This Alumni-written article is part of HEROIC’s Industry Insiders series: a collection dedicated to highlighting the current and authentic experiences of leaders sharing their voices and messages in diverse fields.
I was nervous, but I knew I was going to give the talk. That was never the question.
The question was whether I could show up fully for it. Whether I could say my daughter’s name out loud, on a stage, in front of strangers, and stay present with the audience. Whether I could be a grief therapist and a grieving mother at the same time, in the same room, authentically.
That is what was sitting with me backstage at TEDx Manitou Springs in Colorado.
The Talk and What It Asked of Me
My talk was on Grief Intelligence™, a framework based on my doctoral research and my own experiences with grief. My Core Message is that grief is not something you push through or get over. It is something you learn to work with; it carries information. It can be a source of clarity and strength if you stop fighting it and let it teach you.
I know this because I have lived it. In 2014, I lost my daughter Jordyn Da’Yana to an incurable congenital heart disease. She was almost two years old when she died.
That loss changed my life forever; it changed the way I do everything. It is why I founded The Jordyn Effect, Inc. It’s why I wrote the book Holding Space: My Story of Grief, Remembering, and Thriving After Traumatic Loss. It’s why I built the framework. Her name is woven into my work every single day.
Expressing all of that on a TEDx stage, clearly and honestly, to people who did not know me yet, was the real challenge.
I knew my message needed to be shared—grief is something we all deal with, yet struggle to express and overcome. But I was worried it was too heavy of a topic, that it would be misunderstood.
That’s why I knew I needed to prepare to step onstage with authentic vulnerability and the power to deliver my message in a way that reached the hearts and minds of the people in front of me.
What the Preparation Actually Did
I practiced my talk at Toastmasters International, a local space to practice public speaking and get feedback. But working with HEROIC changed how I understood my job as a speaker. I went in thinking the work was about organizing my content well. After all, I had the research, a clear message, and a clinical argument. That part felt solid.
What I had not done was rehearse the emotional weight of the talk. The parts where I talk about Jordyn. The parts where grief stops being a framework and becomes a real human experience—happening in real time, on a stage, in front of an entire audience.
The feedback I got from the HEROIC Performance Faculty was direct: I was moving through those moments too fast. I had to learn to take a beat.
I realized that I was a clinician doing what clinicians do: staying composed, keeping it together, getting to the next point. And that was exactly the wrong instinct for this talk.
I had to learn to slow down inside the hard moments instead of stepping around them. To rehearse the pauses with the same intention I gave the words. To trust that the audience could sit in the weight of something real.
That reframe was everything.
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