Notes on Resilience

Send us Fan Mail The phrase “Let the s#*% go” can sound like a throwaway line until you hear the story behind it. I’m joined by HR leader Anastasia Bergmann, who shares a deeply personal loss during COVID and what it took to rebuild her life as a single parent with two children while carrying grief that didn’t fit neatly into a return-to-normal timeline.  It’s candid, heartbreaking, and ultimately...

Send us Fan Mail Survivors don’t just get through it. Many come out the other side with hard-won knowledge about what recovery actually takes, what it costs, and what it never fully repairs.  We’re chasing that question from the inside out: what survivors know that people who haven’t lived through trauma often misunderstand, oversimplify, or romanticize. We’re also pulling back the curtain on how...

Send us Fan Mail The word trauma can make people shut down before the real conversation even starts. In this episode, we slow it down and make it usable. Trauma-informed care is most often discussed in healthcare, but we argue it’s bigger than that: it’s a baseline skill for working with humans.  If you lead a team, run a classroom, manage a household, serve customers, or make policy decisions, yo...

Send us Fan Mail Trauma doesn’t just happen to our minds. It is in the body, shaping how we react to stress, authority, instability, and even everyday conflict.  There is a room I get to sit in once a year that gives me real hope: a lecture hall full of scientists and practitioners tackling one deceptively simple question: How does trauma over a lifetime, especially in childhood, get into us and s...

Send us Fan Mail A single sentence in a study can either invite someone into healing or push them back into pain.  That is why we are getting specific about lived experience in scientific research, and why community advisory board should not be an afterthought when the topic is trauma, PTSD, and recovery. We share what it feels like to transition from a community advisory board member to the lead...

Send us Fan Mail Cancer doesn’t just threaten your health; it threatens your sense of control.  When Farla Efros got the call that changed everything, she did something unexpected: she treated her diagnosis like the highest-stakes turnaround of her career. She is a retail turnaround specialist who’s rebuilt major brands under intense pressure, and she brings that same focus to survival with one cl...

Send us Fan Mail What if the biggest myth about resilience is that you’re supposed to build it alone?  We sit down with Steven Minix, vice president of community at Upmetrics, to unpack a grounded, usable take on resilience, positivity, and the relationships that carry us through hard seasons. Steven shares why his optimism isn’t performative and why toxic positivity feels so different from a real...

Send us Fan Mail Your training can be solid, your intentions can be pure, and your heart can be in the right place, and you can still freeze when disaster hits. That moment can feel scary and humiliating, especially if you’re the one people expect to lead.  We sit down with Christen Rinaldi, a licensed clinical mental health counselor and disaster mental health specialist, to talk about what chang...

Send us Fan Mail Health isn’t a button you press or a pill you take. It’s the world you live in, the air you breathe, the stability of your housing, the safety of your streets, and the way your workplace treats you on an ordinary Tuesday. We sit down with physician and epidemiologist Sandro Galea, dean of the public health school at Washington University in St. Louis, to challenge the default Amer...

Send us Fan Mail Trust doesn’t come from one big promise or a single heroic moment. It comes from the small, repeatable choices leaders make when nobody is keeping score: the quick check-in, the honest follow-up, the respectful pushback, the steady tone when pressure spikes.  That’s the thread running through my conversation with Barry Moline, a longtime CEO, coach, speaker, and author, who’s spen...

Send us Fan Mail Your life can look fine on paper while your body and brain keep pulling you into the same loops: avoiding risks, overthinking every move, shrinking your boundaries, or feeling stress that doesn’t match the moment.  We get into why that happens and how resilience is often less about willpower and more about the beliefs you learned early and never chose on purpose. We’re joined by J...

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve ever watched a brilliant, high-IQ leader stall out, you’ve seen the real bottleneck: the way they relate to people. I sit down with Rich Hua, founder of the EPIQ Leadership Group and former chief EQ evangelist at Amazon, to talk about emotional intelligence as a practical leadership skill that improves trust, influence, resilience, and business results.  Rich shares his...

Send us Fan Mail “I’m fine” might be the most dangerous sentence in a workplace after a crisis.  When teams experience a traumatic event, leaders can do everything the checklist recommends and still miss what matters most: whether people feel safe enough to tell the truth about how they’re doing. We sit with that uncomfortable gap between business continuity plans and the lived human reality of fe...

Send us Fan Mail A bomb goes off, you make it home without a scratch, and everyone assumes you’re fine.  In this episode swap, Manya is a guest on Grieve Then Achieve with host Kate Nudds . They talk about the invisible aftermath of surviving the Boston Marathon bombing: PTSD symptoms that hijack sleep and focus, the raw-nerve feeling of living in fight-or-flight, and the isolation that can follow...

Send us Fan Mail Work doesn’t slow down just because we’re overwhelmed.  Expectations climb, messages hit us from every direction, and the do-more-with-less mindset turns into burnout, stress, and that form of exhaustion where people show up but aren’t really there. We sit down with resilience expert and Resilient Minds founder Carré Le Page to get practical about what resilience actually is and h...

Send us Fan Mail Silence after a disruption is louder than most leaders realize. When people are scared, overloaded, or grieving, they don’t just listen for facts, they listen for proof that someone is steady, honest, and actually paying attention.  Listen to part two of my presentation to the Business Continuity Institute 's (BCI) Business Continuity & Resilience Awareness Week (BCAW+R)...

Send us Fan Mail Your systems can be back online while your people are still underwater. That gap, the space between operational recovery and human recovery, is where a lot of what people think of as resilience fails. I take you inside the question that changed my work: How confident are you that your business continuity plan will hold up when the team executing it is terrified, traumatized, or nu...

Send us Fan Mail Ambiguity from leaders can teach people to hesitate, to gossip, and to lower their standards.  I sit down with Kirk Driver, a 34-year veteran of the Fort Worth Police Department and the creator of the Zero Gray Leadership system, to get practical about what clear leadership looks like when the stakes are high and the pressure is real.  If you lead a team, manage a department, or s...

Send us Fan Mail A CEO calls employees “low-value human capital,” companies brag about AI while cutting people loose, and somehow, workers are told to just be resilient. To be honest about what that does to trust and what leaders can do differently, I sat down with Tamar Cohen, founder of Halo Effect, to talk about the real human cost of fear-based management and the very real business costs that...

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve ever looked at your career and thought, “I did everything right, so why do I feel so wrong?” this conversation is for you. We sit down with Graham Skidmore, co-founder of Harmony Health, to unpack what happens when corporate success collides with wellbeing and why the system can feel fine until you step outside the lanes it was built for. We talk about the moment Graham...

Send us Fan Mail We sit down with Chase Sterling, workplace well-being expert and founder of the Wellbeing Think Tank, to get honest about what support actually looks like when someone is stressed, grieving, or barely holding it together. The throughline is resilience—a human process that requires time, space, and genuine psychological safety at work. We talk human-centered leadership in practical...

Send us Fan Mail Your first move as a leader is probably not what you think.  Before the strategy deck, before the new plan, the faster path to trust and better results is to be genuinely curious and listen like you mean it. I’m joined by executive advisor Chris March, who helps founder-led companies scale beyond the founder without losing operational control, and we dig into what resilient leader...

Send us Fan Mail One screw in a piece of drywall doesn't usually feel profound. This time it did. Standing in a gutted house in Altadena, California, more than a year after the Eaton Fire, I felt the absurd weight of wildfire recovery and the despair that comes from doing something tiny to address an enormous problem. Then my mind shifted: rebuilding is not made of big, triumphant moments. It...

Send us Fan Mail You can feel it everywhere right now: more stress, less sleep, shorter tempers, and a quiet sense that a lot of people are barely holding it together.  We sit down with Cynthia Conigliaro to talk about what resilience actually looks like when life hits hard and does not let up. Cynthia shares the real work behind being positive, and why that label often hides a long history of eff...

Send us Fan Mail Most organizations don’t fail because they don't have a plan. They fail because they can’t imagine they would ever need a plan. We sit down with Keith Erwood to talk about what real risk looks like and why business continuity and crisis management have to be more than checklists and compliance. Keith shares how his experience in EMS during 9/11 shaped the way he thinks about...