Notes on Resilience
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.
Episodes
197 episodes
197: Inside A Trauma Research Initiative That Offers Real Hope
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...
196: Lived Experience as Expertise
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 af...
195: Turnaround Mindset, with Farla Efros
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 c...
194: Resilience Is A Team Sport, with Stephen Minix
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 relat...
193: Disaster-Proof Your Nervous System, with Christen Rinaldi
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. ...
192: Health Is Infrastructure, with Sandro Galea
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...
191: Trust Is Built In Small Moments, with Barry Moline
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 w...
190: Rewiring Limiting Beliefs, with Judy Kane
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 th...
189: The EQ Advantage, with Rich Hua
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...
188: Name It To Heal It
“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 en...
187: You Can Lose Your Old Life And Still Be Alive
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
186: The Best Training Has No Measurable ROI, with Carré Le Page
Work doesn’t slow down just because we’re overwhelmed. Expectations climb, messages hit us from every direction, and the do-more-with-less mindset turns into burnout, stress, and that form of exhaustion where people show up but aren...
185: The Human Side of Crisis Recovery, Part 2
Silence after a disruption is louder than most leaders realize. When people are scared, overloaded, or grieving, they don’t just listen for facts, they listen for proof that someone is steady, honest, and actually paying attention. ...
184: The Human Side Of Crisis Recovery, Part 1
Your systems can be back online while your people are still underwater.That gap, the space between operational recovery and human recovery, is where a lot of what people think of as resilience fails. I take you inside the question that c...
183: Zero Gray Leadership, with Kirk Driver
Ambiguity from leaders can teach people to hesitate, to gossip, and to lower their standards. I sit down with Kirk Driver, a 34-year veteran of the Fort Worth Police Department and the creator of the Zero Gray Leadership system, to ...
182: Trust-First Leadership In The Age Of AI, with Tamar Cohen
A CEO calls employees “low-value human capital,” companies brag about AI while cutting people loose, and somehow, workers are told to just be resilient.To be honest about what that does to trust and what leaders can do differently, I sat...
181: Whose Choice Are You Living? With Graham Skidmore
If you’ve ever looked at your career and thought, “I did everything right, so why do I feel so wrong?” this conversation is for you.We sit down with Graham Skidmore, co-founder of Harmony Health, to unpack what happens when corporate suc...
180: Human-Centered Leadership, with Chase Sterling
We sit down with Chase Sterling, workplace well-being expert and founder of the Wellbeing Think Tank, to get honest about what support actually looks like when someone is stressed, grieving, or barely holding it together. The throughline is res...
179: Always Be Curious, with Chris March
Your first move as a leader is probably not what you think. Before the strategy deck, before the new plan, the faster path to trust and better results is to be genuinely curious and listen like you mean it. I’m joined by executive a...
178: Real Recovery Is Slow And That Is Normal
One screw in a piece of drywall doesn't usually feel profound. This time it did.Standing in a gutted house in Altadena, California, more than a year after the Eaton Fire, I felt the absurd weight of wildfire recovery and the despair that...
177: How Lived Experience Turns Into Real Support, with Cynthia Conigliaro
You can feel it everywhere right now: more stress, less sleep, shorter tempers, and a quiet sense that a lot of people are barely holding it together. We sit down with Cynthia Conigliaro to talk about what resilience actually looks ...
176: Beyond Resilience, with Keith Erwood
Most organizations don’t fail because they don't have a plan. They fail because they can’t imagine they would ever need a plan.We sit down with Keith Erwood to talk about what real risk looks like and why business continuity and crisis m...
175: The Gap After The Crisis
The strange part of a crisis is not the first week. It’s the months after, when the debris is cleared, the headlines move on, and your body finally stops running on adrenaline. That’s when many people begin to notice the insomnia, anxiety, irri...
174: Resilient Leadership Starts With You, with Chris Harris
Would you follow someone up the hill if they’ve never taken one themselves? That question sits at the center of our conversation with executive coach and keynote speaker Chris Harris, whose warrior mindset approach strips leadership...
173: How To Talk To Your Doctor, with Dana Sherwin
Doctor visits can feel like a high-stakes performance: you get 15 minutes, you are anxious, and you only remember the perfect question after you leave. We sit down with Dana Sherwin, a healthcare management consultant and speaker sp...