Working with Grief, Shame and Regret: Uncovering Career Transition Potential

Presenter

• Dr. Catherine Hajnal

Date and time

• Tuesdays, April 29, May 6, and May 13, 2025 – 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm ET (Check your time zone)

Price

• PAID webinar series

Language

• This webinar series is presented in English

Accessibility

• This webinar series offers AI-generated live captions available in multiple languages

Whether the reasons for seeking career services are tied to voluntary or involuntary job or life changes, chances are your service participants are dealing with loss. Consider for example being laid off, death of a significant other, being a newcomer to Canada, divorce, the dream career that hasn’t panned out, an injury or illness —underlying all of these are losses that need to be grieved. Yet the language of loss and grieving is not common practice in career conversations.   

However, when these losses go unacknowledged, they can create barriers to moving forward. Our service participants may find themselves feeling stuck. There can be tension between looking back and looking forward. With living losses (also referred to as non-death losses), our service participants may themselves not understand they are grieving. 

While the emotions and experiences of grief and loss may feel uncomfortable to explore, they hold transformative potential. What if grief, anger, shame, guilt or regret—rather than being obstacles—could serve as windows into new career possibilities?   

Denying the impact of losses in the context of work, family, health and community can affect people’s sense of well-being and their ability to move forward.  When career development practitioners are skilled at acknowledging the “tough stuff” they can unleash an incredible human capacity to reimagine and reframe difficult experiences as a catalyst for growth and career possibilities.  

This new webinar series will support career development practitioners in this important approach. Through interactive sessions, we’ll identify different types of loss —with a focus on common losses shared in a career context, explore grief theory basics, and address several myths about grief.

By the end of the series, participants will have gained practical tools to recognize and address their service participants’ losses and accompanying emotions, helping to translate them into valuable insights, skills, abilities and career possibilities.  

• Define and explore examples of different types of loss that a service participant might be grieving including: 
  • Living loss (non-death losses) 
  • Disenfranchised loss (hidden sorrow) 
  • Ambiguous loss 
• Identify possible client responses to loss (physical, mental, social, emotional) and how these might influence career conversations 
• Explore how our words and actions around loss and grieving may inadvertently contribute to disenfranchising our service participants 

• Identify the process of grieving, its many facets, twists and turns including comparing and contrasting some grief models  
• Explore the interplay of grief and time 
• Examine the meaning and sense-making aspects of the grief process and link these with career conversations   

• Explain the Good Fit Model, how it can be used to foster an environment of safety and belonging and to harvest knowledge, skills and abilities found in a service participant’s loss experiences  
• Illustrate the use of metaphor to support the meaning and sense making aspects of loss processing 
• Identify prompts to translate the knowledge, skills and abilities of loss experiences into pain/passion points, and connect those with career possibilities 

Dr. Catherine Hajnal’s pathway to loss and grief is rooted in many years of chronic pain and a career that wasn’t working out as expected. Finding meaning, purpose and a new career in her own losses, she recognized that her research in Human Factors Engineering, socio-technical systems, job design, and organizational health and safety provided a solid foundation for companioning people through the pains and possibilities of their own life transitions. Dr. Hajnal now delivers workshops, papers and conferences on grief, loss, and trauma in the context of career services.  

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