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 us an enriched sense of experiences and makes us more elastic and better able to carry out the broad range of emotions feelings and experiences in this world and be more resilient and effective with a more enriched balance of the experiences of life.

In this podcast:

Machiel explains what a dream is

How dreams can offer creative solutions

Why we need to engage with recurring dreams.

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 who they can became and what they have the potential to be.

Leaders also have to have the ability to inspire and to be visionaries who go beyond the limitations other people see or think. Every person has what is needed to succeed and find that confidence for themselves. Finally, leaders need to let go. Your team will have gone through the different stages and now have the inspiration and confidence to lead!

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 compassion, empathy and deeply listening to others.

It is possible to bring a spiritual approach to our work and posture of service in what we are doing and how we are doing it by developing an approach that brings the same spiritual posture in your most comfortable setting to the office in how your treat people, how you approach your work and how you endeavour to inspire others.

We don't necessarily need to share the reasons and motivations that inspire us with everyone but we don't need to exclude them from the workplace.  Looking at the workplace and finding the 'why' then gives context to the meaning of the work you’re doing.

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, relationships, who you are as a person, whether this is who you want to be or whether this is what you want to be doing in the next chapter of your life and then introducing changes to ensure the next chapter is better than the last and that we benefit from the changes that we make.

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 what its meant to do – to heal - in a more holistic, integrated and less challenging way. In this podcast:

• Lauren explains what Energy Medicine and Energy Medicine Yoga is
• How Energy Medicine Yoga helps with stress and trauma
• Why our energy needs to be in balance.

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 Stanislavski method of acting and then had a twenty-year acting career before realising he also had another set of skills, those of writing, producing and coaching.

In his mid 40s he moved from Manhattan to Malibu and set up a west coast version of his New York coaching operation where over the last 12 -15 years he has worked with young artists to get their careers on the road as well as working with people higher in the industry. In this podcast:

• Craig explains why perfection is not needed - 95% is good enough
• How actors create roles and ‘live truthfully under imaginary circumstances’
• Why actors need resilience, integrity and authenticity.

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 accident that we need. This type of growth is often related to shame, disappointment or embarrassment - the stuff of failures, mistakes and setbacks - but if we have tools to harness both categories then we can live on purpose.

When we can choose to be on purpose, we choose to harness our choice and respond rather than react to life.  Doing things with a sense of purpose knowing where you are growing and doing it purposefully.

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 before he started going forward. To get out of the hole was hard and it was not until he was older that he started to look at his mental health.

Rob tried to find all the positives he could find from what had happened. One of the biggest was that for that time after 9/11 everyone was working together regardless of religion, gender, colour or political beliefs – they were working together for a common purpose. He now looks at that as one of the most impactful things in his life, that its possible for us to work together and have a bigger purpose than just having our point heard and being right.

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 to the point of emotional abuse in order for children to acquire the grit and resilience needed to attain excellence in a competitive world. Setting high expectations in an atmosphere of safety, trust and empathy is light years away from using threats, humiliation and cruelty if the goal is high achievement.

Neuroscientists have found visual evidence in brain scans of the damage that occurs when subjected to bullying and abuse. The bullied brain correlates with failure to perform, substance abuse, aggressive behavior, chronic disease and mental illness.

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 wanted and he quickly realised he would have to 'break the mould' so he could get things for himself. Sam says he had a fantastic childhood and upbringing but is also thankful that it wasn't ‘silver spooned’ so that what he accomplished from his finance career in London, Dubai and New York he gained himself. He thinks his biggest success is that he never settles and that he’s always looked for the ‘what if’ and that has led him to being part of the team setting up Capsll.