When you think about resilience, what comes to mind?

Our culture loves narratives about triumphing over hardship. And overcoming pain, heartbreak, and even abuse can make us stronger.

However, uplifting “overcoming” too often comes at the expense of actually examining and addressing the lack of care, protection, and support people had to navigate on their path to resilience. We valorize grit and perseverance at the cost of people’s health and wellbeing, encouraging them to just keep pushing past the point of burnout.

My guest today pulls back the curtain on these narratives of overcoming adversity and building resilience to find that so much of the adversity people face is rooted in how we fail to care for ourselves and each other in our society. Real resilience, she says, isn’t about your own personal toughness; it’s about how we relate to and support each other.

Soraya Chemaly is an award-winning author and activist. She writes and speaks frequently on topics related to gender norms, inclusivity, social justice, free speech, sexualized violence, and technology. She is the author of The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth after Trauma and Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, which was recognized as a Best Book of 2018 by the Washington Post, Fast Company, Psychology Today, and NPR. She has contributed to several anthologies, most recently Free Speech in the Digital Age and Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change The World. Soraya is also a co-producer of a WMC #NameItChangeIt PSA highlighting the effects of online harassment on women in politics in America.

 

 

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How Soraya made the connection between our toxic ideology of resilience and how we devalue community support and care
• How the idea of “bouncing back” can actually impede change, both personal and social
• How resilience narratives flatten, decontextualize, and depoliticize trauma and recovery 
• Why we need to shift our concept of resilience from individual to communal, cultural, and relational
• How “soldiering on” can perpetuate a lack of options within the system
• The false binaries we have to confront to dismantle the resilience of the status quo
• How telling someone they are or need to be resilient shuts down opportunities for real care and support

 

Learn more about Soraya Chemaly:

• Website
• Instagram: @sorayachemaly
• The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma
• ​​Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger
• Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World
• Free Speech in the Digital Age

 

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

 

Resources:

• EP 72: Identifying and Addressing the Burdens of Individualism with Deran Young & Dick Schwartz
• EP 113:  Curiosity as a Bridge: Uncovering Fears and Building Connections with Scott Shigeoka
• Seek: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life and Change the World
• Nicked, M. T. Anderson
• The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, Zoë Schlanger
• Kneecap
• Challengers
• Succession 
• The White Lotus

Transcript:

[Inspirational Intro Music]

Soraya Chemaly: So maybe instead of saying, “How can we be more resilient,” we should be thinking, “What is it about our lives and society and relationships that inhibits people’s resilience?” Those who are not resilient, how are they hurt by our culture so that they have this particular impairment, which is difficulty adapting.

Rebecca Ching: When you think about resilience, what comes to mind? When you apply the concept of resilience to yourself and others, what do you mean or intend? Have you experienced being told you’re resilient or need to be more resilient? And what impact did that feedback have on your relationship with yourself and others?

Now, I believe resilience, as a health, wellness, and leadership concept serves as an important measure for ourselves and others. However, I now see how I’ve used this term in ways that unintentionally collude with toxic ways of working and relating, and when you see someone praised and highly regarded because of their resilience, know that that resilience comes at a significant cost that many people would gladly not have gone through to earn their badges of resilience.

I’m Rebecca Ching, and you’re listening to The Unburdened Leader, the show that goes deep with humans who navigate life’s challenges and lead in their own ways. Our goal is to learn how they address the burdens they carry and how they learn from them and become better and more impactful leaders of themselves and others.

As we near the final episodes of this series on imagination, how we can envision a different world in grounded and radically hopeful ways, I’m excited to share today’s conversation with you. I deliberately timed this episode to drop right after the 2024 Presidential Election. Now, whether you’re listening right after it drops, a week later, a month or a year later, I hope you find this conversation with my guest and her insights, teaching, and wisdom timeless.

2:10

Now, this guest is returning for her second interview to talk about her latest book based on resilience, and she dives deep into how ideologies around resilience often pull us away from genuine resilience focused on health, connection, and the proper care that sustains us. Now, I suspect we’re all familiar, all those listening are familiar with phrases like: “No pain, no gain,” “Just do it,” “Get back up,” “Keep trying,” “Persevere.” And I guess there’s not something wrong with those phrases inherently, but connected to resilience, I’m seeing how it’s problematic. And I, too, was steeped in this language.

As Kelly Clarkson sings, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Now, I’m gonna refrain from singing that out of respect for you all and, of course, Kelly, but I do love that song, and it’s got a great beat. I love working out to it, especially on my spin cycle, but it perpetuates a flawed approach to healing. Our culture clings to this narrative minimizing the real harm in ongoing hardships people face, which are often avoidable, and rather than viewing them as opportunities to build some kind of street cred resilience, they might need to take a different look. I mean, sure, I understand pain, heartbreak, and even abuse can make us stronger. I’ve lived this, and I know you have too. But the harm comes when we glorify overcoming more so than addressing the lack of care, protection, and support that many people will endure without.

Brené Brown’s research on vulnerability and resilience highlights how these “overcoming narratives” often obscure the importance of asking for help, sometimes for something small or for something bigger and building connections for support rather than facing our struggles alone.

4:01

I see this a lot in workplaces too. When someone struggles, how often do we hear complaints that they’re not resilient enough? What’s needed instead is likely some combination of space, training, time off, a compassionate listener, problem solving. But that doesn’t fit our culture’s preference for efficiency and order. Caring for people well can feel messy and uncomfortable, and can be a financial and time investment, especially when balancing deadlines and profits.

And Angela Duckworth’s research on grit emphasizes perseverance, and yet the rub for me is that is often gets misapplied to push individuals beyond their limits without addressing the systemic issues that cause burnout. And we sure do love a story about someone rising from adversity. The hero’s journey is a powerful, though problematic, narrative. But stories of overcoming often, again, gloss over the hardship. We like to look at the victory but not all the other stuff. It doesn’t feel as good, does it? Advocates in the disability community often call this inspiration porn, stories that make us (folks who aren’t disabled or struggling) feel good but do nothing to address the daily challenges that many people actually face.

Faith communities love these stories too where we celebrate someone coming out on the other side of their pain and struggle, which again is wonderful. But it often overlooks the ongoing suffering behind the scenes and a lot of accountability often too. When we step back, as my guest does today, we see that much of this adversity is rooted in how we fail to care for ourselves and each other well. Instead of doing the nuanced, uncomfortable work of changing the systems that drive health inequities, like (and nothing new to you all) inadequate healthcare, insufficient paid leave, the pressure to consume and buy more and more, low wages, ugh, we default to wishing we or others were simply stronger.

6:03

And in a 2020 report, Gallop found that 76% of employees sometimes experienced burnout on the job with 28% reporting that they’re very often or always burned out at work. And this data highlights that the problem is far larger than personal resilience. It’s about the burdened systems that impact and the things that we need to change.

This election season especially is when many of us are feeling the emotional weight of the past decade and more. And it’s gonna be so easy just to want to move on after November 5th and resume life as usual, and depending on what happens, I don’t think either is gonna be possible, frankly. But we can’t default to just wanting to rush past what needs healing, what needs care, what needs attention. I really want to encourage you not to do that to yourself and to be gentler with those in your charge and in your community. Our personal and collective well-being depends on doing the work, and that means resisting the drive to burn ourselves out and keep driving ourselves and others like we have the last several years.

Now, I know this is easier said than done. I am in it with you. But we must try and continue to try. And I know you’re a deeply caring person, but it’s exhausting to keep showing up and trying to be a decent human in a world that isn’t always set up for us to succeed. And I’ve been thinking back to Dick Schwartz’s second visit to the podcast back in January 2023 where he identified cultural burdens like individualism, patriarchy, racism, and materialism, which we all breathe in daily. These forces fight to maintain the status quo. But true care is built in joy, connection, and community, and we can have those even amidst the hard stuff. We can do the both/and, and it’s so important to check in with yourself and ask why you’re driving so hard and realign with your values.

8:02

Sometimes we’re just doing the best we can, and it requires that. But stay curious about it. Be cautious of resilience myths that tell us to just suck it up and, yeah, we have responsibilities to our jobs, our loved ones, our pets, our homes, but we’re living in monumental times, and it’s okay if you’re not bouncing back as quickly as you think you should.

When you feel frustrated or judge others for not getting it together, that’s a sign for a pause. These feelings can indicate a need for boundaries, rest, and a values check. This is not something we can simply snap back from. I am looking ahead for conversations I want to have here because there’s a lot of healing ahead of us. We must be compassionate, creative, and patient with ourselves and others, and if you’re feeling stretched thin, find support through a peer group, coach, therapist, or some source of connection. We need to protect our curiosity too. I encourage you to revisit my interview with Scott Shigeoka where he explores the importance of true curiosity over predatory curiosity, and I recommend his book Seek for more insights.

You know, there’s so much I don’t know about what’s ahead, right? None of us really do. But I do know that no matter what happens, we need to redefine resilience and get serious about how we care for ourselves and others. And so, I am so thrilled that Soraya Chemaly agreed to come back on the podcast to talk about her latest book The Resilience Myth: New Thinking of Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma.

Soraya Chemaly is an American writer and activist whose work focuses on the role of gender in politics, religion, education, tech, and media. Her first book, which she came on the podcast to talk about, earlier this year in January of 2024, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger was recognized as best book of 2018 by The Washington Post, Fast Company, Psychology Today, NPR, and has been translated into multiple languages. And as an activist, Soraya has also spearheaded several successful global campaigns challenging corporations to address online hate and harassment, restrictive content moderation and censorship, and institutional biases that undermine equity and negative affect free speech.

10:18

Now, listen for when Soraya drops a powerful challenge when she notes that if we’re thriving but everyone else around us is not, does that really mean we’re resilient or lacking in integrity? Oof. And pay attention to Soraya who talks about resilience as a relational concept as opposed to a state. I love this and think it’s at the heart of a critical perspective shift around resilience. And notice when she encourages us to move from asking how we as individuals can be more resilient and focus more on what it is about our society that keeps people from being more resilient. Now, please welcome back Soraya Chemaly to The Unburdened Leader.

Soraya, welcome back to The Unburdened Leader podcast! I was so excited to invite you back to the podcast after I got your book The Resilience Myth, and I’d love to talk about how you came to realize that our popular idea of resilience was harmful.

Soraya Chemaly: Well, thank you, first of all, Rebecca for having me. I’m just delighted always to talk to you. So I sort of came at it from the perspective, actually, of care. I was very interested in what it is exactly about our society that makes us culturally so hostile to the idea that we should care for each other as a society.

Rebecca Ching: Mm.

Soraya Chemaly: And when I wrote Rage Becomes Her, my earlier book, it was about anger and why women’s anger was an expression of me and how suppressing and punishing women for being angry was a way of essentially saying, “We don’t care what you need.”

12:02

So when I started writing the second book, I put those things together, and I thought, “Well, what’s happening?” If we’re ignoring need, if we’re ignoring human fragility, mutual dependence, all the things that we understand make our lives possible, and in fact make our lives full of love if we are lucky, what’s happening? And one of the things that was happening, I think, is that we’re being hit over the head with these narratives of personal resilience. “You can power through.” “You can be tough.” “You can pull yourself up by the bootstraps.” All of these stories of exceptional people overcoming horrifying things and there are so many good things about personal resilience, and there are many ways to cultivate it, but in fact as I say right up front in this book, this isn’t a book about that. It’s about resilience as an ideology that’s weaponized in this society.

Rebecca Ching: Absolutely, and I want to get into that. I love that intro. I’m just curious too, just for you personally before we dive into more of those different ideologies, how did this realization around the connection between how we talk about resilience and care for each other, how did it lead to you making any different choices on how you move forward in your writing and how you live your own life?

Soraya Chemaly: I mean, I talk about this a little in the book. But I did have, like so many of us do, a kind of accumulation of crises all at one time. My husband was terribly ill. My children were in tumultuous adolescence. My father was dying in another country. A hurricane hit my home country. Trump was president. COVID started. It just was an avalanche of things altogether, and this is while I was thinking about these ideas and about to write this book. And what it really did for me, I think, was make me really appreciate the support that I had because on the one hand it was quite scary and lonely and isolating because, well, I felt there was a lot sort of resting on my shoulders.

14:08

But I realized that A) it’s impossible for me to do any of this alone. It would be a fantasy to think I was going to do it alone. And then I had this great gift of love and support and friendships that were sustaining me. What I really wanted to say was why is it that in every resilience book, every resilience story, every list of ways to be resilient, we have all of these kind of disciplining of ourselves, how to be more mentally tough, how to forgive, how to be grateful, how to be optimistic, and then one little lonely item somewhere on that list is build a supportive community like it’s a nice-to-have cherry on the top instead of the actual core thing that enables all of the rest, enables the optimism, enables the gratitude, enables the fortitude. It just was ass backwards. It was completely inverted.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, it’s interesting how you phrase that too, right? All these other things that are very individual, right? It’s put on us. And then, “Oh, yeah, build a community too.”

Soraya Chemaly: Just toss that in there.

Rebecca Ching: Just toss that in there. But to really build community takes intention daily. It sounds like I’m gonna go to eBay. I’d like to find a community, about three to five people. [Laughs]

Soraya Chemaly: Yeah, and actually, you know, what was really kind of horrifying to me was that a lot of the things I read, and I read a lot, made it sound like you should build the community for purely transactional reasons. “It will make you happier. It will make you live longer.” I mean, there was no kind of ethos of doing it out of reciprocal care, out of mutual well-being, out of safer, sounder, healthier world. It was really still about you as an individual. How can you optimize your life, and one of the ways you can optimize your life is to have more friends. Sure, duh. But does that actually mean we have to think of it in the most selfish, transactional ways? Probably not good, you know?

16:15

Rebecca Ching: You referenced the intro in your book, and that really stood out to me too where you wrote — and I feel like this is so important to say. It’s not like you’re wanting everyone to chuck the word resilience, because I think everyone’s, “What’s the right thing to say?” You’re like, “No.” You want to get under the hood of what do we really mean when we’re saying it, and you said, “I’m not asking you to renounce resilience as an idea –,” and I loved this like you said, “– but as an ideology that clings to some of our most damaging cultural ideas.” I’ve repeated this so much to my clients.

I want to go dig a little deeper on some aspects of these idolatries — idolatries? Ideologies. 

Soraya Chemaly: They are idolatries.

Rebecca Ching: They are. That was an appropriate slip. And I want to preface this too. This episode is dropping on the Friday after the election here in The United States. And I want folks listening to listen to you and as you unpack these things and make sure we’re not falling into that, whether we’re celebrating something holy, incredible, and brilliant or moving through some pretty heavy devastation. And the top of the one that I feel like I’ve wrestled with my whole life is the ideology of the bounce back. How do you define the bounce back, and I’m curious for you to talk about times you felt that pressure to bounce back.

Soraya Chemaly: Well, I mean, I think most people would associate that phrase of bouncing back with resilience. It’s the phrase we have used, and it’s a very familiar thing. Its roots are kind of interesting because, actually, it kind of comes from the scientific and mechanistic use of the word resilience to describe metal returning to its original shape, to bounce back to its shape, right? And so, that idea that we will return to a prior state of stability or just a prior state is really prominent in our imaginings of resilience. But we never return to the same state. That is a fantasy. It’s not just that things happen and that change happens. It is that we are changed over time. We are changed by circumstances. We are changed by relationships. We are changed by tragedies, losses.

18:25

And so, when we talk about the resilience of bouncing back, I really honed in on what does that imply? It implies lots of things. One is even though it sounds like we’re looking back to an idealized time, it’s about a progressive future. We’re actually envisioning improvement of our current state and that in bouncing back, we can achieve a better future than the one we’re currently experiencing. So that’s thing one, and that’s a very powerful idea because we live in a culture grounded in a notion of time that is very Christian in its teleology, and the idea is that we will constantly improve, that there’s a better life after. You know, those are really ideas that are resonant with a lot of religious ideas, and I’m a super secular person. I grew up Catholic. I’m not Catholic, can never not be Catholic, all those things.

But the idea is that there’s an inevitable progression and that good things will happen if only we can bounce back to the state we were in before. And I think that’s misleading. I think we need to be comfortable with the idea of change and that maybe we’re new people and we have to adapt to new circumstances, not by clinging to old identities or relationships, but by revisioning them in ways that can also enable us to be happy.

But the second thing I think it does is it makes us focus on the idea of trauma and resilience as resonant in a moment in time, an event. And so, the idea there is that life was good, life was “normal,” everything was humming along, and then bad things happened, whatever it might be, a hurricane, a car crash, a pandemic. And we need to be able to overcome (a word that’s really used that) so that we can reach normalcy again.

20:26

But what that does is it actually erases the trauma that many people experience through chronic stress, through discrimination, through inequality, through social injustice, through historic and intergenerational trauma because those are circumstances, they’re not events. You can’t say to someone who is suffering from being a Black person in a post-slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration society that there was an event that they have to recover from, that they can bounce back from. Those two things do not go together.

And so, what the use of that word “bounce back” does is it narrowly defines trauma and recovery, it erases context, historical context, cultural context, and it depoliticizes solutions. If you just think that it’s an event happening to a person in a person’s lifetime, then you don’t have to invest in material resources, social change, community, collective goals, or any of those things. You can just stay really focused on the one person and their immediate need.

Rebecca Ching: I feel like we could just end the conversation there.

Soraya Chemaly: [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: Of course we’re not going to! I think that’s so powerful. Okay, first, just going back to the bounce back and metal.

Soraya Chemaly: Yes.

Rebecca Ching: And seeing how we’ve taken something we applied to metal to humanity, to human beings.

Soraya Chemaly: Yes, that’s right. A mechanistic thing.

Rebecca Ching: I’m sitting with this going, “My gosh,” you know? Again, you think about the culture and the grinding and getting us to act like machines. It’s not lost on me. And again, folks listening, I’ve said these things.

Soraya Chemaly: Oh, I’ve said these things. We’ve all said these things.

22:04

Rebecca Ching: Exactly! And now it’s poison in my mouth, you know? And I think it’s like how do we want to move forward, and again, there’s an adapt or reinvent, but that’s a lot of labor for us, especially those in leadership spaces, to go, “I’ve got to learn something new. I’ve got to sit with something that doesn’t feel efficient and quick.”

Soraya Chemaly: Oh, yes. But some of it makes it easier.

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] Of course it does, in theory.

Soraya Chemaly: So what if you realize it’s not all on you? Right? It’s not all on you.

Rebecca Ching: Yes.

Soraya Chemaly: It’s okay to have compassion for yourself and for others. I mean, really, I thought a lot about this in terms of bereavement. My father died, literally seven hours before I was starting a new job, in another country. And so, the first thing I had to do in my new job was say, “I can’t start my new job.” And I felt this immense pressure, and I thought, “Well, what’s acceptable? I can’t go home because of COVID. I literally cannot travel, so that’s not an issue.” And I thought, “But I am grieving but I could still work,” right? This is what goes through your head.

But then I realized, well, what a luxury, in fact. I have a choice. I do not have an hourly wage that means I have to show up in order to feed my family that week. And our society doesn’t allow for any of that. It doesn’t actually acknowledge grief. It doesn’t acknowledge loss. And even in that demand that people show up for work or that you should consider yourself strong if you go to work and you’re productive, that’s another thing, right? If you can power through your feelings and power through your grief then you’re a strong person. People are like, “Oh, my gosh. I can’t believe you’re here.” You know, there’s a lot of reward for that and that’s associated with resilience, but it also means you are not available for the people that depend on you and that love you and that care for you and that need your care in grieving, right? And bereavement is just one small example.

Rebecca Ching: Right.

24:11

Soraya Chemaly: But again, it’s very atomistic. It’s about that one person, not about their relationships across various spheres of their lives.

Rebecca Ching: So another ideology that — I mean, there’s so much written about this — is the ideology of thriving.

Soraya Chemaly: Oh, yes, and growth.

Rebecca Ching: And I’m curious. How do you see this one show up in your life? Oh, gosh. I know.

Soraya Chemaly: I mean, I think you know me well enough by now. I’m not like that — the word growth I find super problematic for a whole variety of reasons, especially because it’s associated with capitalist ideals, exploitative histories, and in our country, certainly, the idea of limitless frontiers of “free land,” right? We can grow infinitely. We can expand infinitely. We can take what’s there because no one and nothing is there.

Rebecca Ching: Oh, yeah.

Soraya Chemaly: That is the history most people learn. And so, that idea of growth and progress and literally infinity, a disembodiment, right, like a not-material-growth idea, it doesn’t help us sustain embodiment. It doesn’t help us feed people, clothe people, deal with hard limits, which we really have to deal with, limits on everything right now, you know? We can understand what our commitment to growth and limitlessness have done to the planet, right? We understand toxicity.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah.

Soraya Chemaly: I mean, I say in the book I don’t understand why we’re not calling this entire era of the past hundred and fifty years an age of toxicity because we’ve managed to poison the water, the air, the trees, the soil, our bodies. There’s nothing that has been untouched by toxicity in our quest for growth, and so, yeah, I’m not a fan.

26:03

And as for post-traumatic growth, it’s very interesting. I think people are changed by trauma. But I think one of the best critiques that I saw of this was A) it’s such an ambiguous idea. We don’t really understand what growth means. Even studied, they can’t define what growth means, and whatever it is that is captured in that notion of growth, it also happens after positive experiences.

If you go and you have a euphoric, communal experience like at a concert, you experience a form of growth, right? Or if you have spent time joining community and you volunteer and maybe you are teaching new immigrants how to read. That’s a positive experience, and you experience growth, and yet we don’t talk about post-positive growth. [Laughs] We talk about post-traumatic growth, you know? And so, we could be investing in two things.

Rebecca Ching: Post-positive growth, ooh.

Soraya Chemaly: Post-positive growth. We could be investing in ways that if people want to pursue this idea of growth and self-improvement, which I think is problematic too because we have these ideals that contribute to perfectionism, so we perfect ourselves. When is enough growth? Is there enough? Am I ever enough, you know?

But the second thing that I was gonna say about that is from the resilience perspective, most of us are resilient. Most of us experience hardship and then come back to a state where we can have well-being and happiness and feel purpose and meaning. The vast majority of us do. So maybe instead of saying, “How can we be more resilient,” we should be thinking, “What is it about our lives and society and relationships that inhibits people’s resilience?” Those who are not resilient, how are they hurt by our culture so that they have this particular impairment, which is difficulty adapting?

28:00

Rebecca Ching: And just adapting that a little bit too or shifting that language to just even whether it’s your work, your organization, wherever you’re at, what’s the culture like that will help people be more adaptable, will help people shift when life life’s, and it’s lifeing big time right now. And the sense of thriving, though, it really has been such one that it’s all about I’ve got to pursue my thriving and the cost. Like you said, the last 150 years the age of toxicity, it’s heartbreaking hearing you say that. I feel my heart just kind of ache at the cost of that.

The other side, though, of this, this is another word, and, oh, you know, I don’t hate the word, but I want to reclaim it, is the ideology of overcoming. How could we reclaim this phrase because I just see people jump in going, “How do we overcome,” before we’ve even witnessed or acknowledged or moved through any kind of difficulty?

Soraya Chemaly: I mean, I think there’s a particular thing about American culture, which is its association with optimism. We also, culturally, are anti-intellectual, and we don’t want to grapple with hard historical truths. We keep them at bay. I mean, if you just think about the way Germany, even though it also has its ascendant right wing that is horrifying, but Germany didn’t say, “We didn’t perpetuate the holocaust.” They said, “Oh, my God. We did this, and now we have to think about it and live with it multigenerationally.” And in The United States, we are nowhere near that with our history of Indigenous genocide and Black enslavement. I mean, nowhere near, nowhere near, you know? We’re still having pissy, little arguments about statues commemorating torture, sadists, right? That’s where we are.

So I think that this idea of overcoming, again, is very focused on the positive, perfectable future. Don’t brood on the negatives. Don’t fixate on the struggles. But as Norman Vincent Peale said, “Put it out of your mind and look to the future.”

30:05

Rebecca Ching: That’s literally 95% of personal and professional development. [Laughs] Literally!

Soraya Chemaly: Overcome? 

Rebecca Ching: Overcoming and put it out of your mind and shift your mindset and focus on the good and, you know, leave it all behind, which doesn’t make sense from a neuroscience perspective. It’s like asking people to give themselves lobotomies just to forget, yeah.

Soraya Chemaly: But I also think that there’s something particular about that that is part of the structure of white supremacy in America, right? We have to acknowledge that because what a luxury it is to put the past behind you as though it didn’t affect you. People can’t do that if it’s your life every day.

Rebecca Ching: Right.

Soraya Chemaly: I mean, these are all complicated, dense ideas that operate at lots of levels, you know? If I got a flat tire and also broke my leg and then, you know, bad things happened all in one day, you might be able to say, “Listen, put it out of your mind. Move forward,” right? But to equate that with some of the horribly traumatic circumstances, stressful inequalities of our society and say, “You can do it! Put it out of your brain. Move forward,” who’s that helping, you know? So we also need to grapple with the nuances of what we’re talking about.

And I think that’s sometimes hard in this era because we’re sort of in a trauma factory, trauma porn world, and even the word trauma has lost meaning. You can be looking at TikTok and someone will say they were traumatized by a bad dinner, and then the next video you see is literally a gruesome image of a child blown to smithereens, and the same words are being used for the same things, and that is cognitively really shocking and difficult, too. And it numbs us, right? We all have a sort of psychic numbing going on.

31:59

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, the psychic numbing. That protective — it’s real. The impact of what we’re consuming and experiencing, and it’s diluting important language and how we talk about things. But yeah, the thriving piece, it feels just out of reach, I think, for a lot of people, or they’re sacrificing to thrive later. And what does it mean to thrive in the moment, in a hot mess of a life and a world where maybe the budget isn’t perfect, and things aren’t —

Soraya Chemaly: Right.

Rebecca Ching: But how do we connect with each other and celebrate and grieve and witness our day-to-day stuff, and that’s actually what is healing I’m finding more and more. Obviously, clean drinking water and good education and healthcare, those are foundational also to that. But there’s something that, to me, when I think of resilience, it is in those moments of witnessing and being witnessed in community like you’re talking about. That’s where I thrive.

Soraya Chemaly: Yes, and I think what you’re describing actually is a notion of thriving that accepts our interrelationality, right?

Rebecca Ching: Mm-hmm.

Soraya Chemaly: What I’m trying to say in this book is one model of resilience is highly toxically individualistic, whereas in a paradigm shift, we should just be conceiving of resilience and thriving with it as relational. If you’re thriving but everything around you is falling apart, does that mean you’re resilient or just an asshole, right? Like, how can you actually find joy, satisfaction, happiness, how can you thrive in an environment in which everyone around you is suffering? I think those are incompatible. I don’t think you’re actually thriving. Something else is happening.

So the way you define thriving to me captures that element of a rising tide lifting all boats, it is that we are connected, we are related. When you thrive, I can celebrate your well-being and you can celebrate mine.

34:01

Rebecca Ching: I will say, too, I mean, one of my love languages has been going to live music and dancing with strangers. That’s been medicine, especially since we’ve re-entered the world after shelter-in. And so, that collective feeling of music and dancing but there’s an intimacy of feeling seen and witnessing others that I think that’s where resilience can continue is those are the moments that get us through.

[Inspirational Music]

Rebecca Ching: Leading is hard. It’s also often controversial as you navigate staying aligned to your values, your mission, and your boundaries. Navigating the inevitable controversy can challenge your confidence and clarity and calm. I know you don’t mind making hard decisions, but sometimes the stakes seem higher and can bring up echoes of old doubts and insecurities during times when you need to feel rock solid on your plan and action.

Finding a coach who gets the nuances of your business and leading in our complex and polarized world can help you identify the blocks that keep you playing it safe and small. Leading today is not a fancy title or fluffy bragging rights. It’s brave and bold work to stay the course when the future is unknown and the doubts and pains from the past keep showing up to shake things up. Internal emotional practices and systemic strategies are needed to keep the protector of cynicism at bay and foster a hope that is both actionable and aligned.

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[Inspirational Music]

36:12

Rebecca Ching: One of the other ideologies that I actually grappled with a little bit, and you talked about soldiering on and those that choose not to and those that you wrote about or these incredible athletes who, themselves, have a lot of privilege even though they hold identities outside of dominant culture but have a lot of wealth and access. And this is one I wrestle with because a lot of people feel like they don’t have a choice to not soldier on. They’re like, “I’m trying to make ends meet.”

Soraya Chemaly: “I have to keep going.”

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, and I think this is a spectrum because sometimes I’m like, “But do you? What would happen? What would fall apart? And would that be a bad thing to rebuild? And where are the privileges in all of that,” for sure. But I do think, though, the soldiering — so many people don’t think they have a choice, but they do but they don’t have a choice because that would mean a full-on deconstruction, I think, and maybe even a devolve of their world for a moment too. So yeah, how do you catch yourself for you when you default to soldiering on?

Soraya Chemaly: That’s such a good question. I mean, I think part of the issue — actually, let me step back a minute. I think It took my having children to think about what it meant to set an example in which I wasn’t —

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] Yeah.

Soraya Chemaly: — taking a healthy path. I certainly, for the first 10, 12, 15 years of being a mother, didn’t sleep. So, first of all, I managed to have kids, to work, to be a wife, a daughter, all the things, like so many of us do, but at great physical cost, to be honest, right? Like, I did it. I soldiered right on but was it necessary? Probably not, right?

38:03

So I created this standard for myself based on what I thought the expectation of my roles was, but I also set an example that ultimately I didn’t want my daughters to follow. I thought, “Wait, what am I actually teaching them, and do I want to teach them that?” And I didn’t. I thought, “This is really unhealthy, and I don’t want them to think that this is necessary, that it has a moral value, that it makes them a good person.” So that was sort of a deeply personal way to think about it.

But also, like everything else we’ve discussed, I think the expectation that people will soldier on is necessary because we don’t have options in our society. By soldiering on, ironically, perversely, we perpetuate a system in which we don’t have options. I’m actually quite fascinated now by different forms of refusal that girls and women, in particular, are participating in. They’re using language like “lazy girls,” and “quiet quitting,” and I’m gonna use this example, which many people won’t agree with but, you know, going “boy sober.” Nobody thinks of that as a form of resilience, but if your experiences with boys and men are deeply troubling, possibly traumatic, stressful, and make you unhappy, then going boy sober is saying, “I’m not doing that anymore. I’m not powering through that madness anymore,” you know? Things move sideways in ways we don’t anticipate, you know?

Rebecca Ching: Say more about these different forms of refusal. I haven’t heard about boy sober, but it’s like, “You know what? Instead of pushing myself to date, be in a relationship –,” whoever it is you’re wanting to partner with, if you’re having a hard time with it, “I’m just gonna, you know, do life.”

40:03

Soraya Chemaly: Well, I mean, yeah, and I think that 30 years ago women weren’t as educated, they weren’t financially independent, and they would have soldiered on because, in fact, it made rational, logical, financial, economic sense to find a spouse, form a partnership, have a family that, in essence, is an economic unit that functions to the benefit of both people in a heterosexual relationship. But if that’s not financially necessary, if it’s not a sure path to safety, which we know it’s not because most women are hurt by men they know, not by strangers, then what you end up with is what’s happening now is women divorcing, initiating 70% of divorces, women who are three to five times more likely to be queer, bi, lesbian, women who are sterilizing themselves because Roe v. Wade was overturned, and they’re like, “No fucking way I’m getting pregnant in this environment, and I don’t want babies.” There are all of these quiet refusals happening, and that’s just the US. It’s happening all over the world, right?

Like, South Korea has something called the 4B Movement, and the four B’s all mean no, and it’s no to dating, no to marriage, no to sex, no to babies. And entire communities of women are simply not engaging with men because of the insane violent misogyny that is exploding and has exploded over the course of the past ten years, and we’re also experiencing that in this country but just in different forms.

And so, I think those refusals are resilient responses to very trying, stressful circumstances.

Rebecca Ching: My son who’s in ninth grade, 14 years old, he said, “Mom, my English teacher was kind of saying, ‘Come on, boys! Hardly any boys are going to college anymore. It’s mostly women.’”

42:01

And I’ve read these statistics too. And my son was like, “What am I supposed to do? Tell everyone –.” You know, he was feeling — he took on this personal charge like he was getting in trouble for all men in the future. 

Soraya Chemaly: Yeah, but what did the teacher mean by that?

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, because I asked. I said, “What did the teacher want from you?” And he was like, ‘I don’t know. He was just saying, “Boys, get it together!’” And I was like, “Oh, how did that land with you?”

Soraya Chemaly: That’s so unhelpful.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, that’s pretty much what my son said, and I agreed. We talked a little bit about some of these shifts and what’s happening with men that are a little older than him and some of these shifts too that they’re noticing with women not partnering up and the education gap and what this means, especially with the enrollment cliff coming, and there are a lot of different interesting conflations coming up about what’s gonna be over the next decade. I’m just curious, especially with less men going to college and more women going to college, what do you make of that?

Soraya Chemaly: So, first of all, more men would go to college if we didn’t have a gendered, racialized wage gap. Women have to go to college so that with a college degree they make what a man with a high school degree makes, right? So if we want to address the boy crisis in education, we should really straighten out the wage gap, right? There’s much more incentive for women and girls to go and get degrees because they need degrees to make the same amount of money, right? So that’s thing one. I totally understand why a young man who can go get a really great-paying job with a high school degree, in his mind, wouldn’t incur student loans. Something like 68 or 70% of student loan debt in this country belongs to women because they’re actively investing in themselves to try and close that wage gap. I think that’s one thing.

The second thing is things like that teacher’s example are really unhelpful because he wants to shame the boys. He wants to shame the boys into winning because, in fact, one of the most dangerous aspects of gender socialization today, I would say, is that boys still learn that to compete with other boys is okay.

44:12

You can lose to another boy. That’s acceptable. But to lose to a girl is shameful because, ultimately, there’s a male supremacist belief that to be like girls, to lose to girls makes you weak, makes you like girls, right? And so, that teacher really is exacerbating the problem that he’s purporting to address by causing division, positing literally that boys’ losses come — that girls’ gains come at the price of boys and men, right? “If more girls are going to college, less men will go to college because there are only so many spaces,” right? Even though we actually know now that schools are positively discriminating in favor of boys to try and keep the gender balance in place. That’s a whole other issue, right?

And so, I mean, it is really, really complicated, really complicated. But the other thing is girls have been outperforming boys for 100 years in schools, and it hasn’t closed the wage gap, and it hasn’t changed institutions, and it hasn’t changed power in the country, so I have a lot of tiny violins when it comes to this topic.

Rebecca Ching: Thank you for weighing in on this.

Soraya Chemaly: Sorry. [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: No, I think it’s — no! Don’t apologize! I’m doing the mic drop sign to you here.

Soraya Chemaly: Well, the wage gap has just started growing this year again, just for the record.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, I was just gonna say. I was just gonna say I just read that statistic too.

Soraya Chemaly: Right. 

Rebecca Ching: And in light of this disparity, so I just think, my goodness. And so, but I think this is all connected with resilience and going to the root —

Soraya Chemaly: Yes. Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Ching: — and paying women well is a big part of it. So I want to do a call up though. I want to do a call up for folks listening.

46:01

And I love how you think. I love how you see things. So what do you believe would be different about our culture and the body politic if it changes its tune? If we change our tune about resilience, what would we see and feel in our places of work, in our education, in our homes?

Soraya Chemaly: Well, I mean, first of all, I’m making an argument for a couple of things. The main argument is that if we want to think about resilience, then we have to develop resilience against the worldview we inherited, which is super binary. It’s based on domination of others. It’s hierarchical. We don’t really think about it, but everywhere we turn we are encountering hierarchies, competition, and domination. And so, even what we just described in terms of binary gender, we know the complexities, we know that it’s intersectional, we know that it has to do with many other factors of a person’s identity, but in the framework, the abstracted framework that our institutions are built around, we still have men and women, black and white, straight and not straight. We have all of these polar opposites, and within each diag there’s always a hierarchy, right? So you end up with a white, male, cisgendered supremacist culture that is baked into so many of our systems, our politics, our corporate structure, our family lives, etcetera.

And so, we have to think, “Well, what does resilience mean if it’s a resilience of the status quo,” which is what I’m arguing we have. We have a resilience that is designed culturally to support what I just said, whereas if we, for example, take one of those, the mind/body — we have a duality of mind/body. We really think in our culture that the mind is superior to the body and that the body is our source of frailty and weakness, and in fact, it’s debased, and we associate women and Black people with that debasement.

48:06

So our resilience embraces a resilience of the mind as superior. So mental toughness, attitude, grit, growth, all of these kind of mind-based attributes, and when that happens, we ignore the fact that we are our bodies and that our embodiment matters, and it matters to our adaptability and to the ways in which we are traumatized and recover. And so, the second chapter in the book is actually about the body. You were talking about the euphoria of having an ecstatic experience with other people in a concert, and that’s not just because it made you kind of happy. It’s because your entire body shifted to align itself with everyone around you. And that resonance, that collective resonance makes us feel good, right? We all feel good. By ignoring that, we’ve actually undermined our ability to find resilient solutions that also include things like making sure people have good food, water, beds to sleep in, that they can depend on each other, that we can have social trust in our society, that we can support peace instead of war. There’s just this total rollup of benefits when you provide for everyone.

Rebecca Ching: I did a deep dive into the mind/body disconnection for a talk I was giving, and I was like — it was rooted in money and sexism. That’s why they split because that’s basically it. It was just kind of sexism, power but also the profit, how to sell things and make these issues but also keep women in line. It was mind blowing.

49:59

Soraya Chemaly: But how do you turn enlightenment thinking and justifications for racial capitalism — they went hand in hand. And so, it wasn’t just that women were associated with dirty, inferior bodies. It was that Black and brown bodies were considered mindless. They did not have personhood and so, therefore, just became features of the environment that could be exploited like the rest of the environment and bodies that could be employed for labor, right? And so, retaining that sense of the mind’s superiority also meant placing it in a white man’s body, right? Rationality and intellect and all of that got poured into the container of white skin but particularly white men.

Rebecca Ching: You used the example of grief, and the more that we’re into this conversation, I’m just seeing that a truly resilient person is someone who can metabolize grief in their own personal life but also the systemic kind of wounds that we’re — because resilience in the way that we’re taught is a bypassing, it’s an exiling, it’s a stuffing, it’s a minimizing.

Soraya Chemaly: That’s right.

Rebecca Ching: And if we open ourselves up to feel our own losses, you can’t close the door on them feeling the wounds and the bad choices in history and the echoes of the destruction and the dehumanization there. And if we’re able to sit with that and metabolize that and sit with that discomfort and still move through to caring, working a good job, getting a — we can do that. We treat ourselves and others differently. That’s the resilience I want to be part of cultivating, and I feel like in my mind that’s almost the measure is how are you doing with grieving and metabolizing grief as I’m listening to you today.

Soraya Chemaly: Yeah, and I think too, this was certainly my experience, because I was so invested in the mind and I thought resilience was so mind-based, I didn’t recognize how, in trying to be strong, my grief had totally physically manifested itself for months, right, like literal pain, pain in my body.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, for sure.

52:09

Soraya Chemaly: Constant, constant discomfort. And even though intellectually I knew that I did not believe in a mind/body division, it didn’t matter because I am of the culture. And so, I tried to cope the way I kind of defaulted into traditional advice about coping, very mind-based, and I minimized the power of my own body to help me grieve. It took me, you know, a good seven, eight, nine months to stop and say, “Oh, that’s what’s happening. That’s what’s happening,” you know? And so, being able to understand our bodies and to understand the relationship between our bodies, our emotions, our cognition, which I think we only understand super minimally right now, but that was very helpful, you know? And I think, as you just said, if you can understand that for yourself, it makes you more empathetic for others. It makes you more compassionate towards others.

Rebecca Ching: Unmetabolized grief looks like resilience in a world that wants us to grind on, right? Then the autoimmune issues or the other physical pain —

Soraya Chemaly: All of it, that’s right.

Rebecca Ching: — all of it shows up the relationship strain. A metabolized grief is messy. It’s awkward. It’s not polished, especially for women who are told, “You can’t show emotion,” or you have to be measured in all of these things. But it’s real, it’s true, and that’s where connection is found when we’re really being true in our expression and there’s a common humanity. We’ve all experienced loss. If we’ve loved, we’ve lost, and I think there’s something so connected with resilience and grief. I’m feeling very strong about that in our conversation.

Soraya Chemaly: No, I agree with you.

Rebecca Ching: I guess just saying, you know, folks, given everything that we have gone through and are going through as a country, as a culture in this election cycle, how stretched — at least everyone I know, myself included —

Soraya Chemaly: Yeah.

54:07

Rebecca Ching: — how many people feel. You know, in light of our conversation, how do you see us better countering the narratives of a toxic resilience myth in our lives, with those we lead, and how can we better treat ourselves as we’re moving through this season?

Soraya Chemaly: I think we’ve touched on some of this, but I’m a writer, so I focus a lot on language. And we convey a lot with our language that we may not intend to, like all the militaristic language that we know and that I write about, or that idea that we’re soldiers and that our pain makes us better. We aren’t soldiers, and we don’t have to have pain to be better. That’s not true. And in fact, people who experience pain and trauma are more likely to feel deeper pain and trauma the next time than not. So that whole “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is a confused mess of disinformation, right?

Rebecca Ching: Yes.

Soraya Chemaly: We’re not exactly sure what stronger means, and we’re not exactly sure what better means, but we do know that people who experience trauma are more susceptible to having greater trauma, not less susceptible, you know?

And so, first of all, I do think that the language we use when we talk to people matters, like women who are experiencing intimate violence. We know that if we tell a woman in that situation that she’s so resilient or, like many people do, that she needs to stick with it because he’ll change or stick with it for the kids, that just endangers her. That makes it much harder for her to be resilient because she feels isolated from her community. She doesn’t feel connected to the people around her that purportedly love her. Those situations like that, we should be  more aware of how we use the word resilience itself because telling people they’re resilient, how does it help them? What is the goal of telling them that?

56:01

Instead of saying, “You’re so resilient,” it might make more sense to say, “How are you? What do you need?” Because, in fact, saying, “You’re resilient,” closes off those other conversations very often. That’s just a very small thing. I do think, though, that thinking of resilience relationally can help shift the way things happen. If we have the expectation for our self that our resilience will come from us inside of ourselves, that means we project that expectation on others instead of saying, “How can we support you?” Whether it’s in the workplace, whether it is in a religious environment, whether it’s in a family, you know, the difference between how do you build your resilience skills and how do we make sure that you can depend on us, those are two very, very different conversations.

Rebecca Ching: That trajectory shift, that excites me to have those conversations, and I feel like more and more people are receptive to that and getting open to the awkwardness of what’s involved to go there because it’s so different.

Soraya, we could talk forever! Thank you for coming back on the show. Before you go, I want to just ask my traditional quickfire questions.

Soraya Chemaly: Oh, yes!

Rebecca Ching: But I can’t emphasize enough, before we jump in, for people to run, don’t walk, and get this book. Soraya’s one of my favorite writers.

Soraya Chemaly: Thank you.

Rebecca Ching: A gorgeous writer, your researching, I love a good resource section and notations, and oh, my gosh, you know, it’s so fun. I get a book of yours, and I go look in the back and see all the resources. [Laughs]

Soraya Chemaly: Oh, that’s so nice to hear because, you know —

Rebecca Ching: I’m such a nerd! I’m such a nerd like that.

Soraya Chemaly: No, but you will appreciate — I literally was like, “I just wonder, am I just beating my head against a wall when I do this?” [Laughs] I’m glad! Thank you.

Rebecca Ching: No, you’ve got a witness there. But before we do our — I don’t want to sign off quickly. I want to make a big deal about this. Get copies of this book and buy it for your team and have conversations and rumble with it in a generative way.

58:00

If we’re using this word, you know, doing it in a way that actually moves your team forward in a way collectively, it’s gonna be a lot of unlearning, and you just gave us that map. So thank you for another — I mean, Rage Becomes Her is also phenomenal. So you’re a national treasure!

Soraya Chemaly: Thank you!

Rebecca Ching: I’m, like, being all cheesy to you right now, fangirling for a moment, but I feel seen when I read your books. I feel validated, and that’s such a gift, and I know there’s so much labor in what you do and putting it out there.

Soraya Chemaly: Thank you.

Rebecca Ching: So thank you for showing up in what you do!

Soraya Chemaly: I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Rebecca Ching: Okay, so fun stuff! What are you reading right now?

Soraya Chemaly: Oh, my gosh. Well, that’s such a good question.

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs]

Soraya Chemaly: So I have what I think of as my daytime books and my nighttime books because they’re books that I refuse to read when I’m going to sleep, you know, because they’ll just keep me up.

Rebecca Ching: Mm, sure. Sure.

Soraya Chemaly: I’m reading a book right now called Nicked by M.T. Anderson, which I just started at the recommendation of a dear friend. I can’t report back on it. I trust her, and I’m reading that. But I also really wanted to mention this book that I love called The Light Eaters, which is about plants and trees and their intelligence and complexity. I can’t say enough good things about this book. It’s just so good.

Rebecca Ching: Okay, I’m adding them to my list. What’s the best TV show or movie that you’ve seen recently?

Soraya Chemaly: Oh, my gosh. I saw a very funny movie called Kneecap about Irish language, Irish rappers. Can’t say enough good things about it.

Rebecca Ching: Okay.

Soraya Chemaly: I also really loved — oh, what is that movie? It’s with Zendaya about tennis players. It was so good. It was just so joyful.

Rebecca Ching: Is it Match?

Soraya Chemaly: No, no, no, no. It’s Challengers.

1:00:00

It took me a moment. It’s Challengers. I just kind of giggled my way through that whole movie. All I’m looking for these days is the giggle. Yeah, so I loved both those. And TV, I think probably the genre of super rich white people behaving badly I find endlessly entertaining. So Succession and White Lotus, very excellently written.

Rebecca Ching: Yes.

Soraya Chemaly: Very excellently written.

Rebecca Ching: Yes, and cringy. Cringy, like I’m making faces.

Soraya Chemaly: So cringy! So cringy. So horrifying.

Rebecca Ching: What’s your favorite eighties piece of pop culture?

Soraya Chemaly: My favorite piece of eighties pop culture? I think it was gender-bendy musician stars.

Rebecca Ching: Ah, David Bowie?

Soraya Chemaly: It was just this explosion of non-binary beauty everywhere, and I also just loved Blondie so much.

Rebecca Ching: Ah, she’s a legend.

Soraya Chemaly: She’s amazing. Yeah, and the last thing I will say, although I don’t think people will associate it necessarily with pop culture of the eighties, but because I grew up in the Bahamas and that part of the world, watching Reggae take the world by storm was really something, you know?

Rebecca Ching: Oh, I bet. I bet. What is your mantra right now?

Soraya Chemaly: Sleep. Sleep is my mantra.

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] Yes!

Soraya Chemaly: One word, over and over and over again.

Rebecca Ching: What’s an unpopular opinion you hold?

Soraya Chemaly: The unpopular opinion I hold is that it doesn’t make sense to make a distinction right now between good men and bad men because the way masculinity works is sort of defined and premised on the assumption of male supremacy.

Rebecca Ching: Ooh, I’ll be chewing on that one. And who or what inspires you to be a better leader and human?

Soraya Chemaly: Well, first of all, it’s really exhausting. Everything’s really exhausting right now, I think. And we’re all experiencing — and I consider myself very fortunate, right?

1:02:06

I have everything I need in life, and I’m still exhausted. So I think often about all of the people who came before me who made my life possible, who fought namelessly, tirelessly their whole lives, and I’m so appreciative of that.

And I had a young woman at a school in great distress (she was 15) come up to me after a speech and what she said was, “Do you think we’ll defeat the patriarchy in my lifetime?” And I just didn’t know how to answer her in a way that wasn’t soul crushing, and we have to just remember it took so long for us to get to this point. It’s gonna take us a very long time to change it. So every little bit counts.

So I’m just kind of inspired. When I feel deflated, I think of the women I know who are still doing this work and they’re 80, 85, 90, 95. They’ve had so many lifetimes of doing this, and they inspire me.

Rebecca Ching: Soraya, it’s always a pleasure. If people want to check in with your work, where can they find you?

Soraya Chemaly: Well, I still am on Twitter, X, whatever you call it, despite all of its horrors. I don’t post very often but I’m there, and I have a Rage Becomes Her account on Instagram and Facebook and another one under my name. When I publish anything, that’s where I share it, those places, more or less. And so, yes, that’s where they can find me!

Rebecca Ching: Ah, Soraya, thank you! Take care of you.

Soraya Chemaly: Always a pleasure to talk to you!

Rebecca Ching: All right, before you go, I want to make sure you take away these key learnings from this conversation. And as Soraya highlights in our conversation drawing a lot from her book The Resilience Myth, resilience isn’t a personal trait, it’s relational. Instead of asking how we can be more resilient, we need to question what it is in our society that keeps people from being more resilient in the first place.

1:04:14

Soraya reminded us that when we celebrate stories of overcoming adversity, we often ignore the systems that caused the hardship, and I’m wondering how we can shift from praising individual perseverance to challenging the structures that force people into survival mode. This is such a dance. It’s so important though to not look at this as an all-or-nothing binary. I think we really need to get curious and get messy in this one. And Soraya also challenged us to look at resilience and make sure that we’re not doing that without integrity, and it becomes hollow if we are. And if we’re thriving while those around us are struggling, what does that say about the systems we’re a part of, and how can we push for some real collective care, right?

So I’ve got some questions for you to consider as we wrap up our time together on this episode. How have cultural or societal expectations shaped your understanding of resilience, and how might you redefine it based on what Soraya shared today? How are you unintentionally upholding the systems that require constant resilience in the old-school way from yourself or others, and what would it look like to shake things up and do something different instead? And how can you contribute to a culture of care that prioritizes well-being over the constant need to overcome? Honestly, this one’s hard. It’s like one thing in theory and another thing in practice, but I do think we’re capable of doing this even in small, subtle shifts.

As we explored today, resilience isn’t about pushing harder or ignoring the pain. It’s about creating conditions where resilience is not as necessary as a survival skill. Let’s challenge ourselves to lead with care and integrity, recognizing that real strength lies in changing the systems that perpetuate harm and honoring the presence of joy, grief, and loss in the spaces that we work and lead. And this is the ongoing work of an Unburdened Leader.

[Inspirational Music]

Thank you so much for joining this episode of The Unburdened Leader. You can find this episode, show notes, and free Unburdened Leader resources along with ways to work with me at www.rebeccaching.com. And this episode was produced by the incredible team at Yellow House Media!

[Inspirational Music]