Resilience Unravelled

Robert Vershelst or 'Fireman Rob" was 23 years old with only a year in the fire service when he was part of the search and rescue operation after 9/11. Rob found the situation very surreal and didn't understand how to process it. He had these feelings for many years and used alcohol to quell the darkness. There were a lot of things going on in his life during those years that dragged him down befo...

Jennifer Fraser is a best-selling author and award-winning educator on bullying and the impact neuroscience has on personal development and culture change. Our culture is so seeped in bullying and abuse - from children’s playgrounds to the upper echelons of leadership - that we’ve come to normalise the behavior. The bullying paradigm has parents, teachers and coaches believing they must be tough t...

Sam Syed is co-founder, CFO and COO at Capsll, an app that enables users to gather their once-scattered memories into digital time capsules. Sam was born in London and is one of six brothers with a Portuguese and Pakistani heritage. He became aware of racism at a young age but feels this helped him build his resilience. His working class background meant he grew up not always getting everything he...

Matthew Fox is a spiritual theologian, an Episcopal priest and an activist for gender, racial and eco-justice. He has written more than 39 books that have been translated into over 60 languages. In 1993 he was expelled from the Dominican order of the Catholic church after 34 years, by Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). His mistake was reviving Creation Spirituality which blend...

Belonging is an archetypal experience that we all seek. In the workplace, a sense of belonging will only happen if you have both diversity and inclusion. When you facilitate diversity in hiring practices and instill inclusive policies, procedures and behaviors, your organisation has its best chance of creating a culture that supports a sense of belonging for everyone.  Diversity is a fact. In...

There are a lot of things that happen to us in life, events, injuries, trauma or divorce. With any type of life event happens we try to protect ourselves so we cover ourselves to survive and continue living. A life event such as the pandemic makes people withdraw and disassociate to protect themselves and others from things they used to care for. When people do that they go into a victim mindset -...

Dr Stephen Sideroff is an internationally recognised psychologist, executive and medical consultant and expert in resilience, optimal performance, addiction, neurofeedback, and leadership. He has published pioneering research in these fields. He is a professor at UCLA in the Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences and the Department of Rheumatology, and director of the Wallenberg Ins...

Sallie Wagner feels resilience is incredibly important and crucial to our life and wellbeing in four major areas – physical, emotional, mental and social - and that there are some very simple ways we can build our resilience. Resilience can also help us to move out of all the regrets we have in life – the ‘what ifs’ and the ‘if only’.  As we build resilience we can move on from those regrets....

The First Africa Family Business Summit (AFBS) will be held at the Kempinski Hotel in Accra on June 24th 2022. The aim of the AFBS is to bring together family business practioners and help them to build a network that will allow them to share information and insights amongst themselves. The audience will be made up of family business owners and senior management, the next generations of their fami...

Like most people, successful executive, life strategist, and author Rob Swymer has gone through his share of adversity. Rob married his first wife Bonnie at the age of 21 during the summer of his college junior year and together, they had 3 children. In 2013, Rob lost Bonnie to a massive brain aneurysm and he learned that all the adversity in his life prior had given him the strength to endure the...

Often people attend time management courses and come back very enthusiastic about what they've learned. They start of with good intentions but after a short period slip back. Perhaps time management is bigger and broader and the question we should be asking ourselves is how are we managing ourselves. In the bigger context it's apparent that more people are asking themselves this question now than...

A clinical depression in her 20s, and later, a bipolar I diagnosis, caused Michele Capots to lose all self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth. She felt defined by her illness and was unsure what it meant for the rest of her life. She no longer believed in herself, and lost the confidence to achieve her goals. Michelle knew nothing about bipolar and was in and out of psychiatric wards for thre...

Kevin Roth began to play the dulcimer in 1972 at the old age of thirteen, and at sixteen recorded his first album which immediately launched him into international fame. His career took him to a concert and symphony stages around the world, to festivals, radio, television shows, and two appearances at the White House. Then came a sudden diagnosis of Melanoma which changed his life. He was giv...

Lara Sabanosh and her husband had been marrried for twenty years and had been based at Guantanamo Bay in a civilian capacity for four years. On January 9th 2015 after an evening event he went missing and his body was found later in the bay. In telling the story of his disappearance, the media portrayed him as a war hero and a wonderful husband and father but this did not tell the full story of the...

Pre-pandemic in the US there was a notion that if you did all the right things, happiness would just happen to you. That's not actually the way happiness works. In the pandemic there was a paradigm shift where millions of people started asking themselves were they happy in their life or was their life ending up how they imagined it. Lots of people said no its not and resigned in mass numbers. A se...

 Paola Knecht is a certified leadership, transformational, and self-development coach with fifteen years of experience working in leading-edge global corporations, including Viatris and Syngenta. In her recently published book The Success Mindset: Take Back the Leadership of Your Mind she challenges the mainstream view of success and asks her readers to redefine success so it is truly meaning...

Clint Davis is an entrepreneur with a passion for storytelling and preserving the past. A cancer survivor who lost two siblings at a young age, Clint has always had a keen awareness of the importance of remembering the past, while also making the most of the present moment. He now empowers others to save their histories and pass on their legacies. In this podcast: Clint talks about how moving give...

Rosie Mankes is a life coach, motivational speaker, and author of Find Your Joy and Run With It, a memoir about overcoming her second battle with cancer, the transitioning of her mother into an assisted living facility, and the unexpected loss of her brother, all within one year. Rosie talks to Dr Russell Thackeray about how her identity as a secret comedian helped her come out of adversity happie...

Karen Liebenguth is an accredited mindfulness teacher, certified coach, mentor and facilitator.  She is also the founder of Green Space Coaching and a life and executive coach, eco-therapist and mindfulness trainer.  She was one of the first people in the UK to start coaching while walking in nature after finding that both she and her clients get far better results outside rather than si...

Dr Alex Hershaft was just 5 years old when the Nazis invaded his homeland of Poland. He and his family were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto but he survived and after escaping Nazi persecution and immigrating to the USA, he worked as an environmental consultant. In 1972, a routine inventory of a Midwest slaughterhouse changed the course of his life. He is now the President and founder of Farm Animals...

Lisa Broderick has worked with entrepreneurs and established companies to create lives of presence and purpose for four decades. Her approach of integrating science with metaphysics and her own personal experiences to help others with little or no scientific or spiritual training master their innate abilities with practices designed to improve their lives, their relationships, and how the world se...

This week on the Resilience Unravelled podcast, Dr Russell Thackeray talks to Arman Vestad who spent a lot of his life on the run! Through a series of poor life choices and unfortunate circumstances, he found himself dealing drugs and engaging in other criminal activity. After leaving prison for the 10th time, it wasn’t long until Arman found himself under arrest once again. This time, however, a...

The Soberful Life with Veronica Valli This week on the Resilience Unravelled podcast, Dr Russell Thackeray talks to Veronica Valli who struggled with alcoholism through most of her twenties. A binge drinker, she was aware for some time that something was wrong but was unable to define what it was however a chance meeting led to her finally getting help and turning her life around. At the height of...

Jonathan Joseph saw a lot of toxicity and negativity when he was working in the luxury womans fashion and sportswear industry. This not only affected people working in the industry but also consumers through marketing and advertising. He thought that it would be possible to shortcut some of the issues such as the body dysmorphia created by unrealistic standards by empowering children rather than f...

The type of conversation that many couples have often doesn't help their relationship. Often it boils down to a debate, a checking in about who knows what and whose ideas are better. What’s needed is an enlivened conversation that builds resilience and allows both people to explore and learn together. They can then move out of an adversarial mindset to a place where they can learn and be resilient...