Resilience Unravelled

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 conversation around understanding infertility.

In this podcast:

• Why blood tests don't provide the full picture
• How tracking the menstrual cycle can help woman’s health
• The importance of optimising and balancing hormones

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 seen as more transferable or easier to obtain but these things are massively important in themselves. Combining well-developed people skills to existing technical skills provides the basis for a great leader!

In this podcast:

• Why leaders need emotional intelligence and people skills
• Why awareness needs to be actionable
• How technical skills and people skills come together in a great leader.

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 need to look at how we use space, sensory cues and group dynamics and then explore the challenges people face when their innate need for human connection is unmet.  

In this podcast:

• Why the latest brain science is network based
• The use of psychopharmacology
• How we can improve the remote experience.

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 actions can benefit ourselves and other’s. In the US there is a struggle to know how to grieve and how to talk about it. There is a superstition about it so people who are grieving have little access to tools to help them develop resilience in the face of that change.

In this podcast:

The difference between Buddhist and non-Buddhist meditation practices

How Buddhists approach grief and loss

The link between meditation, compassion and wisdom.

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 Science in criminology and a Bachelor of Science in health, society, and policy.

Desange was given an opportunity to have a different future when she went to the U.S. but she always remembered the girls left behind. She founded unDEfeated for the countless young women in Uganda who don’t have someone valuing their worth and she hopes to break the cycle of poverty by creating opportunities for women to start and operate their own businesses.

In this podcast:

• Desange talks about her journey from civil war in Congo, to a refugee camp in Uganda and finally to the U.S.
• The hardships facing women in Uganda
• How education is the key to change.

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 entering this space and the exciting thing is that we get to define what that seed change looks like and the new paradigm. Women are hungry to look for the modeling of ‘what can my life look like in my 60s 70s and 80s?’

In this podcast:

• How women can feel ‘less than’ as they get older
• The dangers of loneliness and isolation
• Why the menopause can be a time of reassessment

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 approach Jeff has been working on over the last ten years is called the Invitation to Change‘ which is an invitational idea rather than a command one. Its basis is in community reinforcement and family training, an approach called CRAFT which is the most powerful evidence based approach for helping families help loved ones. What we know from CRAFT and other psychological based approaches is that you can take care of yourself and stay connected and that this is actually the most powerful way to help someone to change.

In this podcast:

• Jeff explains the role families can have when helping their loved ones with substance issues
• How the ‘Invitation to Change’ programme works
• Why Science and Kindness can help people change

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 others. They are just not feeling satisfied but they don't have the emotional training to engage in difficult conversations about important things like Am I happy? Am I satisfied? Am I feeling constricted about money? Am I not feeling fulfilled in my work? If you don't have the capacity for that or take the time to dig deep during a marriage you’re likely to end up at the divorce lawyers. There is a choices – do it yourself, go to mediation or through a collaborative process or go to court and make a public display of all your trauma.

In this podcast:

Nanci explains how the collaborative divorce process works

Why we need to reposition, reconfigure and take feedback

How to use divorce for personal growth and transformational

change..

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 irritations and distractions of everyday life and focuses on happiness joy and wellbeing.

In this podcast:

• Dawson explains how temporary states can become traits
• The three most effective things you can do to achieve brain remodeling
• How meditation can deactivate the default mode network.

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 companies with innovative, measurable marketing strategies and her dynamic background is in leading and building high-performance marketing teams that include demand generation, integrated marketing, product marketing, digital marketing, public relations, brand management, analyst relations, and crisis communications.

Martha feels she has tenacity and stubbornness which was built up over time by having to deal with a lot of challenges. Children are often very resilient and Martha feels that there is an immigrant work ethic that tells you that you don't quit. She was also an oldest child so knew the pressure was on her to blaze a trail for the family in the US. This was difficult at times because her parents didn’t know what she was going through but as an adult she now feels that what was a difference and a negative when she was a child is now her superpower.

In this podcast:

• Martha talks about some of the pressures of being the eldest child in an immigrant family
• Why what seemed a negative as a child is now a ‘superpower’
• What she would tell her ten year old self.