Our Story
You are not alone. There are 3.6 million widowers in the US alone (US Census 2019). Each uniquely dealing with their loss, sadness and grief, and all at different stages in their journey. But we have a lot in common, and by sharing our stories, can help ourselves and provide others with comfort, healing and guidance.
Growth through Grief is a resource and community site to help widowers like you through your healing process, helping to turn your loss and sadness into growth and purpose. To facilitate the journey, we have created a set of events, articles, tools, personal stories and interviews, designed to help you learn from other widowers, mental health professionals, faith leaders and growth experts. All designed to improve your mind, body and spirit and achieve growth through grief.
We hope you leverage these events, tools, articles and interviews to help guide your personal healing and growth process, and that you too can one day share your own growth through grief experiences with our community.
Source: US Census 2019: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families/marital.html
Advice, Help and Tools for You
Content is at the heart of what we do – to provide you with resources to help you cope with your personal grief and provide some guidance, advice and tools you can use to turn your grief into a growth opportunity.
Tom Pisello
Founder and Growth Evangelist
Our Founder
Tom Pisello is a widower and the father of two daughters. Tom lost his wife Judy in 2017 after her ten year battle with cancer.
As a result of this loss, Tom founded the Growth through Grief site, resources and ministry to share his personal experiences of growth through the grief journey, to help others with their unique healing process. Through his own challenges and journey, Tom achieved complete sobriety, lost 60 pounds, gained a growth mindset and rekindled lost faith, now sharing these hard-earned lessons and the learnings of other widowers and experts with you.
Prior to creating Growth through Grief, Tom was a successful serial-entrepreneur, analyst, speaker, and author of the business books: Evolved Selling and The Frugalnomics Survival Guide. He was well known as “The ROI Guy”, founder of value, sales and marketing consultancy and software firms Alinean and Interpose, a Managing VP of analyst firm Gartner, Chief Evangelist and sales enablement expert for Mediafly where he was the founder of the Evolved Selling Institute and host of the popular revenue and sales enablement podcast – Evolved Selling. Today he runs a new value sales and marketing consultancy, Genius Drive.
Tom lives in Flatiron District of New York City.
Connect with Tom’s via his profile here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tompisello/
Board Members
Christopher P. Ice
CEO & Founder of Ice Executive Coaching & Consulting
Christopher is a fellow-widower and currently CEO & Founder of Ice Executive Coaching & Consulting, providing executive coaching for top level executives in Fortune 500 companies and Presidents in higher education.
Prior to this current role, Chris served as a Business Advisory Board Member of Franciscan University of Steubenville , CEO & President of Ave Maria University , and CEO / Board Member of Catholic Charities of Kansas City along with executive leadership roles at Neace Lukens, Covenant Hospice Services and Federated Insurance.
Checkout our interview with Chris at: https://growththroughgrief.org/finding_leadership/
Helen Keeling-Neal
Licensed Mental Health Counselor
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist
Prior to her work in mental health, Helen was a Creative, serving as an adjunct professor at UCF, University of Central Florida, in Radio Television Production, the Director of My Art Studio, which is a children’s art studio and program, and was president of multimedia agency Emerged Media.
Helen also has personal experience with grief and loss as a widow of 12 years, with her husband passing away when her children were, only four and six years old.
Checkout the interview with Helen: https://growththroughgrief.org/episode-3-piling-on-how-to-deal-with-compound-grief/
Pastor Joseph Thompson
As a faith leader, Joseph formerly served as Discipleship Pastor for Action Church in Orlando, FL. Cultural Architect/Chief Storyteller of Primal Church, Lead Pastor for The Well, and Associate Pastor for New Life Church.
As an executive business leader and entrepreneur, Joseph is the Co-Owner of Rehoboth Home Care Services.
As a fitness guru, Joseph was the Head Coach/ CEO of CrossFit Conduit and Primal Purpose Inc., and remains a CrossFit enthusiast and judge.
Jeremy Wood
CEO and founder for SearchOutsideTheBox.com
Jeremy serves as CEO and founder for SearchOutsideTheBox.com.
Prior to SearchOutsideTheBox.com, Jeremy served as an Account Exec and Marketing leader for WorkflowOne, R H Donnelley and Craneware
Connect with Jeremy at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/searchoutsidethebox/
