152: Leading Without Fear, with Melissa Agnes

Fear rewires leadership in the moments that matter most. 

We sit down with Melissa Agnes, keynote speaker, author of Crisis Ready, and a shaper of ISO 22361, to explore how leaders can move from survival mode to creation mode when the stakes are high. Melissa shares why so many teams cling to the concept of getting back to normal after disruption, and how that reflex can stall recovery when normal created the problem. Her antidote: embodied leadership, daily regulation, and a culture that turns readiness into a default, not a wish.

We dig into the science of fear and why your thoughts aren’t always trustworthy under stress. We talk about grief as a mix of loss, longing, and feeling lost—and how addressing grief openly builds trust and momentum. From co-regulating a room with a calm nervous system to designing four levels of safety—physical, emotional, psychological, operational—Melissa maps out practical steps any leader can use to stabilize teams.

Crisis readiness, as Melissa defines it, blends mindset, skill set, and organizational capabilities so you fall to strong training instead of weak habits. That means practicing vulnerability, clarifying values, and running honest after-action reviews that actually change how you operate. The result is a healthier culture and leaders who show up as whole people at work and at home.

Melissa Agnes is a speaker, the founder of Crisis Ready Institute and creator of the Crisis Ready® Certification, and is recognized as a Top 40 Thought Leader in Security & Life Safety (2025). She helped shape international crisis management standards as a panel member for ISO 22361 and is the author of Crisis Ready: Building an Invincible Brand in an Uncertain World. You can connect with and learn more about Melissa on LinkedIn or Instagram.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 3:40 Breath Work As A Leadership Tool
• 7:00 The Pull To “Go Back To Normal”
• 11:05 Grief, Growth, And Opportunity
• 13:55 Redefining Strong Leadership
• 17:15 From Management To Crisis Readiness
• 20:45 Fear Science And Decision Making
• 24:35 Parts Work, Ego, And Thought Traps
• 28:35 Training Defaults And Culture

Transcript

Melissa Agnes: 1:15

Fear is such a risk to leadership, to organizations, to society, to the world when we don't understand it. Most people have not been taught the depths of the science of fear and like what it does in our body and how it shapes how we lead and how we think and how we make decisions.

Manya Chylinski: 1:36

Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Manya Chylinski. My guest today is Melissa Agnes. She's a speaker, author, and founder of the Crisis Ready Institute, and creator of the Crisis Ready Certification. She's recognized as a thought leader in security and life safety. She helped shape the International Crisis Management Standards, ISO 22361. And her book is Crisis Ready: Building an Invincible Brand in an Uncertain World. We talked about what does it mean to be crisis ready? And we talked a lot about the concept of fear. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. Melissa, thanks for being here. I'm really excited to talk to you today.

Melissa Agnes: 2:24

I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Manya.

Manya Chylinski: 2:27

Question I start out with for everyone. What's one thing that you have done in any area of your life that you never thought you would do?

Melissa Agnes: 2:36

It's really funny that you asked that question. I thought back to like my whole life, and I my first answer was going to be like, well, like everything pretty much. But no, that's not that's not acceptable. I actually said it this year that I enrolled to become a breath work facilitator. And never in my wildest dreams did I anticipate that.

Manya Chylinski: 2:54

That's really interesting. What made you decide to do breath work?

Melissa Agnes: 2:58

The universe literally like nudged me on the back. Um, I was in full mode of developing the curriculum for our one of our crisis ready certifications. And it just kept coming up, and I kept thinking, I'll get to it. I'll get to it. And my deal with the universe, people might think I'm a little crazy, but my deal with the universe is I'm always open. I'm open to receiving. I work to receive. I'm also human. So if I miss something, just say it louder. And that usually comes in the form for me, my personal experience is it feels like hands jolting me in my back, like pushing me forward. And I was literally in an elevator in a hotel in Orlando, going from my room to the lobby to meet a girlfriend for lunch. And I got that jolt with that message. And it's really funny because I was like, okay, that's our deal. So, you know, that's you speaking more clearly. And I got out of the elevator, I ended up holding before going to lunch. And that evening I dove into the content and all kinds of pieces of the remainder of the certification started to make sense to me. So it was, it was very, very divinely guided. Um, and it serves really well. Big part of what I do is helping leaders get out of their fear-based brain, because fear only lives in the brain when they're leading through catastrophic moments or moments of high stakes and tap into their body. And the best way to do that is through breath work. So it just something I never anticipated, and yet something that has proven to be so, so advantageous and beneficial.

Manya Chylinski: 4:29

Wow, that's really cool. And I love your talking about listening to what the universe is suggesting for you. It can be so difficult to know, or sometimes I think, okay, I have this idea. Is that the thing that I'm supposed to be doing, or is that just an idea? Because sometimes it is just a thought or just an idea. I like the idea that it keeps coming back and it keeps repeating, and now you realize this is something I need to listen to.

Melissa Agnes: 5:00

Yeah, I mean, it kept doing that. And so I kept saying, I'll finish what I'm doing, which was the certification curriculum, and I'll get to it maybe. The other piece, though, just to add to what you just said, is another kind of symbol of what's what's real or versus what's just a thought. And we have so many thoughts, and maybe not every thought is is a priority. Um, following the highest vibration. So that when you're conflicted, also is a resource or is like a tool that I use of what is the thought or what is the action or what is the plan or whatever it might be that makes me feel the most excited or the most grateful or the most like those are the highest frequencies. So following the highest vibration is always, in my experience, is always the right path for it as well.

Manya Chylinski: 5:46

Right. Oh, that's that's wonderful insight. And seguing into our topic of crisis management, you talk about that vibration, and I can't help but think a crisis is a massive vibration saying this is what you need to pay attention to right now.

Melissa Agnes: 6:06

Yeah, absolutely. Um, crisis is so interesting to me because so many people, and it's all fear-based and it's understandable because human beings don't like the unknown. The unknown triggers fear and triggers resistance, and crises are filled with unknowns for everybody involved the leaders, the communicators, those who are impacted by the crisis. And so with that comes this typical, I'm making a very general statement here, but the human kind of wants to revert back to back to normal and putting that in quotations. Meanwhile, it's wild to me because if a crisis strikes, obviously something's not working, something's not optimal, something's broken. And so to revert back to normal is to say, I want to go back to yesterday where I felt comfortable and safe, but yesterday something wasn't working because today we're in crisis. So it's that getting comfortable, and that's where actually I didn't think we talked about breath work, but that is where breath work really does help, is getting into the body where fear doesn't exist. And therefore you can get into creation versus survival, which means you have access to your prefrontal cortex, which means that you have access to executive functions like creative problem solving and innovative thinking and all the things that envisionary kind of um mindset and leadership. And so, yeah, so talking about like the low frequency or the low vibration of a crisis, just kind of so when people want to revert back to normal, it's just it's just so natural, but yet so counter constructive, so counter to what really needs to happen. Yes.

Manya Chylinski: 7:44

I think back to my own experience and early on after the bombing, all I kept thinking is I just want to get back to the way I was. I just want to get back to the way I was. And through all of the work of recovery and healing, realized, you know what? I actually don't want to get back to the person I was before. And the crisis was outside of me entirely, but it really caused me to look at my life and think, is this what I wanted?

Melissa Agnes: 8:42

It's interesting that like one of the things that we do at Crisis Ready is we really dive into the emotionality of a crisis and um lead, not just lead with empathy, but lead with understanding in order to have true empathy, understanding what the different emotions are, so that the leader can create safety in that and just all these different things. And grief is a combination of feeling loss, feeling longing and feeling lost. So I love what you just framed of you know, being in that grief, being in that loss, longing and feeling lost, and then getting to the other side of that where you go, I won't speak for you. But that part of what I always believe, I always say, I always believe that the universe is always working for us. No matter what we think, no matter what we feel in the moment, it always is for our greatest good. So once we get through that and we gain the clarity and the understanding and then the acceptance, the surrender of, okay, what's where's the opportunity here for evolution and for something greater?

Manya Chylinski: 9:40

Right. Absolutely. Oh, thank you for sharing that. Well, you know, as we're talking about crisis, how do you define strong leadership in a crisis?

Melissa Agnes: 9:51

It goes to that piece of being human. Um, I would say that strong leadership is having the courage to show up as an emotive, imperfect human, which is the most vulnerable thing to do, right? I think that we we've grown up in a society that has depicted leadership as being this strong, stoic, never falters kind of silhouette of a being. And today we live in a world where there's so much change. And with change, whether it's positive or negative or constructive or destructive change, it's scary no matter what, because our bodies don't like the unknown, like I mentioned earlier. And so for me, looking at a leader who has the strength or the courage to step into the reality of the emotions of the situation and can actually be honest with themselves about what they're feeling and what they're going through, as well as, and this can take us down a whole loop, but or a whole pathway, but as well as staying in creation. So it's one thing to feel scared, and that's completely natural and normal because you're leading, you've got so much on your shoulders. And then, of course, your fearful, not just of making a mistake, but then what happens to your reputation and your legacy and your career and all these things, right? It's so natural. So to feel the fear and also still gain access to that creativity, that creation mode. So not letting the fear take over on from the leadership standpoint, and then so that takes great courage in and of itself. And then meeting those that you're leading, being able to say, I acknowledge I understand, or to the most my ability, I can understand what you guys are feeling, and I'm gonna meet you there. So it's not performing confidence, it's having the inner groundedness and safety to actually step into the realities of the situation that are the most vulnerable, that makes the most courageous, most relatable, and most trustworthy type of leader. Right.

Manya Chylinski: 11:49

Interesting. As you were talking, I was thinking it can be really difficult to meet someone where they are in their emotional reality on a regular day, let alone with a crisis happening.

Melissa Agnes: 12:02

Absolutely. And that's where I go to embodiment of not just understanding what the skills are that are required to really be a strong leader in this sense, but to practice every day to stretch your vulnerability muscles like you would at the gym, right? You go to the gym, you you lift some weights, your muscles tear, you take a few days of rest, they build back stronger, you go back, you do same thing with vulnerability, same thing with understanding emotionality. Like it really takes an embodied leader, and an embodied leader has done the work outside of crisis.

Manya Chylinski: 12:35

Well, you help leaders and organizations be ready for crisis. What is one of the things that you feel you most have to address, or maybe myths you have to bust as you get started helping people become crisis ready?

Melissa Agnes: 12:51

Right now, what I'm doing is I'm talking a lot about fear because fear is so natural. Fear is such a risk to leadership, to organizations, to society, to the world when we don't understand it. Most people have not been taught the depths of the science of fear and like what it does in our body and how it shapes how we lead and how we think and how we make decisions, and then how we're able or not able to meet other people, as well as to have compassion to understand their fear and what is happening in their bodies. And the reason why that's so important to me today is because there's so much fear in our world today. And so, therefore, if we really want to lead people through that and ourselves through that, our families through that, our businesses and our communities, et cetera, then we have to understand it so that it's not as scary, right? It's kind of like shame when you when shame, shame breeds in the dark, shame breeds in silence. And the second you start to speak and to share a little bit of what you might feel shame about, then all of a sudden that shame starts to dissipate. It's kind of the same with fear when we understand the depths of the different layers of fear and what it does in the body and energetically and just all the things, then all of a sudden it becomes less scary and it's easier to step into our courage.

Manya Chylinski: 14:18

Interesting. As I think about, as you were talking about fear, I was thinking about pain, which is something that I've gone through as part of my healing process, and realizing that these are messages from our body. It's it's telling me something I need to be paying attention to, and it's learning what is that thing I need to be paying attention to. And it strikes me that fear might be a similar kind of that might be a similar kind of process when you feel fear to think, okay, that's a message. What does it mean? When you have that ability to think about it, because fear can be reactive.

Melissa Agnes: 14:56

Absolutely. And I will say, I will say yes, and so fear is absolutely an indicator. Fear keeps us alive, right? We've survived as many centuries as we have as human beings because we have fear and it keeps us alive. Fight, flight, freeze. However, our egos, so our self-identities, right? Like I am Melissa Agnes and my ego is Melissa Agnes, and my ego's job is to keep Melissa Agnes alive. Therefore, fear keeps me alive. And when I said that we like anything new can trigger fear and resistance, is because our egos, so even if that new is positive, it'll say, I don't know, I don't trust. And it's new, it's foreign, it's unknown. I don't trust that I can actually keep you alive there. Therefore, I'm going to create fear and create resistance. So while if it's like physical or if it's a real fear that's right in front of you, then that makes sense. However, our thoughts, one thing, one thing that I learned over the last several years that I wish I would have known when I was younger is that we cannot trust our thoughts all the time. Most of the time, we actually cannot trust our thoughts because our fear only lives and breathes in our brains. And so our thoughts are often fear-based thoughts. It's perceived threat, it's not real threat. So there's really this discerning of what is the voice or the signal of fear in my body versus what is actual fear? Like what is an actual cue that I am in danger versus my brain just trying to keep me safe, even though I don't need its protection right now.

Manya Chylinski: 16:31

Yes. Okay, I'm gonna share a personal story. Something was going on with someone in my life, and I was worried about them, which was completely natural given what was happening. My brain went down the path of about the worst possible thing you could imagine happening to them given their situation. And I was really struggling to get out of that thought pattern because I knew it wasn't real and I knew it wasn't what was happening, and yet I wasn't able to get myself out of that. And I literally yelled to myself, shut the f and that got me because I don't normally talk to most people that way. I definitely don't talk to myself that way for the most part.

Melissa Agnes: 17:15

I'm glad to hear that. Yeah.

Manya Chylinski: 17:16

Yes. And it was very startling, and I was able to get myself out of that. But it was such an example to me of my thoughts are just, I don't need to believe them and I need to stop them because they're telling me something that is patently untrue at this moment.

Melissa Agnes: 17:34

Yeah. And it can be a vicious cycle. And I think I won't speak for everybody else. I know I've been down that. I lived my life, I built a whole career around having a brain that saw risk everywhere, right? So it's and it's so it served me in my personal relationships not so much. So learning to discern between that or to decipher between that, a couple things that have that work. One is breath work, really does work. Because what breath work does is it takes us out of our brain and into our bodies where we are safe and where we have access to our heart brain and our gut brain, which is more powerful than our brain brain when it comes to intaking what's actually real, because there's no fear there. So one is that. And then two, have you heard of parts work?

Manya Chylinski: 18:20

No.

Melissa Agnes: 18:21

Parts work is when it's a therapeutic style where you realize that we are made up of so many different parts, right? Like I have the part that loves to binge watch television, or the part that loves to be outside, or the part that isn't secure about certain things, or whatever it is. And parts work and inner child work goes off of the premises of let's say that something happened to me when I was really young. And because of my environment, I didn't, I wasn't met in that traumatic experience and it didn't get to heal properly for whatever reason, right? And so therefore, let's say I was nine years old. That part of me, that nine-year-old, stays stuck in time and unhealed. And so then I could be in a as I'm 39 today, I could be in a in a moment with my fiance and he might do something. It's not on him, right? He just does something, but there's a part of that nine-year-old that comes back up to protect me. And so it's no longer you or me is a 39-year-old whole healthy human, like adult, rational adult, but it's that part that's coming up. And so it's really interesting that it took you to like yell at yourself to get to snap yourself out of it. There's um, that's, I mean, I wouldn't always recommend people yelling at themselves.

Manya Chylinski: 19:39

Agreed, absolutely agreed.

Melissa Agnes: 19:42

To pour self-talk in our in our world today. But I know like it's about understanding like what is the fear that is guiding the thoughts or the whatever it might be, and really going down that trajectory of what does that part of me need right now, and tending to that nine-year-old part of yourself who is scared because of XYZ. And in doing so, one, you get to come back into wholeness, you get to come back into creation and out of fear. And then two, you also heal aspects of different traumas and different things from your past that probably didn't get the care that they needed in those moments.

Manya Chylinski: 20:22

Right. Didn't get the attention. Well, I will say, in my own defense, did I tried my usual breath work and my other usual coping mechanisms? And this thought was just so persistent. And I just had to be like, yep, no, we're shutting you down, baby.

Melissa Agnes: 20:37

Yeah, it happens. I was there last week. I sent a voicemail mode to my coach. I was like, I can't get out of this fear, the fear spiral right now. I need, I need support.

Manya Chylinski: 20:45

Exactly. Exactly. Well, I mean, talk about that fear and that fear spiral. That's what makes us, well, I think that's what makes us reactive. That's why something's happening and I'm just gonna react, whether it's that free spider flight, or it's later in the process and you're still just reacting rather than having a chance to think about it. So when you work with leaders, how do you get people to move from being reactive, being in that state, to really being able to think about it and thinking about like the long term, how to move forward?

Melissa Agnes: 21:22

It's really hard. It's really hard. And then that's why over a decade ago, I branded myself and the company as crisis ready versus crisis management because I was being cold in the middle of the night by leaders and companies that were in crisis. And I did not have rapport with, I didn't have relationship with. I had really great SEOs. So they found me and they would call me. And they're in fear and they often, it's the answers require vulnerability, right? In order to lead through crisis, you have to be courageous enough to step into some aspects of vulnerability. And if you don't have the training, the understanding, the rapport with me so that you feel safe with me and you can trust me to do that prior to being in that state of fear, it's really, really, really hard and takes a lot. So, all of that to say, my way of doing that is really going for the crisis ready side of things. Like, how do we, how do we embody, learn to embody what I call the mindset, the skill sets, and then we have the capabilities within our organizational culture that support the mindset and the skill set. So that going into a crisis, first of all, we revert to default. So it's always how do we strengthen our skills, strengthen our skills, strengthen our skills so that when a crisis hits and we revert to default, our default is automatically leveled up because we've been working to level up our default. So there's that, which means that your spike or your downward spiral or whatever isn't going to be as intense because you've strengthened these muscles and you've you have the knowledge, you have the skill set. And then once you're there's the rapport where you have the trust and we have the the yeah, the trusting relationship where you know you can lean on me or my team, you know that we've got your back, you we all know where we're all coming from. And then once the crisis, once you're in recovery mode or in your post-crisis, then it's really about what can you, what can you learn from this? And how are you going to learn from this? There's so many organizations that have, you know, a whitewash or a debrief after a crisis. And then they got, they get all these valuable insights and they create this great to-do plan of here's what we're gonna do to evolve moving forward, and then life happens, and then the next crisis hits and they realize, like, oh man, we never actually stepped up our game. So it it's a whole combination of a lot.

Manya Chylinski: 23:50

Right. Absolutely. You said something that reminded me of, I did not come up with this, but I appreciate this way of thinking about it, that especially in the moment of crisis, we don't rise to the level of our ideals or our dreams. We fall back to the level of our training or our policies because you don't have time to be thinking of something new or imagining what the world can be like. You're just reacting and responding. And there's a cognitive load, and you're also just trying to reduce that as much as you can.

Melissa Agnes: 24:21

Yeah. Dr. Joe Dispenza says it beautifully when he says you cannot be in creation mode and in survival mode at the same time. So, my work is how do I help leaders learn how to recognize when they're in survival? So that's fear and resistance, how to recognize when they're in survival and how to quickly like how to build that skill set so that they can quickly get out of survival into creation and lead from that place when everybody else is still in survival. So when you're leading through a crisis, there's gonna be a lot of fear. How can you rise above the fear so that you can be, you can enter in with the calm nervous system and help other people co-regulate with your nervous system, which is biological synchrony and just all these things that essentially be the leader that you want to be in those high-stakes moments, you don't get there to your point. You don't get there by saying, hopefully one day I'll be there if I'm tested. Right. So that's that embodiment and that's that crisis ready component that I'm I'm a strong advocate for.

Manya Chylinski: 25:21

Right. And we all like to think in various ways that we are going to be the hero when something goes wrong. We're gonna swoop in and do the thing we've never done before, but this is the moment that calls for it. And certainly there are cases where those things happen, but those are the outliers. The true long-term response is the people who have trained and who are who are crisis ready.

Melissa Agnes: 25:46

Yeah, absolutely. And it really is a long-term, like it's a not long term, it is a lifelong journey. Learning to have deeper empathy, learning to have deeper safety, learning to lead with safety and four levels of safety, not just, you know, two-dimensional safety, learning how to do all of these things that even when you're at home and then your home is hectic, I don't know, your baby's screaming and you're in an argument with your significant other, and all these things, like these skills apply there. So that's what I mean by it really is a lifelong journey. And it helps us. I think my my biggest testimonials, my biggest compliments are those who go through our programs. And at the end of it, when we do the exit interview or like the graduation calls, whatever it might be, they'll say, I'm not just a stronger leader, but I'm a better human as a result of everything that I've just learned and and embodied. And that that's everything.

Manya Chylinski: 26:34

That is very cool. And also evidence that the things we're talking about aren't in addition to living a regular life. They're adding to the tools that you have in your regular life. I think they're certainly in the recent past, there's been a lot of talk about the workplace as this separate entity, and you don't bring your whole self to the work and you don't bring your emotions to work because it's this different place. And I think we are slowly getting to the point where we realize that is not exactly possible.

Melissa Agnes: 27:10

No, that's where burnout comes, that's a big piece of where, or it's a piece of where burnout comes. And I remember I've been an entrepreneur since I was 21. And so I've often been asked, especially in the past, by students and different, I do a lot of guest lectures and my books out at Harvard, and like all these different things. And students ask me, well, how do you, how do you separate the two? How do you separate your life and your business? I was like, there's only one of me. There's a multifaceted, multidimensional one of me, but there's only one of me. You're not gonna get a different Melissa as a friend than you are as a client, right? I'm gonna come, I'm gonna approach life and things and and my support of you and my love and all the things in the same way. I might have to be a little bit more strategic when I'm doing business strategy, but that's still a part of me. So there's no that whole like masked and yeah, that I just I can't, that's just not living authentically. And people feel that. And that feels inauthentic and that feels untrustworthy because there's a piece of our system that our nervous system and our intuition that goes something feels off about that person, therefore I don't trust it.

Manya Chylinski: 28:16

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And you might not be able to articulate why you don't trust them. You just know you don't feel safe. Okay. Well, Melissa, we are getting close to the end of our time. What is giving you hope right now?

Melissa Agnes: 28:29

It's giving me hope. When I get off stage, and um, this happened yesterday. So I was on stage last week. I'm a keynote speaker, and I was speaking to a really critical group of people. I'm always fearful that I'm not gonna resonate in the way that I intend to resonate. The things they talk about are different. I approach things differently, especially in this industry. I always have. And that is new, therefore it can be scary, therefore it can create resistance. And yesterday, just as an example, I was on LinkedIn and I got this notification of somebody like restating my talk from last week and saying how much hope it gave her. And then she was there spreading the message of we can actually create the change that we want to see here, some steps that I learned and they are actually working. And that that gives me hope.

Manya Chylinski: 29:18

Yeah. When we talk and we share a message, you never know who's going it's going to resonate with, but it always does, even if you don't see that evidence. But I'm I'm glad you got a chance to see that evidence.

Melissa Agnes: 29:30

I am too. I needed it last week, or I needed it this week from last week. So that was, I was grateful for that.

Manya Chylinski: 29:36

I hear you on that one. And now as we wrap up, can you please share a little bit more about yourself and what you do and how folks can reach you?

Melissa Agnes: 29:43

Yeah, absolutely. So I run Crisis Ready Institute. We certify in crisis communication and transformational leadership. Everything that I've talked about with you and shared is the tip of the iceberg. But I'd say that if anybody listening has any part of themselves that go that's saying, oh, that's interesting. I want to learn more, then I would say that follow that. Follow that. Because oftentimes our students come to us and they'll say, they'll join like the transformational leadership certification, for example. And they'll start by saying, you know, Melissa, I don't know why I'm here, but I know that there's something about why I'm there's something I'm supposed to be here. And then by the end of the program, they're like, oh, their whole life has changed in such a beautiful, positive way. They're like, oh, that's why I'm here. So it's very soul aligned. It's very like if you have a nudge. And the reason for that is because we do things differently than most. So it's really hard sometimes to really articulate that transformation until you've experienced it. But in my experience, there's something in the humans that join it that go, there's something here that I'm just curious about or that's that's nudging me. It's that highest frequency thing.

Manya Chylinski: 30:52

Right, right. What we were talking about earlier. Wonderful. Well, thank you for talking with me today and sharing your insight. And um, I really appreciate learning more about you and your work.

Melissa Agnes: 31:04

Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.

Manya Chylinski: 31:06

Thanks. And thank you to our listeners for checking out this episode of Notes on Resilience. And we will catch you next time.