Episode Summary: In the fourth episode of our new season of Love Life, Live Well, our host Emma Cartmell is joined by Fiona Pelham, CEO of Positive Impact Events, a not for profit organisation working to create a sustainable events industry.
She is also Chair of ISO 20121 and has an Honorary doctorate from Leeds Beckett University.
Episode highlights:
- Understanding that everyone’s journey with grief will be completely different
- How Fiona’s grief journey began when she learned about her dad’s terminal diagnosis
- How Fiona worked to create space and time to grieve and figure out who she was in that new point in her life
- How Fiona decided to view grief as a hobby
- The practical things she did to help her through the journey
- The importance of making time to allow ourselves to grieve
- Trying to find the positives in difficult situations
- The elements of grief that Fiona believes have contributed to her life
- Opening up the dialogue around grief and people’s experiences
- Wanting to make the event sector a safe space where people feel their voices are heard
Key Takeaways:
- Everybody's journey with grief is and will be totally different. And there isn't a wrong journey that you can have with grief. - Fiona
- I would say it's about being very responsible in making sure that you are grieving and not sort of suppressing it. - Fiona
- It is okay to be happy because grief is part of life. It's an expression of love and we can't have life without grief. So it's okay to still feel those emotions of happiness again. - Fiona
- There's a lot of societal norms that tell us one, we shouldn't talk about grief or two, it should be a big tragedy, but the reality is all of us will lose someone. So grieving is a shared space, a shared conversation that we'll all experience and we can all speak about. It would be different for us all. But one of the most important things is that we talk about it. - Fiona
- So it's the generosity of giving the griever the space to just say anything they need and to be a listener at that moment. - Fiona
- A statistic from the grief conference said 85% of people say they are scared to talk to people who are dealing with grief because they don't know what to say and they don't want to upset them. And yet 90% of people grieving do want to talk. - Fiona
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