Life's Curveballs: When Shock Hits, Let it! The Power of Doing Nothing

In this raw and unfiltered episode, Teresa shares a deeply personal moment that caught her completely off guard—and how she found clarity not by fixing it, but by doing absolutely nothing. From an emotional unraveling at work to the quiet stillness of walking to the beach, she opens up about the power of pausing, processing, and letting your thoughts settle before making any decisions.

She also shares a special shout-out to her listeners around the world—especially in Mexico—with a heartfelt gracias desde el fondo de mi corazón.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by something small because everything else in your life was already heavy—this episode is for you. You’ll walk away feeling seen, heard, and reminded that you’re not alone—and that clarity often comes in the stillness.

Thank you for tuning in! I truly appreciate every single listener—whether you’re here for the first time or have been with me from the start.

Want more? Follow me on TikTok and Instagram @inshockradio for extra content, motivation, and real-life moments!

Transcript

0:42

Hi everyone, and welcome to the show. I am so glad you're here today. Whether you've been listening from the very beginning, or this is your first time tuning in, thank you so much for spending this time with me. Before we dive in, I wanna give a. Big shout out to all of my listeners around the world. It truly blows my mind that this show has reached people in different countries in corners around the globe. And I wanna give a very special thank you to my listeners in Mexico. Did you know that nearly half of you are tuning in from there? That's incredible. I just wanna sayon and thanks everybody for being a part of this community. We've talked about moments in life that hit you with no warning. There's no buildup, there's no time to prepare. It just hits you like the wind, and that's what happened to me this week. The kind of moment that pulls the rug out from under you, leaving you standing there thinking. Wait, what just happened? It's a strange feeling, right? You go from feeling okay, maybe even good. You might have a lot of peace in your life, and you're just cruising along to feeling like your chest is heavy, your brain is overloaded, and nothing feels steady anymore. Do you know what I'm talking about? And even though I'm feeling much more grounded today, I just wanna walk you through it while it's still so fresh, because there's something powerful about reflecting on these moments when they're still very close to the surface, life throws something to us so fast, so un unexpectedly, it just knocks the wind out of us. Not physically, but emotionally, mentally, and in some ways, that kind of impact can be hard to recover from. You know what I mean? The kind of emotional gut punch where everything feels unsteady. Like even things that had nothing to do with the event, suddenly feel off. It's like your whole nervous system got activated. Your heart's racing, your thoughts are racing, and it feels like you're just trying to catch your breath. Your chest may be tight from some anxiety you're not even sure sometimes. What just knocked the air out of you? Our first instinct, mine included, is always to go do something. How can I fix it? I need to call a friend. I need to call somebody in my family. I need to make a plan. Reorganize your thoughts, work it out. Or if we don't wanna go down that road, we distract ourselves, throw on a show, go for a drive, doom scroll, or maybe even pour a drink or eat something just to feel a little more in control. Why I. Why do we do that? I'll tell you why. Because feeling everything at once is overwhelming. It's too much, and we're human. We want to run the other direction when this stuff happens. But here's the thing that I learned yesterday. And I say this with my whole heart, sometimes the best thing you can do in that moment when you get negative news is nothing like, really nothing. Don't make a planned and just be with it. That might sound counterintuitive, and trust me, it felt a little weird for me yesterday. I'm someone who's always in motion, always solving, always pushing through, but yesterday something told me to pause. To just let it be, let the thoughts swirl, let the emotions come up without trying to shut that down and in doing nothing, I started to feel the tiniest bit of space return. It wasn't clarity at first, it was just stillness. A moment where the storm slowed just enough for me to realize, I am going to be okay, but not right now. And that's okay. That space, that pause, that's what this episode is about, and I wanna talk about it because we don't always, and I would say most times ever give ourselves permission. To do that, we don't give ourselves room to not react, but sometimes that's exactly what we need the most. Believe it or not, in shock, is not my full-time job. It is my passion project. I am a professional in the technology industry. Working alongside some truly solid leaders, the kind who coach their teams like they're heading to the Super Bowl. I created in Shock for Moments, just like the story I'm about to tell you, when life knocks the wind outta you and you're left trying to figure out how to cope. That's what we're here to do today. So let's get into it. One of my direct leaders of five years, somebody I've learned a great deal from, I truly admire him, announced that he's resigning. We have worked side by side on contracts, strategize for hours on accounts, and have powered through some intense deadlines together. We don't live in the same city. When I say side by side, it's not about being neighbors or anything like that. It's about having kind of that deep connection with the people that you work with, someone that you trust and respect. If you think of your job today, and maybe you are working with or have worked with a leader who's been with you for many, many years, and all of a sudden they resign, it hits you kind of hard. When you spend that much time building and performing under pressure with somebody, they become a pillar in your world. And yesterday that pillar stepped away and I didn't see it coming. I've got pretty good spidey senses and I don't know where they were. They clearly checked out because. That news hit me like the wind. During the announcement, there was a pause. I took that opportunity to speak up to share how much I admired his coaching style and that I'd really miss working with him. But the more I spoke, the more shaken my voice became, and then I broke down in tears in front of my entire team. That is not like me. I have worked in corporate America my entire life, and I have never cried publicly like that. Talk about catching yourself off guard. It caught everyone on my team off guard too. After that announcement, my mind went into overdrive. My thoughts felt like rush hour traffic coming from all different directions. Nothing was clear to me. I couldn't focus. I couldn't even absorb anything anyone else was saying. It was like noise on top of noise. Have you ever had somebody share something with you while your own brain is exploding with a million thoughts? You can't even hear what the person is saying. That's where I was. What shocked me even more than the news itself was how quickly everything started to unravel. One domino fell and suddenly it was like an avalanche. I started to question. Everything, my role, my value, my direction, should I be here? It felt like a tornado had touched down in my brain with a million thoughts spinning around in a giant circle out of control. I couldn't find clarity, I couldn't make sense of anything. It was if my entire foundation had been lifted off the ground and dropped into the eye of this mental. Storm and the worst part is I was starting to beat myself up over things that didn't even make sense, including why I started in shock. I was completely overwhelmed and I remember thinking, girl, what the fuck is going on with you today? Get a hold of yourself. Normally, I'd push through. Show up, work harder, power through the feelings. But this time, something inside me said, stop. And I'm so fortunate that I work with an incredible I. Amount of people that stepped in and covered for me, they saw what happened to me. I was on camera in front of this entire team. They allowed me to do something I rarely do and I clearly needed to do, and that was disconnect. Check out. So I walked to the beach. It was freezing out, but the cold air snapped me into the present. I was very emotional, but I was with myself in that stillness. Something shifted all of the sudden. I was present with my feelings and I thought, this is exactly what I need. I don't need to fix anything. I don't need to make any decisions. I don't need to distract myself. I don't need to talk to anyone. I. I just need to be and just feel what is happening with me right now. So I let the thoughts come in every emotion. I was crying every negative spiral. I just let it in. All the thoughts about beating myself up, I said, come on in. You're welcome. Because I knew I was not gonna feel this way today. The thoughts were temporary, and I knew eventually they would settle. I knew the storm would pass, and even after I spent some time on the beach, which for me is food for my soul. It truly is. It's like a salty therapist who can't talk back to you. You are just absorbing everything that's happening inside you. I ran a couple of errands in complete silence, barely interacting with anybody at the checkout stand. I just let the storm swirl in my mind, and by the time evening came, the anxiety had lessened. I had started to really process everything that was happening and took a lot of deep breaths. But as you can imagine, I had a really tough time sleeping that night. Even though some of the thoughts had started to settle, the peace I had before all of this unraveled was gone. Processing takes time, grief, shock, even unexpected change. It all stirs things up and it takes space. For the storm inside you to be able to calm. And here's the thing, I think everyone's gonna love this more than anything.'cause you're probably thinking, why the fuck were you so upset over one of your leaders resigning? It wasn't just the news I. It was everything that led up to that, and that's what became very clear to me today. Over the last 45 days, it has been intense. I've had very tight deadlines, constant pressure to get things done, working long hours. Getting burnt out, and on top of that, the gray, gloomy weather just kept dragging on. I'm from California, I need sunshine. I'm used to sunny days almost every single day. I didn't even know what seasonal depression was until I moved to the east coast. Then March rolls around. And while the calendar says it's spring, it looks nothing like spring outside, no blooming flowers, no warm breezes, just more cold gray days. Seasonal depression is real. For those of you who aren't in a state where spring is still winter. It's tough, especially for people like me who've bounced out of sunny California and come to the Northeast. It's different. So as the tornado begin to settle, I got clarity and perspective that this was a compound effect of work gray weather. And then the announcement of my leader's resignation. That was the straw that broke the camel's back and the floodgates opened up. It reminded me that when we get hit with negative news, our reaction isn't always about the news itself. Think about that. It's about everything else. We're already caring. So if you're going through a lot and something hits you that normally wouldn't shake you, it might just be the final straw. The thing that tips you over when you're already stretched thin. Even the smallest shift can feel like an earthquake. I. Right. No matter how small or big, it really can make a difference and it made a huge difference for me. I don't cry a lot. I'm a real person. I have emotions, but I power through. And so the simple fact that I was shaken to tears really threw me off my game. It was when that clarity came, after I gave myself that space to process that, I realized, you know what? You have had a lot of shit happening at one time and you were burnt out. You needed to cry this out. It was like relieving all the stress and it really was'cause I feel fine today. I'm so grateful I didn't make any big decisions yesterday because if I had, they would've come from a place of emotional disruption. There was nothing clear going on in my mind. How can we possibly think we can make major decisions when we're under distress? It just can't happen. That pause, like I said, gave me room to process, and now I see things more clearly. You know that song I can see clearly. Now the rain is gone. That's what I'm talking about. Given the new fiscal year and changes that came in my work world, I thought I'm actually in a really good place right now at work. I. I can be more thoughtful and really focus on making a big impact. I don't need to pivot right now. I don't need to make any big changes. I just needed to pause and I did. Our minds can take us to some pretty dark places if we let them. Especially in moments of emotional stress. And the truth is we shouldn't take every thought so seriously when we're in that storm. I was in it and I believed just about everything that crossed my mind. If you're listening and you have that negative news moment, maybe think back to this time. Realize what's going through your brain isn't the truth. Processing negative news, no matter how big or small takes time. We all move through it at our own pace some faster. I would say I'm pretty fast at processing stuff. I don't like to have heaviness weighing me down while others move a little bit slower. I. To overcome whatever that negative news is. There's no perfect pace. But when you give yourself that space to feel it at the point of impact, I cannot tell you how incredible that feels and how quickly the chaos begins to settle. The spiraling stops, the self-doubt fades. You stop going to the worst case scenario and you start to see things much more clearly. That's exactly what happened to me. I got clarity, I also remembered why I started in shock because believe me, in that tornado I even questioned this. I have been through a boatload of real life heavy shit, and I know I'm not the only one, but I truly believe that sharing my stories. The stories of all the guests that I've had on and will be coming on can help any of you listening or people that you think should be listening find your strength. That's why In Shock was created. I truly believe in this. I wanna build a community, a place for people to come to click on different stories that might really resonate or be relevant for you. And it's about you being able to hear real people and how they made it through. Their hardest moments of their lives and what it actually took to move through the emotional weight of it. All And if you've been tuning in, you already know I believe in the power of laughter, even in the darkest moments. Especially in the darkest moments. So yes, I will keep bringing guests on to share their incredible stories. I have some coming up in April, and yes, we will laugh because life is heavy sometimes, but it also can be really funny too. I am just so honored to be here with all of you and for all of you to be listening in. If you are in the middle of your own spiral and your thoughts are loud and your feelings are intense, I want you to know you don't have to fix it right away, and you don't have to make any decisions. Let it process. Go for a walk. Be still turn off the outside noise. Give those thoughts space to run that internal meeting that's happening upstairs without any interference. Because when the thoughts stop storming the gates and take a seat on the bench, that's when clarity shows up. We've gotta remember to be gentle with ourselves in those moments and be gentle with other people too, just because it doesn't seem big to you that the negative news your person, friend, or family might be sharing with you. It could be something of magnitude for them. Let me give you a perfect example. One of my girlfriends has such a groovy vibe. She is super chill, and I know if she's listening right now, she knows I'm talking about her. She just vibes. Do you have friends like that? These are people who seem like nothing gets to them, but what I've learned from her, especially during this last year,'cause she's had some heavy stuff come her way. I. Is that when these vibey people have something come their way, it might feel lighter to you. It may not feel like something that would disrupt you or shake you, but things shake people differently. Be mindful this may not seem big to you, but it is very big to them and they need you right now. So listen and be there for them. We help people heal. We really do. Through our support, we show up for each of them during their vulnerable moments. I wanna thank you for tuning in today and being here with me in this raw moment. If this resonated with you or reminds you of somebody who is either in a shit storm, please share this episode with them. They may get a little nugget out of it, but most of all. Give yourself grace and we don't have to move or do anything crazy when negative news hits. We make our decisions and react when we've processed everything. I hope you all have a wonderful day Until next time.