the power of narrative therapies

The speaker discusses the use of AI in generating ideas for their newsletter and how it has been helpful in their work. They mention a tool called Jasper, recommended by HubSpot, which they use to gather industry trends. They also touch on the topic of narrative therapies, which are seen as a potent tool in grief counseling. Narrative therapies involve clients expressing their grief journey through storytelling, allowing them to explore different perspectives and ways of dealing with their loss. The approach respects the individual's unique grief experience and cultural background. The speaker suggests that funeral homes can create opportunities for people to come together and share their experiences and memories related to their loss, fostering connection and support. They encourage listeners to reach out for further discussion. Hello and welcome to the Industry Insights section of the Ash Flash Building Connections newsletter. I am here today to talk a little bit more about narrative therapies. So honestly, since you've made the commitment to listen to this, I want you to know I've been using AI to generate ideas for this newsletter and really using it on a daily basis in a lot of different things that I do. My son was encouraging me to incorporate more of it. You have to take what comes and then make it your own, but it's a huge help. So if you want to talk even more about that and about how you might put that to work for you in your funeral home or a pre-need agent or salesperson or whatever it is you're doing, reach out to me and let's have that conversation. I'd love to share what I know, which is only scratching the surface. So I put in to, Jasper is the tool I'm using. It's recommended by HubSpot and HubSpot is what we use at Golden Considerations as our CRM for us and for our partners who are taking advantage, full advantage of our amazing response driven Facebook marketing system that's just crushing it really for all the partners that are using it. It's generating a lot of leads. So if you want to talk about that, let me know. At any rate, I put this idea about industry trends into Jasper and Jasper is a great tool in a lot of different ways. It's really a lot better than any of the other tools I've tried. So again, if you want to talk about that in more detail, let me know. So I put in, write me a paragraph about recent trends in the funeral profession. And it kind of gave me a version of what you see as the paragraph here that you read that got you to this link to this audio podcast. And now I just want to share with you the additional thing that it talked about, about the narrative therapies, storytelling as a means of healing and grieving and mourning and all that. And I wanted to also say that this section of the newsletter is really designed to inspire you hopefully and maybe put some stuff out there and in front of you that you might not have seen otherwise to get you thinking and growing personally and professionally and exploring new ideas. So it's not designed to be an end all, be all thorough thing on this topic. And so the narrative therapies caught my eye, so I asked AI, expand upon narrative therapies. And it gave me this, a potent tool. And this is straight out of the AI. I didn't change this at all, just to give you an idea of kind of how it's working. Narrative therapies, a potent tool in the field of grief counseling, view individuals as separate from their problems and focus on the stories that people construct to make sense of their lives. This form of therapy allows clients to express their grief journey by recounting their experiences, feelings, and memories related to their loss through storytelling. Clients can externalize their grief, view it from different perspectives, and explore various ways of dealing with it. The narrative approach fosters a sense of empowerment and agency as clients can reframe their narratives, highlighting resilience, strengths, and resources they have used to navigate through their grief. This therapeutic method is particularly effective in its respect for the individual's unique grief experience, cultural background, and personal values. So I thought that was really good. That was really insightful for me. I read that. It got me thinking in new ways. Here's what it gets me thinking about, a couple of things. So I had the amazing experience in the first half of my career working as a clinical exercise physiologist and working directly for someone by the name of Dean Ornish. You may or may not have heard of him. He was famous at the time in the diet wars and the whole thing. He had something called the Heart Disease Reversal Program. And in that program, everybody got really focused and caught up in the diet aspects of that program. But where the real power of that program was, was in the group support, the community piece, the connecting people who were going through the same thing and allowing them to share and interact and support each other in amazing ways. People transformed inside that program. As people transform inside their grieving process and their mourning process, when you lose people, the earth shakes and it changes you in cathartic, grueling ways. And you really need to work on it. And so because in order to get through it, in order to survive it, and then in order to keep moving, and that is our responsibility to everyone that has gone before us and whom we have lost, is that we keep going and not do them the disservice of shutting down. So I don't want to get too caught up in that. But I thought it's an opportunity for a funeral home. Many of you are already doing this in many capacities. But the idea of setting up more opportunities like your holiday remembrance events, which everybody just went through last month, opportunities for the communities of people grieving the loss to come together and support each other. At your funeral home, local churches, gathering places, events you create, whatever it is, fostering that connection and giving people, opening the door to them, to recounting their experiences, feelings, and memories related to their loss and telling stories. We've been telling a lot of stories about our Labradoodle Alley over the last few weeks. And it has been immensely helpful. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for listening. I'm trying to keep these little bursts short. If you hear something that piques your interest or you want to talk about something in more detail, reach out to me. Let's have a conversation. Hope to hear from you soon. Either way, so grateful that you're here.