How to Deal When the Shit Gets Real Podcast · Rietta Boksha

Nichole Lee: Loss and Liberation

·44 min·2 clips

Nicole Lee says her mother was diagnosed in May 2018 and died in September 2018, and that loss changed her life.

Rieta opens by asking Nicole Lee how she handles moments when life gets hard. Nicole says the first move is to stop trying to go over, under, or around the pain. She makes the case for sitting with it long enough to understand what it is teaching. She is careful to say that this is not easy for everyone. She also acknowledges that some people can only stay with the discomfort for a short time. Even so, she invites people to try. The episode then shifts to the work she does with clients. Nicole ties her approach to her own life experience. She describes a major career change after more than 20 years in corporate work. The decision was not something she had thought through in a neat or tidy way. It was a move driven by mission and by the sense that she had to keep going. She says the surprise was not regret so much as grief. She grieved her identity. She grieved her routine and the structure that had shaped her life for so long. At the same time, she felt excitement about having space to choose what came next. She talks honestly about the emotional mix of grief, depression, and excitement. She also names isolation as a real strain, especially during the tail end of COVID when much of the work still happened virtually. That sense of disconnection made the transition harder. The host reflects that many people tie who they are to their job, and Nicole agrees that the separation is difficult. The episode then circles back to the challenge of noticing what is in front of you. Nicole recalls asking for signs and not seeing them. She laughs at the way the answer can be right there while people are looking everywhere else. That leads into a simple warning about distraction. She points to cell phones and social media as forces that pull attention away. The exchange stays warm, direct, and personal throughout. It keeps turning big feelings into language people can actually use. By the end, the episode makes a case for slower honesty over avoidance. It does not pretend that sitting with pain is comfortable. It treats that discomfort as part of becoming clearer about your life.

As heard by us

A calm, direct look at grief, identity, and the harder work of change.

Nicole Lee speaks plainly about grief, identity, and the choice to sit with hard feelings instead of trying to dodge them. The episode opens there, then moves into the weight of leaving a 20-year corporate identity behind and the grief that can come with that kind of change.

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Why you'd press play

For when you need to stop outrunning a hard change and actually sit with it.

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