Alice left with a huge stack of papers from her husband’s financial advisor. She knew they were important and she was supposed to be completing the forms, but they didn’t connect with everything else going on in her life. Instead, they sat on the corner of her desk, collecting dust. After all, she was trying desperately everyday just to keep her head above water to survive her grief.
Widows often see themselves as blocked off from re-entering life. Many feel resigned, defeated, frustrated and confused, especially around finances. Our approach is to have a series of conversations that tackle the financial aspects of your loss more easily and with less stress. Co-Active® conversations are all about becoming financially confident through deeper awareness of your values and realigning your life to match.
Process Conversations: It’s about meeting you where you are.
Unfortunately, widows often keep their responses under tight control and block feelings. Managing, controlling, and suppressing emotion takes tremendous effort; it expends internal resources and can leave us feeling exhausted. We can even get sick – physically and emotionally – by keeping things in. However, emotions are a normal function of being human. When we don’t permit our bodies to discover and discharge whatever we’re holding inside, we don’t grow.
A Process Conversation allows a shift in the internal experience about your grief journey. These conversations are the openers for a deeper examination of your finances and future. Releasing the energy in the emotion allows new movement forward.
Fulfillment Conversations: Determining the “rightness” of choices.
Fulfillment Conversations help you discover or reaffirm what is essential to you through the exploration of your values. You are invited to pursue your fulfillment, despite the circumstances. Fulfillment is about being “alive” again after loss. This helps you gain the clarity to have confidence for making financial decisions that align with who you are now.
Use your finances to support your renewal. Discovering your fulfillment is an intensely personal journey; it is also constantly changing, which can be confusing after loss. Change is okay and you always have your values to help determine the rightness of choices. Create a life that is full of meaning, purpose, and satisfaction. It sounds simple, but as a widow, it takes tremendous courage and commitment on your part to really choose and keep choosing a course of action.
Balance Conversations: Forwarding the action.
Balance is not about making everything even. Rather, it is pulling through the grief and feeling that you are choosing your life moving forward, not just reacting to it. In your life these days, what are you saying yes to? What are you saying no to?
Balance Conversations are designed to restore flow. These conversations help to sustain change by moving beyond the aimless wandering in the cul-de-sac of grief. The intention is to redefine what is possible. It is an expansive phase that emphasizes creativity. You see the boxes holding you in and pull from your inner resources to create more flow in your life again. Knowing you have choices opens up the space to align your finances with what really matters.
In the example at the beginning, Alice was overwhelmed with the paperwork and felt disconnected from the process. In our approach, these series of conversations would transform the papers into an understanding that she could meet her daily living expenses and still indulge in her love of travel. Alice would build awareness around where she was “staying stuck” in regard to her finances and grief experience through the Process Conversation. In her follow-up appointments, the Fulfillment and Balance Conversations would help her reaffirm what was essential to support her renewal, become comfortable with the “rightness” of her choices, and align her finances with restoring flow in her life. No longer gathering dust bunnies in the corner, the now organized papers would have meaning and connection.
Co-Active® conversations create a curiosity or hunger for all that is possible – which often includes gaining or recovering inner strength and resourcefulness to evolve, grow, and expand from the loss of your husband. Most widows find themselves looking at where they are personally about six months to a year following the occurrence of their loss. There are no exact time frames when this is likely to take place, and there is nothing out of order if you find it takes more or less time. The ability to take a new look at life usually results from the passage of time, a better acceptance of your widowed state, and the courage to face a future without your spouse.
Clarity equals confidence. No matter what happens to us in our lives, we always get to choose how we’ll think about it. You are more resilient than you think. You have the power to believe that something else is possible, and have the faith that things can and will change. These conversations help you be brave and courageous so you can push through what feels scary. Bring connection and meaning into your financial decision making process.
~Laura
Any opinions are those of Laura L. Amendola and not necessarily those of RJFS or Raymond James.
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