How Loss Feels: Dynamic Exercise for Building Student Self-Efficacy to Provide Griever-Centered Support to Work Colleagues

Experiences of grief and loss are ubiquitous in organizational life, yet few students receive any systematic instruction in how to comfort and support colleagues who are grieving. This paper describes a unique exercise for increasing students’ understanding of the experience of loss based on listening as a group to an avant-garde jazz piece, Loss, by Don Ellis. Reflection on elements from this piece draws on the use of metaphor to provide insights into what it means to be present and seek to understand in the midst of a co-worker’s suffering, with the goal of increasing students’ self-efficacy to provide comfort and support. I describe the theoretical foundations of this exercise and provide detailed instructions for running and debriefing it. I also discuss tips and techniques to help instructors to guide and navigate student responses toward translating the insights from the exercise into generative responses in the workplace.