IAM1159- Author Comforts and Supports Those Dealing with Grief and Loss

Emily Thiroux Threatt is the author of Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief: A Comprehensive Guide to Reclaiming and Cultivating Joy and Carrying on in the Face of Loss.

Having gone through the experience of two husbands dying, as well as the deaths of her father, mother, sister, many family members, and friends, Emily has much experience in the grieving process and has learned to face life with love, optimism, and joy. Her mission is to comfort and support those dealing with grief and loss focusing on happiness.

She earned a master’s degree in English with a concentration in writing which led to her career teaching writing at the university level, so she naturally turned to writing to deal with her grief. She also teaches those dealing with loss how to use writing to deal with their grief.

• CEO Hack: Happiness
• CEO Nugget: Take good care of yourself
• CEO Defined: Taking responsibility for myself, treating everyone well, and doing the best I can do

Website: https://lovingandlivingyourwaythroughgrief.com/

https://lovingandlivingyourwaythroughgrief.com/blog

Twitter: @ThreattEmily
Facebook: https://tinyurl.com/jauwxcee
LinkedIn: Emily Thiroux Threatt
Skype ID: Emily Thiroux Threatt
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emily_thiroux_threatt/
Amazon link to book Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief: https://tinyurl.com/byprxber

Check out one of our favorite CEO Hack’s Audible. Get your free audiobook and check out more of our favorite CEO Hacks HERE

Transcription

The full transcription is only available to CBNation Library Members. Sign up today!

Please Note: Our team is using the AI CEO Hacks: Exemplary AI and Otter.ai to support our podcast transcription. While we know it's improving there may be some inaccuracies, we are updating and improving them. Please contact us if you notice any issues, you can also test out Exemplary AI here.

00:15 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:42 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I Am CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Emily Thoreau of, Emily Thoreau, threat of loving and living your way through grief. Emily, it's great to have you on the show.

00:55 – Emily Thiroux Threatt

Thank you for having me. I appreciate being here.

00:59 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, I appreciate you coming on too. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Emily. So you can hear about some of the awesome things that she's doing. Emily is the author of Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief, a comprehensive guide to reclaiming and cultivating joy and carrying on in the face of loss. Having gone through that experience of 2 husbands dying, as well as the depths of her father, mother, sister, and many family members and friends, Emily has much experience in the grieving process and has learned to face life with love, optimism, and joy.

Her mission is to comfort and support those dealing with grief and loss, focusing on happiness. She earned a master's degree in English with a concentration in writing, which led to her career teaching and writing at the university level. So she naturally turned to writing to deal with her grief. She is also teaching those dealing with loss, how to use writing to deal with their grief. Emily, appreciate you for taking some time out to be on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

[restrict paid=”true”]

01:55 – Emily Thiroux Threatt

I am.

01:56 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, let's do it then. So to kind of kick it off, I know I touched on it a little bit when I read your bio, could you take us through what I call your CEO story? Well, then you get started with all the awesome work you do.

02:07 – Emily Thiroux Threatt

I, as you said, have had 2 husbands die. And after the second one died, I thought, okay, now what am I going to do with the rest of my life? I'd been teaching for years at the university. I've done a lot of other things. But I knew that this was kind of a turning point for me. And I had to figure out what to do. And I realized that I could help others with what I had been doing with my writing through grief, ways to different ways that I had used writing. And so I started inviting people over to my house and they came, I didn't know anybody. I'd only lived in Maui for a couple of years at that time and had been taking care of my husband. So I hadn't had a chance to meet a lot of people.

So I created a meetup group and said, come to my house and we'll write about grief. And it was wonderful. It seems like a lot of people who are grieving kind of crave a community of people who understand and can get it. And I think that was as helpful as the writing itself was, was to just get to be in a conversational group where There was no hidden agenda. We could just talk about whatever we needed to talk about. And the people just loved it. It was really great. So I felt like I'd found my niche when I did that. And the book evolved with other things that had happened dealing with that also.

03:35 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I appreciate you, obviously, for doing that. And of course, sharing your story as well, too. And I think so many times, as an English major myself, I go to writing for just about everything. I feel like it's such a great, I guess, modality or way that you can express yourself, release, and do so many of those things. But I love how you talked about the community piece. Because I think so many times when you're going through grief, going through frustration, so many different things that you feel isolated, you feel like you're by yourself, but sometimes by telling your story, not only does it, I think, provide that release, but it also sometimes connects you with other people because you realize you're not by yourself.

04:11 – Emily Thiroux Threatt

That's right. And in this case, when I first did this group, nobody in the group knew each other, everybody was new to the group. And so we weren't, we weren't coming in with any baggage, so to speak of what they thought about us before. For instance, when my husband was shocked, like my first husband who died, we were really active and prominent in the community and everybody knew us. And I felt like every place I went, somebody was judging or saying, well, should she be doing that yet? And it wasn't that I just thought that I heard them say it out loud. So, you know, that, that sort of thing happens and this way, everybody came in fresh. We dealt specifically with who we are, and who we were in that very moment.

And we could go from there. And it was really helpful. We actually created quite a bond. The people that were in the group are still friends of mine. The group stopped meeting when the shutdown came, obviously. But I took what I do online. So now I've got 3 different Facebook groups that people can do. And I do a Saturday morning, writing together through grief on Zoom group. And that helps a lot to us just, it amazes me at the end of the group every Saturday, it seems like we're smiling and laughing and feeling really good. And that doesn't mean we don't shed tears during the group sometimes, that it's such a loving way of supporting each other.

05:43 – Gresham Harkless

I know you touched on a little bit about, you know, all the things you do to kind of serve your clients. You have the Facebook groups, and then you also have the training that you do as well. So is there anything else you do to kind of support the clients that you work with? And I wanted to hear a little bit more as well about your book and what you cover there.

05:59 – Emily Thiroux Threatt

Okay, I am in the process right now of starting something that I'm very excited about which is the Happy Our Grief and Happiness Alliance It is something that people can join and we'll meet every week and each week. We'll do a little writing. We'll do a happiness practice. We'll do something but we'll build community and That's going to be starting soon. I'm really excited about it. It's becoming quite a beautiful program. And it's based a lot on how I wrote my book. When I wrote my book, I had written 52 cards to a friend of mine whose husband just died suddenly and she was much younger. Her husband was one of my husband's very dearest friends, and we were family friends.

And I thought she was not going to have any idea what to do right now because she wasn't anticipating this at all. So I wrote her a letter about all the things that I could think about that she needed to know right then. And she appreciated that so much, but I thought I've got to do more. So I ended up writing her 52 cards once a week for the first year. And when I decided to do that, I sat down and said, okay, if I'm going to do this, what are 52 things I can say, because that's a lot. And I ended up writing the content for the cards in about 2 days. And I was very excited that I came up with that much. And each 1 was kind of on a different subject. And when I completed doing that, I thought I'd become the writer I am.

I said I had an outline for a book. And so I created a book out of that. And in the book, it's not just a memoir, lots of grief books are memoirs. My memories are in there. But so are a lot of other people dealing with grief. I interviewed a lot of people and each chapter is on something different. And at the end of the chapter, I give them an activity that they can do. A lot of times it's writing something and other times it's different kinds of activities. Through doing this, they can actively participate in dealing with their grief so that they can start to move forward. So they can smile more. And It's kind of a different book that way because most books don't give you something concrete that you can actually do. So that's kind of the benefit of my book. And of course the things, the activities there are the kinds of things that we do in the Grief and Happiness Alliance meetings.

08:30 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, Well, I appreciate you for sharing that, obviously, what's in the book, but also the journey to the book as well, too. And I love that, you know, so many times in a lot of different aspects, we don't know how best to take a step forward or what to do. And I love how it sounds like everything started by being of service to somebody else. And then all of a sudden these phenomenal things started, to come about from that, like you mentioned, having the framework and the outline for the book and just being able to take those steps.

You know, one in front of the other. So absolutely love the, obviously you being able to write the book, but also the journey to get to where the book was being published as well. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call your secret sauce. And this could be for yourself personally, your book and your organization, or everything you're building. What do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

09:18 – Emily Thiroux Threatt

I think it's happiness. Not everybody expresses their happiness. A lot of times people think to be taken seriously, they have to be serious. And so they are very intent in what they're doing. I think it's incredibly important to approach everything that I'm doing related to this with a smile on my face and be happy and have people feel comfortable talking to me because I feel like a safe space, mostly because of that happiness. They can see that they're not talking to somebody else who's going to bring them down or is going to be dealing so much with their own grief that they can't really help you. So I think happiness is my secret sauce. Thanks for asking that. I hadn't thought of it that way before, but I think that's it.

10:09 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. This too could be around happiness. It might be something you would tell somebody that you're working with or if you were to hop into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

10:23 – Emily Thiroux Threatt

Oh, that's an interesting question. I think it would be to take really good care of yourself. It's like that thing about putting your oxygen mask on first in the airplane, that if you're not taking good care of yourself, you can't help anybody else. So self-care is really, really important. And I think especially in business, people forget that They think getting everything done on their to-do list is what's most important as opposed to taking care of themselves, but they can find, and this has happened to me in my past in different business opportunities.

I get so focused on deadlines and getting things done that I don't smile that much. I don't take that good of care of myself. I'll skip meals, I'll not get out and walk and do that sort of thing. And all those things don't serve you. What serves you is being whole and happy and complete in yourself and taking things, you know, prioritizing things, doing the most important things doing your best at whatever you do, and smiling in the process. And you'll find that everything comes much easier when you approach it that way.

11:37 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that so much. And I think so many times that we forget about, as we talked about before, the whole self, the whole aspect of who we are, and all those different aspects. But on an even deeper level, I say often that we forget about that human aspect of business. And whether we're talking about, you know, you know, going through or even facing maybe the grief, or we're talking about if you are maybe not eating, if you're maybe not sleeping, just the wholeness of who we need to kind of be taken care of so that we can serve even better. And if we forget to serve ourselves and to make sure that we're in a place where we can give more, then not only are we doing ourselves a disservice, but like you said so well, and like you show so well, you're also doing a disservice to many of the people that we can impact as well.

12:20 – Emily Thiroux Threatt

That's right. That's exactly how it works.

12:23 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. And so I now want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Emily, what does being a CEO mean to you?

12:35 – Emily Thiroux Threatt

Being a CEO means taking responsibility for myself, and doing the best thing that I can do. I own a company in addition to doing this. I own an ambulance company in California that I inherited and I've been involved with since I was 13 years old. And I treat people like with the golden rule. I always want people to have what is best for both of us. And I just feel strongly about that, that it's very, very important to keep in mind what you're asking somebody else to do and that you're doing it with love. For instance, last year we had the 60th anniversary of this company.

And so we decided, and we were gonna do a big celebration. We were planning it when the country got shut down. So what we did instead was put a big ad in the paper talking about all of our employees and how wonderful they were. And we gave each one of our employees $600 to separate celebrate the 60th anniversary. And they were kind of blown away. You know, who does that? But we thought we wouldn't have the company for 60 years if we didn't have wonderful employees. So I think it's very important to treat people well.

14:06 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And as I talked about, I think so many times we forget about that aspect, forget about the people that are maybe businesses that we're supporting or we're patronizing and working with. We forget about the human aspect of business. So that's why I love that you talked about that and put that at the forefront, because I think it's something that not only does it impact people there and those organizations, but I think it impacts them when they go home, impacts them when they talk with their friends. It just creates that kind of domino effect where you're starting to make a really good impact on happiness in people's lives.

14:41 – Emily Thiroux Threatt

That's right.

14:43 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, Emily truly appreciate that definition And I appreciate your time even more. What I want us to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get a hold of you, find out about all the awesome groups, your book, and all the awesome things that you're working on.

15:01 – Emily Thiroux Threatt

Thank you. Well, the easiest way to get ahold of me is through my website, which is the title of my book, Loving and Living Your Way Through Grief.com. My email is also Emily at loving and living your way through grief calm. On there, there are all the links to my different things. I'm on Instagram, I'm on Twitter, I'm on YouTube, I'm on Pinterest, and as I said I do several different Facebook groups. So I'm out there all over the place and you're welcome to join our Saturday morning Writing Through Grief group. There are so many ways to get a hold of me and I am happy to be of service to you. So I hope to hear from all of you.

15:45 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, I definitely appreciate that and to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information that shown us as well too, so that everybody can follow up with you. But I truly appreciate you for taking some time out being of service to us and being you know, on the show. But I love even more that not only do you help people out, but to provide them with those tools and the way that they can kind of get through grief or get through so many different aspects and struggles that we kind of go through in life.

16:06 – Gresham Harkless

So appreciate you so much for doing that. And of course, taking some time out with us today and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:12 – Outro