Flourishing After Adversity

How to Rebuild Friendships and Belonging After Major Life Changes Host Laura Mangum Broome discusses how major life changes—such as divorce, widowhood, illness, estrangement, or an empty nest—can make longtime friendships feel uncomfortable and trigger loneliness, often because shared routines and contexts shift. Using a hypothetical example of Diane after divorce, she explains that disconnection...

Breaking the Avoidance Cycle: Taking Meaningful Action After Life Changes Laura Mangum Broome hosts the Flourishing After Adversity podcast and explores why people delay actions that could improve life after grief, illness, loss, divorce, or unexpected change. Using examples of learning piano and a divorced woman, Susan, avoiding a women’s group luncheon, she explains the avoidance cycle: anticipa...

Rebuilding After Betrayal, Loss, or Injustice: Accept Reality and Move Forward Host Laura Mangum Broome introduces an episode on rebuilding life after betrayal, loss, or injustice caused by someone else’s choices, emphasizing that acceptance means acknowledging reality—not approving what happened—and that you can move forward without waiting for apologies or resolution. Using a collapsed-bridge me...

Finding Meaning in a Future You Never Expected Laura Mangum Broome hosts the Flourishing After Adversity podcast and explores how to find happiness, purpose, and joy when life changes through divorce, widowhood, retirement, empty nest, health crises, or other losses. She explains that disappointment often comes from comparing the present with an expected future, and that happiness can be redefined...

Stop Seeking Approval: Rebuilding Self-Trust and Self-Worth After Adversity Host Laura Mangum Broome welcomes listeners to the Flourishing After Adversity podcast and shares a free resource, “Reframe the Spiral: 5 Quick Coping Strategies to Shift Negative Thoughts and Reclaim Your Day.” She explores validation after major life changes, distinguishing healthy encouragement from dependence on others...

Busy But Stuck: How to Make Meaningful Progress After Adversity Laura Mangum Broome explains how, after grief, illness, loss, divorce, or major change, people can stay busy yet feel stuck—like rowing a boat still tied to the dock by fear, uncertainty, overwhelm, or not knowing what’s next.  She distinguishes busyness from meaningful progress and outlines five strategies: define what progress shoul...

Stop Rehearsing the Problem: Find Possibilities After Adversity Laura Mangum Broome introduces the Flourishing After Adversity podcast using a “junk drawer in the dark” metaphor to show how adversity can drain limited emotional energy when we keep digging through problems. She distinguishes healthy emotional processing from repeatedly rehearsing complaints that keep you stuck, clarifying this is n...

From Overwhelmed to Functional: Curbing Anxiety to Rebuild After Adversity Host Laura Mangum Broome uses a midnight headlight metaphor to explain moving through hardship without seeing the whole road, warning that anxiety makes people stop and wait. She argues curbing anxiety during adversity isn’t about feeling better but about reclaiming the clarity, energy, and identity needed to rebuild after...

Recalibrating After Loss: Walking Your New Path Despite Pushback Laura Mangum Broome introduces the Flourishing After Adversity podcast and a free download, “Reframe the Spiral,” then uses a compass-and-storm metaphor to explain how loss changes the “terrain” of life and requires recalibration. She shares five major losses in five years—including her teenage son’s suicide, breast cancer, heart fai...

When to Sit With Grief—and When to Start Building Again Host Laura Mangum Broome explains that grief can’t be rushed, using the chrysalis metaphor to show how transformation requires time and struggle, and shares her own losses (her teenage son’s suicide, bilateral breast cancer, a heart transplant, her father’s death, and an unexpected divorce). She describes how women often either rebuild too so...

Designing Your Next Chapter After Life Falls Apart: A 3-Step Framework Laura Mangum Broome welcomes listeners to the Flourishing After Adversity podcast for women facing grief, illness, loss, or unexpected change, and shares a free guide, “Reframe the Spiral.” Using the metaphor of rebuilding after a building is destroyed, she explains that time alone doesn’t rebuild identity—intentional reinventi...

Name the Loss, Release Its Grip: 6 Steps to Rebuild After Life Changes Host Laura Mangum Broome explains that many women can name the event of a setback (divorce, diagnosis, empty nest, retirement) but not the deeper loss of identity, purpose, and the future they expected, which keeps them feeling stuck.  Drawing on her experiences of losing her son, breast cancer, a heart transplant, and divorce,...

Find Yourself Again: Reconnecting With Your Core Values After Life Changes Laura Mangum Broome welcomes listeners to Flourishing After Adversity and explains that feeling lost after grief, illness, loss, or unexpected change often comes from identity disruption when central roles end. Drawing from her own experiences (losing her son, cancer, heart transplant, her father’s death, and divorce), she...

Hope Doesn’t Find You—You Build It: The iCope2Hope System™ Laura Mangum Broome shares that hope isn’t something you wait for but a skill you can build, grounded in research by Casey Gwinn and Chan Hellman defining hope as goals, willpower, and pathways. Drawing on her own experience of five major losses in five years (losing her teenage son by suicide, bilateral breast cancer, chemotherapy-related...

Regret as a Signal: 3 Moves to Stop Circling the Unopened Door Host Laura Mangum Broome frames regret not as punishment but as a signal pointing to what still matters, warning that unaddressed regret drains energy, presence, and peace. She describes two unhelpful responses—suppression and rumination—and argues that only action “closes the door.”  The episode offers three practical moves: name the...

Three Red Flags Keeping You Stuck in Hard Seasons (and How to Flip the Script) Laura Mangum Broome welcomes listeners to Flourishing After Adversity and shares how, after her 27-year marriage ended suddenly following earlier losses and serious illness, she realized her “waiting” wasn’t healing but hiding. She names three common “red flags” that keep women stuck when gratitude feels impossible: mak...

How to Find Yourself After a Relationship Ends: Grieving the Roles, Rituals, and Identity You Lost Host Laura Mangum Broome explores how major relationship losses can leave women grieving not only the person but also the roles, routines, future, and identity built around that connection, quoting “How empty of me to be so full of you” from Louise Hay and David Kessler.  Drawing from five major loss...

Rebuilding After a Storm: Reconnect with Your Core Values and Passions Host Laura Mangum Broome explains how, after major setbacks, people can keep functioning yet feel hollow because they rebuild from fear and stay stuck in survival mode, mistaking coping for living. Using the metaphor of a storm-damaged tree with intact roots, she shares her own five-year stretch of breast cancer, losing her tee...

Flourishing After Adversity: The 3 Conditions for Post-Traumatic Growth Laura Mangum Broome introduces the Flourishing After Adversity podcast and explains that the difference between growing through grief and staying stuck is a learnable framework, not willpower, strength, or faith. Sharing her experience of five major losses in five years—including losing her son, surviving bilateral breast canc...

The Outcome Guardrail Map: Break Fear of the Unknown and Take the Next 200 Feet Laura Mangum Broome introduces the Flourishing After Adversity podcast episode on decision paralysis caused by fear of the unknown, explaining it as a neurological survival response when the brain cannot predict.  Drawing from her experiences with cancer, the loss of her son and father, a heart transplant, and an unexp...

The 6 Stages of Grief: Name What You’re Feeling and Move Through It Laura Mangum Broome explains how naming grief can reduce shame and help people move through loss, drawing from her experience of losing her son just before a scheduled double mastectomy while facing cancer. She clarifies that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—are not linear o...

The Power of “Yet”: Shifting from Fixed to Growth Mindset After Adversity Host Laura Mangum Broome explains how adding one word—“yet”—can shift limiting beliefs from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, drawing on Carol Dweck’s research in Mindset. She shares how being repeatedly placed in jobs without training forced her into trial-and-error learning and later revealed she’d been using a growth m...

Necessary Endings: Use a Hardship Autopsy to Move Forward Laura Mangum Broome explains that after surviving hardship, people can stay stuck by carrying forward people, habits, environments, or patterns that no longer fit, calling these “necessary endings.” She introduces a “hardship autopsy” as a practical, non-blaming tool to gain clarity and move forward intentionally by journaling through three...

Toxic Positivity vs. Post-Traumatic Growth: Are You Healing or Performing? Host Laura Mangum Broome opens with a wound metaphor to explain how forced optimism can cover unresolved pain, then introduces the Flourishing After Adversity podcast and a free resource, “Reframe the Spiral.” She describes how common phrases like “stay positive” can pressure people to bypass grief, leading to anxiety, numb...

From Victim to Victor: Reclaiming Agency After Adversity Host Laura Mangum Broome welcomes listeners to the Flourishing After Adversity podcast and shares a free guide, “Reframe the Spiral,” for coping with negative thoughts after setbacks. She explains that a victim mindset is a human coping response to pain but that staying there keeps focus on what was done to you and drains agency, while a vic...