Any Way vs. No Way
A creative tool for finding small steps forward when everything feels impossible
When grief enters our lives, it doesn’t just take away what we’ve lost. It often convinces us that joy, dreams, and desires are now off-limits too. It tells us that the plans we had for our lives have suddenly been irrevocably altered, if not erased completely. That voice that says “no way” gets louder, more insistent, more final.
But what if that resistant voice, the one telling you your dreams are impossible, isn’t the final authority? What if No Way could sit in front of you and you could talk back?
To explore this area, we’d like to share a creative practice from Creative Grief Studio Founder, Kara Jones, for moving through the paralysis that grief can bring. It’s simple, accessible, and surprisingly effective. She calls it the “Any Way vs. No Way” tool, and it’s used to help people rediscover their sense of agency when everything feels impossible.
This tool isn’t about toxic positivity or pretending grief doesn’t exist. It’s about gently, curiously questioning the absoluteness of “no way” and discovering that even in difficult moments, there might be some way forward, even if it’s tiny.
For paid subscribers, the complete exercise is below, along with specific examples and a worksheet format you can use again and again. In it, you’ll list all the reasons something you want feels impossible, then counter each one with a small, doable step you could take to move toward it.
We hope this exercise opens up some possibilities for you and your clients, no matter how small they might seem.
You don’t have to make the impossible possible all at once. Sometimes just imagining one small step is enough to remind us that we still have agency, we still have imagination, and we still have permission to want things.
