My Resilience Advantage: How To Enhance Your Life Skills

What if every setback in your life was actually a stepping stone to something greater? In this episode of The Resilience Advantage,  we dive deep into the essence of resilience and strength—and how you can intentionally cultivate them to thrive in life’s toughest moments.

• 🌱 Ever wondered why some people bounce back stronger while others struggle? Discover the surprising truth about resilience—it’s not just something you’re born with, it’s a skill you can develop.
• 💪 Feeling overwhelmed or stuck? Learn why true strength isn’t about never feeling weak, but about showing up for yourself, even when life feels impossibly hard.
• 🧠 Ready for actionable strategies? From reframing failure to embracing uncertainty, I share powerful steps to build resilience and unlock your inner strength.

With my real-life stories, practical tips, and insights from leading researchers in positive psychology, this episode will inspire you to see challenges as opportunities for growth.

🎧 Tune in to uncover the art of becoming: not just surviving, but evolving into your strongest, most authentic self. Are you ready to take the first step?

Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who needs a little extra encouragement today! 💬✨

Contact me for Divorce, Reinvention, Life, Mindset & Positive Psychology Coaching and transformative retreats. rhian@thepositivedivorcecoach.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Welcome to Becoming. I'm Rian, a positive psychology coach, speaker, and your host. A few years ago, my whole world fell apart. Divorce, depression, a career in crisis. But from that chaos, I learned the power of reinvention. This podcast is your space to explore how to rebuild, redefine, and rise stronger. No matter where you've been, together we'll uncover the tools, stories, and insights to help you step boldly into what's next. Welcome to Becoming. I'm so so glad you're here with me today. Thanks very much for joining me for my first episode. Now, in today's episode, we're going to explore the aspects of resilience and strength and how we can intentionally cultivate both of them to improve our lives and to improve every aspect of our experiences. Because, you know, let's face it, okay, life happens. Things go well, things go not so well. And we all get knocked down at some point, right? But the question isn't about whether you're gonna fall or whether you're gonna fail. It's all about whether you're gonna get back up. And more importantly, how you get back up. So, you know, we can all think, oh, I'm gonna start again, I'm gonna start again. But are you starting with conviction? Are you starting with growth? Are you starting with learning the lessons that got you to that point in the first place and implementing them so that the next time you're more successful? So that is all about resilience. So let's start by unpacking what resilience really is. So it's often described as the ability to kind of bounce back when things go wrong, right? But it's so much more important than that. You know, it's not about returning to where you started. Like I said, you know, we all get knocked down, we get back up again, we try again. Don't try again from that initial point where you started. It's about moving forward and growing stronger. You're wiser, you're more grounded, and you're just more knowledgeable on what happens next. And almost that failure in the first place and that kind of adversity that you've experienced. If you reframe your mindset to see that as something positive that's enabled you to learn some valuable lessons and grow, well, that's resilience. And there's a professor, Jan Emmanuel Deneve, the director of Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, right? So this is grounded in science, okay? It's, you know, these positive psychology experts and academics who have done so much research around the human condition. So Professor Jan Emmanuel emphasizes the strong link between resilience and happiness, right? So his research indicates that, you know, people who cultivate resilience and who kind of learn from adversity and from failure and see it as a part of growth and a part of becoming who they really want to be and achieving what they really want. Well, those kinds of people tend to experience higher levels of satisfaction. And that's not just in the task in hand that they're trying to achieve. It's not about this particular goal that they're striving for or this major life event. Maybe they want to enhance their career, maybe they're, you know, looking for love, they want to get married, maybe they want to increase their friendships, or they have a huge personal goal, it could be something philanthropic, whatever it might be, it's about experiencing higher levels of satisfaction even in the middle of challenging events. So this perspective from Professor Deneve is supported by the findings in the World Happiness Report. Um, you know, if you look at uh during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was remarkable resilience in living a satisfactory life. So there's also a Harvard University professor called Professor Arthur Brooks. He's a renowned happiness expert and he explores the interplay between resilience and happiness, suggesting that if you embrace life's challenges and if you see them again as learnings and as opportunities for growth, you can transform your path to happiness. Happiness, you know, it's with within us, right? But it doesn't just happen, it's a choice. So we can choose to look at everything that happens to us on a day-to-day basis and think that life's really unfair and that you know you can't do it. I can't do it. Where's that gonna get you? Not very far. So if you reframe the negative things that happen to you in your life, or or perhaps they're not even that negative, right? It might just be that something hasn't quite gone to plan. Reframe it, refocus your mind, really display your resilience in action by coming back stronger, more tenacious than ever, and more determined to actually make it happen, no matter what it is, yeah. That's resilience, that's growth, and that's where real strength is developed. It's where you cultivate the happiness that you're going to feel and the fulfillment that's gonna fall into every aspect of your life. So the ability to be able to bounce back from adversity and to be able to bounce back to a stronger position, to a better position, to constantly be striving forward and becoming, yeah. So that's all about growth, and that's all about a growth mindset. The Professor Carol Dweck coined the term and has written a fantastic book about. Um, really kind of moving from that fixed mindset that you may have around certain things, which it can be learned behaviour, to really retrain your psyche and your whole approach to life to be about growth, right? It really is quite a magical thing when that happens. Um, but you know, resilience, it's more than bouncing back, you know. So I want you to think about a tree in a storm, right? The wind is battering the branches, but its deep roots are keeping it anchored. Now that's resilience right there, okay? It's not just surviving the storm, and it's the deep roots and the foundations that keep it anchored. And if we think about our own lives, you know, it's our experiences and our beliefs and our kind of who we are in ourselves that enables us to anchor ourselves when we're being battered by that storm and know that we will come through it the other end. And you know, the storm isn't gonna rage forever. There is an end point where the sun is gonna come back out, and we are then going to be able to regroup, and just like the tree, we're gonna be able to adapt and thrive afterwards. We're going to be able to bloom again, our blossoms are gonna be stronger because you know, nature's a wonderful thing, and if like me, you like gardening, right, you'll notice that you may grow something from seed, right? And in your one, it grows, it does quite well. You kind of get a lot of satisfaction from the way that it's flourishing, and if it's a flower, for example, it might, you know, it might be really beautiful, and you might get one or two blooms um in that summer. The colour could be just incredible, you know, a really deep colour that brings you a lot of joy. And that flower has has demonstrated growth, it's been nurtured, right? So that's another key thing that we need to do within ourselves. We need to nurture ourselves and look after ourselves. That develops resilience, right? So that flower now has has bloomed and it's gonna come back again next season. So it's going to go back kind of almost into, I guess, a hibernating state. Now, any gardeners out there who are real experts in this, I don't know if I've got the right term, okay? I am an amateur gardener, but it brings me a lot of joy. So I'm gonna look after that plant. I'm gonna cut it back, I'm going to feed it, I'm probably going to change the soil. I might repot it, maybe it's in the garden, maybe it's not. I might bring it in. My point is, I'm nurturing it and I'm looking after it. Now, how many times in our lives do we just keep going? You know, life happens, we get so incredibly busy and we forget what our soul, what our body, and what our mind needs to flourish. We look after everybody else. We're doing everything for everybody else, especially, and I don't mean to be sexist here at all, but you know, women tend to be that nurturing person within the household, within the family unit. The woman tends to be the person who looks after everyone else's needs while the man kind of hunter-gathers, you know. Now, look, that dynamic is changing. You know, I'm an independent woman, I'm all about growth, I'm running my own business. So I'm not an advocate for that uh by any stretch of the imagination. But what I'm saying to you here is that nurturing, we tend to look after everybody else and put ourselves to the very bottom of the pile. Now, I'm looking after this flower, for example, right? And next year, when it comes back again, when it rejuvenates, when it kind of thrives again, it's going to flourish in a bigger way, in a different way, right? Because it's had that kind of journey to this point. It's been nurtured, it's been looked after, the bloom's been magnificent. And then next year, you may get more blooms, bigger blooms, bigger flowers. So I want you to really think about that analogy in terms of your life and how you're flourishing forward, how you're becoming, how are you going to become a bigger bloom? How are you going to become more vibrant and just stronger and more resilient, you know, in everything that you do? And when you can unlock that power within yourself, that's when you can access the intrinsic happiness that comes from developing resilience. Now, here, I want to digress a little bit, right? What am I doing here on this podcast talking to you about resilience? You know? How have I demonstrated resilience? So I'm going to kind of recap a little bit on the last 49 years of my life. So um I've reinvented myself over the last, I'd say, two years. So let's just explore that a little bit. I grew up in South Wales on a council estate in a single parent family. We weren't, you know, we weren't very rich. We didn't have a lot of money, you know. My mum worked so incredibly hard and things were difficult, you know. I remember a time where we'd have to hide behind the sofa if somebody came to knock on the door for a bill to be paid. If, you know, my mum had run out of money in the middle of the month and we were trying to get to the end of the month. So things weren't easy. I think at this point I may have been the only child out of 30 people in my class to be from a single parent family. Everybody else kind of had mum and dad at home. So I felt very different, and I really tried to fit in because looking at those family units, you know, and and what they experienced, it was something that I really yearned for and really felt a big gap in my life. Now, my dad, or my biological father, I should say, because he's never been a dad to me, he didn't acknowledge me, right? And this left me feeling like I was less than. Uh, just like I wasn't enough. And that theme seemed to carry itself through to everything that I did. But it motivated me because I thought, well, if he thinks I'm not good enough to be in his life or that I'm not enough, I'm going to prove him wrong. So I guess that was a motivator. Am I saying that that's the right motivator? Probably not. But at this point, does it really matter? No. We have to use in life the energy from the universe and the things that come into our lives, we have to use them as fuel to drive us forward, you know, and to make us flourish. So this kind of negative aspect of my life, I turned it into a positive. I used it as a motivational factor. I was going to work as hard as I possibly could at everything that I did, whether it was academics, I was a singer. Um, I'd started learning to sing when I was around eight years old, which was wonderful that my mum could find the money to pay for my singing lessons and my piano lessons. And it was something I was so incredibly grateful for. I would practice for hours on end because I knew and understood, even at such a young age, the sacrifice that she'd made to make sure that I could do that and that I could flourish and and you know have something joyful in my life because I I find so much joy from music. And even now I teach um a little bit of piano and voice to a few pupils. Um, but more than anything, kind of sitting at a piano and learning a new piece and working on that piece until it's perfect brings me a lot of joy, a lot of satisfaction. And it's also a way of calming my mind, right? Because I'm digressing a little bit now about overthinking. When you're overthinking a lot, if you can find something that can take your attention, whether it's playing the piano, whether it's a project about knitting, whether it's a jigsaw, whether it's going for a long run, everyone's got something where they can quiet their mind. And that's got huge benefits for our mental well-being. So back to a bit of my story now. I went to university, first person in my family to go to uni, right? I worked so hard in uni. I wasn't one of these students who partied or anything because I just didn't have the money to. I was working, I was working in a cocktail bar. I'm gonna break into song here in a minute now, but um if any if any of you of my generation um remember that song, you'll know what I mean. I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. So um that's a bit of my humour there. But anyway, less of me laughing at myself. I was working, I was studying, I was doing everything I possibly could to make the most of the opportunity because I knew how hard I'd worked to get there, and I knew how much my mum had sacrificed to enable me to do that, and I wasn't going to let a minute pass me by. Now, I was really hard on myself, okay? I became a perfectionist, and nothing I seemed to do was good enough, and that held me back in a lot of things because being a perfectionist causes you to procrastinate. You kind of think it's not good enough. Um, I need to work harder. And you know, even recording this podcast episode, I've seen elements of my perfectionism coming in. Now it's something that I'd really worked on, right? Because like in this whole concept of becoming, it's more important to do something than to do it perfectly. You can perfect it over time. So when it came to recording this first episode of the podcast, right, I'll be honest with you. Um, I probably started writing the script around a month ago. And I believe I've now recorded it around 20 times, where I've then listened to it back and thought, I'm not happy with that, I'm not putting that content out. I need to do it again. Now, look, it's okay to be incredibly proud of the work that you're doing and to want it, because I wanted this content, right, to inspire you. I wanted to motivate you, I wanted to educate you, I want to be helpful in helping you thrive in every aspect of your life because, you know, that's who I am now, you know. I'm a positive psychology coach and I'm all about growth. But was that perfectionism going to put me in a position where I'm not actually going to get the podcast out? I'm never going to fulfill my dream. I'm constantly going to procrastinate about making the decision and making the action. No. Now, back in my 20s, that would have held me back. The growth, the art of becoming, and the art of realizing that it's more important to put things into action and to work on them while you're doing them, to keep flourishing, keep moving forward. And that's resilience in action. Okay. So a little bit more about my story. I left university and I had applied for a graduate scheme in London. Now, I remember applying and thinking, I probably haven't got a cat in hell's chance of getting this job. Okay. They're all looking for Oxbridge candidates. They've all been privately educated. I've gone to a comp. I'm from a single parent family and grew up on a council estate. What chance have I got? Anyway, lo and behold, I had every chance because I got the job. And this was huge, right? The salary was more than my mum earned. And like for our family, it was like, wow, I was going to live in London, I was going to be working in the city, I was on a graduate training scheme for three years. I was going to have the best training, the best support. They sent me to America for six weeks to teach me how to code in C and to give me, like, you know, training around leadership and business and all that kind of thing. It really was a dream come true. Also, I thought, because another thing that was going on in tandem was the fact that I've mentioned the singing and my love of music. And I'm a pretty talented singer. I've got a good voice. Here's me now being humble. Um, you know, people would say that they've listened to my um show reels, and I've got a great voice. So, but you know, I've got a good voice and I love singing, and I think that comes across in my performances. Anyway, I really wanted to be a professional opera singer. And during my A levels, before I got to Union, I'd auditioned for the Royal College of Music in London, the Royal Northern in Manchester, Trinity in London. You know, I really wanted to go to a conservatoire and I got offered a place in the Welsh College of Music and Drama. And um it was an unconditional offer, right, to go and study opera in the Welsh College of Music and Drama. And I turned it down. Now, you know, as I've gone through life, I've always kind of looked back on that with a little bit of regret. And, you know, we always say, you know, no regrets, keep moving forward. And, you know, where I am now in my life, right? I'm incredibly happy and incredibly nourished. But you can't help think what would have happened if I'd have taken a different path, okay? But all these decisions that you make for yourself, these big decisions and this courage to move forward in any way that you can, that is what defines you. And that is resilience right there, and it's building on that resilience and making your intrinsic resilience so incredibly strong and so incredibly big that there comes a point where and and there's a term that's talked about in in the field of positive psychology, and the term is psychological immunity, right? So, you know, when you think about immunity, you think about your body's health, you think about the biological health. Is my immune system strong? Am I eating the right foods to support my immunity? Am I going to be able to fight off viruses? Very rarely do you hear anybody say that they're going to focus on their psychological immunity. It just doesn't cross your mind. I know when I first heard the term, it hadn't crossed my mind. And then I sat with the thought and did some reading around the subject, and I thought to myself, do you know what? This is actually really important. If we cultivate our psychological immunity and put as much effort into that as we do our physical immunity, then that's where we build resilience, that's where intrinsic happiness comes from, and that's where we have people living really flourishing, happy, successful lives because they're focusing on their psychological immunity with just as much effort as they are their physical immunity. So I'm talking to you about my journey, Sam. I'm digressing quite a lot, but um bear with me, okay? So I go to London and I have an amazing four years. Well, do I really have an amazing four years? Look, it was great, right? I loved at the start of my career. I was so fortunate. But then you think about manifestation and you think, was I really fortunate? Or did I manifest this? Did I invite it into my my universe, you know, with the hard work that I did, with visualizing me working in a suit, carrying a briefcase. That was really important to me. It kind of depicted what success was. So I was 22 years old, and I'm thinking, well, this is success, right? So it's like, what next? I didn't follow my dreams with my opera career. I'm now in a position where I've got a great job and I'm working 14, 15 hours a day. So, you know, when you think about that in terms of well-being, was it really that great? Was it good for my psychological immunity? I mean, it built resilience in me in terms of working hard and it built real kind of professional standards and a really amazing work ethic. But in terms of well-being, you know, was that the right thing to do? And um, a lot of people ask who it was I worked for. So it was Anderson Consulting, who have now rebranded to be an Accenture, and they're renowned for working their staff incredibly hard, especially these graduates, the analysts, the consultants who are on projects and they're working 15, 16 hour days. And they do earn a great salary, but very rarely do they have enough free time to actually enjoy that money, okay? So you start thinking about what is it that's really important now in terms of psychological immunity, health, well-being. You know, back in my early 20s, that didn't even cross my mind. It was all about striving forward, achieving, and success. And success meant something very, very different to me in my early 20s than it does today. You know, ask me today, what does success mean to you? And it's about happiness. It's certainly not about the things that you can buy. It's not about driving an amazing car. And I've got a story about cars that I tell to everybody. And uh, you know, I will share it with you at a at a later time in a podcast down the road. Because for me, that was about a mindset thing to do with cars. I'm digressing again. Let me go back to developing resilience. So I met somebody and I was incredibly lonely when I lived in London, right? So it was, you know, it was great, it was high profile, it was exciting. I didn't really make the most of all the culture in London. If I lived then now, I'd be in the theatre every week, I'd be going to all the museums and the exhibitions. When I was 20, I just, you know, in my twenties, I didn't, right? I worked. You know, I worked such long hours, I didn't have the energy to actually do that in my free time. So I met somebody and it was amazing. And it was so quick, you know. We had this instant connection, this amazing love that I felt for this man. And, you know, you hear of like, you know, that lightning bolt or whatever. I really feel like I experienced it, you know? And he became my best friend, and we very quickly moved in together. I resigned from my job in London, huge decision, and I moved to Scotland, which kind of all my friends thought I was a bit nuts, to be honest. But, you know, I was going to follow my heart. And I very much have always had the mindset that if life presents you with opportunities, grasp them, go with it and see what happens. You know, then you can't look back with regret. Now, I appreciate that that's a total contradiction to what I've talked to you about with regards to me wanting to study opera and me being too afraid to follow that route in case I failed because I didn't believe I was good enough, which again comes back to this learned experience from my childhood when I was a child, my father not acknowledging me and not feeling good enough. So, you know, as we go through life, all the experiences that have happened to us and the things that we've learned, they come with us. So the resilience is how we choose to use those things as a tool for our benefit and for our happiness. So I then got married to this man and we had 20 years together. 20 very good years. You know, my life has been really great. I've done lots of things. I lived in Cheshire for 10 years, we started a family, I ran my own business, I developed a drama and music franchise in the education sector. I was really successful in terms of that, and then we had the opportunity as a family to move to the Middle East, and you know, it was exciting, it was an adventure. I'd never lived in another country and I was totally up for it. So we went. Anyway, being in the Middle East really kind of changed me because I wasn't happy there and I couldn't understand why. And again, it was all about a little bit of imposter syndrome. I didn't feel like I fitted in, you know, kind of the culture out there is, you know, everybody's incredibly beautiful, incredibly tanned, incredibly, I don't know, adorned with fashion labels. It's a culture where what you wear and what you have is kind of more important than who you are. And that didn't sit well for me. It really didn't. And I struggled and I was lonely. Out there. And I struggled with friendships because I met some amazing people who I wish I'd have had longer with to develop deeper connections because I don't trust easily. Again, that goes back to, I think, from the exploratory work I've done to my childhood and my father and things that happened to me. I don't trust easily, okay? So it takes me a long time to develop a deep connection. And deep connections are what I value, right? I've got a very, very best friend who I've known since I was, I was 20 when I met her. So we're coming into our 30th year together, and she is my best friend, and I'm very aware that I'm not hers because she has so many friends, and I really admire her for that, and that's lovely. But we have this real connection. I care about her deeply, and she cares about me, and she's been in my life through the ups and downs, you know. So connections are so important, and I didn't have those connections in the Middle East because it's quite a transient place where people come and go really quickly, really frequently. They come, they think, Well, I'm only here for 18 months, two years, you know, it's almost like, why would I invest? And anyway, I wasn't happy there, and over time this really manifested itself in my psychological immunity and impacted it a lot. I've suffered with depression on and off most of my adult life, clinical depression, and I couldn't understand it, you know. I was thinking, I'm successful, you know, I've got a great work ethic, I live in a fabulous place, I've got this love in my life, I've got three amazing children. Why am I struggling with depression? You know? And I do remember at one point, right, my ex-husband, because we're now divorced, my ex-husband said to me, Rihanna, you just need to pull yourself together and just be grateful for what you've got. And I took that really badly because when you're depressed and somebody tells you to pull yourself together, you wish you could. You can't. You don't know how to. You're struggling to function every day. Even getting out of bed and getting in the shower is difficult when you're suffering with depression. So this blase, you know, comment about pull yourself together, it's it wasn't helpful, okay? And it caused a lot of turmoil in our relationship. And back then, you know, depression wasn't as acknowledged or understood as it is now. And um, I remember trying to educate him on mental health and the fact that, you know, depression was very much about um brain chemicals, and you know, it wasn't something I was intentionally doing. Um, it was it was um something that I was suffering with. But being able to recover from the depression and really that it kind of started my journey into into positive psychology, probably back in about 2014, if I'm honest, because I started to educate myself and take responsibility for my own psychological immunity and my physical health, because I kind of had gone up and down with my weight throughout my whole adult life. When things were great, I was incredibly slim and showing up on my A game. When things weren't great, I was eating like it was going out of fashion, you know? And that's something I will talk about on another episode. Um, because it's something I've really struggled with. And kind of self-image and body image became a huge struggle for me personally. But my point is, I got through it, I educated myself, I started doing things. Now, if you remember, I said, my ex-husband said, pull yourself together and be grateful for what you've got. Now, in that moment, in that kind of sentence, be grateful for what you've got, I kind of reacted really badly. I was like, How dare you tell me to be grateful? You know, I know that my life's good, but I just don't feel happy. And it was just, you know, I was in turmoil, right? But having educated myself and having really learned about positive psychology, gratitude is one of the most important tools that we can use every day to develop our resilience, to develop our intrinsic happiness. When you're grateful for the things in your life, no matter how big or small, it kind of rewires your brain in a way and rewires your subconscious. No, I'm not a neuroscientist, right? And um, at a later date, I would love to interview a neuroscientist about how this actually works in your brain. But basically, the gratitude aspect reframes your mindset over time. Again, you're working on your psychological immunity. And I started to just, I love flowers, okay. You if you follow me on Instagram, you will all know I love flowers. I share them with you all the time. They bring me so much joy, the colour, the vibrancy, you know, it's just looking for the small things day to day that you're grateful for. And I'm very much into positive affirmations, again, as another tool to develop resilience and to increase happiness. And one of the positive affirmations that I started saying to myself, it was around April time last year. I I'd taken my eldest daughter to Italy for a long weekend, um, as a treat, really, for her and for me, because we did stay in a lovely hotel on Lake Como, and um, you know, we had a fabulous adventure together, it was a really lovely experience. Um, so while I was there, we were talking about me launching my business as a coach because back in April 2024 I was still working as a full-time marketeer, and I knew that I wanted to do my coaching practice full-time. It's something that I'd been involved in in and out for about eight years and had meant a lot to me, and I got a lot of satisfaction from. I knew I wanted to work as a coach, but I needed to take that step, and I needed to develop again that resilience and that kind of intrinsic manifestation to have the courage to take the leap to make it happen. So I started manifesting, and one of the manifestations that I was doing every day was something amazing is going to happen. Now, I guess that sounds quite simple, right? And you kind of think, well, is it really what's amazing? You start thinking about what is amazing? What do I think is amazing? And amazing is different to everybody. What's amazing for you will be totally different to what is amazing for me. So I was thinking, you know, every day something amazing's gonna happen, something amazing's gonna happen. And you know what? It did. It's really incredible how when you use these positive affirmations over time, your subconscious mind and your psyche and your whole psychological immunity believes it. It becomes a part of who you are. Until every day, amazing was happening and it lifted my spirits and increased my happiness, you know, and really made me a lot more resilient and a lot stronger. So if we go back a little bit to my journey now, I've talked about the um going to the Middle East and how that didn't work out, and I was incredibly happy and unhappy, sorry, not happy. I was unhappy. There were happy times there, right? Don't get me wrong. There are some good things about living there, you know. I got to travel a lot. Um life, you know, the standard of life was very, very high. But that kind of reinforced in me that that wasn't really what drove me, and it made me feel a little bit uncomfortable, if I'm honest. It was almost a bit inauthentic. So I wanted to come home. I was watching Keeping Faith on BBC Wales, which is a programme, a drama series that um is shot down in West Wales, and I was looking at the coast, and the he writhe I was feeling. Now, if you're Welsh up there, you'll know what that word is, he writhe. There is no actual English word I can translate it into to uh kind of express the sentiment, right? It's a longing for, it's a feeling of belonging that we have. Um, so my here, my longing for was to come home to Wales. And that's what I did in 2019 when unfortunately my marriage did come to an end. Uh, you know, a painful ending, because then between 2019 and 2022, the man who'd been my best friend, my husband, and the father of my children, we kind of became enemies, you know. We we fought a lot, we made some legal people incredibly wealthy. We probably paid for a couple of their holidays because we fought like cat and dog over things that in the scheme of things, you know, you have to really remove yourself. And that's something I work with people who are going through divorce uh and going through relationship breakups as part of my practice because it's really important to me because when I was going through it, it nearly broke me. It really, nearly broke me. And it's the most difficult thing I've ever gone through in my life. And learning from it and coming back from it stronger again made me more resilient, made me happier, made me actually value what I have in my life, what I want from my life, and to realise that just because something has ended, just because something's so incredibly painful and difficult to talk about and you know, difficult to deal with, and that grieving process that you go through when you experience loss, it's not the end. You know, there's a fabulous saying that painful endings can result in incredible beginnings, and that's all about mindset, and it's all about resilience, and it's all about coming back stronger. So that's kind of my journey to where I am today and how I've developed my resilience throughout my life. Um, you know, I'm now a positive psychology coach, I have a full-time practice, I work online and globally, and I also have just launched in my community because I want to work with people here to help them live happier, more successful lives and to just be intrinsically happy and to flourish really. So I've kind of developed this real passion for positive psychology and the science of human flourishing, and I've totally immersed myself in it for years, and finally I had the courage in the summer of last year, around June, July time, to apply to do a master's in applied positive psychology. Um, you know, we can talk about imposter syndrome and how that came in, but I didn't let it stop me. And I'm now half well, I'd say I'm about 35% of the way through my master's. In fact, I get my um first assignments back in about 10 days. So I'm actually really excited to see what that is because doing the assignments was particularly difficult. The term was exhausting, it was really, you know, hanker down time because I was doing a master's, I was running a business, I'm still doing marketing consultancy one or two days a week, and I've got amazing clients in London around that, um, uh, who I'm very, very grateful for. And the work's fascinating, and I do love it. But um, you know, the positive psychology coaching is where my heart is, and I want to help inspire you to live your very, very best life. So that's it for me for today. Uh, I hope you've enjoyed the episode, and I hope you've got something from it in some way, listening to my journey and my kind of version of events and the small little nuggets that have been in there around the science of positive psychology and how you can take that and put it into your own life daily. You can work with me, you know, coaching one-to-one, or you can just be part of my community and get my newsletters, you know, and listen to my podcasts and get the content that way. So, thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate you giving me your time today to listen to me speak, and I hope that something amazing happens for you today, and tomorrow, and the day after, and that it continues. So, I want you to flourish, I want you to live a happy life, and I'm gonna sign off now. So that's it from me, sending you so much love, strength, and positivity. Your host and your coach, Rihanne. Thanks for joining me on Becoming. If today's episode resonated with you and you're ready to take the next step in your own journey, I'd love to hear from you. Visit Rihanlindleycoaching.com to learn more about my coaching programmes and how we can work together. Or drop me an email at Rian at Rian Lindleycoaching.com. That's R-H-I-A-N-L-I-N-D-L-E-Y. I'd love to hear from you. Remember, life is about evolving. One bold step at a time. Until next time, keep becoming