Leading through loss: what grief taught me about self-leadership

I recorded a podcast with a leadership coach this week, and our conversation centred around a question I hadn’t really explored out loud before:

What does self-leadership look like when you’re grieving?

In previous articles, I’ve spoken about grief in the workplace - how leaders and colleagues can support someone who’s navigating loss.

But this conversation took me somewhere else. It asked me to reflect on how I learned to lead myself.

When leadership looks nothing like the textbook

After losing my husband while pregnant with triplets, leadership wasn’t about strategy, structure, or systems.

It wasn’t about setting goals or motivating a team.

It was about getting through the day.

In those early months, I had to unlearn almost everything I thought I knew about leadership.

Self-leadership became less about performance and more about presence. Listening to my body, honouring my energy, and allowing myself to stop when everything inside me said enough.

There were days when I couldn’t think clearly, when my body held more exhaustion than my mind could process.

In those moments, “leading” meant resting. It meant acknowledging the chaos and choosing compassion over productivity.

Creating a business from grief

Yellow Falcon wasn’t part of a career plan.

It was born from necessity, from the realisation that there were no practical, compassionate tools for widows trying to rebuild their lives.

Every checklist, template and lesson I created came from walking that path myself.

Building a business in the midst of grief required a different kind of leadership:

- The kind that trusts intuition over instruction.

- The kind that leads with empathy, not ego.

- The kind that’s willing to sit in uncertainty and keep showing up anyway.

The alignment I never expected

When I look back, what stands out isn’t the strategy, it’s the alignment.

The way every decision was guided by a simple question: Does this help someone else feel less alone?

That question has been I have asked myself a lot while creating my course. 

Self-leadership, at its core, is about integrity.

It’s about listening inward, honouring your capacity, and building something that reflects both your humanity and your purpose.

A final reflection

Grief stripped away everything that wasn’t essential.

What was left was truth, humility, and a quieter kind of strength.

And that’s where self-leadership began, not in ambition, but in awareness.

We often talk about leading others, but sometimes, the most powerful leadership journey begins when you learn to lead yourself through the dark.