Notes on Resilience
Notes on Resilience explores how human experience, including adversity, shapes leadership, innovation, and culture. Host Manya Chylinski talks with people whose work, research, or lived experience reveal how we adapt, care, and create after challenge—what these stories show about the systems we build, and what must evolve.
These conversations are rooted in a simple idea: the goal isn’t resilience for its own sake, the goal is well-being. Resilience is what makes recovery and growth possible.
The show serves as field research on how people and systems recover, rebuild, and move forward.
Notes on Resilience
11: Self-healing with Jacob Kendall
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Listen in on my conversation with Jacob Kendall, a social worker, speaker, and coach. We discuss resiliency from both personal and population-level perspectives, and how to walk alongside someone who is dealing with something difficult.
Jacob has a unique perspective as someone who has had two open-heart surgeries and has worked as a social worker.
You can find Jacob on LinkedIn or via email: jacobevanskendall@gmail.com
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#trauma #resilience #compassion #MentalHealth #CompassionateLeadership #leadership #survivor
Hello. Welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Monia Chelinsky. In today's conversation, I speak with Jacob Kendall. He is an amazing person. He's a social worker. He's a speaker. He works helping social workers transition into other industries. And we had a wonderful conversation about resilience and taking the population level view rather than looking at it as individual responsibility. And we talked about how to walk alongside someone when they're dealing with something difficult. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. Thanks for listening. Hello, Jacob. Before we get into the question of who are you and why are you and I talking today, I want to ask you a question I start out with everybody, which is what would you want your superpower to be if you could have one?
SPEAKER_00I'm sure this, like many people, this has changed over the years. Definitively now, though, especially after my second open heart surgery, I've had my aortic valve replaced twice. I think I want something like uh Wolverine from X-Men where I can do self-healing. Be really nice not to have to deal with that. I also have uh chronic back pain that I just can't seem to fix. So maybe the ability to heal would alleviate those those concerns.
Manya ChylinskiOh, that's a great one. I'm gonna add that to my ever-growing list of superpowers that I like to. Um, so you know, I would like to learn about who you are and what you do, and how is it that you are in a place to be thinking about trauma or resiliency that you and I are talking today?
SPEAKER_00So yeah, there's kind of the my personal response to that question, and there's a professional response. And I guess I can start with the personal. Like I just said, I I've had two open heart surgeries, and my first one I didn't experience nearly as strongly after my second one, which was in late 2019. I I would say that I was forced to face my own mortality. I and I I changed career decisions. My priorities have changed, my worldview has changed, and I've had a lot more anxiety because you can only have so many of these surgeries, and I'm just like, there I have a lot of moments where I'm literally terrified that it's it's gonna happen again. And so I definitely think you know your body goes through that physical trauma, and you also have mental health, uh an impact on your mental health from enduring those kinds of experiences.
Manya ChylinskiAbsolutely. That sounds very frightening and very difficult experience to go through twice, let alone once. Um all right. Well, I imagine you do think a lot about mental well-being and resiliency given your personal experience. Well, I'd love for you to explain your thinking about resiliency from the professional perspective as well.
SPEAKER_00Sure. Uh it's a couple of different things. I had a social work degree, and that's something that is a really important topic, both when it comes to helping our clients and helping ourselves. And I I recently put a post on uh LinkedIn, I had no idea that it would have the response that it did. But the first line was social workers, why let's talk about why we're not making the salaries that we deserve. And it really, really could nerve. And I had tons and tons of people, and they're still reaching out to me about how they want to make a shift out of clinical social work because of just the the burnout and compassion fatigue and and the effects that it has on them over time. And there are a lot of people who are complaining about how they're not adequately prepared to um get the support they need because social workers, you know, our entire stick is that we helped those who are most vulnerable. And this is it wears on you over time. It does. Um, and I know that there's increasing research on compassion fatigue and burnout and caregiver burden, and I think all of these concepts are related to one another. And social working here are not the only ones who deal with it. You know, I think it's higher in like uh trauma or ER sections of the hospital, um, responses to disaster and things like that. And and then there's another piece, and I actually do I'm I'm trying to envision how these I think that the dots do connect, but I haven't connected them yet in my own mind. I also have an interest in uh faith deconstruction. Um, I'm actually taking some seminary courses right now because of my interest in it. And I I you know I've gone through my own journey where I grew up in a Baptist church, and I actually grew up in a fairly moderate environment where it was okay for me to explore questions. I've enjoyed the intellectual nature of my own journey, but I know a lot of people who have um found that their religious beliefs run up against a a brick wall and seem to not be they can't reconcile a lot of that with what they see in the world. And I know I know people today as as young and middle-aged adults where if they even hear religious terms or Christian terms in in conversation, they they might have traumatic responses to that. Um and I know that that's not an uncommon thing because I've I've heard about it enough now to know like that, yeah, this is this is something that that needs to be addressed. I think that that the church is another area where there's been some pushback against mental health. And um, so that's another that's another thing that I'm exploring as well. It's a lot less well-formed than the social work piece, but it does interest me.
Manya ChylinskiYes. Well, you used a term that I'm not familiar with, faith deconstruction. Can you just briefly explain what is that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I don't I don't love that term because I think the deep part of it, the prefix that implies that something negative, like you're tearing something down. I'm trying to come up with a term that also indicates that while you're going through this process, you could be building something up. But it usually refers to people who grew up in a religious environment. And being here in the US, most of such individuals I've met are Christian or were Christian. But then they realize that, you know, I mean, pick pick pick a contentious issue, same-sex marriage, induced abortions, LGBT issues, racial justice, etc., that they may have grown grown up in an environment uh where what they were taught from a theological standpoint was at odds with the reality in the people that they meet um as they go through life and they don't know how to reconcile that. And so faith deconstruction refers to they have to they have to break down those religious beliefs, and it can be a long and arduous process to do that because it can be really, really deeply ingrained. There are probably a lot of ways that I could define it. That's a common one that I've seen and read about.
Manya ChylinskiRight, right. Wow, I imagine that is that it is something difficult to have to go through or to choose to go through. Um and, you know, that's kind of challenging your own worldview and needing to maybe change your worldview. Am I understanding that correctly?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's it's you know, it's never simple. There are a lot of, for example, um, I saw a documentary on this. You know, I I I am a cis white male married to a woman, so I'm not speaking personally about this, but I know that there are, let's say, uh people who grew up in the Christian church who come to identify as gay, for example, and their religion may still be very important to them, but they know that it's at odds, at least protect perhaps the environment they grew up in with the the fact that they identify as gay with their sexual orientation. They may not know what to do with that. So it's it's never just this one-way street of I need to get away from this. It's can I still maintain this while also having kind of this other identity as well? It it's it's different for each person. It's my my point is it's just not it's not simple, it's not simple and straightforward.
Manya ChylinskiYou did, you did answer my question. And it's it's interesting that that's something you are you're pursuing while at the same time you're doing this really important work with social workers and kind of helping people think about how to move on from clinical work, because certainly anybody in the mental health field or even just connected to the mental health field right now, I think is feeling some strain from the system and from what's going on in the world. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. What do you think people misunderstand about trauma or about resilience or about both of them?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think that there are there's a lot that people misunderstand. There are two components of it a lot I would like to highlight, and it comes from my my own perspective. One is, you know, we're all about what's right in front of us, and we can see this with any kind of disaster, for example. Um, Americans are really, really good at stepping up and giving donations to or volunteering causes right after something happens, like a tornado hits a town, or Hurricane Katrina, or 9-11, um, so forth and so on. I mean, you saw the res you may have seen the response to the the Bills player Damar Hamlin and how his a lot of people just gave to his chair to you. They were they were responding to something that was right there, but eventually that subsides. And you know, we can look at the Haiti earthquake or the Indian Ocean tsunami. What's actually going on? The the problems that were caused by those situations are long term, but people just forget about them and move on. So there's the time element. I think we have a hard time realizing that we really need to still be paying attention to the long term. Uh, I think ACEs are a good example of this, adverse childhood experiences, things that happened in our very earliest years. As a dearontologist, I'm looking at what's going on in older adult years, and you know, after retirement lean leading to death eventually. And ACEs, what happens before we're even born, what happens in our very earliest years, increases our chances of having these long-term impacts way down the road. But for whatever reason, we just have a hard time connecting those dots because it's not right in front of us. Right. So that's one thing people misunderstand nothing about trauma. You have the long-term piece there, and we need to be keeping that in mind. And the other piece is I was trained by a demographer, so I tend to look at things from a population level view rather than the view of the individual. I I know I said I was trained in social work, but I I don't want to do clinical work. I'm I'm up here, more bird's eye view. And I think that we should, uh, in public health is a field that's becoming better at studying this. We need to be applying these demographic and epidemiological methods of analysis to trauma to understand. So, what does this look like at a population level? Because we're probably going to find things that that we're not going to find if we're just working on the ground level with individuals. And I think that's true of any problem. So, you know, American individualism is is running rampant right now. We think that everything happens at the level of the individual, but it doesn't. We have to be considering these other levels of analysis as well. And that applies just as much to trauma.
Manya ChylinskiYes. I'm glad to hear you say that. Um, you know, after my own experience, I started to really move towards that position of number two, what you're talking about, the kind of population level response to an understanding of trauma. And um I think, you know, it's fine to think about how do we help somebody after something has happened to them. But it's also important, and if you look at ACEs, for example, it's also important to start thinking about, well, how did people get to this particular traumatized place in the, you know, in the beginning. Yeah. Um yeah, you know, to get back to what you were first talking, I want to unpack kind of both of these, but to get back to the first, you were talking about, you know, we kind of there's often a very robust response right away after something big in particular happens and people want to support. And I remember reading about the lines of people waiting to donate blood after 9-11. It's just this kind of automatic, ooh, we have to help. But as you said, it isn't something that carries on for the long term. Why do you think that is? And is there anything we can do about it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, one of my favorite courses I taught as a former professor was uh on dying and death. And I remember one of the chapters that we went over from the from the book, or maybe it was an article that we read about it, was the concept of salience. If you if you compare the societal response to things like terrorism, which kills less than 1% of Americans, compared to the societal response to uh heart disease, which kills nearly a third, you would think that our response to heart disease should be stronger and more impassioned, but it's the exact opposite because it's not salient. So like, where everyone has heart disease, oh blood pressure, you can just take money medicine for that or cholesterol, whatever. Um, polio is a good example. Uh, there were just so many people who got ill to uh bandwagon for that. These are serious issues. Don't let me say that they're not. Yeah, but if you look at the numbers, polio, you know, it never really killed that high percentage of children. There are there are definitely things that kill kill us. I know I'm thinking about in terms of mortality, causes them death or causes them morbidity, disability, etc., that are much more common, but they're not salient. So there's something about the human mind, I think. Um, and these are population level studies, so I I am extrapolating a little bit down to the the individual level, but I would argue that there is something about the human mind that sticks to something that happens to be salient. You know, why do we have onlookers delay with traffic? Um, where something that sticks out to us is going to get our concern, even if the overall numbers don't match up. Is what I'm saying making sense?
Manya ChylinskiIt is making sense. I'm thinking about the fact that that more people are afraid to fly than people are afraid to drive, but driving is much more dangerous.
SPEAKER_00I know, yeah, exactly. There's just something about flying that uh captures our attention, maybe it's more interesting. I'm not I'm not sure, but but but the I think it it's related to the concept of salience, something that sticks out in our mind.
Manya ChylinskiIs there a way? So if we if we kind of take a step back and we're thinking about trauma and the response to the sort of general public response to a traumatic event or general public's understanding of the long-term impacts of a trauma, is there a way to make that salient for the long term? Or do we have to kind of figure some other way around it?
SPEAKER_00Uh I used to think that the answer was, well, if we just show the numbers on this, then people are going to be convinced. But we we're we are living in a crisis of science, um, which means a couple of things. One, people don't understand how science works and what it how it should be valued, uh, or that it shouldn't be valued. And they also just they just don't value it. And and I'm not, I didn't come up with that term. That's that's I think that's a fairly well understood concept that we're in a crisis of science. So, you know, I it it wasn't that long ago, and it's kind of the reason I, you know, I got my PhD and why I went into academia, because I I respected research and I thought that it was the answer to things moving forward. But um, as we've seen with you know, recent with climate change, with COVID, that there are people on opposite ends of the spectrum that they can't vote be right and supported by science. Um, so so clearly some other factors are coming into play by which people value what they choose to believe and focus on. So uh I hate to be disappointed and say I don't know the answer to that. I I do wonder if there's I I I don't know. I I I I think maybe changing the way that children are are educated to engage, to use what they're what what we're taught, but to engage with like real-time social issues, I I don't I I don't want the answer. I used to think that it was science, but things are just not going well enough. Science the science itself is good, but it's not it's not being used the way they should.
Manya ChylinskiRight. And I used to think it was all about the numbers too. I used to think if we could do the research and show the numbers and this was the economic impact or this was the demographic impact. Demographic impact, then it would just be clear and light bulbs would go off and you know, dominoes would fall. And I've come to realize I'm not sure that's the case. And I like that term, although I don't like what it means, crisis of science. Does compassion play a role in moving the needle on people thinking about long-term impacts?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think it plays a role in the immediate aftermath, like we were talking about earlier. You know, Americans do have really high rates of volunteerism and giving, but that tends to weigh off after a while until the next big thing happens. I think that compassion does play a role, but it has to be more there. I mean, I I co-founded a company that provides grant writing to nonprofits, and all these people running nonprofits think that others are just gonna throw money off after them because, oh, we're helping children and it's gonna pull on your heart stream. That doesn't work. You have to have a very effective, almost ruthlessly efficient marketing in order for you to raise money for your great calls for a nonprofit, which I think shows that clearly there are other other factors at play here, and compassion is not enough. So that's my point with that.
Manya ChylinskiYeah.
SPEAKER_00I think it's multifaceted, you know? And I'm sorry, I wish I had more exact answers. I'm just these are my observations.
Manya ChylinskiSo yes. No, I I understand. And and it's like you said, it's multifaceted. These are complex issues, and if they were easy to solve, they wouldn't still be issues that we're even remotely interested to talk about, because that we would already have moved on from them. Um so you also were talking about kind of the population level view and public health, and trying to, I guess people sort of don't understand that level. And I guess it's the same thing. We're kind of talking about the science and the numbers that people perhaps aren't necessarily listening to.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. A good example. Example I usually give is I don't know if you were asking a question within that, but you just one quick example I'll give is that you know, a common response that we hear about people who the raising obesity epidemic, if you just focus on the individual, then you're gonna your response is gonna be, well, those people just not eat as much. They should have a healthier diet, they should exercise more. But if you really look at it from a population level, you will see that people on the lower SES often live in food deserts, and they literally cannot do any of their name choices that they can make that would give them greater access to nutritious foods, and they have higher rates of stroke and obesity in those areas. So it's like if you just look at the individual level and think that everything boils down to making good decisions, you're missing a hell of a lot.
Manya ChylinskiYes. Yes. And I think that a lot about our response to trauma from my own experience, I quickly realized it isn't necessarily about the individual, it's about how our institutions are perhaps not being supportive of people who've been dealing with trauma. And what I like to refer to is the system, but it's not set up to be necessarily responsive to trauma in general. Certainly there are institutions and and groups that do this. But then we keep saying to people, oh, but you're resilient. But we're but we're not setting them up in a situation that supports that resiliency.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. These are definitely structural issues for sure. Um we we have not had we've had a very uneven response to mental health. And um I think I think that's a huge part of it. Um I could sit here and go on a huge soapbox about the inadequacies of our and inefficiency of our healthcare system. That's not the point of this, but but I just want to at least point out that all these systems are contributing to it.
Manya ChylinskiYes, I would agree. But you know, if we're looking at a structural level, we're looking at the systems or institutions, which I sort of use these interchangeably, I know they're not, but what is the role of society or systems or institutions in helping people heal from trauma or to be supportive of people's resiliency?
SPEAKER_00That that's a really good question. One that what one that immediately comes to mind is with the same business partner that I've co-founded, that organization that provides great nonprofits uh with, I also co-founded a small mental health practice. And, you know, I've always had heart disease, so I've seen the healthcare system from the perspective of a patient, but over the past few years, I've also seen it from the perspective of a provider and health our our entire health insurance system is just highly inefficient, like a labyrinth. And I think intentionally so. I don't think that that it adequately supports yental health. Um, it does not adequately encourage different healthcare providers to interact with one another. Um, the way that things are coded, reimbursed. I really think we need some structural changes to healthcare. And that's an easy enough thing to say, and a lot of people agree on that. What they don't agree on is what are those structural changes that we need. And and maybe you'll give me a pass and let me simply stop it saying that we need those changes. Um we definitely could go into a much more nuanced conversation about what those changes should be, but I really think that that healthcare is definitely one of those areas that that needs, I mean. Healthcare providers are not paid very much. The reason that social work, that my post about social work struck a nerve is because we grew up in a society in which social workers are connected to providing welfare. We are not a welfare-friendly society. We don't think that it's worth funding. And if it's not worth funding, that means that social workers are not going to be paid well. They're going to get birds out and lose their caution because they're frustrated with the system and it's not working. And they're eventually going to want to leave or do something else because they're not making the salary. Just like I would say that the same is true of uh primary level education or teachers, mental health providers should make more money and be better supported.
Manya ChylinskiYes. They should be making all the money. I feel like both teachers and mental health providers, those are such critical services. And you're right, we could go down the rabbit hole of the healthcare system, and we could go down the rabbit hole of teachers need to be paid more, and these are of education too, yeah. These are both problems that I know some really smart people are thinking about. Um but it just it kind of it's all this swirling soup to me of the of the system just not being supportive of how we as humans actually live our lives. And yes. So again, I'm already starting to think down that path. I need to stop at the moment. You know, so you've had some incredible experiences, I think, both in your work and your personal life that have you thinking about resiliency and kind of what does that mean. So what would you say is one or more if you have them, important lesson about resiliency and compassion that you've learned because of who you are?
SPEAKER_00Entired resiliency. You know, I think another feature of the American psyche is to want to avoid death. But I personally think that the more we embrace and reflect on and talk about our mortality, the actually the higher quality of life that we have. I think we need to be more open to having these conversations. We're just we're just terrified of it. And I see this in older adults. My PhD is in geriatricology, so I've interacted with, I've done research on, I've read a whole lot about older adults, and it's you know, they're it's not with everyone, it's not universal, but it is a common trend to just kind of avoid those conversations. Uh yeah, it it seems counterintuitive to think that the more that you reflect on it and are open to talking about it, the higher your quality of life will be. But it I do think that it's true. And, you know, from a social perspective, one of the things that we learn how to do is walk alongside people. And I think something that can really solve a lot of problems in this country in terms and I would I would take this to compassion. I I tend to use the term empathy um over compassion.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00Uh that one's I guess I I tend to there's a lot of overlap, they're not the exact same. I feel like one is like, I don't know if you put compulsion on a resume, but empathy is like really one of those skills that you could tell, you know, when you're applying for a job. So empathy is really important. And I think with all the political polarization going on now and all these issues, that we just need to learn to accept that other people have other perspectives and be open to hearing those perspectives and walk alongside people, meet them where they are. We're so individualistic that we expect everyone to meet us where we are. We're not going to get very far with that. We're not getting very far with that. We're going to go a lot farther if we agree to meet others where they are. That's how we're supposed to treat our clients as social workers. And I don't think that it's a concept that everyone should be aware of.
Manya ChylinskiI really like that thought of walking alongside someone as a way to say meet them where they are. And, you know, I can speak from my own experience that there were people who walked alongside of me as I was dealing with trauma, and they made all the difference. To continue the metaphor, some of them walked with me for a long time, some of them met not very long, but they all were kind of next to me when I needed them.
SPEAKER_00My my favorite course that I taught was uh vulnerable pest populations. So LGBT persons, older adults, persons with disabilities, religious minorities, racial, ethnic minorities, homeless persons, formerly incarcerated persons. And one of the most important assignments in this course was for the students to go out and interview individuals who identify with one or more of these. And so my question is: regardless of what your religious beliefs are, or whatever you personally think about any one of these issues, how can you not go out and interact with someone who faces daily, everyday struggles and talk to them about those things, meet them as a person, how can you not be impacted by that? Right? Right. And I'm not I'm not suggesting that people change their beliefs about these issues. I just want you to just get a taste of what that what that's like and how how it affects you and how it affects them.
Manya ChylinskiRight. And just to be open to somebody else's experience and recognizing that it is just as valid as my own experience and my own way of seeing the world. Yes. So I think we've already talked about this a little bit, but it what would you say is the most important action or policy an organization can take to be supportive of trauma survivors?
SPEAKER_00Single action, I don't know. A few different things come to mind. I definitely think considering, and I'm seeing this more on the social media platform that I'm most active on is LinkedIn. So uh given that that's was the intention of LinkedIn was to be set up as a professional platform. So it's it makes sense that I'll see posts about health insurance bankheads, maternity leave, and things like that. And there's a lot of chatter right now about um, I think some states, a state recent was it, Colorado maybe to New York, has a law requiring unlimited PTO. And basically in maternity leave, that's a big that's a big topic as well. We're the only industrialized country that I know of that does not have paid maternity leave, which is just you know, it's just ridiculous. I think that's one area to look at. How do we recognize that uh, you know, our employees, uh our workers have all of a variety of needs. What can what policies can we put in place that really that really help with that? And it's not just good health insurance policies, it's these, it's PTO, it's payment or sickly grieving time. That's another one that comes up, sufficient time to grieve. And I think I think that's definitely one side of things. I I don't want to live in a place where everyone is mandated to forced to sit through some form of education on how you need to listen to other people. I I hope that I am conveying it as well.
Manya ChylinskiI think I understood what you meant, which is that we need to be finding a way to encourage people to truly care about these issues on a real human level, because just having a training isn't necessarily going to change somebody's mind. And forcing someone to go to a training is never really a way to get them to care about the topic that you're talking about.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, people aren't people would not respond well if there were some federal policy that required that. And we want them to be able to respond well. I don't know what the answer to this is, but I I do uh I I don't know. Uh I get it. It probably goes back to the point about science. I want them to believe that if if people were exposed to like knowledge on these topics that it would affect them, maybe it would it's I I don't know. We live in we live in a really I mean I've read several and several sources that this is the most politically polarized, not only that our society have ever been in, but that any society has ever been in. That is an incredibly, incredibly difficult barrier.
Manya ChylinskiYes. There is a well, if you believe the internet, it is an ancient curse. May you live in interesting times. And we are deep in the middle of some interesting times.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
Manya ChylinskiSo what is a question that I didn't ask you that you wish I had asked you?
SPEAKER_00Well, something that interests me is maybe I shouldn't have said this as my answer to one of your questions. But like I think that term concepts like trauma and resilience do have a particular clinical definition or technical definition, and they should, especially when you're conducting research on them, you know, you have to have these operate operational definitions. Let's take dementia. Science is fast at work trying to figure out what is the absolute earliest that we can detect whether someone is is going to get dementia. And and what that means is can we detect that they're going to get dementia before they get it? Can we do the same thing with trauma? Right. And so where do you draw the line of once you've had this many experiences, or once your experiences are this severe, or whatever, you you're in the trauma point. But I just I guess I wonder, is there a way to hit it before that point? Does that mean that we should change? I don't know if that means we should change your definitions so we come up with another term, like the stage pre dementia I was often referred to as mild cognitive impairment, MCI. And some people never go beyond MCI. So, like, what are the pre-stages to it? And I know that we're looking into that, but that's just kind of one question that comes up. You know, the logical conclusion to this is if we had a society that addressed everyone's mental health, and that's pretty much the answer that I'm getting at. But of course, that's a difficult thing too. So you'll probably you may have noticed in some of my questions that I I may have it may have sounded like I was just kind of addressing general issues, but I won't explain the best why. Yeah. Um, I I know I didn't always have a trauma-specific response because I'm really kind of thinking of it. I tend to believe, like, let's use gerontology, let's use aging as an example, cities that are really healthy for older adults, such as good sidewalks, walk and good lighting at night, trees and pretty, pretty walkways, easy access to pharmacies and banks and grocery stores, who would not want to live in a place like that. Right. So it's thinking when thinking about what would be good for older adults, like, oh, now we've come up with a solution that'll be good for everyone. And that's how I that's how I'm kind of approaching it with uh with this conversation with trauma as well.
Manya ChylinskiRight, right. Thinking, yes, that if you make it good for people of a particular type, you are actually making it a good environment for everyone. And yeah, I think those are the directions we should be going in. So as we get ready to wrap up, I do have one question I ask everyone, which is what would you tell your 18-year-old self about resilience or about compassion?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm I'm constantly thinking about back to maybe the conversations, the interaction, decisions I had in my early 20s, and I'm like, man, I was a dumbass.
Manya ChylinskiWe all were. We all were.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I I'd slap myself around a little bit. That's a good question. Life truly is short, take the adventure. I had some decisions I've made where I took a really cool international trip and I traveled all around the world, and I really like that. There's some decisions I didn't take. I didn't I didn't take the more adventurous decision. I'm a better person for having made those riskier decisions because I I travel them and I met people, and those people changed me. And I know that I believe what my worldview and the way that I view these different vulnerable populations and issues, they are what they are because I've met so many different types of people around the world. So I would just say, you know what? Take the more adventurous road sometimes. I think that's gonna result in. I like to believe, maybe I mean too idealistic, I like to believe that it's gonna result in you being a better person, have a uh a wider view that makes you more willing to have to have those conversations with with others who are different from you. I like to believe that that's the case.
Manya ChylinskiI like to believe that's the case too. So as we wrap up, tell us how our listeners can reach you. Well, do you have a website? Um, I know you're on LinkedIn. What's the best way for people to learn more about you?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the Jacob Kendall, I'm on LinkedIn. And then, you know, I provide services where I'm really good with cover letters and also more specifically helping postdocs or helping social workers. Well, so I'll have a website for that. That's the wordsmith.us. Um, the wordsmith because that I'm really good at like working with words in in the like writing a cover letter or doing a presentation, or or jacob.kindle at the wordsmith.us.
Manya ChylinskiI'll put that information in the show notes for anybody who um didn't write them down, you'll still get that information. Jacob, thank you so much. This was a fabulous conversation. And it I already feel pieces I want to have more conversations with you about in the future.
SPEAKER_00Thanks very much for the opportunity. I enjoyed the conversation as well.
Manya ChylinskiThank you. All right, everyone. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I did. So if you'd like to learn more about me, Mania Chilinsky, I work with organizations to help understand how to create environments where people can thrive after difficult life experiences. And I do this through talks and consulting. I'm a survivor of mass violence, and I use my experience to help leaders learn about resiliency, compassion, and trauma-sensitive leadership, to build strategies to enable teams to thrive and be engaged amidst difficulty and turmoil. If this is something you want to learn more about, visit my website www.manachilinsky.com, email me at mania at maniachilinsky, or stop by my social media on LinkedIn and Twitter. Thanks so much.
