26: Charlene Lam on Curating Grief, Grace, and Leaving Well
Charlene Lam is a certified grief coach and curator of The Grief Gallery. After her mother died suddenly in 2013, Charlene leaned into her creativity and instincts as a curator to guide herself through grief. Since then, she’s presented multiple international exhibitions featuring the belongings of loved ones lost.
As a grief coach, Charlene helps busy individuals to unpack and process their grief after a significant loss, using the lens of curating. She believes we are ALL curators after a loved one dies. She developed her Curating Grief coaching framework to help people process grief in a creative, accessible way. Originally from NYC, she's based in Lisbon, Portugal. She is a fan of hammocks, and dumplings and post-its are her love language.
“I define curating as choosing with intention. You don’t need to be an artist, you don’t need to be creative, you don’t need to have a gallery space, but you are choosing with intention what goes into your spaces. You are choosing with intention what you carry with you, what you pack in a bag when you go on a trip. You are choosing every day what takes up space. To me, that’s curating.”
Additional Quotes:
I talk a lot about the need for grit because we have hard things to do after loss and grace, grace for ourselves and grace for other people.
We misunderstand what our role is. We think that we're there to fix it or that we can fix it or that we can save them from pain. And that's not what our role actually is as someone who's trying to support someone with loss. And equally, I think when we are the person who has experienced a job loss or a work transition, we think we can save ourselves from pain. And sometimes we can by doing some research or planning or different strategies, but we can't really save ourselves from, let's say, the essential pain of loss.
We need better ways of figuring out what's ours, what someone else's, what do we want to carry, what are we already carrying, what can we let go of? And I think curating is a beautiful way to do it.
Books discussed in this episode:
The Grieving Brain by Mary Frances O'Connor
The Way of Transition by William Bridges
To connect with Charlene:
Free Monthly Gathering for The Grief Gallery
Take the Workplace Transition Archetype Quiz.
To learn more about Leaving Well, click here.
My Bookshop.org Leaving Well library has many resources to support your workplace transition journey!
To support and contribute to the production costs of this podcast:
This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.
Transcript:
I define curating as choosing with intention. You don't need to be an artist, you don't need to be creative, you don't need to have a gallery space, but you are choosing with intention what goes into your spaces, you are choosing with intention what you carry with you, what you pack in a bag when you go on a trip, you are choosing every day what takes up space.
So to me, that's curating.
This is Leaving Well, where we unearth and explore the realities of leaving a job, role, project, or title with intention and purpose, and when possible, joy. I'm Naomi Hattaway, your host. I will bring you experiences and lessons learned about necessary endings in the workplace with nuanced takes from guests on topics such as grief.
Confidence leadership and career development braided throughout will be solo episodes, sharing my best practices and leaving well framework. Expect to be inspired, challenged, and reminded that you too can embed and embody the art and practice of leaving well as you seek to leave your imprint in this world.
Charlene Lam is a certified grief coach and curator of the Grief Gallery. After her mother died suddenly in 2013, Charlene leaned into her creativity and instincts as a curator to guide herself through grief. Since then, she's presented multiple international exhibitions featuring the belongings of loved ones lost.
As a grief coach, Charlene helps busy individuals to unpack and process their grief after a significant loss using the lens of curating. She believes we are all curators after a loved one dies. And she developed her curating grief coaching framework to help people process grief in a creative and accessible way.
Originally from New York city, she's based in Lisbon, Portugal. She is a fan of hammocks and her love languages are dumplings and post its. Charlene, as we jump right into your interview, I would love for you to first share a little bit about your mother. Oh, I love talking about my mother. So thank you for asking.
My mother, Marilyn, she was amazing. She was a Chinese American New Yorker, just like me. And she moved to New York when she was 15 from Hong Kong. When she died, she was back in New York. She had moved to California and. Just a couple of years before she died, she was back in her beautiful New York state and she had bought her dream house by a lake and was looking forward to a lot of things.
She was planning a trip to Alaska and a trip to Asia, so many plans, and she was also training to be a social worker. She was embarking on a second career, maybe even a third career after taking early retirement from Hewlett Packard. And she decided she really wanted to help people. So I still have her index cards where she wrote out, you know, the things for her social worker exam and with highlighter and everything.
And that's just how she was. I'm really struck by how much she wanted to help people and also this evolution, how she showed me how much you can change over a lifetime, where when I grew up, we didn't talk about death. We didn't talk about grief. Chinese culture is very superstitious about all of this.
And by the time she died, she was giving presentations about grief and end of life planning to Asian immigrants. She'd really kind of found her purpose. And sadly, she passed away from a stroke very suddenly before she was really able to embark on that next journey for herself. And looking back, I really do see how a lot of my work with grief.
Is a tribute to her, and I also think about how it's co created with her, so I'm really liking thinking about it that way. I love that so much that the idea that it's co created and that the ripple that she had put out into the world, not only as your mother, but to then bring some of that work and then have that live on with you and the work that you're doing.
That's beautiful. Can you talk a little bit about your past association of leaving change and transition? And then also talk a little bit about how that's changed recently. When I was growing up, we did not talk about grief. Um, my first encounter with big changes and transitions, one was the death of my grandmother.
I was five years old and my parents, oh, they really didn't know how to talk about it. They really didn't know how to explain what had happened. And thinking back, they really didn't know how to talk about change. They really didn't know how to talk about transitions and moves. The other really big loss in my childhood was when I was 10.
And we moved from my childhood home of New York City, in Chinatown, in Manhattan, to a very white town. In the San Francisco Bay Area, and once again, my parents didn't know how to prepare me for it. I found out because I overheard them talking about it and I asked them, are we moving to California? And they said, yes, and that was such a formative experience for me.
I've always associated change and moves, especially physical moves with loss. And experiencing circumstances outside of my control. So I really resisted change. I would, I would stay at jobs until the company got shut down or got bought out or as I told a colleague, this job is killing my soul. And she said, why are you still here?
And I would say I'm not good at leaving. I'm not good at transitions. I'm not good at change. And that has changed a lot in the last couple of years, which I'm happy to go into. Yeah, I actually would love for you to talk a little bit about your recent geographic and place based moves, um, and how maybe that has impacted some of your, um, new way of looking at transition and change.
For someone who's not great at moving, I do it a lot. My husband and I, we got married in the San Francisco Bay Area, and then we did a cross country move to New York to my childhood apartment, which was my grandmother's apartment. And then we did a transatlantic move to Sweden, and then we moved to London.
And I have done two transatlantic moves in the last five years. Where we moved from London to New York, and then we moved from New York to Lisbon in Portugal, which is where I'm based now. And over those years, over those decades, I've gotten better. Not so great at packing. Packing the physical items is still really, really hard for me.
And I always cry, and our relationship always takes a hit. But dealing with the transition part, that's changed. I actually initiated this move to Portugal. I think that was the first time. It was my idea. And I drove it, and it felt amazing to really feel like I was going toward something. I know why this feels right, and I can set myself up for success.
I can try to cushion the blow to our relationship and to our finances and all these aspects of our lives. And I think I've gotten so much better at understanding, too, how to handle transition. How much time it actually takes. And honoring that. I love that you bring that up, Charlene, about the decision to move to Lisbon being your idea, because I think there's so much on the spectrum of grief and loss that when something happens to us, and we didn't have any control or any say, or any knowledge, you know, it's a whole different reality than when the other side of the spectrum is that we decide something and so I love that you brought that up because that that does change how I think we react to big transitions and big changes.
And there's still grief there. There's still grief, even if it's a transition that we chose. So I think that's one of the big aspects of educating people about grief. As someone who works in grief and end of life, a lot of our work actually is about educating people, because there's so many misconceptions.
There's so many myths about what grief looks like, what loss looks like, and do we deserve to feel grief because we lose a job versus losing a person? So, so many questions there. Yeah, so we could go one of two ways and I'll let you pick the one direction that we could go as a nice segue would be to talk a little bit more about some shocking things or some myths around grief and processing.
The other way would be to go down the path of similarities between grief from the loss of a loved one and what happens with your personal identity and relationship to work. So which one do you want to go down first? Let's talk about the myths and I definitely want to do the other path too. Perfect.
Right? That's the thing about transitions. We think we're choosing one path and we don't get to go back to the other location, but nope, we can actually do that. It's not linear. Oh, that was a big part of the learning experience. My first therapist spent a lot of time exploring that idea with me, that our lives are not linear because I really, really wanted it to be linear.
There are so many myths about grief. And how we process it, what it looks like, yes, there's often the assumption that it's death related. I was recently at an event for online business owners, and I got interviewed for a podcast, and this woman said, I really haven't experienced grief because I really haven't lost anyone.
And it was so eye opening to me to realize Oh, I'm at this event for people who are experts at what they do, experts at business and marketing at sales, and they are beginners when it comes to understanding grief and grieving. Grief is not just about death. Grief, we can define that as a natural response to losing anything that we are attached to.
A person, a place, a project, a business, an idea, a pet, anything that we're attached to. And this book that I've been reading recently is amazing. It's called The Grieving Brain by Mary Frances O'Connor, and it's about the neuroscience of grief. At a recent talk that she gave, she defined grief in a way that really made sense to me, and I've been repeating a lot, how we often think of grief as an emotion.
She defines it as a response, a response that includes emotions, includes thoughts, includes behaviors, and physiological responses. So responses in our body. I personally say that grief is an emotion and a response because I think most of us think of grief as an emotion. We think, oh, we lost something. We lost someone.
I felt this pang. I felt this hit. I felt grief. And that seems natural for people to be able to name. And it makes so much sense to me that we define it as a response, a full body, full life. Kind of a whole system response to loss. So that's one of the biggest ones that it's a response. It's a full body, full life response.
And then the other one is about the five stages of grief. A lot of us who are doing this work have a lot of opinions about the five stages of grief because it's so misunderstood. And that. In short, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, when she came up with it, she was really working with people who were dying. Dying themselves and coming to terms with their own death.
So it was never really originally meant to be applied to grief. And it was never meant to be linear. So I like how Terry Daniels, she's another expert who says, Well, you can think of it as, again, a range of potential responses. You might respond with denial. You might experience anger. And you might not.
These are five potential responses. You might experience some of them and you might experience a whole bunch of other ones. I love both of those because of the response. Possibility and the spectrum possibility again. I think it gives me in my body. It feels like more grace and space to have my own reaction to it.
And it also helps me have more grace and space for others, knowing that their reaction and response might be different from mine. And then it also lets us grow inside that my response and reaction today to grief and loss is going to most likely be very different. To your point about your relationship to change and transition, it will be different in the future.
So that's really powerful. Grace and space. I, I love how you named it as grace and space because absolutely. And I talk a lot about the need for grit because we have hard things to do after loss and grace. Grace for ourselves and grace for other people and yes, about what we need now, what we needed, then what we need in the future.
Um, I just finished a coaching call with a client and that was part of what we explored. What did she need then and letting that be okay and answering the question of what does she need now and letting that be okay. I just wanted to add one more thing about the business owners event. It just occurred to me that, oh.
If people are facing loss with the five stages of grief, if that's what they're operating with, And maybe they're operating with the expectation that you're supposed to move on. They are actually working with information from 30 or 50 years ago. Even further back, back to Freud and his explanation of what you're supposed to do when you experience loss.
For people who are running businesses, who have thriving careers, who work with the latest information, it's really as if you're working with outdated information. Like you're saying... Oh, let me figure out my social media strategy for MySpace because that's what was relevant 30 years ago. Why are we doing this?
Why are we trying to tackle these really human experiences of grief and loss and transition with such outdated information? I think about like our phone's operating systems. Like you can't use and download the latest and greatest thing that has happened because you're on the old operating system. That makes perfect sense.
I love that operating system analogy. Yeah, yeah. Analogies and metaphors for the win. Yeah. We're going to have so many more things to write about and talk about after this episode, right? Could you, Shirlene, talk to us about a bit with the power of curating and how your brand of curation genius helps process loss.
I'd love for you to share more about that. Irriting is the lens that I use in my grief work, and that came out of a very personal experience. Of course, this all comes out of personal experience. Most of us who do grief work are here because of our own losses and our own experiences with grieving. And when my mother died, I was working as an independent curator in London, so curating was already something that I did.
I was working with artists and designers, like ceramicists and jewelers, and I was presenting exhibitions about their work, so pop up exhibitions, and When my mother died, I had to fly from London to New York. I actually went back and forth for over a year, and I had to clear out her house. I couldn't afford to keep her house, that dream house that she loved so much, and I couldn't get myself to throw anything away.
Everything felt really precious. Everything felt really meaningful. And the only way that I could get started with making some choices was to be a curator. I put on my curator hat and I asked myself, Okay, I know how to do an exhibition. I know how to choose things for that. If I was to do an exhibition about my mother, which 100 objects would I choose?
And that was a hypothetical question. But... It really got me moving. I started choosing and I did figure out how to sell the house and how to empty it out. And about two years, more than two years after my mother died, I did a physical exhibition in London featuring her objects and it was beautiful. And when I decided to help other people with their grief, I looked back and kind of said, why was curating so effective?
Why was that so helpful for me? In a way that therapy wasn't, I've had a lot of therapy by the time my mother died, but curating was this creative and gentle way of guiding me through some really hard experiences and hard choices. And I define curating as choosing with intention. You don't need to be an artist, you don't need to be creative, you don't need to have a gallery space, but you are choosing with intention.
What goes into your spaces, you are choosing with intention what you carry with you, what you pack in a bag when you go on a trip, you are choosing every day what takes up space. So to me, that's curating, and you are already curating. You just might not be aware of it yet. So I offer curating as a lens for people who are experiencing grief and dealing with loss.
Some people are actually dealing with the physical things, the objects and the belongings. And curating is a lens, a different way of looking at those physical objects. And other people are sorting through emotional stuff, and curating is a way to look at situations, at people, at what is said and not said, done and not done, in a different way.
And to me, that's the beauty of it, art and coaching. A lot of it is about seeing things differently, right? So I think curating is a beautiful lens for that. That feels so resonant when you're talking about going back to what you knew. So you knew curation. And so I'm thinking about people that are listening to this and thinking, but how do I process if I'm not an artist or if I don't have that?
Go back to what you know, go back to what's worked for you in the past, um, and what might come, maybe not easy, but simply to you, um, to help you process through some things. I'm wondering if it feels good to go down that other path about similarities between grief and loss and how that translates to personal identity.
And what often happens is that we may over dedicate ourselves to our work and job titles and what happens when that transition happens. We often talk about the concept of secondary losses. There's the primary loss of a person or of a job or of a home. And then there are the secondary losses. All one, the ripple effect of that, but also what else did that person or did that job or did that role mean to you?
What did it represent to you? For a lot of people, it can be a sense of identity, a sense of purpose. A role, a routine, and there's so much parallel in that, whether we're talking about losing a person or losing a position or a role. In the case of losing a person, you might have been a caregiver, and that was your life.
That's how you defined yourself, that gave you a sense of purpose, that defined what you did day to day. That's how you described yourself. And when someone leaves a role, or a company gets shut down, or you leave a place, you lose a lot of that. So the secondary loss is so much parallel there. We've seen that too.
Yeah, I've, the secondary loss piece is huge, partially because I think that, um, Most folks think that the decision is maybe stay or go, um, take the promotion, not take the promotion, what have you. And then they're surprised by all of the things that come after that. I think about two folks that I've worked with who have made decisions around their jobs based on the loss of someone.
Maybe it is a divorce or, um, someone dies. a child, a loved one, a partner, what have you. And that also impacts what they do for their work in the future. Um, and so the idea of secondary losses and, and it feels a little perpetual almost. And then that brings back into full view why the work that you do with your clients is so important to help process through that.
Yes, absolutely. I think it really is processing. And often we're so focused on what's the next thing that we don't take that time to process. And sometimes it's because of circumstance, right? We need to go find another job. I need to keep going. I need to pay the bills. Or in my case. I need to figure out what to do with the house.
I need to take care of the paperwork. I don't have time to pause and feel my feelings and potentially fall apart. So, we don't take that time to really process, to really deal with all the fallout and the impact. And, I see a lot of other similarities too. The pain of experiencing circumstances that are outside of our control.
When we lose someone, when there's illness. When there's a pandemic, and we can't fly to take care of a person or to deal with things we want to, those are circumstances outside of our control. And often, if there's a change in role, a loss of a job, other kinds of job like transitions. There are a lot of things outside your control.
There's also the pain from a lack of care. Often, when people describe what's most painful about losing their person, yes, there's losing the person, and there are stories about a doctor, a nurse, A customer care person who did not provide care, who was not caring, who was not considerate. And I think we see that a lot too in work, right?
I love that you brought that up. That is something I had not thought about. But the standards of care that we should expect and be able to expect inside of the workplace does mimic those same kind of things. I've heard stories about people calling to maybe close a credit card after a
I don't know any of those kind of personal effects and being treated not with care or how important it is and how beautiful it is when they are treated with care and how much that's impactful. And so I think about the correlation, even between like an exit interview of how typically poorly those are handled in the workplace and how just a little bit of care would go such a long ways.
Yeah. Yes. The exit interview. And how is news delivered? Yeah. How many people have gotten fired or gotten bad news by email, by text? I've been speaking to some people who got let go from a contract role that they really valued and they were asked to respond by emoji to confirm that they received the message.
It's terrible. That is not. A good standard of care. Not at all. I think about a company recently that had some layoffs that they couldn't avoid. There was just some things that needed to happen. And one of the things that they did was sent everyone and it might sound on its face a little silly, maybe, but they sent everyone a door dash gift card and said, we just want to make sure that you have dinner and that you have some food to at least let us take care of that.
And I think that that is. Yes. Small. It didn't cost the company that much, but just that standard of care to say, we know this is going to be hard and it's going to be hard to adjust and start processing this, but at least let us make sure there's food waiting for you so that you can make sure that you eat.
Because I think that there's a lot of things that happen that are similar to the grief and loss of losing someone. And the grief and loss that comes with job transitions, especially when they're out of your control, you have to take care of yourself. And it's often hard to remember to take care of yourself.
And I also really appreciate that you brought up how the communication is handled and how the news is handled. And that's another parallel around losing someone that you love and the parallels of workplace. I love that example. Yeah. Because I think that speaks to of that company that sent a gift card to say, make sure you're feeding yourself acknowledges that this is going to be hard and acknowledges the person not just as a worker, but as a whole person with a body who's going to feel it in their body and also the potential ripple effect for their family.
So a whole person, a holistic approach to dealing with those transitions. Yeah. One of the things that happens so often is, is when someone else that we love. Experiences a loss. We don't know what to say. And I think that is another correlation of when someone close to us experiences being fired or their job being made redundant.
We don't know what to say. So I would love your insight there. And maybe it's not one answer. Maybe it depends on the person. But what would you say to those of us who want to support others who are experiencing loss? That's so common, the dilemma, I don't know what to say, I don't know what to do, I don't want to hurt them further.
And unfortunately what happens is then people don't say anything because they don't know the right thing to say. And that's not what's important. Saying the right thing is not what it's about. If we go back to that question of what do people actually need? What do they need now? What might they need later?
That's what I would encourage people who are trying to support someone to think. One, what do they need now? Not what do you need? Do you need to feel better because you feel so bad that they've experienced this loss? That's not actually what they need. What do they need now? They need to hear that someone's thinking of them, that you love them, that you're there, that you don't know what to say.
You're offering an ear or hand or a heart offer something and I think part of that is we misunderstand what our role is. We think that we're there to fix it. Or that we can fix it, or that we can save them from pain, and that's not what our role actually is as someone who's trying to support someone with loss.
And equally, I think, when we are the person who has experienced a job loss or a work transition, we think we can save ourselves from pain. And sometimes we can. By doing some research or planning or different strategies, but we can't really save ourselves from, let's say, the essential pain of loss. Yeah, thank you for that.
What are you walking towards, Charlene, and hoping for as you continue processing your own grief, and then also supporting others through their own? I'm so passionate about this concept of curating. I feel like I'm in love with it, and When I said that it feels like I'm co creating this work with my mother, I think she would really love it too.
My mother loved museums, galleries, art spaces. They were always my happy place because she would take me to MoMA. She would take me to the Met, and we would go to the Louvre, like during the summers, and she loved Paris. So, I'm doing a lot of research into why curating works, why it's so effective, and I just want more people to know about it, because...
Offering this more supportive, gentler, creative way to look at loss and what we're experiencing and what we might be carrying I think is really needed. There's so many people in pain. There's so many people in pain. There's so many people carrying their own losses and carrying other people's grief. I think we need better ways of figuring out what's ours, what someone else's.
What do we want to carry? What are we already carrying? What can we let go of? And I think curating is a beautiful way to do it. So, I've got a podcast in the works. There's a short film in the works. I'm working on my book. I just really want more people to know that grief support doesn't have to be grim.
That there's the possibility for beauty amidst all this ugliness and difficulty. So thanks for letting me share my message too. Well, yeah, and I also think about when you were describing what you hope that folks know more about, I'm also just imagining kind of the bumping up of us as we go out into the world, whether it's at the workplace or at the grocery store or in the stories that we pass down to those that are coming behind us.
The work that you're doing with instilling that grief can look differently and it can be a creative process. Just think about the ripple of how that will impact and touch so many that you'll never know about. Um, and it just, it becomes such a crucial, crucial thing that I'm hoping and excited about your message going out further, you have a book that you're appreciating right now called the way of transitions.
Would you talk a little bit about its message and. It's meaning to you. Ah, yes. I do love sharing objects because these objects spark so many stories. This book is called The Way of Transition by William Bridges, and this is a book that was in my mother's house. She went back to school, and she actually got her company to pay for it, but she got her bachelor's and then her master's, uh, in her fifties.
And she was training to be an Now she actually became a marriage and family therapist, but this was one of the books that was assigned to her in her master's program. And The Way of Transition talks about how there's a liminal period where that you leave, there's an ending, and then you almost dissolve before your next thing, before the beginning of something else.
And How that in between period feels terrible, and we resist it. And it's so necessary for the next thing that we're going to do, for the next stage of who we're going to be. And, of course, that applies so much to death related loss and to work transitions. And it has my mother's notes in it. It has her handwriting and it's so meaningful to me because I feel like, oh, thanks mom, looking out for me once again, giving me some resources.
And, Carleen, is there a ripple on the front, is that water with a ripple on the front of that cover? Yeah, the cover does have a droplet and then there's a ripple and you see the rings of that ripple going out. I love that. What was that spark for you? Just thinking about the ripple effect of each of us taking small bits of insight and inspiration about how to better handle grief, how to better handle and process transition and how that does ripple out for the people that we are in contact with.
And as we learn more about ourselves and learn more about that grace and space and curation and all of those things, how that can just have so much meaning as it goes from one person to the next. Yeah. Charlene, what does leaving well as a concept mean to you? Leaving well to me means accepting that leaving means loss and gains of being willing to face and even embrace that duality in the same way that my work is often about it.
Embracing the beauty as well as accepting the ugliness of death and grief and bereavement that leaving well is going to have both of it, and I'm not going to resist the painful parts because I've learned that doesn't work and I'm going to learn grieving is a learning process of adapting, figure out how we do move forward with our own lives, even after loss.
So that's what leaving well means to me. Thank you. Is there anything that you would like to share that we haven't covered just one more thing that I would think would be a, um, another parallel you've named in a previous podcast episode about people saying. I didn't get to say goodbye. I didn't get to say goodbye to my coworkers.
I didn't get to say goodbye to my office, my desk, and in the realm of personal moves. I love how you described how with your family's moves, you say goodbye to your favorite places. And you have this ritual, there's this ceremony, there's what I think of as like an artistic gesture that can be part of saying goodbye.
And how often we hear that with people who have lost loved ones. I, I didn't get to say goodbye to my mother. She died so suddenly from her stroke, she was just gone. So that was a pain for me. I didn't get to say goodbye. And I have found my own ways of, one, saying goodbye to her in that form, as I knew her, as our relationship was.
And I've found new ways to stay connected to her, to continue to have a relationship with her. So I wanted to offer that. That's beautiful. So as we close, do you have any advice that you would give folks that are listening? I would advise doing what I do for my grief coaching clients to really start with Acknowledging what happened?
Acknowledging and naming what happened. What was its impact on you and Normalizing talking about that grief and then after you can knowledge you get to start making choices Choosing with intention. How do you want it to impact you now and in the future? What is the legacy of that work that you did?
What is the legacy of that time period in your life? And you get to start making choices from there. I love that all so much. This has been fabulous and I so appreciate you Charlene for the work that you're doing in the world and thank you for coming on to have this conversation with me. This has been so fun.
Thank you. Right? Talking about grief and loss and transitions can be fun. It can be. It's necessary. It's necessary. Yeah. Thanks, Charlene. Thank you.
To learn more about leaving well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace, visit naomihattaway.com. It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system. We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide, to shift culture, and to create transformation. Until next time, I'm your host, Naomi Hattaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a navigation guide for workplace transitions.