Rebound from loss
like a boss

The four lessons we've learned that have transformed lost dreams into a life of abundance and fulfillment

A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.          -- William G. T. Shedd

Through the loss of many dreams and the births of many more dreams, we have come to the conclusion that there is no fault in lost dreams, only lost ships.

If you feel lost, read on -- this is for you.
So many of us decide the journey itself was wasted if we don't end up where we thought we should. Then we make the fatal mistake of untethering from the moor we've docked in and disappear at sea -- lost to ourselves and lost to humanity.
Have you ever poured you whole heart, mind and energy into something and felt like it was really going somewhere? Like, years of commitment, only to find yourself out, shut down, rejected and heart broken? 

We have been there three soul crushing times in our ten years together.

Missed expectations, broken hearts, difficult things beyond our control, bad choices with painful consequences and shattered dreams are devastating, identity-challenging and life changing. It took us a few times around the block to just come up for air after the first big loss of the dream of living overseas doing non-profit work. 

The second time involved a difficult genetic diagnosis for our precious daughter which changed both her life trajectory and our daily world. This one took years to assess, wrap our minds around and grieve (we still struggle with this as we watch the joys and suffering in our E). 

But really, it was the painful loss of a full-time ministry (our "calling" and passion) over relational differences that really sent our world in a tail spin. Overnight we were out, our kids cut off from their friends and hundreds of friends around the world were affected. It broke us. It forged a new way of thinking and living. 

It changed everything in all the best ways. Our hope for you is that these simple tools will help you move through the fire and into a more abundant life than that which you painfully left behind.

The dreams we've lost

01
Innocence of dreams

Some dreams are born pure, young, and full of potential. Those are the sweetest dreams, the most innocent. Its the dreams that often come to us in our teenage years that we then spend years laboring and studying toward. 

If all your dreams feel this way, maybe you're still in looking down the barrel of your first big loss -- hang tight! We're here to help you through it.

For us, we dreamt of living in East Africa doing non-profit work that really makes a difference. It was a dream born in our teenage years that was constantly praised by older, presumably wiser, people. And you know what? We did it! ...for a short time, at least. That is, until it all came crashing down around us and we found ourselves back in California with no plans, no career, and what felt like no hope.

If you've found yourself spinning after the loss of a good and pure dream, we are here for you!

02
Dreams for our kids

Each of us carry hopes and dreams into parenthood -- and even hopes and dreams of becoming parents! We are no different. Kaben had plans for our non-existent sons years before we had kids!

When we received a medical diagnosis for our daughter Eisley, so many of those dreams rose to the surface and exploded like landmines for months. 

If you have kids who were born in a way that didn't fit your imagined offspring, or if your kids have made choices that turn your stomach, you know what we mean.

The loss of dreams for our kids is an ongoing loss -- as our daughter gets older, it is more and more apparent she isn't like the other kids and we have to deal with new rounds of grief regularly.

03
A sweet spot career

What could be better? A dream career that leverages all your strengths perfectly - with just enough guidance to run hard and enough freedom to go big. Aren't there countless well-meaning business books on the very topic?

We had that dream career -- firing on all cylinders, with promises of growth and promotion, using all our strengths and learning new strengths all the time. We were working in full-time Christian ministry and many affirmed that it was our sweet spot.

Then, suddenly, the gravy train came crashing to an end. We were thrust out of our sweet spot, knocked off track. The long, promising career we had our eyes set on was gone. 

It is scary to watch a dream burn, and if you've been there then know we are here with you now!

The keys we discovered to rebound

Name it. Own it. Grieve it.

After both of our devastating career losses we found ourselves grappling with really hard questions. We were in a total tail-spin. 

What just happened? Whose fault was it? Were my life's ambitions actually false hopes - or worse, bad dreams? 

These were the everyday thoughts that weighed us down with a thousand pounds of burden. We were suffocating. That's when we accidentally stumbled into the first lesson in rebounding from devastating setbacks: In order to overcome something we had identify what we were trying to overcome. We had to name it.

When we are lost in our pain, it can be incredibly difficult to know which way is up and down. Don't rush it. Sit with yourself. Meet yourself -- especially when your "self" is just a screaming, crying mess. In your mind's eye, sit down with your devastated soul, put your arm around your own shoulder; lean in and cry together. Then wait, listen, pay attention. Follow the road of emotions to their end point. What is there? Name it. Say it out loud to yourself first, then write it down:

"I am in terrible, no good, awful pain because __________ "

Then, do it again tomorrow. Do it enough that when you look back at the answer you first wrote down you think, "Oh, that was barely scratching the surface." That's when you'll know you're close to the real painful loss. 

In time, we recognized that naming our loss wasn't enough. It's like learning that the thing in front of you is called a "car". 

Fantastic. Now what? 

This next part is brutally hard. It was (and still is) hard because it requires we do that one thing we as humans so despise doing: we had to own our role in creating the problem. As soon as we knew what we were looking at (because we named it), we could begin to see the fissures between all that we had hoped for and all that actually happened. 

The longer we looked, the more we could see. We could see where we were wrong. We had to say sorry -- to ourselves, to God, and to other people. We could also see, more objectively and less pushed by our emotions, the roles others had played. 

Naming the loss and looking at it long enough to own our role opened up a pathway to something that felt so elusive early on: we began to grieve the things that weren't in our control. We saw a whole lot that wasn't in our control -- including other people's choices and opinions of us. And we could grieve that. We could grieve miscommunications and missed expectations. We could grieve unexpected medical issues. We could grieve that we weren't all we had hoped we were to be. We could grieve that we had good intentions (staying long term), and that those good intentions may have made a bigger mess than was needed. 

The first key to freedom is to name the loss, own your role in it, and grieve what you cannot control.

The key to freedom is the pause between the impulse and the response.

Imagine that you awaken to find yourself in shackles in the belly of a ship. In the middle of a storm. What do you do?

The first step to freedom is to unlock the shackles! In our emotional lives, we unlock the shackles by naming the loss, owning our role, and grieving what we cannot control.

Host, not inhabit

Now that you've named the loss, the trick is to not become controlled by it. But how? 

In our stumbling and fumbling, we learned a secret that psychology already knew and we've since read lots about. We learned that we are not our emotions. Importantly, we learned that emotional freedom is the pause between the impulse and the response. The emotions we feel don't need to become the thoughts we think, or the actions we take. They can simply be our emotions. 

Not wrong, and also not in charge.

We've since learned that most people have one of two responses to intense emotions: to inhibit them or to inhabit them. We found that both responses led us deeper into the misery of stuck hardship. 

So we found a third way. 

When people inhibit their emotions, they detach from what happened or refuse to acknowledge how they feel about it. Short-cutting pain only shortcuts growth. Don't resist feeling your feelings. It isn't mushy, and it isn't exclusively feminine. In fact, it is divine: a practical expression of being image-bearers of God. We were made with emotions, so feel them!

When people inhabit their emotions, they hand over control of their thinking and acting to their feelings. Most Shonda-land characters are based on the premise that everyone does this. While it makes for good entertainment, it makes for a miserable life. To engage our emotions is to reflect our divine imprint; to be ruled by our emotions is to twist the reflection to ourselves, not the divine. Feeling our feelings is good; being controlled by our feelings traps us in a cycle of pain with no exit.

The third way we found was to host our feelings. 

To experience emotional freedom from your loss you must host your emotions: when an emotion knocks on the door of action, pause and consider whether going through that door is what you want to do. Invite the guest feeling in and sit down and the table together. Inquire about where they come from and where they are going and what they think they need from you for the journey. You aren't obliged to do anything but ask good questions and listen. Then, as a hospitable person, decide for yourself just how much of your guest feelings will become part of the day's activities.

So here's the second key: Host your emotions; don't inhibit or inhabit them.

We thought we saw the whole horizon. We didn't realize we were only looking through a porthole.

Now that you've loosened the shackles, what's next? You look outside at the storm raging and it feels like, even free, all hope is lost.

The next step in freedom is to recognize that what appears to a full view of the outside world is really only a narrow sliver of a wide horizon. Get above deck and take in the larger view!

Get above deck & draw a new map

The grief and emotions of a significant loss take time to process but you don't have to wait for them all to resolve to lift your eyes and begin looking toward the future. The most honoring thing you can do for yourself and for others is to remember who you are and what you love at your core. Take the time to identify who you are outside of the framework or limitations of your previous role or lost dream: disentangle yourself from the expectations of this past season and let yourself embrace the root of your soul.

What do you love to do? What are your deepest passions? What things drive you to action? What kinds of beauty are you drawn to?

Write it out. Write out the answers to these questions and others several times over several days (or weeks).

It is easy to "know" how your strengths fit when you're living in the dream. It requires whole new skills to begin to see how your passions can come to life in places so far away from the dream. You aren't living that dream anymore --it's a shipwreck behind you, and you are now in that far place. You're grieving the lost dream, and freeing your passions from the wreckage of that dream is critical in moving into a space where a new dream can be born.

It took us almost a year to set aside our own bias toward "good" strengths and "good" passions. Our childhoods, religion, and culture conspired to convince us that some passions, strengths, and dreams were better than others. We had to look past all of these heavy influences to find our true selves on the other side. When we were able to shelve some of the extra baggage and look around the horizon with our true selves, it turned out to be a big wide horizon indeed!

When we were living in our dream, we thought we saw the whole world clearly. Indeed, we even traveled the world living our dream! It took a dedicated process of separating ourselves from our dream to realize that what felt like a big view was only one thin slice of all there was to see. We wanted to find new opportunities, but we kept looking back into that small slice -- after all, it was what we knew and what we were good at. But this returning of our gaze only hampered our growth. We learned one critical truth that gave us so much runway:

You only see opportunities in the direction you're looking. To see new opportunities, we must look in new directions.

So go back to that writing exercise up above. Read over what you wrote. Identify the coordinates that ring true to your self and begin to dream again about your future! Go all out! Take the risk -- the sky is the limit! Don't let other people's critique or your own inner critic slow you down! 

Draw a new map. Here are our four tips to effective cartography (and order matters):

  1. Go as far as you can alone by asking this one question over and over. 

    We began by brainstorming easy transitions that use our strengths and we went from there. We then intentionally entertained ideas that seemed far-fetched. We thought about careers or ideas that held no appeal just to learn the exercise of answering this one critical question.

    The question that changes everything for seeing a bigger horizon is, "How could my true self change the world <here>?" Come up with a whole bunch of "here"s that weren't on your radar before. Hang with them until you can begin to image a world where a person like you makes a difference in a place like that. As we were able to cultivate imaginative realities where we changed the world in scenarios that seemed totally opposite our interests, we learned even better what our actual strengths and passions were.

  2. Then go a little further with this encouragement.

    We wrote out at least 20 places our passions could add value, brought us joy, and aligned with our personal values & interests. Some involved moving; most didn't. If 20 things sounds overwhelming, don't give up on yourself. Keep drawing that new map! With each element you add to your map, you'll find that the horizon stretches just a bit further still.

  3. Then go even further with others (specifically, a certain type of "other" people).

    We talked to people who took a different path than we did. We shared our core passions and values and asked where in the world they saw those types of elements adding value and making a real difference. Some people's answers included living in other countries!

    Getting outside our own heads (after we've first gotten to the bottom of our own selves) really helped push the boundaries of the map -- now we could see distant lighthouses on the shores of foreign lands popping up. Get familiar with yourself first, then ask people who are totally different from you and doing things you'd never [before] dreamed of doing what a person like you could contribute in their corner of the world. It opens up the map quite a bit!

  4. Bring it back in with friends (specifically, a certain type of friend).

    We took all that data and invited in some close friends to act as personal advisers. For us, being involved in a community of faith, we already had a high degree of trust that our friends' values aligned with ours. They helped us narrow our extensive list to a few. Together we plotted a few courses across our new map, helping us materialize how we could get from here to a possible "there". Sometimes you can go after one of the options hard. Sometimes it's best to put feelers out in every direction.

    Once you've re-met yourself and have collected a few ideas from the far corners of the horizon, circle up with those who know you best and who are more interested in seeing you flourish than maintaining their own version of a comfortable friendship. That last part is key. The people you gather around you must be 100% committed to your growth -- no matter the stakes. For us, it was four married couples, in our same age demographic, living in different parts of the world, but who we always talk about in the tone of, "when I grow up, I want to be like them."
Back to the nautical theme, here's the TL;DR: the base passions act as the coordinates on the new map. Free association of wild ideas, plus asking the opinion of people far outside your current circles help to identify uncharted parts of the map. Tried and true friends label shallows and sandbars, and help to plot a few possible routes toward new territory. God calibrates the compass to true north. 

As an aside, we'd also recommend that you get outside your routine/location for at least one weekend: fresh air has a way of providing fresh perspectives.

In short, it takes a lot of data, from a lot of sources, to make a good map. Don't short-cut the process and don't rush it; abide with it. Some dishes can't be microwaved.

Which means the third key is to know yourself from new perspectives: get above deck, look around, and draw a new map. You can't make a meaningful change without good coordinates.

When a dream is lost, it can feel like you're lost and adrift at sea. Once the emotional ship is steadied, you need a new map. Getting a sense of what a new map could look like also requires looking at the horizon differently, which leads to key number four.

Changing course is not the same as changing ships.

You're above deck now and can see for miles. That storm you saw down below? It's only off the starboard side. Turns out there are lots of far off islands dotting the whole horizon. Entire worlds you couldn't even imagine down in the pits of your pain now lie within reach. Which do you choose?

Leverage all you've learned to begin charting a new course!

Buried Treasures

You've made it so far. If you've read this in one sitting -- holy moly! You really have made it far.

More importantly, if you've read this over several sittings and had meaningful conversations with yourself and others in between, then you truly have covered a lot of ground and we applaud you for that. Your efforts aren't wasted. So just how far have you come?

You've named your loss. You've owned your role in it, and grieved what you couldn't control.
You've loosened the shackles of your emotions by learning to pause between the impulse and the response. Perhaps you've sought professional counseling (we highly recommend this) and you've started to gather the people you can count on in this season.
You've gotten your head out of the sand and have discovered new and surprising passions -- and new and surprising places those passions would help change the world!

Just reflect on that. Be proud of yourself. Thank God for his graces. You've done amazing already!

But you still haven't landed anywhere. You're still at sea, between the dream that once kept you afloat and a potential new dream that is lying just out there on the horizon. You aren't drowning in the storm and you also aren't on dry land. So let's move toward land. But how?

Most loss is messy. Whether its a broken relationship or a dead-end career, watching the dream burn down usually involves getting a few burns yourself. And when burned, you avoid the fuel that caused the fire. If you've done a good job owning your role in it, then you might feel like parts of you are that fuel!

And no matter what ship you find yourself on, you'll end up starting another fire. And watch another dream burn down. So it's tempting to just walk away from everything about you that may have led to the pain to begin with. This is the cheap way out -- and it will clip your wings.

The truth is, if you're looking for a vessel to get you from the wreckage of a lost dream to new lands full of new dreams, the materials you need to build it are the flotsam around you: your strengths, your contributions, your youness from before. That's what you need now.

The messiness of a lost dream probably included some scathing comments about your character or your conduct. Some of it may have been on-point. But that doesn't mean that the root of your personhood is wholly degenerate. It's probably just a little sharp and snagged somewhere and made a tear. Say sorry about that, but don't chuck out the whole tool just because it wasn't used properly. Cultivate the proper use of the tool. It will help you build a new ship and achieve new dreams.

Your strengths, passions, and contributions are your tools. They are wholly yours, and the mix of them will be found no where else in the whole world. Don't swim away from them. Grab them up like floating driftwood and lash them together to form a raft. 

When we don't learn from our losses, our passions keep lighting new fires in new dreams and the pain-cycle continues. When we do learn from our losses, we build skills around our strengths and passions. We time the "when" and "how" of our passions better. We thread the needle between driving and supporting so that we elevate our dreams and the people we care about equally (and more often!). As we learn these skills, our passions are like a hot wood stove on a cold winter night: raging and totally put to right use.

When it comes to job loss or relationship loss, it can feel like everything we contributed must have been wrong, or a mistake, or misplaced. Because if it ended badly (and especially if we didn't see it coming), then what else might have been going on that we didn't know about? 

To you who feel this way, let us say this (because we've been there): Other people's decisions don't detract from your contributions. 

So other people decided they don't like you. Okay, but you still made a difference -- just not to them, or not at the very end. So other people didn't like how you handled something. Great, you can learn from that -- but you also probably handled a ton of things really well. 

In our story, and in closing, there was another element of this to which you may relate: we found, after the fact, that we had put our trust in people who ended up hurting us. We were vulnerable with people and that vulnerability was weaponized against us. We learned from people we respected, and they turned around and cast us out. We were mentored by people who betrayed us. 

So what then? Was everything we received from them a total loss? Was everything they said a sham? No. Much of the counsel was spot on. We had to discipline ourselves to not discard all the good jut because the ending was painful. In the end, it didn't work out, but that doesn't mean that the total investment was futile.

Don't let a bad ending spoil the whole lot. Don't throw the treasure out with the saltwater!

The last key that will change your loss into a huge win is to find the buried treasure: your youness doesn't change, even if the dream does. Give yourself space to discover new passions, and when you've got some distance, dig around in the past and uncover the buried treasure of the goodness that came with the passions which were alive back then. Find the treasure of your contributions and the treasure of other people's contributions to you and your growth. Take the old and the new, together, bind them fast, and set sail for new lands.

Chase new dreams. Face new storms. You're vessel is stronger now, more adaptable. You are not who you were and you haven't left what made you, you. You're eyes are clear, your map is broad.

Come, the horizon beckons.

Other people's decisions don't nullify your contributions.

You've charted a new course, but the storm did some real damage to your ship. You need some repairs. Luckily, all the materials you need are floating in the wreckage of your dashed dreams. 

Don't throw the treasure out with the saltwater -- recognize the good that was done (both by you and to you) when the dream was still humming with life, and build a new ship out of the wreckage. You'll be stronger for it.

the index cards for later

01

Loosen the shackles
When life maroons you, it can be hard to know which way is up. Pause and feel the buoyancy begin to slowly pull you toward the surface. Name your loss, own your role in it, and grieve what is out of your control.

02

Host, not inhabit
Freedom is the pause between the impulse and the response. Bring your emotions into the conversation and don't be controlled by them. Host, don't inhabit.

03

Get above deck
What we think we see isn't all there is to see. You can only see the opportunities in the direction you're looking, so get above deck and take a look around.

04

Find buried treasure
The positive experiences in the dream aren't undone by the loss of the dream. Find the contributions that stick to you, and build a new future on top of those. Don't throw the treasure out with the saltwater!
 top photo by Pho Da on Unsplash

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