One minute you have it all. The next, you are dismantling a family home.

Many of you know that Laura and I have had a pretty rough two years. We celebrated Christmas 2023 in a state of blissful ignorance. A healthy mum and dad, just moved up the road from us, to spend the last of their days near their two daughters and their grandchildren. Six months later we lost Dad. At the same time, Mum fell apart with trauma-induced dementia, and by the end of that year we were dismantling their family home  sixty-plus years of a life together, packed into boxes.

You never know what is round the corner. I look back at that Christmas in something close to awe at our naivety. Somehow I thought what we had would never come to an end. We would do anything to have them back.

Grief is one of those topics that makes people uncomfortable. We cross the street to avoid it in conversation, skim past it, pivot awkwardly when someone brings it up. But grief changes you. And sometimes, not always, not straight away, not without enormous pain, it changes you for the better.

The pain does not go away. But something happens alongside the pain, something the psychologist Richard Tedeschi named post-traumatic growth. His research, and the substantial body of work that has followed it, describes how people who move through profound loss can emerge with a different relationship to life, deeper appreciation for what they have, less tolerance for what doesn't matter, and a clarity about time that most people only access when they're forced to.

That's exactly what happened to us.

Would we have had the confidence to set up this business if we hadn't experienced what we have? I suspect not. We might have been too afraid. Afraid of failure. Afraid to speak publicly about things so honest and personal. But now there is very little to be afraid of, apart from losing someone you love. Grief is a leveller like no other.

It gave us an understanding of time. A cliché, yes, but it's a cliché because it's true. Time is not a given. It doesn't go on forever. And if we didn't jump in and start this business now, when? The kids are still ploughing through school and need us. There is always a reason to wait. There is always a more convenient moment just around the corner. Grief removed that option. It drove us toward gratitude for what we had, for what we still have, for each other, and for what we are building together.

Grief taught us something very specific about emotional capacity.

It is the entire foundation of what we do at The Emotions Lab. Because grief demands it. It demands that you hold the feeling, allow it its full force, without attaching a catastrophic story to it. Without complicating it with layers of judgment or shame. To roll with it when it comes. To give it space, and let it pass through.

That is not a passive or soft skill. That is one of the hardest things you will ever do.

Dr. Dan Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, spent years mapping what he called the Window of Tolerance, the zone in which you can feel difficult emotions, real ones, without being flattened by them or going completely numb. Inside that zone you can hold grief and still function. You can feel fear and still make a decision. You can sit with your child when they are falling apart and not fall apart yourself. Outside it, in either direction, none of that is possible.

Grief is one of the most demanding and effective ways of widening that zone. Because you have no choice. It arrives. You cannot control when. You can only learn to let it move through you or destroy you.

That is what expanding emotional capacity actually means.

As a mum of a highly sensitive, anxious, complex child, you are being asked to do this every day. To hold your child's worst moments without merging with them. To stay when everything in you wants to react, fix, rescue, or run!

That is not a parenting strategy. It is a skill. And it can be built.

When you build it, grief stops being something to dread and becomes something you can live alongside. Your child's rage stops being something to extinguish and becomes something you can witness without poleaxing you. 

You cannot give your child something you don't have yourself.

Grief has given us this business, this work, this community. It gave us bravery we didn't know we were capable of. And it gave us the full understanding, not theoretical but felt in our bones, that emotions are not problems to be solved. They are the experience of being human.

Expanding your emotional capacity is finding your freedom. Not freedom from hard feelings. Freedom to live fully alongside them.

If you're ready to start building yours, come and work with us. The Leadership Method Coaching Edition is open now.