Resilience Unravelled

There is so much resilience required in writing a book because you are being judged and critiqued about what you've written very personally. Even if it's a non-fiction book that critique is about something you generated yourself. It’s very hard to separate ourselves from the words we’ve written and the content we’ve delivered. If you remember a time in your life where your examination was being gr...

Brian started asking why did he experience post-traumatic growth rather than post-traumatic stress? He looked at his peers and although they had had the same stimulus, they had different results. Brian felt he had grown from his experiences and that they had increased his resilience and ability to see things as opportunities rather than obstacles or things that would drag him down. Other guys on t...

Following her own personal infertility experience, which included seven miscarriages and two rounds of IVF, Amy Beckley used her PhD in Pharmacology to create Proov, an at-home progesterone test. This helps to provide women with more information on why their bodies may be miscarrying.  As well as sharing, her personal story with fertility, Amy has made it her mission to empower and change the...

There is also a feeling that as we skill leaders up somehow their rational skills diminish - as we improve one, the other falls away.  In the past this meant technical staff didn't want to take on a leadership role because they thought their technical skills would become obsolete or because it was somehow seen as a lessor role. This is perhaps because the skills needed to be a good leader are...

There are a lot of ways we can improve the remote experiences, but we need to learn the signs that our needs aren’t being met in our virtual interactions, for example why Zoom calls are physically exhausting, why what we intend to say gets lost and distorted in virtual settings and why being part of a remote team can increase stress. To understand what is missing from these remote interactions, we...

Buddhists approach grief and loss in a different way. The traditional westernised view is that it’s something that's not talked about, something that’s slightly embarrassing and that if we talk about it, it might happen sooner. Buddhism seems to integrate ‘passing on’ in a more obvious way so people are less ashamed to talk about it, can remind themselves that life is brief and that our words and...

Originally from Democratic Republic of Congo, at the age of two, Desange Kuenihira and her six siblings moved to a refugee camp in Uganda. She was told repeatedly that she was meaningless and that her only potential worth was the dowry a much older man. Desange lived in Uganda for twelve years as a refugee before moving to the U.S. and building her life in Utah where she gained a Bachelor of Scien...

At the moment we are in a unique position. The average lifespan of a white woman in the early 1900’s was 51. Although there were people who lived to their 80s or 90s this was not as a cohort or large sector of the population. Now is the first time that there is a large number or high concentration of people in this space. The Baby Boomers, the Gen X’s and now even the older Millenials are all ente...

One of the messages for families dealing with addiction has been that if a loved one is struggling, you need to step away and take care of yourself. The tough love idea that you have to let someone hit rock bottom before they will change. This has nothing to do with evidence or effectiveness and is an approach that is heartbreaking for families who are scared, concerned and asking for help. The ap...

People step out of marriage for different reasons but in Nanci’s experience it’s usually because communication has broken down or people are just not being honest. They don’t feel secure enough to say what they mean and mean what they say. The failure of communication leads to a lack of accountability and people get entrenched into positions of misery and want to blame and point the finger at othe...

The states to traits progression in people who meditate, especially those who meditate effectively, means that they are able to increase neural mass in parts of the brain such as the corpus callosum and the memory and learning system. There is an increase in neural tissues in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex that hooks the executive centres in to the emotional brain and down-regulates all the ir...

Martha Aviles is a marketing executive based in Austin, Texas. Her parents were Nicaraguan immigrants who arrived in Miami, Florida in the 1970s. Martha was born and grew up in Miami before moving to southern California and then Austin, Texas in the early 90s where she became involved in high-tech marketing, the career she has pursued for the last twenty years. She focuses on impacting high-growth...

Living a life of discord and emotional suffering doesn’t need to be the norm. When we unravel the stories that the mind holds on to so tightly and become aware of our patterns and triggers, it can lead us to an awakening of a very different reality filled with ease and grace. Beth Bell’s soul journey has taken her around the world to live, starting with humble beginnings in North Dakota, to Califo...

Nowadays there is a lot of discussion about the impact of childhood trauma but not a lot of time has been given to the relationship between siblings who are part of emotionally abusive families. It can be difficult to realise that you grew up in a home with these dynamics because denial that these things are happening is common. Sometimes this denial lasts to adulthood. The relationship between si...

Like all high level sport speed skiing is about failure, rectification, incremental gains and constant evolution. It’s an extremely tough sport mentally and physically – you know you'll have crashes but you have to have a long-term vision and know where you’re tying to go. You have to put goals in place that are incremental – you’re not going to get to your end goal of skiing at 200 kms an hour on...

There is a criticism of some awareness approaches. The critical thing is what comes next, of having awareness not for the sake of awareness but of making choices and taking meaningful action. We can’t just pretend to live joyful lives, we can’t just hope and affirm. Being consciously brave is about being able to know what is needed in any given moment and then doing it. When we have the capacity t...

Where there is a rupture in a team or where people don't necessarily agree, there is often a desire to get to a place where it is a little less uncomfortable, where it’s ‘nice’. We need to move, not to ‘nice’, but to a place where we can generate fresh ideas, where we can have discussions that move the organisation, team or a group of individuals to a new place, a new solution or a new way of doin...

Laura Purdy feels telehealth and digital health are the progression and future of healthcare. She sees healthcare as following the way the banking industry has evolved – we do almost everything remotely, rarely go to the bank and when we do its’ an inconvenience. If healthcare follows that trend, as technology is developed and adoption increases, it will get to the point where the first thing we t...

This week we thought we'd give you another opportunity to listen to Dr Thackeray's take on Psychological Safety, something he has long been fascinated by. He is particularly interested in how it aligns with Burnout and Resilience and in this podcast he discusses: What psychological safety is What it’s all about What it has to offer us Some of the different theoretical ideas around psychological sa...

Ryan Larson has been a firefighter in Phoenix, Arizona for twenty-one years. In the emergency services sector people often talk about the physical requirements, the structure, the sense of clarity and knowing your role and what you have to do. But being a firefighter is a lot more than this - it isn’t just about running into a burning building, it’s about knowing your environment, knowing the stru...

Sam LaCrosse hasn't done anything amazing. He's not extraordinary or impressive. He’s just an ordinary guy from Cleveland, Ohio, who now lives an ordinary life in Austin, Texas. Sam’s approach to living a rich and fulfilling life doesn't involve slogans or self-esteem dogma. He feels the path to a good life lies in discovering and honoring your own core values. Sam grew up as part of a tight-knit...

Estelle Giraud is passionate about creating a better healthcare system. She believes that we all have the fundamental right to have agency over our own body, our own health journey and, the privacy that goes with it. The idea that we own and cleanse our own health data means we can show our own data to the people providing our healthcare needs on a global scale. Different countries have different...

David Richman is an author, public speaker, philanthropist, and endurance athlete whose mission is to form more meaningful human connections through storytelling. As a former sedentary, over-weight, smoker, David knew that he needed to focus not on what others wanted out of him, but on what he wanted out of life. Through lessons learned in business and sport, he introduced the concept of the “midd...

When artists describe their creative process, they inevitably talk about being in an open mind state where the download of core creativity can happen, that creativity isn’t a rational, calculated activity, its about allowing oneself to become receptive.  Pure originality is core creativity, something that comes from ones pure core collective unconscious. Mindfulness meditation can take us out...

Research and science shows that meditation actually enhances creativity so you can come at a problem with several different angles and be more creative about solving it. It decreases anxiety and in a more relaxed state you are open to getting more insights and having more breakthroughs. Meditation can also enhance emotional intelligence which makes you more empathetic, less likely to act impulsive...