242. Resilience in Action: How Ginous Assil Overcame Loss and Thrived as a Female Entrepreneur

If you think resilience means handling everything alone, this story will change your mind. Ginous Assil shares how she faced big loss and crisis not by going solo, but by trusting her inner wisdom and leaning on a supportive community. Her story shows that real strength comes from connection and simple, practical tools—not just grit.

Why Listen to This Episode:

• Learn how resilience can grow even in tough times
• Discover easy mindfulness tools to find calm during chaos
• See how community turned isolation into strength and support

If you want to turn life’s challenges into growth, this episode shows how Resilient Minds can help you build lasting strength and peace.

Meet Ginous Assil:
Ginous is the founder of Nana Good Eats in NYC. After losing her husband and raising two toddlers alone, she thought she understood resilience. But when a house fire hit her family just as she started Resilient Minds, she realized surviving is different from thriving. 

Her raw story reveals how female entrepreneurs face unique isolation and how group healing helps more than doing it alone.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why women entrepreneurs often feel isolated and stressed
• How Resilient Minds gives you right tools exactly when you need them
• How writing and sharing with others can change your view of work conflicts
• Why vulnerability with a group helps you break through tough barriers
• How community creates lasting support beyond the program
• How practicing together builds real, lasting resilience

On Community/Group Experience: "It is incredibly therapeutic because you're hearing other people verbalize what you're experiencing. And that by itself is like, I'm not alone in this. I'm not the only one going through this struggle, and it really helps." - Ginous Assil

Why Community Matters:
Women build networks differently. Resilient Minds creates real connections with shared support, not just surface networking. Having these tools during crisis helps you do more than survive—you grow stronger.

Ready to Stop Going It Alone?
If you feel pressure to do everything yourself, you’re not alone. 

Resilient Minds offers 8 weeks with other women who get it. 

Starting September 30th, join us for evidence-based mind-body practices, real community, and tools that work when life gets hard.

Learn more and apply:https://www.dradrienneyoudim.com/resilient-minds 

Limited spots available for women ready to break the cycle of professional isolation and build sustainable resilience for whatever comes next.

3 Ways that Dr. Adrienne Youdim Can Support You

• Join Resilient Minds: If this sounds familiar, you're exactly who Resilient Minds is designed for. Next cohort starts September 30th - Limited to 12 high-achieving professionals ready to move from success to significance.
  Ready to stop asking "Is this it?" and start living like you know it isn't?
  Application details here: https://www.dradrienneyoudim.com/resilient-minds
• Subscribe to Dr. Adrienne's weekly newsletter https://www.dradrienneyoudim.com/newsletter.
• Connect on Instagram : Follow @dradrienneyoudim for tips and inspiration on well-being and peak performance.

Transcript

Adrienne Youdim: 

If you've been listening to the podcast recently, you might have noticed that we've been talking a whole lot about resilience because it is my belief that if you're around long enough, eventually life will throw you a curve ball.

Your ability to engage with life's happenings with resilience, essentially with grit and grace, means everything in terms of how you make it to the other side.

Up to now we've talked about many skills and practices and practical ways in which you can build resilience in your own life, but it's also instructive to see real world examples of how people have been resilient with their own challenges.

I can't think of anyone better than to bring this home for us as our guest in this week's podcast. Ginous is an entrepreneur. She is the founder and [00:01:00] owner of Nana Good Eats, a delicious Mediterranean restaurant in New York City.

I'm so glad to have you here with us today.

Ginous Assil: Thank you. Thank you. So glad to be here, Adrianne.

Adrienne Youdim: So we did some extensive work together in Resilient Minds, but your story of resilience began long before that work. I wonder if you can just start by sharing when you were really most or first tested in your life and how you had to cultivate that resilience in order to move forward?

Early Challenges: Immigration and Loss

Ginous Assil: It goes back a while, actually - this year, 20 years this year. I guess even farther back. That would be moving from my home country to this country in my teenage years. That's a whole set of challenges that I had to face as a teenager and a lot of moving with family, [00:02:00] unsettled life for a while, moving to a new country and all that.

But the most challenging time was in my thirties when I was just married for about six and a half years with two toddlers, and my husband was diagnosed with very serious form of leukemia.

It was very, very challenging times that I was facing. It was hell for about two and a half years. Unfortunately, we did lose the battle and he passed away when he was 39, I want to say.

So about two and a half years was a huge struggle and challenging - raising two young children and going through that whole journey, and finally losing my husband.

After that, when you have toddlers and you lose a partner, there is no time to stay in bed and stay under the covers. You gotta get up and you gotta [00:03:00] move on and do what you need to do.

So I guess that would be the first real, real challenge to learn resilience in my life and go on.

Finding Inner Strength Through Acceptance

Adrienne Youdim: Yeah. I mean, we all face, unfortunately, loss and illness - it's inevitable. But for you to have faced that in yourself with two young kids... And to your point, having to continue to care for these kids out of necessity, it sounds like you had to build that resilience.

But I wonder, yes, you had to, so to speak, but did you have a sense in the moment that you were doing anything particular or leaning into any natural strength at the time?

Ginous Assil: What stands out for me, remembering that time, was a sense of acceptance. Just really tapping into - now I have the [00:04:00] vocabulary somewhat to call it what it was - but some kind of an inner strength, I guess it is.

To accept and move forward, but also purpose. It was like my purpose were my children. My purpose was the several different projects, real estate projects he had left behind for me to complete.

So that also helped - having a purpose, having goals and all that helped tap into this inner strength to accept and move forward.

Adrienne Youdim: When you talk about inner strength, awareness, and acceptance, I feel like so often - and I've been guilty of this personally - when we're faced with a challenge, we want to fight it. We want to change the reality, we don't want to face the reality.

How did you find that ability for something that was really so unjust to have acceptance? Did you fight it? Did [00:05:00] your acceptance come after a period of kind of friction between you and reality, or was that just something innate that you had?

Ginous Assil: No, naturally I fought it. I believe I fought it for about almost three years, two and a half, three years.

But that's the thing with death - it's final. There's nothing to fight anymore. You're kind of pushed to the point that you gotta accept - there's no other option, right?

So then what? Then the decision is: Do I accept with a positive attitude and move forward and not let it destroy me? Or do I let it destroy me or my life, and in this case, my children's life?

It was kind of a sudden clarity that comes with that realization and such an extreme reality [00:06:00] that you gotta choose. That clarity helps you see and therefore choose which path you want to take.

The Moment of Clarity

Adrienne Youdim: What I love about what you're saying is that I believe that we all have that inner wisdom that you speak of. That knowing, I think is how you stated it. We all have that inner wisdom.

The ability to tap into that really requires a certain level of stillness. Acceptance requires a level of stillness, awareness and intentionality. But it all kind of stems from that inner knowing.

It's really lovely to hear you say that in something that is so trying and taxing.

Ginous Assil: Yes. And as you said, we do have it - we all have it - but we do forget, I think at times. It's practices that I've had the honor of having with you that helps bring it [00:07:00] back because I believe back then it happened naturally, but it doesn't always happen naturally.

Back then I remember very specifically - I was driving back actually from, my husband was in the hospital and I was driving back by myself. It's weird for me to even say it, describe it like this, but it really was a very clear moment of acceptance on this drive back by myself in the car and tapping into what you just described as this inner knowing.

It's a very peaceful, calm - I want to say almost unemotional, unattached place of acceptance, accepting reality.

Yes, it's there, but we forget to tap into that. It's a beautiful place that we have to be reminded to go back to. Like you said, that stillness - it doesn't have to be emotional, it doesn't have to be attachment. It doesn't have to be [00:08:00] anything because it's so powerful in and by itself.

I don't know if it makes any sense, but it's experiences like that that I've personally tapped into. Occasionally I do go into it. It's something that comes with more and more practice.

The Fire and Resilient Minds

Adrienne Youdim: Yeah, it does make sense because I think everyone who's listening can think about a time in which they experience sudden clarity in the midst of struggle or distress.

But you're right - in order to revisit that place because it doesn't come all the time (we wish that we could always be in that place of serenity and clarity), we do need to cultivate it with practices.

I know that you've done a lot of work over the years and then almost serendipitously we came to doing the work together as you joined Resilient Minds in January of this [00:09:00] year.

Again, it's almost mind blowing to recall that just before many of the participants who are on the West Coast had experienced the Palisades and Eaton fires, the fires that we experienced in Los Angeles just days before that, you, living on the East Coast in New York, had experienced a fire as well.

Ginous Assil: Yes. Bizarre coincidence. These are the incidences that really make you believe, like everything happens for a reason and how this work came into my life at exactly that time with exactly those participants. It was amazing.

Yes, it was two days. The fire - there was a small fire in my residence, but it was very damaging. But it happened exactly two days before the LA fires. So yes, and another extremely challenging time. But I was fortunate to [00:10:00] join this group and it really truly helped me at a very trying time.

The Power of Community

Adrienne Youdim: One of the beautiful things about Resilient Minds, one of the things that I personally appreciate as a facilitator, is not just the skills that we'll talk about, but community building of like-minded individuals.

We don't recognize, I think at times, how similar we are to people who live thousands of miles away, have different cultural and maybe ethnic backgrounds, who have different walks of life, different professional backgrounds.

In many ways you were very different than many of the people who were in that group, but also very much the same and also tied by this, again, bizarre coincidence. The sense of community and recognizing the universal thread that connects us all is [00:11:00] therapeutic in a very profound way.

Ginous Assil: Yes, it is incredibly therapeutic because in such a setting with a group, you're hearing other people verbalize what you're experiencing.

That by itself is like, "I'm not alone in this. I'm not the only one going through this." And that by itself is very therapeutic as you put it. And calming in a sense, and just knowing you're not the only one in the world going through this struggle.

It really helps. It really helps to know and to share that experience and go through this healing process together as well, using the tools and observing and sharing how the different experiences work.

Adrienne Youdim: I think what is inherent in experiencing trials and tribulations is that it can be inherently alienating. When we are in our thing, whatever that thing [00:12:00] is - whether it's catastrophic or even the small and seemingly trivial struggles that we go through - we feel so alone.

It's by nature very isolating. One of the beautiful things of being in these groups is that it allows us to recognize the truth that we are not alone, that common things are common. That regardless of who we are, we experience the same universal hungers as I like to describe it.

Professional Isolation

Ginous Assil: That's not only in personal life, but as a restaurant owner, as a female restaurant owner, isolation feels very real also in my work situation, professional life.

Yes, my work situation, because it's very much a - and it's a common thing that a lot of women business owners in the restaurant world [00:13:00] feel - that we're just, we feel very isolated.

Men kind of have connections they can contact, but you don't feel that. So in that sense as well, I've been able to use the tools that I got in my workplace also.

Adrienne Youdim: I'm so glad that you brought that up because I don't think it's exclusive to the restaurant world. This is actually documented in the data and in research as well - that men tend to do better in terms of networking, taking time to cultivate relationships: work lunches, after hour drinks, golfing, or the likes.

Whereas women don't really take that time. I think women - this is a generalization - but they tend to either be working or on their off time, they're caretaking, even if they're not parents. Many women find [00:14:00] themselves in a position caring for parents or caring for siblings.

Women inherently tend to be more in general serving caretaking functions, and so there's not a lot of time left and not a lot of time allotted.

I think there's also this lack of permission. So it is true that women, and particularly women who are entrepreneurial in their professions - even lawyers or doctors like me who have gone out on their own - it tends to be an isolating experience.

Overcoming Group Hesitation

Adrienne Youdim: What I wanted to ask you is that I actually was speaking to a patient earlier this week who's interested in enrolling in Resilient Minds, but she was turned off by the idea of the group. She didn't want to talk about her stuff or share with the group. That's actually something very common.

Is that something that you could relate to or can you speak to that in any way?

Ginous Assil: So many years ago, I had the opportunity to do an experiential workshop. It was right after I had lost my husband and I was also very hesitant. I always say, if it wasn't for my sister, who I trusted a hundred percent, I would've never joined an experiential group workshop like that.

Now I'm here to tell you that it is a priceless experience, especially because of the group environment, because of what we just talked about.

Even if you don't want to share, it's okay. You don't have to, but I encourage it. I always say everyone should do a group workshop because in my opinion, I think it [00:16:00] forwards it - as opposed to one-on-one work or therapy or whatever - because there's many people sharing a lot of different experiences that you find commonality in.

So even if you don't bring up something, someone else might say something that - my God, it applies to me. That I can relate to. That's like a light bulb that might have not been on your radar to think about, but it opens up something.

In that sense, I think it's an opportunity not to be missed.

Adrienne Youdim: I love how you describe it - that it almost accelerates the aha moments to have multiple people in the room because of that relatability or the commonality of our experiences.

I think it's one of those things that if we haven't done it... I can understand, particularly if you're [00:17:00] in a professional space, there's a certain persona that we want to uphold. I can understand that it's not within our comfort zone, but being able to push out of that comfort zone, there really are blessings on the other side. The reward is tenfold.

Ginous Assil: That's all I can say. The reward is tenfold.

Adrienne Youdim: To your point, even if you don't share, but I have found that there are always participants who are listeners - perhaps they're hesitant at first. But invariably, I've never had a cohort in which at the end, all participants were not actively engaging.

Ginous Assil: Yeah. Even if you're shy, it'll take sometimes someone else sharing something very vulnerable or intimate that may or may not make you comfortable to also share. Again, even if you [00:18:00] don't want to, you don't have to, but hearing someone else be vulnerable or share helps.

Adrienne Youdim: Vulnerability begets vulnerability.

Ginous Assil: Right. And even if it doesn't, even if you still don't want to, it will help internally. It will help within your own mind somehow, somewhere it'll touch something that will have that aha moment for you.

Tools and Techniques That Work

Adrienne Youdim: What I want to touch on now is the fact that unbeknownst to you, when you actually signed up, you ended up taking the Resilient Minds Course during a time of significant trauma and calamity in your own life.

You had already signed on and then literally days before our start, you had a catastrophic fire in your home that required you and your children to move out.

What's interesting about this work - as I initially learned it [00:19:00] - it was actually intended to be done during times of trauma, in places of trauma. There's a lot of medical research where the basis of Resilient Minds, the mind-body skills, have been taken to war zones in the Middle East, in Bosnia and Kosovo, or in times of significant trauma like post Parkland shooting.

They have used and utilized these skills in that very time when it was most acute.

I bring this up because I think sometimes people, when they are in that really acute phase of something difficult, think there is no bandwidth or no time, no energy, no capacity for doing work. But in fact, this is when it is most intended.

Do you feel like something about you happening to be in an acute traumatic time of your life made you more open, or how did it change your interaction and interfacing with these skills?

Ginous Assil: It was truly as if God given that I did this work during that period. Because when you're in the midst of such catastrophe or disaster going through it, you forget this proper breathing that relaxes you so that you are able to function normally - or to the best of your ability - to get the clarity you need to move forward and make decisions.

So it's the most [00:21:00] basic of things - breathing - and we think we're doing it, but it's not until you actually make it a conscious practice that you notice the effect it has on your body, on loosening up the tension you're carrying as a result of what you're going through or what you're in the midst of.

You don't realize how tense your body is or how much tension - physically, psychologically - you're carrying with you until you actually sit down, give yourself that stillness, give yourself that time to do the conscious breathing, to do the many practices that you offer.

They do magic in their simplicity. There's no other way of explaining it, but we forget. We are either not conscious about it enough, or we don't know about it enough, or even if you've done these practices (which I have), you forget at times of huge [00:22:00] trials like that.

It was a great time to do this with you because it allowed me to again calm the mind, the body so that I can make the decisions that I needed to make at the time - with clarity and more sensibly rather than out of panic and out of a foggy mind.

You need it. You need to.

The ROI of Mindfulness

Adrienne Youdim: I really want to highlight that point that you made in terms of the practices giving you clarity so that you could make decisions in an aligned manner.

A lot of times these practices are sold as stress reduction (which they are) or calming (which they are). But I don't think that we recognize how much stress and [00:23:00] tension and outside noise and busyness impact our ability to function at our highest capacity.

Particularly when you are a professional or a business owner - you know you've done something magnificent, like bring a restaurant to life and make it a success - you're used to doing well. You're used to achieving and accomplishing.

One forgets or one does not recognize how taxing that stress can be and how much more optimal our decision making capacity can be when we actually take the time to do this work.

It's almost like, yes, it takes time (and that's one of the things that potential participants will push back against - "oh, I don't have time to do it"), yes, it takes time, but I think it gives us [00:24:00] back time multifold because we are so much more effective.

Ginous Assil: Exactly. The time that you invest - it's like any other investment. You invest this in yourself and it pays back.

You think you don't have time, but when you're on go, go, go, go, go with a cloudy mind, you're actually not as efficient as you could be if you take a moment and then be more efficient, be more productive with a clear mind.

Like any other investment, the return on your investment is huge. It's just not tangible as you would imagine, but in a different way.

As a single mom and as a business owner who just had their life turned upside down as a result of the fire, yes, I'm used to multitasking and making decisions [00:25:00] on the go. Just throw it at me, anything. But you really don't realize - you don't know what you don't know.

Once you get that clarity, you're like, "Ah, okay, I now understand." That's the part we don't know is missing when we don't take the time to do the practice necessary.

Specific Tools and Techniques

Adrienne Youdim: You mentioned breathing. I wonder if there's any other tool or technique that you found very useful - something that maybe people are not familiar with. We did creative expressive drawing and expressive writing, shaking practices, guided visualization, autogenic phrases, biofeedback - a lot of different modalities to give people various touch points.

I wonder if you had a favorite that stood above the rest?

Ginous Assil: A lot of favorites. Some were fun, some were like, aha.

The shaking and dancing was amazing because it just brings you back to - I don't know - just letting go and not taking things too seriously.

There was something about each of the practices, but one that was more challenging for me was the reflective writing - the one that was a dialogue with the issue at hand. That pushed me a little bit beyond my [00:28:00] comfort, I guess, but it was really revealing in what I got out of it.

Like you said, it's not just one challenge. There's like 10 different challenges going on at the same time. Each of the practices could be applied to another area of life or another issue at hand.

Adrienne Youdim: Can you, without going into the specifics, maybe describe a little bit about how expressive writing was revealing?

Ginous Assil: It was revealing in that it completely changed my perspective about a situation that was so much more clear and - how would I describe it - not as personal as I thought it was.

It was a situation with someone that I had taken very [00:29:00] personally. But when I did that practice, I realized, "Oh, it's not as personal as I thought it was." Very interesting.

Adrienne Youdim: What I love about that - and it's interesting because the writing practice has done that, I've heard that several times in the groups - what I love about that is that it is a way of getting to the truth through your own, on your own.

There are circumstances in which we are very dogmatic about our views and our beliefs, and if anyone else wants to guide us or advise us on it, particularly the person with whom we have the confrontation with, we dig our heels further. It becomes impossible for us to see a different perspective [00:30:00] at times.

What's beautiful about this is that it is your own doing. You are coming to a realization that is to your benefit of your own accord.

Ginous Assil: Absolutely. In a very surprising way, which was the nice part about it.

More Techniques: Autogenics and Emotional Labeling

Adrienne Youdim: And so you were going to say about the autogenic phrases?

Ginous Assil: I found autogenic phrases to be - I had never done any practice like that before - very relaxing.

Adrienne Youdim: Just for our listeners, this is a form of relaxation practice that is essentially a suggestive practice. So utilizing phrases, suggestive phrasing, in order to bring about a sense of ease and relaxation. But then that also engages the body, so it allows people to have interoception, which basically means that you are receptive to the cues that are [00:31:00] coming from your body.

I think for people who don't know about this work or the practice, it may sound like woo-ey, but the reality is that we think with our minds - we're very cognitive as humans and particularly as humans who live in the West - but our nervous system engages information in many different ways below the neck, not only cognitively at the level of the brain, but in the body.

Suggestive phrasing allows us to access that information just by way of description.

Ginous Assil: I just remembered there was also the labeling of emotions. That was really helpful. That's a practice I use at work a lot because challenges come up at work and you can easily get angry or frustrated and reactive in that [00:32:00] sense.

But it really helps with distinguishing what it is exactly. Then again, deciding how to handle it - not like a knee jerk reaction. Recognizing how you're feeling about it and what's coming up, and then addressing it properly as opposed to being reactive in the moment.

That was also a very great practice.

Adrienne Youdim: It comes back to how we are navigating the information and noise that we're being bombarded with on the outside and not allowing it to derail us - not only in our health and wellbeing and stress, but as you mentioned again, how we wish to engage with the outside world.

That impacts our relationships at home. It [00:33:00] impacts relationships at work, it impacts how we work, how we build teams. There are so many ripple effects of doing this work for ourselves that ultimately, we can sell it as like a productivity hack, but really I think at the community level, at the relational level, it's so profound in terms of how we can change what is a very reactive world that we live in right now.

Ginous Assil: Yes, absolutely. It's all about relationships, whether at work or personal or at home or family or friends. It's all about what we do with it that affects everything. Like you said, it has an immense ripple effect.

Then the inner guide meditation, which brings me back to what we were talking about at the beginning, where it allows - it gave me the tools to be [00:34:00] able to tap into that inner wisdom that you lose touch with throughout challenges in life. So that was a great practice also - the inner guide meditation.

Adrienne Youdim: I also love that you brought that up because I think in challenging times, or even when we have a question in our mind - professional question or we're at the stage of leveling up - we tend to look to the outside: coaches or therapists or guides, mentors, gurus, all of which are great.

But there is this inherent wisdom, this inherent knowing. Each of us knows what our next step should be, the next best step in our own lives, if only we are quiet enough and trusting enough to excavate that.

Ginous Assil: Yes, exactly.

Final Thoughts

Adrienne Youdim: I really loved hearing your perspective in so [00:35:00] many different ways, so many facets of your life. Thank you for being so honest and open in your share. This has really been a lovely conversation.

Ginous Assil: Thank you Adrian. I really enjoyed the workshop and I encourage, I really encourage everyone to do it.

Adrienne Youdim: I wonder if you have any last thoughts or considerations, anything that you think would help people out there listening who want to build their own resilience? Any last words?

Ginous Assil: Just dive in. It's simple and it works and it will positively affect you in all aspects of life.

Adrienne Youdim: Beautiful. Thank you again. I loved having you.

Ginous Assil: Thank you, Adrian. Me too.