Resilience Unravelled

Jennifer had dissociated with the person she was as a teenager who was physically, emotionally and sexually abused by three teachers. She had put this away in a box and not integrated it so it started to operate as a mind bully. She was a high achiever in the academic world but when she came home behind closed doors she bullied herself through cutting and eating disorders. She was hurting her own...

When we tell ourselves about not being defined by something we generally mean not talking about it. The traumas that happen and that we don't want to be defined by we don't talk about and so we don't deal with them. They then become ‘the monster under the bed’. They end up controlling us because we haven’t dealt with them. We have to face these things head on. Feel the emotion then go back to what...

Although everyone dreams, most people don’t know that their dreams can be used for personal development. They key is to ask the right question and keep your mind open so your dream can provide the answer.  With direction it is possible to learn the reality of how your dream is constructed, how your own mind creates part of the dream and your emotions, expectations and intent. This gives...

As the founder and CEO of of dance company in India and now CEO of a multinational organisation in the US, Rani Puranik has realised there are 4 stages to leadership. Initially its to listen so you can gather information and then reflect it back out then to act as a bridge to bring stability to organisations, teams and individuals. This means thT slowly and steadily you can gear your team towards...

There is an intersection in business which makes people feel their lives have to be compartmentalised making it impossible to combine their spiritual and work lives - the idea that work just has to be work and `I can't bring some of what I believe in terms of my own spirituality’. Some of the things we do at work however are in alignment with the things that exist in our spiritual life such as com...

The term midlife crisis has a really bad reputation but it can be a time for positive change and far more exciting and interesting than we think. The pandemic has caused many people to have a mid life crisis simply because they had time to think about their life choices. That’s really what a mid life crisis is. A time to reevaluate what’s going on in your life whether it’s your career, relationshi...

Energy touches every area of your life - how you’re feeling or sleeping, how your relationships are working, how quickly you heal, whether you have an optimistic or pessimistic outlook or whether you take action of pull back. All are affected by how coherent all of your energy systems are. The need is to find out which area is out of balance energetically and bring it back so that the body does wh...

This week on the Resilience Unravelled podcast, Dr Russell Thackeray talks to Craig Archibald who is an acting coach in California who works with actors at all levels in their careers. He became involved in the theatre when he was 11 years old and progressed to a professional actor when he was 15. He worked at the Royal National Theatre in London and New York’s Neighbourhood Playhouse studying the...

Growth and resilience go hand in hand. We can think about our growth in two ways - by accident or on purpose. If we want to be resilient we need to take life by the horns and maximise our wellbeing by embracing both. Most people focus on growth on purpose because that's what’s wanted – its the things we planned for, were hoping for and were willing to get uncomfortable for but it's the growth by a...

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...