I'm Maura Aronsmeli, and this is the anxious achiever. We look at stories from business leaders who have dealt with anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges, how they fell down, how they pick themselves up, and how they hope workplaces can change in the future.

Are you sad? I'm sad. And sometimes I'm overwhelmed by a sadness so intense it can only be described as grief. Like many of us,

I grieve now for our world, our people, and our planet. Grief is in the air. On HBR,

David Kessler wrote powerfully that the world, all of us, we're feeling different kinds of

grief for what we're experiencing right now and what we fear in the future. The loss of

normalcy, the fear of economic toll, the loss of connection, it's all hitting us and we're

grieving. The grief that we imagine in the future is really anxiety, Kessler tells us.

It's like your mind is just going to a future point and imagining the worst. It's called catastrophizing.

Have you been there recently?

I definitely have, like a million times a day.

Perhaps nothing has been more symbolic of the loss of our formerly prosperous and delicious way of life than the cratering of the restaurant industry during coronavirus.

Food and drink has always been a brutal business.

Working hours, really tough margins, but it's a creative industry full of innovation,

and it's glamorous something a lot of us are attracted to.

Today's guest, Jody Adams, is someone who's been so resilient in the face of grief,

and we'll talk with her about what happened a few years ago.

But I think of her now as a leader in the Boston restaurant scene.

In fact, when I called her for our interview,

she had been participating in a webinar with restaurant owners about what to ask for in terms of aid. She's involved with seven restaurants,

and she's working and leading with this one's vibrant community to process a whole new

kind of grief. Grief can manifest in different people in different ways, but it's often a situation where you can feel alone, trapped in your own mind, unable to see a future.

And when organizations are facing a loss, being a leader and leading through grief can be really challenging.

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