Grieving, Achieving, and Gratitude: A Reflection on 2024 with Becca Powers

In this episode of The EmPOWERed Half Hour, I take a moment to share my personal reflections on 2024—a year filled with grief, achievement, and gratitude. 

Through vulnerable storytelling, I invite you to join me in reframing challenges and victories, offering insights into resilience, self-appreciation, and intentional living.

Navigating Deep Grief

This year, I experienced profound loss with the passing of my brother, a journey that has been deeply emotional. I share how grief can coexist with love, leading to growth and deeper connections. My hope is to encourage you to embrace your emotions and uncover the meaning they hold.

Celebrating Milestones

Amid the heartache, I found moments of joy and achievement, like becoming a USA Today bestselling author. Reflecting on these milestones reminded me of the importance of recognizing and celebrating personal wins, no matter the circumstances.

Gratitude as a Guiding Light

Gratitude has been a transformative tool for me this year. It has helped me process pain, reframe challenges, and discover empowerment even in the darkest moments.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the empowered half hour. I'm your host, Becca Powers, international keynote speaker and USA Today bestselling author. And I am here by myself today just to talk to you. So guys, we did it, we made it through another year. And here we are at the end of 2024. It's the last episode.

Of the 2024 podcast season. And I thought that I would just spend some time sharing some of the thoughts that have been on my mind. so as I look at reflecting on 2024, the three words that come up for me are grieving, achieving, and gratitude. And they may or may not sound like they go together, but that is life. And you might hear Marley in the background. She's, having a field day on the couch over there.

Finding Meaning in Loss

But anyways, so, you know, in March, as you guys know, I lost my brother. I didn't really lose him per se, but he passed away and transitioned. And that left me as the. You know, the sole survivor of my family.

And that's come with a lot of heaviness and a lot of reflection. I, find myself missing him daily. I find myself looking for signs daily. And as many of you know, um, who follow me. That the moment he passed away, my sister in law and myself, we saw dragonflies everywhere. So the dragonfly has really become a symbol, um, not only for my brother, but for, um, transformation for a confirmation that I'm going in the right direction. I feel that, you know, there's so, so much to be grateful for, even though I'm experiencing a deep loss. And you might relate to this too. I want you to think about, you know, what are you grieving from 2024? And there's so many people that lost their jobs, lost loved ones.

And, um, you know, maybe lost the lifestyle they used to have or, you know, lost themselves and just continuing to move through the motions of day to day lives. And I think that there's an opportunity for us to pause and find out in in self reflection. What have we gained from this? And not just what we lost. I mean, you know, what did I physically lose? I physically lost the relationship with my brother. Um, but what did I gain? I have gained a deeper sense of my spirituality, um, my connection to him cause I am reminded of him daily. And that fills me with a lot of, um, relief. And so. You know, if you, if your heart is hurting this holiday season, what I want to say to you is look for the good, there is good in everything. And I'm not just saying that because I have a positive outlook on life, which I do, but it's a choice we get to make. We get to choose how we look at things and the meaning that we assign to things, you know, in a return to radiance. Part two, I talk about, you know, change the meaning, change your life. We get to choose the meaning that we assign to things.

It Takes a Village to Heal

And I could sit here and say, Oh, you know, I'm the sole survivor of my family. This means that I'm alone. Um, but it's not true. I am surrounded, you know, I have a husband, I have four kids while my mom, dad, and brother might be passed away. I am not. I am very much loved. I am very much supported. And that's meaning that I could assign to losing my family. Um, of I'm alone would only hurt me. It would isolate me. It would make me feel, um, isolated. unloved and, and, and unsupported in this great big world. And that's not a good way to go looking at everything. And so as I sit and I reframe this, I get to choose that this meaning of, of, of now having my mom, dad, and brother transition means that I get to explore my self resilience.

I get to choose my family. I get to choose my friendships. I get to choose who I let end to love. And I also get to allow others to, to love and support me in maybe a way that I wouldn't experience if my parents and my brother was still here, because I do have a void. And so I have, you know, it does take a village. It does take more people to come in and fill that void. And if I was in the mindset of I'm alone versus, you know, I'm supported and there's, you know, You know, enough humans out there to love and support me. Um, that that feeling of I'm alone would would potentially drive me to dis ease, um, mental health issues, emotional health issues. And I have this great big life that I want to live. I am that I am living. I'm a mom to A blended family of four. I have a husband. I have this beautiful career of being able to share deep insights and wisdom and personal transformation with you. And. the readers of my books and the audiences of my keynotes.

I have, um, so much to live for and so do you. And so I wanted to, to, to start with grieving because I think that it, we have, we are conditioned at the end of the year to be grateful. And I do want to end this podcast on gratitude, but I wanted to start it in grieving because I just want to give you permission to grieve. If you need to cry, cry, if you need to be mad, mad, if you need to scream, go into your car where you're by yourself and freaking scream, grieving is an emotion that means that there was deep love or deep connectedness and, and that there is a loss, so don't feel ashamed of your grieving, give it a space to move through you.

You know, I find myself going, I go to hot works a lot and it's a 45 minute workout in a sauna and I cry a lot in hot works, but guess what? I get to choose to do that. I give my grief someplace to go. And so I'd love to give you permission. If you have anything that you're grieving to give your grief someplace to go and please, please honor it.

And with that, I want to transition to achieving, um, for myself. Again, this has been such a wild year because it has been one of my most I would say knee dropping painful years of losing. My brother definitely has brought me down to my knees multiple times in grief. Um, however, it's also been the year of some of my biggest achieve achievements.

Embracing Success and Creating Space for More

I just did, uh, my second back to back year of hitting, um, president's club at Cisco sales champion, but it's my 10th. In my whole career. So I just went double digits and I'm like, how can I be so sad? And then also have all these wonderful things happening. I don't understand. And then of course, it returns.

Radiance has been my, my book baby for. Mm, going on two years and even longer as far as putting the concepts together and stuff. And it released in October and hit USA today. Like, Oh my God. Like that, you know, talk about being in your radiance. Like that's a return to radiance. Like here I am being able to express my gifts and my purpose with the world. And. Wonderful things are happening and it felt so there was moments during the high achievement that I actually felt guilty for achieving. And then I'm like, wait, you know, my brother's death actually has nothing to do with my achieving my achievements are based upon the momentum and the groundwork I have laid down.

Over the course of years. So again, I just want to offer a state of reflection. If you what have you achieved this year? And have you taken the time to celebrate it? I, you know, in October, I had a celebration for the book release. Had about 60 people there and instead of having it marketing for marketing reasons and having it open to the public, which at some point I'll probably still do in case there's anyone local that wants to come and, you know, talk and have a book signing and all that. But I really wanted to honor the space of like love and support and to share this monumental moment with the people I love the most. And I had 60 people there that. You know, I love, and they loved me. And I remember walking up to the front of the room and laying eyes on everybody. And the first words out of my mouth was look at all this love I found.

And, uh, it was just such a beautiful moment in time because. It really helped reinforce that we are multidimensional, that we live in multiple ends. And, you know, so as I'm sharing some of my achievements of 2024, I want, again, to turn it to you and, and ask, you know, I'd ask the question, what were some of your achievements in 2024, but have you celebrated them? Have you shared them with the world? Anyone that you love a lot of times when it comes to achievement, we don't share our achievements because we feel like it's bragging, but it also is really sad to not celebrate our achievements because, um, there's this thing that from a science perspective, a neuroscience perspective called a positive feedback loop.

And when you start to celebrate small wins, um, and share that with others and then others celebrate you in return. It creates a connection within your in your programming that says, Oh, this is good and creates the space for more. So wouldn't you want to? Achieve more of what you want. It's not about achieving for an award, but achieving more of what you want in life, seeing your dreams come to fruition, your goals get accomplished.

Um, if you had the opportunity to, from a, again, like a neuroscience perspective, reinforce good things coming in, wouldn't you want to do that? So I, again, just want to leave you with, with that, that. You know, give yourself permission to grieve and give yourself permission to celebrate achievement. It is so good for you.

Gratitude through Pain and Self-Reflection

And then the next thing I want to move into is gratitude. So how can you be grateful when you have deep pain? I actually think that gratitude, this is just in my own, um, experience is my way through the pain. Um, it's really easy again, to, to, I don't even want to say play the victim because the pain is real and loss is real, but it is easy to get trapped in victim mindset. That's a better way of saying it. And you know, there's a lot of things that. Gratitude helps the energy. Gratitude. Well, let me rewind that. So gratitude helps your energy move. It helps recalibrate something that might have caused pain into something that may give you purpose. Um, and that's been my biggest realization is that the more I think about, I am so grateful for the time I got with my brother.

He was only 43 when he passed. I mean, and it's a tragedy and I could start crying about it in 2. 5 seconds if I allowed myself, but I could also, I'm very grateful for the time that I got with him. I'm very grateful for the impact he made in. The world, um, he was in in his world. He was very impactful from his employees to his relationships and and how that impact rippled had a ripple effect. I'm very grateful for my ability to have self reflection, resilience. to express my radiance, my gifts of speaking and writing, um, gosh, I could be sitting here not expressing those things and feeling very stifled. So, you know, what I want to ask you, what are you grateful for? Can, can you list at least three things that you're grateful for? Are you appreciating yourself? Like I appreciate it. It took me a long time to get to a place where I appreciated myself. but it's been a game changer. I, I appreciate who I am. I appreciate the efforts I take. Um, I appreciate the intentions that I have behind the work that I do. I really have learned to appreciate myself a lot more.

And that's another invitation that I want to extend to you as, um, We do major self reflection here at the end of the year is List maybe three to five things that you appreciate about yourself, not about someone else. We can easily pick someone and be like, I like, I appreciate this person because of this. And then because of that, I want you to appreciate yourself. That's the game changer and this, and then you can go to You know, overall gratitude. What are some, you know, what are, write a list of five to 10 things that you're grateful for. It's, um, you know, it is the season to do that. It's a great practice to have throughout the whole year, but as you're wrapping up the year, self reflection and gratitude is the way to go.

So I just want to say to you as the listeners that. Thank you for tuning in every two weeks to our new, to the newly released episodes. Um, I can't have a podcast without listeners and from the reviews that I get to the personal messages that I get to the shares that I see on social, it tells me that you are.

Enjoying the content. And that means more to me than anything. So thank you again for tuning in to the empowered half hour. You hear me say T time. So I want you, I don't know if I've ever shared where that came from. So the acronym for the empowered half hour is T. And I was like, well, I guess I could say that any way I want to, but it'd be really cool to say that as tea and call it tea time because the world definitely needs some positivity.

And so that's why I ended up saying it's tea time, baby. So. So with that, if you like this show, please, please, please give us a five star review, um, write some comments about what you like most about this, share it with your friends, get it out into the world because empowered people empower people and We get to spread good vibes out there.

So I'm wishing you a wonderful closure to 2024 and a beautiful beginning to 2025. Thank you for being a valued listener. And once again, thanks for listening to the empowered half hour.