Why Strong Leaders Fall Apart in Private

Episode 2 - Why Strong Leaders Fall Apart in Private

You have been holding it together for everyone else: your team, your organization, your family, and you are good at it. Nobody would ever know what it is actually costing you.

This episode is about that cost.

Leadership strategist and behavioral consultant Brigitte Brown Jackson opens the conversation that most leadership development spaces refuse to have. Grief is not just about death. It is about every significant loss that changed you while you were still expected to perform. The job. The marriage. The identity. The dream. The season that ended before you were ready.

In this episode, you will learn why the word grief carries so much stigma in leadership spaces, what grief actually is beyond the dictionary definition, the four grief styles that show up in leaders, and which one is quietly running your decisions right now, and why what most leaders call burnout is actually something else entirely.

This is the conversation that finally gives you language for what you have been carrying.

Subscribe on your favorite platform. Then visit griefhasapersonality.com to take the free Grief Response Profile and discover your grief leadership style.

* The content of this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health, medical, or therapeutic advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

I want to ask you something, and I want you to sit with it for a second before you answer. So just wait a minute. When something significant happened to you, when you lost something or someone that mattered, what did you do? Did you get busy? Did you start talking to everyone around you? Did you go quietly and hold it privately? Did you start researching and analyzing everything, trying to make sense of it? Your answer to that question reveals something very, very important. It reveals your grief style. And your grief style has been shaping the way you lead longer than you probably realize. Let me say this. And then we'll start. This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. And it's not a substitute for professional mental health, medical, or therapeutic advice, diagnosis, or treatment. So just remember that. So I need to address something before we go further. I need to address the word itself. Grief. Yes, grief. For a lot of leaders, that word just made you uncomfortable. Maybe you tensed up a little. Maybe you almost clicked away. Maybe you told yourself this episode is not really for you because you're doing fine and you haven't lost anyone recently. But stay with me, stay with me. This is exactly for you. Here is why that word carries so much weight in leadership spaces. We've been trained intentionally and unintentionally to associate grief with weakness. Leadership culture has told us that strong leaders they push through, they don't fall apart, they keep the team moving and the vision up front. And somewhere in that messaging, grief became a word we stopped saying out loud. It became something to manage quietly and privately, alone and quickly. It became a stigma. A leader who says, I'm grieving, risks being seen as unstable, distracted, and not up for the role. So most leaders never say it. They say they're tired, they say they're in a season, they say they're going through some things, they say anything except the actual word. Because the actual word itself feels like an admission of something they cannot afford to admit. And I want to change that today. I want to give you permission to say the word. Yeah. Say it out loud to yourself if to nobody else. Let's say it. Grief. So the dictionary defines grief as a deep and poignant distress caused by or as by bereavement. But here's what the dictionary doesn't fully capture. Grief is not reserved for death. That's the biggest misconception leaders carry into their careers, and it costs them more than they know. Grief is the internal response to any significant loss. Yep, I'm gonna say that again. Grief is an eternal response to any significant loss. That means you can grieve a job you were let go from after 15 years of giving your life to. You can grieve a marriage that ended whether you wanted it to or not. You can grieve a friendship that dissolved without explanation. You can grieve that business that you built, but you had to close it. You can grieve a version of yourself, the person you were before the diagnosis, before the demotion, before the betrayal, before the thing that changed everything. You can grieve a role that was taken from you, a title, a community, a church, a team, a season of influence that ended before you were ready. You can grieve that dream that did not become what you believed it would. None of that requires a funeral, but all of it deserves to be named. The reason this matters for leaders specifically is because leaders experience a loss at disproportionate rates and talk about it at almost no rate at all. The higher you rise, the more you're expected to absorb. Organizational changes that upheave teams and expend leaving you, that public or private betrayal, leaders carry those weights, they carry those losses into everything. And they're not processing it for themselves. So then you wonder why you feel like you're running on empty, even when everything looks successful from the outside. Come on, let's stop. That's not burnout, that's unprocessed grief, wearing burnout clothes. So today we're going to say the word. We're going to normalize this conversation. And not because it's comfortable, but because it's absolutely necessary. Your grief does not make you weak. You're not a weak leader. Understanding your grief is what makes you a better leader. So now let me show you what I mean. Here's what most people believe about grief. They believe it looks the same for everyone, that there is a right way to grieve. That if you are not crying, not talking about it, not taking time off, then you are either strong or you're in denial. And that's not true. It's not even close to the truth. Grief has a personality. Your personality. It moves through you, the way you're wired to move through everything. And when you understand that principle, something shifts. You start stop judging yourself and you start handling those losses. You stop wondering why you didn't fall apart the way such and such did. You can pull yourself together, and then but sometimes question yourself because you pull yourself like the other person. This is going to help you understand yourself. So I've spent more than 30 years working with leaders. But what kept what I kept seeing that over and over again, there was a pattern, even mine. Leaders who have been through something significant, a loss, a crisis, a death, a divorce, a layoff, the end of something they built, they were still leading. They still were showing up. They were still performing, they were still getting the outcomes, but something different was inside of them, and they didn't know how to name it. The grief was in the room. It was just wearing a suit. So let me introduce you to four types of leaders I found myself working with. And you might recognize yourself in one of them. The first leader is the strider. So when loss hits, the strider keeps moving. They keep moving, right? Not because they feel like it, but because it's dangerous for them to be still. They need momentum. So they push their way through their responsibilities, their routines. They themselves were being strong. In a lot of ways, yeah, they weren't. But there's a difference between strong and well. The strider does not always know the difference until burnout is introduced to them. The second leader is a soul sharer. When losses come, they become the person who holds the room together. They hold the stories, they keep the memories alive, they check in on everyone else while quietly setting their own grief down. They're expressive, they're relational, they process by talking, by being with people. But when you pour into everybody else without replenishing yourself, you run dry in the ways you show up, and your leadership will see it before you even know it. The third type of leader is the anchor. And the anchor stabilizes everyone around them while carrying everything themselves privately. So what they do is they don't talk about it. They go through it because their instinct is to protect the people they lead. So they're absorbers, they endure, but their body is keeping the score, even when their words don't. So they might have tight chests, fatigue, uh, might feel like they need more rest, but they need peace. And the fourth leader is the insight seeker. They go through the mind first. So they're the researchers, they're gonna analyze what happened. They want to work on things. How can they fix it, right? Instead of looking at what they're feeling. But at some point, the analysis becomes a way of keeping the actual pain at a safe distance. So understanding your grief and moving through your grief are two separate things. So for those four styles, it really, really matters. So here's the part that can help you with your leadership. Every one of those styles has a strength, but every one of them also has a risk. The strider's risk is burnout, the soul share's risk is emotional exhaustion. The anchor's risk is silent overload, and the inside seeker's risk is emotional stagnation. Now, every one of these risks shows up in your leadership before it shows up in your personal life, even. So it shows up in how you make decisions, how patient you are with your team, and even yourself, and whether you can receive feedback, whether you shut down, it's in your leading, the clarity that you have, or the wall that you build up to protect yourself from feeling. Yeah, yep. Nobody taught us this. Leadership development programs, they don't cover it. Business school definitely doesn't cover it. Most coaches or mentors don't even know the language for it. That's why this show exists. Grief has a personality. So I want you to know this. I want you to know that you have somebody that you can count on, and that's me. I want you to know that you don't have to carry this quietly yourself. I want you to know that you can name it, you can label it. I want you to know that. I really want you to know that. I hope you can hear me. I want you to know that. Because when I understood my own wiring and how it shaped the way that I moved through all of the various losses that I've had, I got to stop fighting myself. I started leading from a place of honesty. And that is what I want from you. So here is your next steps. I want you to go to griefhasapersonality.com. And I want you to take the grief response profile. For now, it's free. It only takes about five minutes to take it. And at the end of it, you're gonna know your grief style. You're gonna know your strengths, you're gonna know your risk, you're gonna know the specific pattern in the way that you lead through all of this. Now, this is not a therapy tool, as I said in my disclaimer earlier. This is a leadership clarity tool. There's a difference. So I want you to go take it this week. Then I want you to come back here and keep listening. I want to have lots of honest conversations with you. Again, my name is Bridget Brown Jackson, and this is Greek as a personality. I'll see you in the next episode.