The Conversations Society Forgot How to Have

Long Beach, Vancouver Island

There are moments when I find myself sitting in an airport, a coffee shop, or a waiting room simply watching people. Thousands of lives moving in every direction, each carrying a story I'll never know. Someone has just landed their dream job. Someone else has lost one. A family is travelling to a wedding while another is travelling to a funeral. One person is about to become a parent. Another has just signed divorce papers. A teenager is quietly questioning where they belong. A business owner is wondering how they're going to make payroll on Friday.

From the outside, they all look remarkably similar.

That has fascinated me for years because it reminds me of something I think we've forgotten. Every person we meet is carrying far more than we can see. Yet somewhere along the way, we've become far better at measuring what people produce than understanding what people carry.

We celebrate outcomes. We track productivity. We measure incidents, profits, deadlines, attendance, engagement scores, and performance metrics with incredible precision. But the experiences that shape those outcomes, the pressure, grief, uncertainty, responsibility, fear, hope, exhaustion, and resilience, rarely appear on a report. They're invisible until, suddenly, they're not.

We've become experts at measuring outcomes while losing the ability to recognize the human experiences that created them.

Berg Lake, Robson Glacier

I've been thinking about that a lot lately because, looking back, I don't think my work has ever really been about grief, leadership, communication, or safety. Those have simply been different windows into the same landscape. What I've really been studying is the human experience and how it shapes the way we live, lead, work, communicate, and connect with one another.

When I wrote My Love/Hate Relationship with Death, I believed I was writing a book about grief. I wanted to open a conversation that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid. What surprised me wasn't the response to the book. It was what I began to recognize in the conversations that followed. Beneath almost every story was another form of grief that people had been carrying quietly for months or even years. Divorce. Financial pressure. Chronic illness. Retirement. Caregiving. Job loss. Infertility. Injury. The loss of identity. The loss of certainty. The loss of the future they thought they were going to have.

Most of those conversations had never really happened.

Not because people didn't care. Not because those experiences weren't important. But because we haven't been taught to recognize them as grief, and we've certainly never been taught how to talk about them. So instead, we carry them quietly, often believing we're the only ones feeling that way.

It became obvious that grief had never been confined to death. Grief is woven through every meaningful change we experience as human beings. We simply hadn't been given the language to recognize it that way.

That realization followed me everywhere.

Portugal coast line, between Sines and Sagres

As I spent more time working with organizations across construction, manufacturing, healthcare, education, municipalities, and community organizations, I started noticing the same pattern. People didn't leave their lives in the parking lot when they came to work. The supervisor worrying about production might also be caring for a parent with dementia. The operator making critical decisions could be navigating a divorce. The manager leading a team might not have slept because their child is struggling. Financial pressure, relationship challenges, health concerns, caregiving responsibilities, and uncertainty don't disappear when someone puts on a hard hat, a uniform, or an office badge.

Then work adds its own weight. Deadlines. Responsibility. Risk. Staffing shortages. Difficult conversations. Constant change. Decision after decision after decision.

Those pressures don't compete with one another.

They stack.

The more I paid attention, the more I realized that many of the leadership, safety, communication, and performance challenges organizations struggle with don't begin in the workplace at all. Nor do they begin entirely at home. They emerge where life and work collide, where invisible pressures accumulate quietly until they eventually become visible through behaviour, decision-making, relationships, mistakes, conflict, or burnout.

That's what eventually led me to develop the idea of cumulative load. Not because I wanted another workplace framework, but because I couldn't find language that accurately described what I was seeing. And once I had language for it, I began to notice something even more important.

People weren't resisting these conversations because they didn't care.

They were avoiding them because they didn't know how to have them.

Mount Assinboine, Naiset peak

That realization has become the foundation of everything I build today. Whether it's cumulative load, SIGNAL, DRIP, SCOPED, Pressure Roll Call, or any of the other language tools I've developed, they all exist for the same reason. They help people recognize what has always been there but has been difficult to see. They give us a way to talk about pressure without blame, to acknowledge human experience without making it personal, and to recognize invisible risks before they become visible problems.

That same belief is also what led me to create my community grief workshops and the What We Carry online conversations. They were never intended to be about death alone. They were created to give people permission and language to explore the many forms of grief, pressure, and change that shape our lives, often in silence. Whether I'm standing in front of a leadership team or sitting in a room with people navigating life's hardest moments, the goal is exactly the same: helping people recognize what they're carrying and giving them a safe way to talk about it.

I don't think society is craving more information.

I think we're craving understanding.

We're craving language that helps us make sense of what we're carrying and what others may be carrying too. We're looking for ways to have conversations that feel honest instead of uncomfortable, curious instead of judgmental, and human instead of transactional.

Maybe that's why this work has continued to evolve. What began as a book about grief has become a study of pressure, language, leadership, safety, and performance. Not because those are separate topics, but because they're all connected by one simple truth.

Every organization is made up of people.

Every family is made up of people.

Every community is made up of people.

And every person is carrying something we cannot see.

Maybe learning to recognize that isn't just a communication skill.

Maybe it's one of the most important leadership skills, safety skills, and life skills we will ever develop.