Lens 2 of 5
Five stages — broadened beyond bereavement
When someone faces a loss — and we mean loss in any form, not just bereavement — five distinct emotional states tend to appear in sequence often enough that they're worth naming: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The same pattern shows up everywhere a person with power has invoked a loss in someone they're responsible for. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross named these stages for the bereavement context; the work since has been to recognise the same pattern showing up far more widely.
Where it shows up in your environment
Once you start looking with this lens, the same arc is visible far outside the bereavement context: in classrooms, in management conversations, in friendships under strain, in any moment where you have responsibility for someone's development or personal matters and the outcome lands harder than the words intended. You cannot always avoid invoking loss — sometimes the work requires it — but you can know what you have invoked, and meet the person where the stage they're in actually needs them met.
Reading which stage someone is sitting in right now is a learnable skill. It changes your next move — what you say, what you don't say, when patience serves better than further talking. The platform's simulator and learning content build that skill in your environment, with feedback, at the pace of a working week.
When integration help is needed
Reading these foundations is one half of the work. Moving them into your classroom, your team meeting, your management practice — the part where the substance actually lands in the environment — is sometimes harder to do alone.
Gary can be called upon to travel to wherever you are and see you through the process of integrating what you now know into the environment that you''re in. At the same time he''ll work with the people you''re now going to be working with — preparing them for the changes they''re about to see and the new style of education or working they''re going to experience. Educating and preparing those people is part of the work, not an afterthought.
If integration help would be useful, write to gary@nowiseeit.org directly, or use our feedback form. None of these foundations are theoretical mumbo-jumbo — they all point at practical good working methodology in your environment, and the partnering offer is here for the moments when getting them landed needs another set of hands.