We recently connected with Brian D Smith and have shared our conversation below.

Brian D, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

Neither. I couldn’t have started sooner — I wasn’t ready. And I’d never wish for later.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: every step along the path was exactly right for the time. Even the ones that looked like detours or disasters.

I got a degree in Chemical Engineering from Ohio State. I spent years preparing for a career I never actually had — the economy had other plans. I ended up in IT sales, which turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. Sales taught me how to connect with people, how to tell a story, and how to understand what someone really needs. I learned marketing at IBM. These are skills I use every single day now.

Then I got fired for something I didn’t do. At the time, that felt like failure. I was angry. Looking back, it was a gift. It forced me to take a risk. I joined a small company I had been working with as a partner while I was at Sun Microsystems. I stepped outside my comfort zone. And something unexpected happened there: my entrepreneurial side woke up. I caught the bug. I launched my own company with my wife while I was still working there.

I was building. I just didn’t know what I was building toward yet.

Then Shayna passed away in 2015. She was 15 years old.

And everything I had accumulated — the engineering mind that asks why, the sales skills that taught me to connect and communicate, the entrepreneurial courage to build something from nothing — it all converged. Suddenly, I knew what all of it was for.

The grief work, the podcast, the coaching, the writing — none of it would exist without every single piece that came before. Even the pieces that hurt. Especially the pieces that hurt.

So do I wish I’d started my creative career sooner? No. I wasn’t ready. I needed all of it first.

The engineering mind. The sales skills. The firing. The risk. The entrepreneurial leap. Every apparent detour was actually preparation.

Shayna’s passing was the catalyst — the moment everything cracked open, and the path became undeniable. But it wasn’t the beginning of the story. It was the turning point in a story that had been building for decades.

The wound didn’t create me. It revealed me.

Brian D, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m Brian D. Smith — grief guide, life coach, certified grief educator, and host of the Grief 2 Growth podcast. I work with people navigating some of the hardest terrain a human being can face: the loss of someone they love, and the loss of something even deeper — the memory of who they really are.

I came to this work the hard way. In 2015, my daughter Shayna passed away at 15 years old. That loss cracked everything open and sent me on a deep search for answers about consciousness, the afterlife, and what death actually is. What I found changed me profoundly. And I knew I had to share it.

But here’s the thing. I’m not a faith guy. Never have been. I grew up in a religious background that placed a high premium on faith, and I was always the one asking uncomfortable questions. I’m Doubting Thomas. I’ve always needed to know how things work, not just that they do. So when grief hit me, I didn’t reach for easy comfort. I went looking for evidence. And what I found, through near-death experience research, studies on consciousness, after-death communication, and the work of serious scientists in this field, was more compelling than anything I’d been asked to simply believe.

That search became the foundation of everything I do.

At the core of my work is one central conviction: most of humankind’s problems,including grief, stem from the fact that we have forgotten who we are. We are not biological accidents in an uncaring universe. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. When you truly understand that, when you feel it in your bones rather than just think it in your head, everything changes. Every loss, every struggle, every dark night of the soul looks different through that lens.

That’s what I teach. How to remember who you are.

And I work with a wide range of losses. Yes, the losses everyone thinks of, child loss, spouse loss, loss of a parent. But also divorce. Loss of health. Loss of identity. Loss of faith. Even the grief of never having lived as your true self. All of it qualifies. All of it deserves the same compassion and the same depth of attention.

Today, I offer one-on-one grief coaching, online courses, a podcast with hundreds of episodes featuring people who have overcome incredible circumstances, mediums, near-death experiencers, researchers, and grief experts, and a Substack where I write about grief, transformation, and the evidence that love doesn’t end at death. My book, Grief 2 Growth: Planted. Not Buried., captures the philosophy at the heart of it all. I serve on the boards of Helping Parents Heal and the SoulPhone Foundation, and on the advisory board of IANDS. This isn’t a side interest. It’s my life’s work.

What sets me apart is that I bring both personal experience and rigorous curiosity to everything I do. I’ve lived this. And I’ve refused to settle for shallow answers.

What am I most proud of? The moments when someone tells me they can breathe again. When a parent says they felt their child’s presence for the first time. When a widow says, “I didn’t lose him. I just can’t see him right now.”

I’ll leave you with two quotes I keep coming back to. Ram Dass said, “We are all just walking each other home.” And John Lennon said, “Everything will be okay in the end. If everything isn’t okay, it’s not the end.”

That’s what I believe. That’s what I teach. And that’s the promise I make to everyone who finds their way to my work.

You’ve been planted, not buried. Things that have been buried stay in the ground. You will blossom if you choose to.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

They say, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” That used to irk me to no end.
I’d love to be a rock and roll star. But I can’t sing or play an instrument. I’d love to have been a professional athlete. But the talent wasn’t there. So for most of my life, I did what made money. Doing what I would do for free wasn’t an option — that was a luxury I couldn’t afford.

Now it is. And that shift has changed everything.

What I do now wasn’t a choice. It’s what life prepared me for. Every career, every failure, every risk, every reinvention — it was all accumulating toward something I couldn’t see yet. Then Shayna passed, and the path became undeniable. Her passing didn’t just change my direction. It demanded this work from me.

And I’ll go one step further, because this is consistent with everything I teach and everything I’ve come to believe: I think my soul planned this before I ever came into this body. The losses. The preparation. The emergence. I don’t think any of it was accidental.

The Buddhists teach that life is about letting go. It’s something we all resist with everything we have. But there’s a truth I’ve had to learn the hard way — when we let go, gifts can come in, if we allow it. We have a choice. We can stand with our fists clenched, wishing for the thing we no longer have. Or we can open our hands and receive what life is trying to give us.

I had to let go of a version of my life I loved. I had to let go of my daughter’s physical presence. Those weren’t small things. They were everything.

But I opened my hand. And what came in was this work, this purpose, this calling I never could have imagined or chosen for myself.

The most rewarding part of being a creative is knowing this isn’t something I do. It’s something I am. I sell products and services. But I would do this work anyway, for free, for the rest of my life, because there is no version of me that doesn’t do it.
That’s a gift I never expected. One that required an open hand to receive.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I’ve tried it all. Advertising, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, collaborations, and being a participant in summits and seminars. If there’s a strategy out there, I’ve probably thrown money or time at it.

Here’s what I’ve learned after all of it:

There are quick ways to build an audience. And there are lasting ways. They are almost never the same thing.
When I’ve participated in seminars and had someone added to my list, those people see me as just a face at the event. They don’t know me. They didn’t seek me out. And they usually don’t stick around. Same with advertising. Someone clicks an ad, maybe subscribes, and then quietly disappears. You built a number, not a relationship.

The most instructive experience I had was early on Substack. I got lucky — a couple of creators with large audiences added me to their recommendations, and my subscriber count shot up fast. It felt great.

Then I watched my open rate drop. Because those people didn’t find me, they got added to my list almost automatically by the way Substack works. They didn’t know who I was or why they should care. My emails went unopened in their inboxes. They didn’t even bother to unsubscribe.

Here’s my honest advice: resist the hacks. Resist the temptation to game the algorithm or find the shortcut. It’s going to be slow. It’s going to feel like you’re talking to nobody for a long time. Do it anyway.

Put out content that is genuinely good. Content that helps people, moves people, and makes them think or feel something real. Don’t chase virality — chase resonance. The person who finds you organically, who searches for something you wrote and feels like you read their mind — that person stays. That person opens your emails. That person replies. That person tells a friend.

A thousand people who actually want to hear from you will always outperform ten thousand who don’t know why they subscribed.

Build slow. Build real.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://grief2growth.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/grief2growth
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grief2growth/
• Youtube: https://grief2growth.com/youtube
• Other: https://grief2growth.substack.com
  https://podcast.grief2growth.com