Interview with Dr. Edy Greenblatt, Resilience expert and CEO of The Restoration Vacation

Fearless Growth with Amanda Setili

Edy Greenblatt, CEO of Restoration Vacation, was one of the earliest researchers in the area of resilience. She has a PhD in organizational Behavior from Harvard University, and a masters degree in dance ethnology from UCLA.

Edy’s definition of resilience is the ability to recover from trauma back to normalcy quickly. This means having the physical, emotional and cognitive resources needed, and the psychological, social, and spiritual energy to access to those resources, so that you can do what you want and need to do each day. To be resilient is to be able to control those resources in order to stay above the burnout line, which is the point below which the normal strategies, the very personal strategies that work for you to be okay, stop working.

If your parents were traumatized, she says, you have changed mitochondrial DNA—you have inherited fear and trauma.

The key is knowing the behaviors and conditions that restore you, and those that deplete you. Then managing those restorers and depleters every hour, every day, every week, just like you manage the food you eat, your sleep, and the water you drink.

Organizations, she says, need to train employees how to manage what restores and depletes them. Organization leaders need to put in place the policies, practices, norms, and culture, to create an environment where each aspect of the organization supports resilience. Edy’s company is creating an AI enabled app that actually helps people do these assessments and provides individualized recommendations on how to be more resilient.