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[Music] hi good evening I'm Kelsey crow i'm the author of there's no good card for this
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what to do and say when life is scary awful and unfair to the people you love and i am also feeling like a lot of self
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improvement efforts are going to be going my way after your presentation i wrote the book based on work that I and
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several other people do for an organization i founded called help each other out and we create tools that are
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practical that make it easier for us as friends of colleagues as neighbors even as strangers to support each other when
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we're going through something difficult that could be lost illness divorce you
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name it any difficult time that can make a shy away when we don't know what to do
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or say and I open the book with a story that I want to share with you tonight and it's actually a story that happened
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between me and my friend katie katie and kelsey to moms were out for a run one morning as the two friends ran slowly up
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a hill katie chatted idly about herself what should i do this weekend maybe a movie though i need a haircut something
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short should i get bangs again then kelsey slowed to a stop Katie kelsey said i was diagnosed with breast cancer
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yesterday Katie's mouth went dry what do I say I'm so sorry she said that must be
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so horrible for you and then she said have you seen terms of endearment the two friends were at the bottom of the
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hill now they stopped again and Kelsey as if catching her breath stared at her incredulously the movie yeah Katie sent
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with Debra Winger right and she's a mom who dies of breast cancer Oh Katie's
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mind tumbled and turned she was talking about that movie but she meant to reference another part a funny part
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humor was always Katie's first resort for everything including being scared we've all been there haven't we for you
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regret the thing that you said or did your driving in the car cringing we've
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also lost phul we've also all been that person in pain we may not have experienced the same situation of
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somebody else but we know what it is to be in our darkest hour you may for example be a stranger to the loss of a
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significant loved one but you may be no stranger to being lost and profound grief you may be a stranger to losing
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your job but you are no stranger to having your confidence broken tapping into our shared experience of pain even
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when our situations that enveloped that pain are different is the practice of empathy and that's why in my work would
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help each other out in the book I talk about practical things to say and do and I also talk about empathy and how we can
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feel confident that we actually already know what to do being in pain and not knowing what to do shows us that we are
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not on the 18 and as anybody who's been in a difficult time knows being on the B
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team is no fun grief rearranges your address book grief is a time for us to know who you can count on and who you
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can't and yet if if it is so important for us to be there for each other if it
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is so important that we connect why don't we and that's where I name three
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empathy roblox to showing up these may be that I don't have the time right our lives are busy they're full
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who has a time to add one more person onto their plate it may be that I don't
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want to make things worse that what I do or say is actually going to make someone
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feel even worse than they already do or we feel like we don't want to pry but I
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don't belong in this situation but they wouldn't want me to acknowledge what
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they're going through but here's the thing we're making this all way harder
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than it has to be and I learned this from my daughter Georgia who was five years old at the time we were driving
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and she asked me from the back seat mom what do you do for a living that's a
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difficult question for me but I ventured a response and I said Georgia I try to help friends be there for each other oh
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she said that's easy she should not do PR for my book I said it's easy why what
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would you do and she said this you gave some ideas of what friends can do for each other when they're sad thank you
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sorry mm-hmm you want to play with me want to kick down your screen mm-hmm I fell um you wanna take a break do you
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want you have a little hug that's it I'm done except I'm not right it sounds so
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simple and simple isn't always easy something happens to us from when were that age to now where we become all self
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conscious about how to be there for French and a lot of that boils down to us believing that we have failed in the
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path to connect and that we are actually just not good at this there must be me imagine some perfect person out there
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with the perfect gesture that could heal this person's pain but if you've been in pain is that
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perfect person the one you're looking for to support you usually it's the
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opposite we're not looking for the perfect person to help us in our darkest hour and we are not looking for the
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perfect gesture to get us through our difficult time and this I realize is very instrumental when thinking about
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how we can reach out to others in their difficult time I have here gesture cards
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which ask people to describe something that got them through their difficult time often these are acts that are
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remembered recalled from years back and that people still remember today and here are some examples talking just the
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opportunity to talk about what you're going through my sister came to my house
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after a terrible breakup and made me something to eat she doesn't normally come over it meant a lot my auntie
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babysits my brother and my mom gets medicine I had a miscarriage and my colleague sent me a beautiful bouquet of
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flowers with a lovely heartfelt message attached a friend I hadn't heard from in
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years wrote a card that said you are in the hands of many capable people including your own how many of these
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gestures require a significant grasp of human psychology how many of them actually take a lot of time not much we
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put a whole lot more pressure on ourselves to be the perfect person than anyone in a difficult time is I did a
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lot of research asking people what work for you and what didn't to get you through your difficult time a lot of
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that is the basis of the and of my workshops and I presented this opportunity for people to talk with me
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as an opportunity to vent get this off your chest this person didn't do this
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this person didn't do that they should have done this and they should have done
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that and what they would tell me over and over again was the value of just showing up but that's what they
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remembered more than what anybody said or did and that was very hard for me I believe because I was really looking to
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stay out of the doghouse and I wanted rules for the road to keep other case I could not believe that really just
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showing up was so important and then I went to a training by dr. Garfield he founded a nonprofit called Shanti that
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helps people volunteers who care for the sick and dying and in his training he opens it up by saying people want skills
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they want to know how to do this how to do that but more than skills what really
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really gets you trust is the kindness that brings you to them in the first place and I should have realized that
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just from my own personal story because obviously a lot of people have this cringe-inducing experience of not
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knowing what to do or say right we've all been there then we shake it off and
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move on but I couldn't move on and this is the reason that i started help each
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other out see I only grew up with my mom I didn't know my dad and I had no extended relatives she was my tiny very
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loving family she also had schizophrenia and when I was 19 she stopped taking her
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psychotropic medication and when I was 23 she became so paranoid that she changed the locks changed her phone
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number and shut me out of her life entirely there were no phone calls there were no
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cars because the loss of the mind does not have a ritual for morning and save for the support of my very close friends
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and one of whom is here tonight the loss of my entire family happened without a mention what I did with that grief was
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not to know how to support somebody else in their difficult time but it did make
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me know that it mattered in our society we're conditioned to think that being
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productive is how we contribute and what one woman told me whose child has a terrible terrible disease is that just
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by listening people are really contributing to the conversation how can we make our kindness manageable so that
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we actually show up and sometimes you may not even be a very good listener so what else can you do you may not be
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around to listen so that's where I devised the empathy menu it's a roster
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of things that you can do to support somebody in a good time in a difficult time it could be cooking it could be
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driving it could be cleaning you could be listening it could be writing a really great card but i did say cooking
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and the thing is is I hate to cook you do not want my casserole no matter how sick you are and herein lies the beauty
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of the empty menu is that you pick from that empathy menu two to three things that you like to do to the three things
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that actually give you joy to do for example i do like buying flowers getting to put together a bouquet for me that's
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some good me time I can do that for somebody else and no is going to ask me and that's the thing
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about kindness if people do not ask you to be kind you just have to offer it but
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to offer it you have to trust your authentic gift so you pick from your empathy menu two to three things that
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you like to do and offer that gift that small gift is adequate and because we can be in a village where everyone
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offers a small gift that adequate becomes awesome because adequate is better than nothing
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[Applause] [Music]