Notes on Resilience

Hosted by Manya Chylinski

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Episodes

191

Latest episode

Aug 2026

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EN-US

About the show

Notes on Resilience explores how human experience, including adversity, shapes leadership, innovation, and culture. Host Manya Chylinski talks with people whose work, research, or lived experience reveal how we adapt, care, and create after challenge—what these stories show about the systems we build, and what must evolve. These conversations are rooted in a simple idea: the goal isn’t resilience for its own sake, the goal is well-being. Resilience is what makes recovery and growth possible. The show serves as field research on how people and systems recover, rebuild, and move forward.

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60 recent

September 30, 2026Episode 3913 min

196: Lived Experience as Expertise

Send us Fan Mail 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. Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREE Support the show __________ 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 Subscribe to the newsletter: manyachylinski.com/notes 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

September 23, 2026Episode 3826 min

195: Turnaround Mindset, with Farla Efros

Send us Fan Mail 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 Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREE Support the show __________ 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 Subscribe to the newsletter: manyachylinski.com/notes 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

September 16, 2026Episode 3730 min

194: Resilience Is A Team Sport, with Stephen Minix

Send us Fan Mail 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: stephen@upmetrics.com Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREE Support the show __________ 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 Subscribe to the newsletter: manyachylinski.com/notes 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

September 9, 2026Episode 3629 min

193: Disaster-Proof Your Nervous System, with Christen Rinaldi

Send us Fan Mail 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: christen.rinaldi@proton.me Website: https://www.christen-rinaldi.com/training Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREE Support the show __________ 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 Subscribe to the newsletter: manyachylinski.com/notes 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

September 1, 2026Episode 3524 min

192: Health Is Infrastructure, with Sandro Galea

Send us Fan Mail 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. Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREE Support the show __________ 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 Subscribe to the newsletter: manyachylinski.com/notes 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

August 26, 2026Episode 3429 min

191: Trust Is Built In Small Moments, with Barry Moline

Send us Fan Mail Trust doesn’t come from one big promise or a single heroic moment. It comes from the small, repeatable choices leaders make when nobody is keeping score: the quick check-in, the honest follow-up, the respectful pushback, the steady tone when pressure spikes. That’s the thread running through my conversation with Barry Moline, a longtime CEO, coach, speaker, and author, who’s spent nearly three decades shaping teams and organizational culture in high-stakes environments. We get into what happens when trust breaks down, including the rare but unforgettable moments when someone lies to your face. Barry explains why being straightforward can be misread as weakness, and how to respond without becoming aggressive or cynical. The practical takeaway: confront the behavior clearly, reset expectations, and decide how to minimize risk while still keeping the relationship functional when you can’t simply walk away. If you’re leading people, negotiating, or managing cross-organization partnerships, these boundaries matter. Subscribe for more conversations on resilience and leadership, share this with a teammate who cares about culture, and leave a review if it helps. What’s one small action that earns trust fastest in your workplace? Barry Moline is a speaker, author, coach, and longtime CEO with nearly three decades of experience leading teams and shaping organizational culture across business, government, and trade associations. He focuses on enhancing leadership, building great teams, ethical influence, and persuasion, and AI leadership strategy. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barry-moline/ Website: https://barrymoline.com/ Email: barrymoline@gmail.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@barrymoline6530 Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREE Support the show __________ 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 Subscribe to the newsletter: manyachylinski.com/notes 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

August 19, 2026Episode 3323 min

190: Rewiring Limiting Beliefs, with Judy Kane

Send us Fan Mail Your life can look fine on paper while your body and brain keep pulling you into the same loops: avoiding risks, overthinking every move, shrinking your boundaries, or feeling stress that doesn’t match the moment. We get into why that happens and how resilience is often less about willpower and more about the beliefs you learned early and never chose on purpose. We’re joined by Judy Kane, speaker, coach, and author of Your4Truths: How Beliefs Impact Your Life . Judy shares a story that reshaped how she wanted to lead, then explains what subconscious beliefs are, how they’re built (often by age seven), and why they can drive so much of our behavior when we’re not consciously steering. We also talk about how these beliefs shape self-esteem, how we read other people’s intentions, and why stress can spike when we secretly doubt we can handle the consequences. From there, we get practical. We walk through ways to spot limiting beliefs by looking for patterns in outcomes, self-talk, and boundaries. We connect resilience to risk tolerance and the experiment mindset some of us were taught, then share a simple at-home exercise: get clear on what you want to be true, imagine it going right in vivid detail, and notice any resistance that shows up. Those uncomfortable emotions aren’t proof you should stop, they’re data pointing to what needs attention. What belief are you ready to question next? Judy Kane, author of Your4Truths: How Beliefs Impact Your Life , is dedicated to helping individuals overcome barriers that keep them stuck or cause them discomfort. She helps people identify and change the limiting subconscious beliefs that hold them back. Through speaking engagements, workshops, and individual client work, Judy empowers others to achieve their goals. Website: https://www.alignedconsciousness.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/judykanepsychk/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alignedconsciousness Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alignedconsciousness/ Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREE Support the show __________ 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 Subscribe to the newsletter: manyachylinski.com/notes 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

August 12, 2026Episode 3228 min

189: The EQ Advantage, with Rich Hua

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve ever watched a brilliant, high-IQ leader stall out, you’ve seen the real bottleneck: the way they relate to people. I sit down with Rich Hua, founder of the EPIQ Leadership Group and former chief EQ evangelist at Amazon, to talk about emotional intelligence as a practical leadership skill that improves trust, influence, resilience, and business results. Rich shares his own journey from socially awkward, achievement-driven nerd to someone who had to learn empathy, vulnerability, and connection the hard way through marriage, parenting, and leading large teams. We dig into what EQ actually is, why so many corporate cultures over-index on IQ, and how that becomes a ceiling at senior levels. Rich also breaks down how he made EQ feel relevant inside a highly data-driven environment, including the moment an internal talk unexpectedly sparked massive demand and helped grow an EQ community across Amazon. The takeaway is clear: emotional intelligence is not a personality trait you either have or don’t have. It’s a learnable set of skills, and believing otherwise is one of the most costly limiting beliefs in leadership. Then we connect EQ to one of the biggest workplace pressures right now: AI transformation. Rich explains why most AI initiatives fail for human reasons like fear, mistrust, and weak communication, and why executives often misread how employees actually feel. We also talk about stress and decision-making, including how unmanaged pressure can shrink clear thinking, and what EPIQ leadership looks like when EQ and IQ work together. If you want to lead change, keep your people engaged, and make smarter calls under pressure, this conversation will give you language, tools, and a path forward. Rich Hua is a keynote speaker and the founder of the EPIQ Leadership Group, which helps executives and organizations build adaptable, resilient, and innovative cultures that are both high-performing and highly human. Website: https://www.richardhua.co/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richhua/ Email: rich@epiqleadership.com Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREE Support the show __________ 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 Subscribe to the newsletter: manyachylinski.com/notes 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

August 5, 2026Episode 3115 min

188: Name It To Heal It

Send us Fan Mail “I’m fine” might be the most dangerous sentence in a workplace after a crisis. When teams experience a traumatic event, leaders can do everything the checklist recommends and still miss what matters most: whether people feel safe enough to tell the truth about how they’re doing. We sit with that uncomfortable gap between business continuity plans and the lived human reality of fear, grief, and exhaustion, and we explain why ignoring it can undermine recovery. I share what I’m learning from conversations with organizational resilience and crisis management professionals, including senior practitioners, and why the same pattern keeps showing up across industries. The operational side is often strong. The human side is where leaders freeze, default to silence, or accept “fine” as a real status update. We unpack how culture and psychological safety shape everything that happens next, from trust and performance to retention, presenteeism, and absenteeism. Most importantly, we return to a principle that sounds simple but is hard in practice: you can’t address something you haven’t named, and you can’t support people through something you’re pretending isn’t happening. We also preview a new long-form scripted audio series that goes beyond the usual format, following people who survived something catastrophic and built something meaningful from it. Does survivorship create knowledge that our institutions need, and do we even know how to ask for it? If you want practical, trauma-informed leadership insights and a more honest way to think about resilience at work, subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREE Support the show __________ 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 Subscribe to the newsletter: manyachylinski.com/notes 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

July 29, 2026Episode 3031 min

187: You Can Lose Your Old Life And Still Be Alive

Send us Fan Mail A bomb goes off, you make it home without a scratch, and everyone assumes you’re fine. In this episode swap, Manya is a guest on Grieve Then Achieve with host Kate Nudds . They talk about the invisible aftermath of surviving the Boston Marathon bombing: PTSD symptoms that hijack sleep and focus, the raw-nerve feeling of living in fight-or-flight, and the isolation that can follow when the world only recognizes physical injuries. Manya shares the frightening, disorienting thoughts that showed up early, and why taking them seriously was part of staying safe and getting support. We also dig into the grief that can live inside trauma--grief for the life you had before, the innocence of believing “this doesn’t happen to people like me,” and the future that suddenly feels uncertain. We talk stigma, why self-reported mental health wounds are often doubted, and how that doubt shapes recovery for disaster survivors who don’t look injured. Then we get practical about resilience and trauma recovery: therapy and trauma-specific counseling, mindfulness and meditation to calm the nervous system, movement through yoga and walking, and the surprising power of channeling anger into advocacy and meaningful action. If you’ve ever felt dismissed because your pain didn’t show up on the outside, you’ll hear language for what’s happening and options for what to do next. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review with the biggest takeaway you’re bringing into your own healing. Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREE Support the show __________ 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 Subscribe to the newsletter: manyachylinski.com/notes 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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