RESILIENCE, on Human Being with Dr. Susan - Episode 2, aired 10/18/25 on Sandcastle Radio, America's Hottest Online Variety and Music Station.

Resilience: Your Emotional Elasticity
Resilience isn’t about being immune to hardship. It’s about the ability to adapt when things get hard — to stretch, absorb the stress or change, then return (or re-settle) to a new normal.
Life brings change, difficulty, trauma, loss, and uncertainty. Resilience means you don’t get permanently “bent out of shape” — you shift, adjust, respond, and recover.

What Builds Resilience — Key Ingredients and Practices
Cultivate resilience through inner work, relationships, and lifestyle choices:
• Self-awareness and emotional honesty — noticing when you feel stressed, numb, reactive, overwhelmed; naming what you feel; allowing yourself to feel rather than suppressing emotion.
• Flexibility and adaptability — in small and big things. Practice flexibility in everyday aspects of life (routine, habits, minor changes) so when bigger disruptions come, you already have “muscle memory” for adapting. 
• Community and relationships — build and sustain supportive relationships so that when adversity hits, you have people you can rely on.
• Self-care and stress-management — consciously caring for your physical, emotional, and mental health.
• Accept change and uncertainty as natural parts of life — rather than resisting or fearing them, learn to meet them with openness, curiosity, and willingness to grow.
Elevating Resilience — Not a One-Time Fix, But an Ongoing PracticeResilience isn’t a switch you turn on once. It’s a habit, a set of capacities, a way of living and relating to life.
You build it over time — through small adjustments, repeated engagement, honest emotional work, community, and self-care.
When life presents hardship — loss, trauma, upheaval — resilience doesn’t make the pain vanish. It gives you the capacity to hold complexity, to grieve, to heal — and to find meaning or regeneration beyond the hardship.

About Dr. Susan Hendrich
Susan is a dynamic leadership coach, psychologist, and speaker with over 20 years of leadership and learning expertise. As the host of "Human Being with Dr. Susan," a new radio version of her popular DETV television show, she brings her energy and experience to the airwaves to explore what it truly means to thrive in the modern world.

Susan has a distinguished career guiding high-performing teams and facilitating organizational innovation. She has cultivated transformative cultures for a wide range of renowned organizations, including Nemours Children's Health, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, the Smithsonian Institution, and GlaxoSmithKline. Her work focuses on maximizing human potential and creating environments where people and teams can succeed.W
ith a doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology, Dr. Susan's insights are grounded in a deep understanding of human behavior and psychology. She served as a clinical supervisor and faculty coordinator for one of the nation’s oldest APA-approved psychology training consortiums and was an invited speaker at the World Congress on Mental Health. For the past two decades, she has led thousands of leaders to unlock their potential through the power of authentic courage.

Susan is an avid photographer, painter, and genealogist who enjoys outdoor adventures with her family and friends. Her personal interests and love for learning outside the professional sphere inform her authentic approach to exploring the human experience with her listeners.

Her personal motto, "Ganbatte kudasai," is Japanese for "Always try your best."
Learn more:
www.youtube.com/@susanhendrich

GRACE, on Human Being with Dr. Susan - Episode 1 (The very first episode!)

Being human is not a linear achievement.
It’s a messy, iterative prototype.
We break. We rebuild. We make meaning out of the rubble.
And somehow—through all of it—we keep becoming.

The culture tells us to optimize.
Our families tell us to be pleasing.
Our jobs tell us to perform.
But the self—your actual self—has an entirely different KPI:
Integrity.
Congruence.
Alignment between the life you’re living and the life you’re here to live.

Most people don’t fail at life because they’re weak.
They fail because the gap between “role” and “soul” becomes unbearable.
They stop recognizing themselves in the mirror of their own calendar.

I used to believe becoming was additive.
More knowledge. More hustle. More credentials. More ambition. But becoming is often subtraction.
Less noise.
Less compliance.
Less pretending.
Less managing other people’s comfort.

If you want to meet the truth of who you are—your life will eventually orchestrate a disruption.
A divorce.
A diagnosis.
A layoff.
A betrayal.
A calling that refuses to be silenced.
These are not punishments.
They’re pattern interrupts.

“Every exile contains the seeds of return.”
Becoming always begins in exile—when the identity you’re outgrowing no longer fits, and the new one hasn’t yet arrived.

This is why we thrash in the middle.
That’s where the anxiety comes from.
Not because we’re broken, but because the operating system is re-writing itself.

Psychologists call it identity dissonance.
Spiritual traditions call it the dark night.
Leadership scholars call it liminality.
Mystics call it initiation.
Same pattern.
Different vocabulary.

We don’t get to precision-engineer our becoming. We get to cooperate with it.

Becoming the self is the most individual project you’ll ever undertake, and yet no one becomes alone.
We are formed by our people—by our mentors, our enemies, our loves, our disappointments.
The village shapes the pilgrim.

Becoming rarely announces itself. It sneaks in through disruption, fatigue, and thresholds we didn’t plan for. One day you realize the life you built doesn’t quite fit anymore. It’s not failure; it’s evolution calling for an upgrade.

We’re taught to chase stability. But stability often becomes camouflage for stagnation. Growth requires discomfort. Comfort requires conformity. You have to choose which psychological economy you want to live in.

The great traditions all understand this. Buddhists talk about impermanence and detachment. The Stoics talk about character and agency. The Vedantic tradition talks about dharma and liberation. Different ways of mapping the same human problem: how to become without losing the plot of who you are.

Most of us delay becoming because it threatens the systems around us. Families get anxious. Organizations get offended. Friends get confused. People who benefit from your old identity rarely cheer for the new one. That’s not malice; it’s homeostasis.

Identity has stakeholders. And those stakeholders have expectations. When you begin to update the code, the ecosystem pushes back. That’s normal. That’s data. That’s also how you know you’re in the threshold.

The most dangerous moment in becoming isn’t the beginning or the ending; it’s the middle. The middle is where you can’t see the shore you left or the shore you’re headed toward. That’s when people panic. That’s when they go back to what’s familiar. That’s when they collapse into old patterns because the uncertainty feels unbearable.

But the middle is where the upgrade happens. Research on adult development calls this the “transformational hinge.”

Our culture doesn’t teach that process. We teach resilience like it’s about grit. We teach success like it’s about credentials. We teach happiness like it’s about consumption. But becoming is about integration. If the parts don’t integrate, the self doesn’t stabilize.