Notes on Resilience

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Most of us can map out a two-week vacation in detail, yet we drift through decades without a clear sense of why we are doing what we are doing. 

When we lack a definite purpose, stress fills the vacuum, our nervous system stays on alert, and life starts to feel like constant reaction instead of choice.

We sit down with Jordan Dunin, founder and CEO of HatchPath and author of The Regulated Leader, to talk about what regulation looks like when the stakes are real. Jordan shares the story of breaking his neck, living through chronic Lyme disease, and spending years relying on caretakers. From that experience, he learned a hard-earned lesson: you are not broken, you are dysregulated, and dysregulation can change. We dig into what it means to face the truth of a situation, let go without giving up, and stop fighting the river long enough to start healing.

Along the way, we connect tiny daily habits to identity change, discuss empathy as a superpower that needs boundaries, and reflect on why playing the long game matters when you are trying to change a system.

If you care about resilience, nervous system regulation, leadership, trauma recovery, and practical well-being, this conversation will give you language and tools you can use today.

Jordan Dunin is the Founder and CEO of HatchPath, author of The Regulated Leader, and a member of the American Heart Association's Executive Leadership Team. In 2016, Jordan suffered a serious neck and head injury in a diving accident, followed by a diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease. What could have defined him instead became the foundation for his life's work: learning to live from a regulated nervous system and building the platform that helps others do the same.

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jordan-dunin-4a63461b1
• Email: [email protected]

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Producer / Editor: Neel Panji

Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams and position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in well-being, resilience, and trauma sensitivity. Learn more: www.manyachylinski.com/services

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#trauma #resilience #compassion #MentalHealth #CompassionateLeadership #leadership #survivor

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The phrase “Let the s#*% go” can sound like a throwaway line until you hear the story behind it. I’m joined by HR leader Anastasia Bergmann, who shares a deeply personal loss during COVID and what it took to rebuild her life as a single parent with two children while carrying grief that didn’t fit neatly into a return-to-normal timeline. 

It’s candid, heartbreaking, and ultimately full of hard-won clarity about what resilience really looks like.

We talk about why resilience isn’t being strong every day. For Anastasia, it’s finding strength in small moments when you feel empty, and leaning on people who can handle the authentic version of you. 

From an HR and leadership lens, that experience reshapes everything: how we interpret changes in employee performance, how we make space for personal crises at work, and why support has to mean more than a policy in a handbook.

We also get practical about building a listening culture. We dig into employee surveys, listening sessions, microcultures inside organizations, and the trust-breaking damage of asking for feedback and doing nothing with it. Anastasia shares why values-based leadership matters, how psychological safety is built through trust, and why leaders sharing their own stories can make it safer for others to speak up.

If you’re working on employee engagement, workplace wellbeing, HR strategy, or simply trying to lead with more humanity, press play and take notes. 

Anastasia Bergmann is an HR leader who partners with executive leaders to transform business strategy into people and culture strategies that strengthen performance, accelerate growth, and foster belonging. 

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Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams and position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in well-being, resilience, and trauma sensitivity. Learn more: www.manyachylinski.com/services

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Survivors don’t just get through it. Many come out the other side with hard-won knowledge about what recovery actually takes, what it costs, and what it never fully repairs. 

We’re chasing that question from the inside out: what survivors know that people who haven’t lived through trauma often misunderstand, oversimplify, or romanticize.

We’re also pulling back the curtain on how we’re building a five-part narrative series for Notes on Resilience. We talk about why we’re choosing an investigative narrative audio style, how narration and sound design can either flatten the truth or reveal it, and why we’re committed to the real version of resilience rather than the highlight-reel version.

From there, we map out where the series can go next: disaster recovery and what it truly looks like to rebuild a community after a natural disaster, plus the Me Too movement as a powerful example of survivor-led change that reshaped public conversation. Along the way, we keep coming back to a practical stakes question for leaders: if you’re a mayor, governor, HR leader, executive, or manager, what decisions are you making about other people’s recovery, and are those decisions based on assumptions or on what genuinely helps?

If you want stories and research that can change how you support trauma recovery and resilience at work and in your community, subscribe, share this with someone who leads people, and leave a review so more listeners can find the series.

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Producer / Editor: Neel Panji

Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams and position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in well-being, resilience, and trauma sensitivity. Learn more: www.manyachylinski.com/services

Please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice. It really helps others find us.

#trauma #resilience #compassion #MentalHealth #CompassionateLeadership #leadership #survivor

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The word trauma can make people shut down before the real conversation even starts.

In this episode, we slow it down and make it usable. Trauma-informed care is most often discussed in healthcare, but we argue it’s bigger than that: it’s a baseline skill for working with humans. 

If you lead a team, run a classroom, manage a household, serve customers, or make policy decisions, you are already interacting with people who carry trauma, whether you can see it or not.

We also challenge a common leadership mistake: misreading trauma responses as personality flaws. What looks like noncompliance, attitude, or difficult behavior may be fear, overload, or protection shaped by past experiences. We connect that idea to resilience, not as toughness or silent endurance, but as figuring out what people actually need to recover, function, and lead. 

If this reframes how you see your team or your own reactions, subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review with the most useful takeaway you heard.

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Producer / Editor: Neel Panji

Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams and position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in well-being, resilience, and trauma sensitivity. Learn more: www.manyachylinski.com/services

Please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice. It really helps others find us.

#trauma #resilience #compassion #MentalHealth #CompassionateLeadership #leadership #survivor

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Trauma doesn’t just happen to our minds. It is in the body, shaping how we react to stress, authority, instability, and even everyday conflict. 

There is a room I get to sit in once a year that gives me real hope: a lecture hall full of scientists and practitioners tackling one deceptively simple question: How does trauma over a lifetime, especially in childhood, get into us and stay there?

In this episode, I talk about the Broad Trauma Initiative at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and what it looks like when many disciplines work to solve the same puzzle. We move from cell biology to genomics, from biobanks to meta-analysis, from quantitative human research to qualitative lived-experience work, plus animal models that let researchers test pathways with precision. The big takeaway is that the answers to prevention, recovery, and risk are likely distributed across many rooms that rarely meet.

Then I widen the lens: trauma science doesn’t stop at research. Nonprofits support recovery on the ground while policymakers translate what we already know into laws and systems. I also make the case that trauma-informed leadership belongs at the center of good decision-making, whether you run a city, a school system, or a team. 

If this perspective resonates, subscribe, share the episode with a leader you trust, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

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Producer / Editor: Neel Panji

Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams and position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in well-being, resilience, and trauma sensitivity. Learn more: www.manyachylinski.com/services

Please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice. It really helps others find us.

#trauma #resilience #compassion #MentalHealth #CompassionateLeadership #leadership #survivor

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A single sentence in a study can either invite someone into healing or push them back into pain. 

That is why we are getting specific about lived experience in scientific research, and why community advisory board should not be an afterthought when the topic is trauma, PTSD, and recovery.

We share what it feels like to transition from a community advisory board member to the lead lived-experience expert on a Mass General study team. The work is exciting because it is, and also brings some self-doubt when you are sitting in Zoom rooms with psychiatrists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, and researchers who speak in acronyms. 

We unpack the moment it clicks: fluency in professional language is not the only knowledge that counts. Data can tell you what happens, but it cannot tell you what it feels like to be the data.

From safer research language to better questions and more ethical human-subjects work, we explain how lived-experience expertise functions as translation. We also zoom out to a bigger point for any organization: Your team already includes people with hard-won insights, but have you built a way to actually hear them?

If this made you rethink what expert means, subscribe for more, share this with someone in research or healthcare, and leave a review so more listeners can find Notes on Resilience.

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Producer / Editor: Neel Panji

Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams and position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in well-being, resilience, and trauma sensitivity. Learn more: www.manyachylinski.com/services

Please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice. It really helps others find us.

#trauma #resilience #compassion #MentalHealth #CompassionateLeadership #leadership #survivor

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Cancer doesn’t just threaten your health; it threatens your sense of control. 

When Farla Efros got the call that changed everything, she did something unexpected: she treated her diagnosis like the highest-stakes turnaround of her career. She is a retail turnaround specialist who’s rebuilt major brands under intense pressure, and she brings that same focus to survival with one clear blue sky goal guiding every decision.

Farla shares how she walks into medical meetings with agendas, research, and a willingness to push back, while still making space for the fear and grief she carries privately. She explains why being fact-based can improve the doctor-patient relationship, how precision-medicine thinking changes the conversation, and why your plan should be measured, updated, and defended when new information arrives. Her relationship-first approach to clinicians is simple but powerful: ask questions about them, recognize the strain of the system, and create collaboration without losing your backbone.

If you’ve ever felt steamrolled by healthcare, overwhelmed by information, or unsure how to advocate for yourself or someone you love, you’ll walk away with concrete tactics you can use immediately. 

Farla Efros is a retail turnaround specialist with three decades of experience restructuring companies in crisis, having served as Interim CEO of True Religion Brand Jeans and held senior leadership as President of HRC Retail Advisory, part of Accenture Strategy. In 2023, at age 51, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and underwent chemotherapy, targeted immunotherapy, a double mastectomy, and surgery to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes — while also grieving the deaths of her sister to cancer and both of her parents. She wrote about the experience in her book, "F*ck Cancer," approaching her diagnosis the way she approached a consulting project — building a protocol, assembling a team, and documenting the journey with candor and strategic precision. She is now NED (No Evidence of Disease).

Website: www.farlaefros.com

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Producer / Editor: Neel Panji

Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams and position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in well-being, resilience, and trauma sensitivity. Learn more: www.manyachylinski.com/services

Please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice. It really helps others find us.

#trauma #resilience #compassion #MentalHealth #CompassionateLeadership #leadership #survivor

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What if the biggest myth about resilience is that you’re supposed to build it alone? 

We sit down with Steven Minix, vice president of community at Upmetrics, to unpack a grounded, usable take on resilience, positivity, and the relationships that carry us through hard seasons.

Steven shares why his optimism isn’t performative and why toxic positivity feels so different from a real-possibility mindset. We dig into the subtle ways our operating system affects the people around us, and how you can stay solution-oriented without denying grief, stress, or conflict. 

You’ll also hear a candid leadership story about avoiding a hard personnel issue for too long, and the lesson that follows: do the needed thing in the time it’s needed. 

Along the way, Steven offers a memorable self-accountability rule: don’t point the finger, pull the thumb.

We also define resilience in plain terms: getting back up when the email, the feedback, the failure, or the curveball knocks you off center. Then we go deeper into community resilience and social support, including a practical personal asset map exercise to help you see how resource-rich you already are. If you care about leadership, mental toughness, workplace culture, and building stronger connections, this conversation brings both heart and tools.

Subscribe for more conversations on resilience, share this with a friend who needs a boost, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway: where do you see resilience showing up as a team sport in your life? 
Stephen Minix is Vice President of Community at UpMetrics, and a strategic facilitator working at the intersection of capital, community, and collaboration. He partners with impact investors, funders, and nonprofits to strengthen the relationships that meaningful work depends on.

Stephen’s expertise is environment creation. He designs spaces where stakeholders can surface assumptions, navigate power dynamics, and build partnerships resilient enough to handle complexity. He helps turn data into shared language so conversations about capital and community become more aligned and more productive.

• Website: www.upmetrics.com 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenminix
• Email: [email protected]

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Producer / Editor: Neel Panji

Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams and position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in well-being, resilience, and trauma sensitivity. Learn more: www.manyachylinski.com/services

Please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice. It really helps others find us.

#trauma #resilience #compassion #MentalHealth #CompassionateLeadership #leadership #survivor

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Your training can be solid, your intentions can be pure, and your heart can be in the right place, and you can still freeze when disaster hits. That moment can feel scary and humiliating, especially if you’re the one people expect to lead. 

We sit down with Christen Rinaldi, a licensed clinical mental health counselor and disaster mental health specialist, to talk about what changed for her after Hurricane Helene when she found herself living the crisis while also serving as a provider. We unpack the hidden “price tags” of overfunctioning, why the myth of being indestructible breaks down fast, and how leaders can protect their physical health and decision-making by tracking one thing: capacity. Kristen makes a sharp distinction between preparedness and chronic hypervigilance, explaining how constant nervous system strain narrows creativity and reduces options right when you need them most. 

From there, we get practical about what actually stabilizes people. We talk about the ripple effect of stabilizing responders first, the power of simply saying “what you’re experiencing is normal,” and how fight, flight, freeze, and fawn can play out in slow motion during a prolonged crisis. Kristen also walks us through the disaster recovery curve, including disillusionment and the jagged climb back, and we connect it to a polyvagal lens so the swings in energy, mood, and connection make more sense. 

If you care about disaster mental health, organizational preparedness, trauma recovery, and everyday resilience practices that keep your observer mind online, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share with a friend who leads under pressure, and leave a review so more people can find these tools.

Christen Rinaldi is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor and Disaster Mental Health Specialist. She served through deployments with disaster relief organizations in the wake of Hurricanes Ian and Idalia in Florida. And with Hurricane Helene, she quickly learned that when disaster arrives on your doorstep, there is a unique balance of being both a survivor and a provider.

Email: [email protected]

Website: https://www.christen-rinaldi.com/training

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Producer / Editor: Neel Panji

Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams and position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in well-being, resilience, and trauma sensitivity. Learn more: www.manyachylinski.com/services

Please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice. It really helps others find us.

#trauma #resilience #compassion #MentalHealth #CompassionateLeadership #leadership #survivor

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Health isn’t a button you press or a pill you take. It’s the world you live in, the air you breathe, the stability of your housing, the safety of your streets, and the way your workplace treats you on an ordinary Tuesday.

We sit down with physician and epidemiologist Sandro Galea, dean of the public health school at Washington University in St. Louis, to challenge the default American habit of treating health as something we only address once it breaks down. 

We talk about a more practical, more hopeful frame: health as infrastructure that needs continuous investment. That means prevention and the social determinants of health, not just clinical care. We also dig into resilience and why it’s not about pretending nothing hurts. Resilience is the capacity to bounce back, and that capacity depends heavily on context, not just on personal grit. Sandro shares his healthiest goldfish metaphor to make the invisible forces around us visible, from community conditions to the cultures we create at work. 

From loneliness and social connection to the long tail of pandemic recovery, we keep returning to a tough public health question: how do we balance individual freedom with responsibility to the collective? 

If you care about prevention, mental health, workplace well-being, and building healthier systems that actually help people heal, this conversation offers a grounded way to think and act. Subscribe, share with a friend who cares about health beyond health care, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH, is the Margaret C. Ryan Dean, and Eugene S. and Constance Kahn Distinguished Professor in Public Health at the Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky School of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, and Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives for WashU.

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Producer / Editor: Neel Panji

Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams and position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in well-being, resilience, and trauma sensitivity. Learn more: www.manyachylinski.com/services

Please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice. It really helps others find us.

#trauma #resilience #compassion #MentalHealth #CompassionateLeadership #leadership #survivor