. That point is what do you do with leaders to help them get in touch? I don't want to scare people away, whatever you want to say about this. What do you do with leaders to help them get in touch with their own sense of grief and their own sense of compassion or, as you put it, empathy, to to kind of be more of a well-rounded human being in their role as an executive?

Speaker 3: 31:35

yeah, it's really interesting when, when we work with leaders, so we have some paid workshops that leaders can hire us to do with them and their teams, and we start with just kind of figuring out where they are as a leader, right. So like there are people who, on varying degrees of the feeling and non-feeling scale, right, so like there's one guy that I worked with who's like such a good business guy, like he knows his numbers front and back, he has all the reports you know. But then the second you talk about empathy, he's like what, like you know, and but what's so beautiful is like he is like, oh my gosh, like I need this. Right, and I think that's where a good leader can see their weakness.

Speaker 3: 32:19

And then they choose to invest in it to make it more of a strength and to get it off the weakness chart right. And so, depending on where we're starting, there are some exercises that we do. Mindfulness is a huge place where we start right, so can you get in touch with your own body where we are right now? Right, and so we do. I do a guided meditation where I just check in and have people close their eyes, just get from the neck up right, we're all in our head.

Speaker 3: 32:59

And we forget that we have this whole body beneath, with a heart and lungs and diaphragm and digestion and muscles and strength, you know. And so we do a guided meditation. I check in, you know, take them from their toes all the way up to their head and just do a check-in and say are you feeling pain? Right? Do you feel tightness anywhere? Do you feel tension? Do you feel like that's that there's a message there, right? Is it trying to tell you something?

Speaker 3: 33:29

And if not, then just in every inhale, send love and gratitude into those places that feel really good. Right, to say, hey, I'm grateful that you know. Yeah, like thank you, this is awesome. And so that's really where we start with almost everybody is this practice of mindfulness, connectedness, because even in those moments, like, we'll get people that say, yeah, like it was so crazy, I was feeling tension in my hip when we were in the hip area and I just really felt like I'm supposed to do X, y, z at work and you're like cool, you know, and like maybe that will relieve some of the stress or the tension you're holding there, right? So I know it sounds like so simple, but that's where we start.

Speaker 2: 34:11

Well, it's simple, but it's beyond a lot of like. There's an intelligence. I mean 80 percent. 90 percent of them are smarter than me by far. You know, they can look at a situation in business and dissect it in a nanosecond and make a decision like that, and it's a right decision. You know they're brilliant people I mean really cool people, you know and at the same time they're kind of corporate athletes that don't take care of their bodies.

Speaker 3: 34:37

Yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 2: 34:38

They work out, they work the same muscle. It's like an athlete working the same muscle group every day and it goes. Eventually it goes atrophy. That's where burnout comes from right.

Speaker 1: 34:46

Yes.

Speaker 2: 34:46

And a lot of it is them. I would imagine you've run into executives that probably. Maybe a next step is what grief have you avoided processing?

Speaker 3: 34:55

Yeah, and that's a big part of when we do the two-day intensive workshop. We have a lot more time to dig into personal stuff, right? But yeah, it's so important for leaders to be able to connect with themselves first and again, that's why we start with mindfulness, because it's just about how can we? Connect to ourselves how can we feel things? And then to the depths that we meet ourselves. Is the depth that we can meet someone?

Speaker 3: 35:21

else, the others Absolutely so if we're just connecting head to head, and then you come to me with a heart issue, but I haven't connected to my own heart, I'm not going to be able to meet you at your heart, right? And so the other thing that we really try and teach, without being like woo woo about it, right, is like we are energetic beings, like as human beings, we have an energy field around us and you can tell, when someone walks into the room, if they're happy, if they're sad, without even saying a word. Right, absolutely. And why is that? Because you, you pick up on the energy around them, and so that's something else that we talk about.

Speaker 3: 36:05

Is you know that connectedness on an energetic level and how you show up, right, like how you show up for others energetically influences the room, and so that's the other piece is when you're supporting someone else, um, or you're, or you're wanting to inspire a team or whatever, like if, on a scale of one to ten, if you go into room with energy level four or five, you're not gonna really inspire anybody, right, um? And so that's that's another piece that is kind of left off. The leadership communication circuit in college is like you know, how do you use this energetic communication to accomplish your goals. That also really help support you being an empathetic, kind, caring leader as well as well.

Speaker 2: 36:57

Yeah Well, you're talking about executive presence, which to me is the thing that holds every other competency together and at the highest level, the major, as there was a HR executive one of the Fortune 100 company that I spoke to one time and he said to me in all my years in this work, self-awareness is the number one leadership competency. If you have that and you expand that, all other competencies come into your purview. And part of what you're saying with the mindfulness. First of all, there's this thing called attention that we kind of like where have I put my attention? It's the thing we have the most control over when we understand how to find it and focus it. But you're pointing to mindfulness is a foundation being able to find how well my attention doesn't care. And I'm sure you have executives where and I have executives where that you even try to get them to put their attention in their body.

Speaker 3: 37:51

they don't they can't do it.

Speaker 2: 37:53

No, it's uncomfortable right it's uncomfortable, or they don't they just well, just well, I, it's just up here, yeah, it's up above my neck right, yeah, and they haven't been taught and so, like the and the thing is in our society.

Speaker 3: 38:05

Right, like we're rewarded for our mind power, we are not rewarded for our energy, empathetic power, right? Um, we're trending more towards that now because I think we're all realizing the importance of it.

Speaker 3: 38:18

But yeah, and you know, one thing you said about the self-awareness piece that is important as well is like when you are self-aware you can much more easily give people the benefit of the doubt because you don't take things so personally. You don't take things so personally, right? A healthy, empathetic, supportive leader will see someone underperforming and think that's normally not like them. I wonder what's going on in their life? Right, the curiosity which is an element of mindfulness. I wonder what's going on in their life that might be preventing them from performing as well as they normally do? Right, instead of just having them go straight to a performance improvement plan.

Speaker 3: 39:07

Right which doesn't make anyone feel good, like those are so terrible, right I?

Speaker 2: 39:11

mean that's a mechanical way of doing it, it's a mechanical head way of doing it.

Speaker 3: 39:15

Yes, and that's the point is like in bereavement, for example. One of the things we talk about with leadership is if you lost the most important person in your life today, how would you feel with your bereavement policy? Right Is three days enough? I don't think so. Do you have to submit a copy of the memorial service or the obituary or whatever to to get your proof that you had this law yeah, like, yeah, those are outrageous I don't mean to laugh at that, it's I know,

Speaker 1: 39:52

I know it's crazy and it's real it's sad and it's real because,

Speaker 3: 39:56

that is a mental approach by an insecure leader who's not confident in the people that they hire to honor the system.

Speaker 2: 40:07

Well, it kind of goes back to we don't trust self-healing. If we don't trust our self-healing or we don't trust that, you know, we think we can figure everything out in our head. That's where the survival mechanism resides right, that's right. So you're always looking for where the other shoe's going to drop. When you're more in your heart, you're more integrated yourself in your body, as you say. You're more self-aware, you're more receptive.

Speaker 3: 40:34

Yes.

Speaker 2: 40:35

And attentive and, of course, compassionate and empathetic towards others and you're going to give them the benefit of the doubt. And when you give people the benefit of the doubt, it's not about giving away the farm, but it's giving some credence to their word that I didn't tell you my dad just died, or my wife just died, or my kids now got a illness and I got to take some time off. You're less likely to not believe that.

Speaker 3: 41:03

Yeah, and as a leader I get it Like there is there is a lot of pressures on right.

Speaker 1: 41:07

There is a lot of pressure.

Speaker 3: 41:09

You can't just give free time off to everybody. Right, I get it because the business will fail, but I do think there's a balance and when you create a culture of caring that's truly authentic Right, where everyone knows that everyone has each other's back, you're going to get people who step up and even just raise their hand to volunteer and say you know what? I got their work Like give them the time off Right. Like give them the time off Right. Like it's a beautiful community of caring that leaders can create, that they like and leaders have the power to create but often just don't even realize it.

Speaker 2: 41:58

Yeah, we don't. We don't have enough faith in people sometimes. I think, demonstrating this, you know, basically, the fundamental law of influence says if you give of yourself in a genuine way, people automatically feel a desire to give back. Yeah, you're doing that genuinely and you're taking the time to listen. And you're taking time, you know, and all you have to do is look at. You know the recent disasters, the Hurricane Alina, I'm thinking about in this town in North.

Speaker 2: 42:13

Carolina, that got no help at all and you look at what happened in those communities. That's what you are unleashing in human beings when you provide them with what their needs are in the moment. And I've seen more, and I just want to say of all the organizations I work with, the people that follow that protocol, if you want to call it a protocol or follow that approach. Sometimes they're a little frustrated that a person's taking another week off.

Speaker 3: 42:38

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 42:39

But in the long run it always comes back to pay them in dividends. And I'm not saying you should be doing it to pay dividends, but it just does because human beings ultimately want to connect with each other and help each other out. That's also built into us.

Speaker 3: 42:53

Yes.

Speaker 2: 42:53

As a species, and are we leveraging or are we bringing that out is a better way of saying. Are we creating environments that are bringing out connectivity and mutual care we have for each other and fostering that as we would in any community, and also setting clear expectations around meritocracy and what we have to do to achieve it? That's all good too. They go hand in hand.

Speaker 3: 43:18

That's right, and true leaders, who are good leaders, know how to inspire action and still let people rest Right, so we've been dancing around.

Speaker 2: 43:30

This other thing, too, that there's recognition of our society is facing a trauma epidemic. You know it really, and grief is part of that. I think grief is kind of built into a big chunk of that.

Speaker 2: 43:41

And we need we talked about needing more trauma in foreign communities, where people are sensitive to people's reactivity and where that might be coming from, and being able to explore that intelligently with them and maybe give them some support to do some healing around that. And it seems the impact of resolved grief, as you said, is a trauma right as well. So how do you see the inner? I know you see a big interrelationship between grief and trauma, right, and trauma doesn't necessarily always have to entail grief, but grief is always probably entailing some level of trauma that's happening to you, you're being impacted by a loss. So how does that being trauma-informed help one be more tuned to grief and can you talk about that in a relationship? As you see it?

Speaker 3: 44:23

Yeah, so I actually think that all trauma involves grief. Yeah, but not all grief is traumatic.

Speaker 2: 44:33

Right.

Speaker 3: 44:34

And.

Speaker 2: 44:35

I had to turn around, yeah.

Speaker 3: 44:36

And I think the you know, I think, how they interplay.

Speaker 3: 44:44

And, to your point, the pandemic was traumatic, right, we all lost our sense of safety because of the political divisiveness of it. There were hateful things being said or done or whatever, right, and it was some, obviously, like people lost loved ones, and so there were so many layers of grief and trauma within the pandemic, and yet we all struggle to know what to do collectively, except for keep working, right, it was like, okay, well, I guess I'll try and maintain some sense of normalcy and just keep working, even if it's remote or wherever Some people still had to go to the office, if you're in a hospital or food service industry or whatever. And I do think that we're in this kind of fallout, a little bit from that, where a lot of people are experiencing burnout. They're experiencing empathy, fatigue and a lot of reactiveness because their nervous systems are shot, right, and so I think part of navigating the world, like I genuinely think trauma-informed care should be taught across all industries, like in the court systems, right, they deal with so many traumatized people and there's not trauma informed care.

Speaker 3: 46:10

Like it's shocking how bad you can get re-traumatized through the court system. They're, you know, in the hospitals and doctor's offices, like places where you're like, oh, this makes sense to have trauma informed care and it's just not there. As we launched the corporate care program, we were looking for places to give back and to potentially explore, like a buy one, give one model where we could you know a company buys one and then we could give one to first responders or people on front lines. And I started talking to police officers, firefighters, ems workers and realized that they don't really have a lot of trauma-informed training. And you're like, these people are dealing with trauma every day.

Speaker 2: 46:54

Yeah, what they see sometimes is causing them a lot of trauma too. Oh, it's horrific yeah.

Speaker 3: 46:59

Yeah, and I think, in order to have the world that I hope for for our future order, to have the world that I hope for for a future trauma-informed care will need to be taught throughout everything you know, because, to your point, it's not something you separate, it's something that is you, it's your survival instinct, it's your reactiveness, it's how you show up every day. And if you're traumatized and you're stuck in your fight, flight, freeze, spawn response, that takes you out of that prefrontal cortex and into your amygdala. And what happens is the prefrontal cortex is responsible for that creative thought, innovative problem solving, empathetic connection and all of that. So if we have a whole bunch of people stuck in the amygdala, back in the brainstem, and then we have a whole lot of people with their prefrontal cortexes offline, we have a lot of people walking around just thinking about themselves.

Speaker 2: 48:02

Right.

Speaker 3: 48:04

And who are truly incapable of thinking of other people and so because their actual system isn't allowing it not like they're completely lost. Yes, they're clueless.

Speaker 2: 48:16

They're locked into their trauma, which is locking them out of connectivity with others, and because you know, I mean, if you look at a lot of addiction training, it's like reconnect to people. That's a lot of what it is and that to me is kind of like they still need to be more trauma informed and most of those things. But they do have one thing which is that reconnection. But there's also, well, how do you help the person's nervous system not be fried when they're trying to reconnect?

Speaker 2: 48:43

and actually be integrated so they can connect. Naturally they want to connect because once we're in that place, that's number one for us as human beings is being in connection right with other people yeah, I mean, it's why we're here, right?

Speaker 3: 48:56

it's like I really believe that connection is, is and love is is our greatest need as humans and that's why we sacrifice ourselves for the sake of others, right.

Speaker 3: 49:07

Is for the bid of connection and so, um, yeah, so this, this trauma informed approach is, I think, is so critical to helping people heal individually but then also solving the world's problems right. We can't think of all the plastic in the ocean while people's basic needs aren't being met in their day-to-day, and so I really believe that to change the world and to really create, I think, the harmonious, you know, peaceful, innovative, creative place I want to live in, that I hope everyone else wants to live in too is is getting to a place where we can deal with the trauma, that we can help people process their grief and not repress so many of their emotions and get back into that prefrontal vortex to operate from a place of elevated thought and feeling and the beautiful thing is going back to self-healing the modalities that have come out to process trauma, grief if you could speak a little bit about because I think we're light years, people don't realize how you talked about.

Speaker 2: 50:20

You couldn't find any help when you were looking around and lost your daughter. That was back when you were looking around and lost your daughter. That was back years ago, yeah, but at the same time we've come light years. So much, yeah, and we can process and go through trauma. You don't have to be in therapy for years anymore. Talk a little bit about some of the tools that are available now. One of your favorite ones that you think really has shown amazing results for helping into the grief process, the trauma healing process.

Speaker 3: 50:49

Yeah, I have a whole section in my book called Healing Tools.

Speaker 3: 50:52

Okay, well, I want to talk about your book too, so maybe we can start doing that, yeah, and I kind of take people through the free approach first, right Of like, this is what you can do for yourself, and then the paid approach of, if you need additional help and outside help beyond journaling or, you know, doing things on your own yoga, whatever, like here are some therapies, some practitioners that could be really helpful and the place that I always encourage people to start is in their body, because if you are in a traumatic place in your brain with the prefrontal cortex offline, talk therapy is not effective or it will be actually reinforce, it could actually reinforce the trauma yeah.

Speaker 3: 51:46

Right, and so I look to somatic practitioners who, like cranial, sacral therapy is one EMDR therapy, internal family systems systems.

Speaker 2: 51:59

really good stuff yeah.

Speaker 3: 52:01

All those are really amazing, amazing raising yeah and even like some crazy woo stuff like sound baths, right, that literally, you just lay on a yoga mat and have the sound waves wash over you, and that's the sound bath, right, and it's certain sound waves, because we're energetic beings, right, they operate at different frequencies. We have different frequencies happening within our body with our different organs, you know, contracting, expanding and different things, and so I really think of a sound bath is just like the human reset button.

Speaker 2: 52:32

It's like emotional acupuncture or something. Yeah yeah, acupuncture is a great one.

Speaker 3: 52:37

I mentioned as well, yeah, so lots of great, lots of great options out there and and some of it too, to your you know your point on on the. We've come a long way in a lot of areas, certainly in the internal family systems, emdr therapy, stuff like that, but like acupuncture, qigong, like there's so many ancient practices that ancient practices that are so helpful to yoga, you know really powerful.

Speaker 3: 53:02

Yeah, it goes back to creating that integrative taking care of self, not just the medical model, right what I need right now, and so let me go try a different mode of therapy or support, and then maybe it's something I come back to. Right, but just knowing that there's not any one tool that's going to work for the whole thing. Right, healing is a puzzle and you just have to find the right puzzle pieces you need at the right moment.

Speaker 2: 53:44

Very good. Well, I want you to talk a little bit about your new book. Has it been published yet, or is it coming out soon?

Speaker 3: 53:51

It is going to press very soon, so what's the?

Speaker 2: 53:54

if you could share the title and a little bit about what you're trying to provide for people through that book.

Speaker 3: 54:00

Yeah, it's called when you Can't See the Light, and it's a trauma-informed guide to surviving a significant loss. Light and it's a trauma-informed guide to surviving a significant loss. And the hope is that I can literally be there for someone every single day. Page by page, each page spread has like a different topic, a different section to dive into. So it can. It can be read like.

Speaker 3: 54:23

It's not meant to be sat down and read like a traditional book, right? Because in grief, typically, especially with a death, we go into that survival mode. Our nervous systems are overwhelmed and we don't have the mental capacity to process a whole book. Right, grief brain is real, and so I intentionally wrote this with very short segments and chapters and just giving people one thing to focus on each day. So today, let's let's focus on hydrating, right, hydrating is so important. We need to cry tears. We need more tears to cry. Our cells are so much water that we need to make sure that we're in our healthiest state just by hydrating. And again, it sounds so simple, but that's just one day of.

Speaker 3: 55:11

I think it's going to end up being like like 370 pages of just step-by-step. This is what you can do and, honestly, it was inspired by a friend who called me from the hospital. They had just delivered a baby girl and she was active during labor and there's a umbilical cord injury or crisis and she didn't survive the birth. And the husband called me, knowing what I do, and asked you know if they should get pictures. And we talked through it and then he was like, well, what else do I need to know? And I was like, oh my gosh, there's so much Right and it's not anything I can tell you in this moment on the phone, like I really need to just show up for you every day and check in on one aspect Right and give you one thing of encouragement and to highlight one thing right.

Speaker 3: 56:11

And so throughout the last decade so that was like over a decade ago and throughout the last decade I've been waiting for someone else to write the book. I've been searching for grief books that I could just, you know, find the one and just give it away and buy it and give it away, and you know that'd be the gift. And I kept having friends call me and say, hey, you know, my cousin just died in a traumatic car accident or my wife just died in a traumatic car accident. What do I do? My dad just died of cancer. What do I do? I just lost my baby. What do I do? And I was like like there wasn't for me. A lot of people told me what to expect. People might say this, you might feel this, but no one told me what to do with it. And so this is the very real, practical guide to give people something to do with their grief, to sit in the suck and to just go day by day, stepping through, finding their own unique path for their grief.

Speaker 2: 57:14

Good, well, that's going to be amazing, and that book will be out. Your expectation will be out. February, March hopefully, and it'll be available through Amazon and all the major distributors.

Speaker 3: 57:28

Yep, yep. Ripples Media is the publisher, and it's a full color book too, so there's artwork throughout, and Amy Strickland is the artist on that. You know we work to just intuitively create things that could help people connect to their emotions. You know, art is such a language of the soul, and so to have a black and white grief book feels egregious.

Speaker 3: 57:45

So it's like you know, art is such a language of the soul, and so to have a black and white grief book feels egregious. So it's, like you know, this needs to be a beautiful book too, to inspire people to open it up every day and feel connected when words fail, you know.

Speaker 2: 57:59

So Are you going to be having a website that supports the book as well? Is that going to be something?

Speaker 3: 58:04

Yeah, so Ripples Media has my author page in the book right now, but I'll probably have a separate website for it too.

Speaker 2: 58:13

Yeah, well, please, I'll get that information. We'll make sure that connection to that Ripple media page is available in the podcast description. Awesome, and as you look ahead, as kind of wrapping up today, as you look ahead, what is your vision for Memento? Is there anything you're hoping to evolve in the work and how do you see it expanding over the years? What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 3: 58:35

Yeah, I'm very excited for the work that we've been doing this past year, which we want to continue doing, to expand a grief Basically we're calling it the learning library and again, there's just this huge lack of resource and education around grief, grief, support, healing, and so we've already filmed 13 plus episodes that will be launching this winter.

Speaker 3: 58:59

Yeah, keep building out resources this coming year and really trying to build it out to be the most comprehensive, holistic variety of videos to support people who are looking for help, facing their own loss or looking to support others. So the first series that we're doing is with a neurologist who's also an Enneagram expert and a number of other brilliant things that he's certified for, and we went through each Enneagram, number one through nine, and just talked about the experience of pain and trauma as well as like, how do you support yourself if you identify with that number? And then how do you support other people if you know that they are high in that number, right, and so I don't know of anything else. That's that's out there. That's like this. We also want to have a lot more interviews with various grief experts as well as healing practitioners, to just help people have a place to learn and to explore new opportunities and discover things, therapies or tools that they didn't know were possible or in existence. So, yeah, I'm really, really excited about that and creating that, because I know there are so many barriers to getting support when it comes to mental and emotional health and a lot of those barriers go away when it's a free video library, so very excited about that.

Speaker 3: 1:00:28

We'll still continue showing up for families facing a terminal diagnosis through our Preserving Memories program. We're recruiting photographers across the country, so if you know of anyone that has the skills and the heart to give back, send them our way. And then the corporate care will still be a focus as well. So we have free one-hour webinars that's focused on navigating grief at work and we talk about what to say, what not to say and why. We talk about misconceptions and grief, and then we talk about regulating nervous systems and stuff like that and how to approach people at work. That's really great. We'll continue that and any corporate care trainings that leaders want to hire us for. So lots of good stuff coming and we're excited.

Speaker 2: 1:01:07

It's beautiful, I mean, for everybody listening to this show. We learned a lot about grief and trauma and about how we're learning as a species to grow up a bit and begin to understand the value of living with and not getting consumed by, but absorbing and being with pain, as well as running, rather than running away from it. So much richness. And the other thing is, what you've seen on the show today is a growth of a leader. To me. I just want to say, like you know, this is leadership. This is how leadership gives birth, and you know I talk about this all the time.

Speaker 2: 1:01:41

We have organizations that jam people through leadership trainings and it's similar to like here's what you say when somebody's hurting. It's kind of like here's what leadership looks like and what you should say when you're a leader. And there's no way that leadership gets developed that way. It's through dealing with what you confronting, what's inside you that needs to be resolved, and beginning to see that that's the gift that you bring through your leadership to the world. And your loss of your daughter, which was excruciating and nobody ever wants to experience, that, was a portal, as you said, that brought something into the world that's touching thousands of people's lives.

Speaker 2: 1:02:22

So, thank you for the work that you do. Thank you. And it was a real blessing to have you on the show today. Is there anything you want to say to feel complete today as we wrap up the show?

Speaker 3: 1:02:33

I think I just want to encourage people, like if you're in grief and you're experiencing a loss of any kind, right now, like it's going to suck right and it's not this, like there's not a moment where it gets better, like I don't want to discourage you in that. It's more of an encouragement to say I'm. You know, my daughter died in 2011 and I still, like, on her birthday this year, november 19th, it's like it still is a hard day, you know, like it's a day of celebrating life and milestones and she'd be 15. Like we'd be talking about driving, you know. Um, hopefully I'd be taking her to Taylor Swift, you know, Like.

Speaker 3: 1:03:15

I I think that there's. It's easy for people to look at my life and think like she's better Right.

Speaker 2: 1:03:22

If there's no better, it's just just like there's no ultimate overcoming of it.

Speaker 3: 1:03:27

Right, and there are layers Right and as you grow and you expand and you carry on in life like you, have the capacity to revisit layers that you maybe couldn't access before, and so healing is never fully done. But what's beautiful is the ability to resolve things in your body much more quickly and without so much suffering. That, I find, is the beauty of the healing journey. And for those looking to support others, it's really really easy to want to hurry them to the future, right, to say it's going to be okay, this is going to mean something to you in the future, right. Or it's going to open up this opportunity or something good is going to happen from this right. But that really ignores the pain of the present.

Speaker 3: 1:04:20

And again, it's all about getting comfortable with the uncomfortable right To sit in the suck and be in pain and say, man, I'm sorry you're going through this and I'm here for you, right? So that's it. If you just show up with love for yourself and for others, you don't have to worry about what's going to come out. If you really lead with love, that will be felt. We're energetic beings, we can feel love, so that's I think what.

Speaker 3: 1:04:46

I want to leave people with is just lead with love. That will be felt. We're energetic beings. We can feel love. So that's, I think, what I want to leave people with is just lead with love. That's our core value.

Speaker 2: 1:04:52

Yeah Well, I talk about the power now, and sometimes the power of now sucks right, but it's all we have and there's always a gift in the moment. So I want to thank you so much for sharing your heartfelt story, your expertise and really the incredible work you're doing at Memento. That is kind of dealing with what you didn't have when you lost your daughter. You're giving that to the world, and your dedication to helping individuals and families and organizations navigate grief is very inspiring. I'm really happy that I had you on the show and I know our listeners are going to walk away with a deeper understanding of how to embrace their human experience overall with more compassion, courage and connection. So thank you for the light you bring to the world and for empowering others to do the same.

Speaker 3: 1:05:35

Thanks for letting me share it.

Speaker 2: 1:05:37

You're welcome and to everybody else listening, thank you for joining on this journey. This is a passion of mine to have people like Ashley on the show to share their journey. Human beings have so much Each individual human has so much to share, and this is just one small example. You know and there's millions of others out there and you're one of them the listeners are listening as well, so I encourage you to share this show with others your friends, your colleagues and anyone who could benefit from Ashley's wisdom and the important work of Momento. And there'll be more information how you can engage with her work and contribute to her work below. And let's spread the message of love and healing to the world. If you're interested in contacting again Ashley or Momento, that information will be below and, just as a reminder, you can find this and all other episodes on YouTube, apple Podcasts, spotify, amazon Music and 15 other platforms. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please consider subscribing, leaving a review or sharing this with your network.

Speaker 2: 1:06:40

And, as we close, remember, as a leader, your ability to foster growth, compassion, resilience and those around you creates ripple effects. As we've seen today, leadership is more than achieving goals. It's about uplifting others, creating meaningful impact and leaving a legacy of care and connection in the world. And with that, this is David Craig Utz, the Leadership Alchemist, reminding you to live purposefully and authentically. Wishing you a great, fantastic rest of your day Until next time. Have a great day.