Building Resilience

Today we are lucky enough to have Holly Bertone, PMP, CNHP as our guest—#1 Amazon bestselling author of the book  Thriving in the Workplace with Autoimmune Disease: Know Your Rights, Resolve Conflict, and Reduce Stress ,  the first book ever to educate others on Autoimmune Disease as a legal disability in the U.S. workplace. Holly is currently the President and CEO of Pink Fortitude, LLC...

How you process information. Problem solving. Reasoning. How you accomplish your goals. These are all cognitive skills. They impact our language skills, how we read, how we write, how we understand information we hear and how we express ourselves through speech. When people say they're having a hard time reading, they may actually be struggling with focus or concentration, or retaining the informa...

10-10-10. Three numbers, but also a life tool to help you make decisions differently and proactively—by deliberately considering their consequences in the immediate present, the near term and the distant future. Should I quit my job? Should I end this relationship? Should I buy this house? Should I skip this meeting? Should I go to the party? How will this decision affect me in 10 minutes? 10 mont...

Everybody loves some good alliteration and abbreviation, which is why we've brought you today's episode—The 3 P's! These three "p" words (personalization, permanence, and pervasiveness), are a quick shorthand from Dr. Martin Seligman (the father of positive psychology) for today's subject. We're going to talk about protective factors—mental strategies to help insulate our minds, to help us build r...

In our last episode, we talked about six different mind traps—this week, we'll talk about even more (there's a reason we had to split this topic into two episodes!). Learning to identify what these mind traps are is like being a defensive driver. If you learn what signs make a road dangerous, you can largely avoid pot holes because you know what to look for. In this episode, we share some personal...

SNAP! Just like a mouse trap, a thinking trap lures us in and before we know anything is wrong, Recognizing these mental pitfalls is so important that we are going to have to split this over two episodes. Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatté introduced four tenets to resilience which we're going to talk about today: 1) life change is possible, 2) thinking, 3) tunnel vision, and 4) fortune telling. Thes...

If you've been listening to us long enough, you'll see that we are constantly saying our thoughts are 100%. Sometimes it doesn't feel that way— because when we think a thought over and over again, it becomes a belief which actually starts to feel like a fact. It is true and there's nothing we can do about it. Appearing in our mind. What also happens is sometimes our brain. Be efficient. We'll thin...

When it comes to your emotional and mental health, it can be hard to even know where to begin to improve. It's so hard to even tell where you currently are—much less where you should be heading. Luckily, there's a way to help map that out. What if we told you there was a 56 item test that can help you get a snapshot of your resilience in distinct areas? But what exactly is the resilience quotient?...

On today's podcast, we're going to be talking about grief. We couldn't pick someone better to talk about it than Krista St-Germain! She is a Master Certified Life Coach, grief expert, widow, mom and host of The Widowed Mom Podcast. When her husband was killed by a drunk driver in 2016, Krista’s life was completely and unexpectedly flipped upside down. After therapy helped her unfurl from the fetal...

 Mindfulness and meditation are two words thrown a lot in the world of mental health. But the question is, how are they different? Simply put, meditation is focusing on nothing and mindfulness is focusing on something (that's an oversimplification, but it's a good start) Studies have shown that both mindfulness and meditation can lower stress, and even help your sleep (did we mention it's fre...

This is an exciting episode for us, because it was based on a book that we refer to all the time—it can make such a big difference in understanding and dealing with relationships of all kinds: with your partner, your kids, your friends, your neighbors...pretty much anyone you meet! The book is The Four Tendencies , by Gretchen Rubin, the author of the well-known book, The Happiness Project . She s...

Since 2020 rolled around, there has been a lot of talk about the concept of "languishing". If you haven't heard about it before, it's a state where you're tired and overwhelmed, but you kind of want to do things. You're lacking energy, enthusiasm, and motivation. You're not completely depressed because you do believe that things will eventually get better. "Languishing" was coined by Dr. Corey Key...

Since experts have been establishing such strong connections between the gut and the brain, it makes sense we wanted to have today's guest on our show! We're lucky enough to be joined by Hollie Chrome of Hollie Chrome Holistic Wellness. Hollie specializes in supporting women in feeling empowered about their Health and Wellness through creating and achieving their own unique Wellness Vision. Hollie...

We've all felt overwhelmed before when we have a lot going on at once in our lives. Thoughts like "I'll never get this done" and "I don't have time to do this" get stuck in our minds. These thoughts create a storm of irritation, frustration, and other emotions, which create the situation of overwhelm. Fortunately, overwhelm isn't something that happens to us—it's a state that we actually create wi...

Sometimes the word "stress" can be used to describe things that are going on inside of us, like our thoughts. Many times, we say our stress is caused by our family, work, school, health, commute, money, COVID (among many, many other things). But what if we were to tell you that your stress is actually caused by none of the above? These stressors are not the cause of your stress. And as long as you...

We're pleased to have our very first guest on this episode of Building Resilience, and it's a big one for us! Dr. Eric Gentry of the Forward Facing Institute is an internationally recognized leader in the study and treatment of traumatic stress and compassion fatigue. He has trained over 100,000 health professionals over the past 20 years, and we're two great big fans of his! Dr. Gentry joins...

Do you like peaches? Believe it or not, there are people who do not like peaches. You can be the juiciest, most beautiful peach, but there is always someone who's not going to like peaches. But do we worry about it? Who's at fault, if somebody doesn't like peaches, do we blame the peach? There are plenty of peaches and plenty of apples to go around, so be who you want to be! This week, we talk abo...

"You can search the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than yourself. And that person is not to be found." - Buddha Research shows that self-compassionate people tend to be more caring, supportive and compassionate towards others. What does that mean? It means that being kind to yourself is actually an act of kindness to those around you! Want to learn how...

How many times do we say "I feel anxious", but we're not really sure why? Anxiety is an emotion, but it also has a physical component, the stress component, which is the fight or flight stress response. The brain gets alerted that you were under a threat. You feel the emotion of anxiety and then your body goes into the fight or flight response. Our body is reacting as if there's danger—but the dan...

Mindset. We've all heard the word, especially in a self improvement setting. But what does it really mean? A mindset is a set of assumptions, methods, or notions held by one person or a group of people. It arises out of a person's worldview or their philosophy of life. Boiled down—it's basically the way we think.  Our mindset is an amazing thing, because it shapes the reality of everything we...

The inner critic. The super ego. The Mean Girls. The concept has many nicknames but they're all the same thing—that inner voice we hear criticising us whenever we try to change. We're imagining we're hearing their voice in our minds, but their opinions are also imaginary. Who are these mean girls? What do they want? How can we use their chatter to our advantage? And what does all this have to do w...

Where does love come from? Most people would say, it comes from my significant other, my kids, my dog, my family, my friends—movies or commercials or cards lead us to believe that love comes from somebody else. This week, we're here to tell you love is not what you think! Because we know that any feeling is created by a thought, and feelings are created by thoughts, we create our love. As always,...

Have you ever been in a relationship where someone constantly criticizes you? Maybe they say you're not tall enough, thin enough, smart enough or sexy enough. Even when you do succeed, that person doesn't seem to acknowledge it or share your joy. Sometimes that voice grows louder and louder, because someone else's voice joins theirs: ours. This week, Heather and Leah talk about confidence: what ar...

Before you go running and thinking "Post-traumatic growth? That's so not for me." —this information is actually really valuable. As we've talked about numerous times before, trauma in all its glorious forms is something that we are all going to be confronted with either personally or we're going to witness a loved one, experiencing something. Sometimes these traumas can turn into something difficu...

Contrary to how it might feel, we get to decide how we act. If someone says something offensive to us, we can choose to end the conversation. We can choose to never talk to that person again. What we can't do is control what they think, feel, or do. On today's episode, we discuss how we can take advantage of the choices we do have, even when it seems like we might not have many options....