Episode Summary
Nagham breaks down her Five Pillars of Behavioral Resilience™ (Self-Awareness, Communication, Decision Integrity, Burnout Recovery, and Adaptability), reframes anxiety as a signal rather than a problem to fix, and shares her own story of surviving as a refugee from Iraq to explain how self-awareness — not just toughness — is what actually builds resilience.
The conversation covers anxiety, confidence, burnout, community, and closes with book recommendations and details on Nagham's free Imkan Academy launch event.
Guest
What You'll Learn
Notable Quotes
"The biggest philosophy that I teach is love, learn, and let go." — Nagham Alsamari
"Stop going to the end of the movie and making it a tragedy." — Lori Jo Vest
"Confidence is not something you are either born with or not. It's something you can train and work on your entire life." — Nagham Alsamari
"If you're burnt out, your plate is already more than full. Stop adding stuff... start removing." — Nagham Alsamari
Timestamps
02:03 — What resilience really means ("bounce forward," not "bounce back")
05:54 — Why self-awareness is the foundation of resilience
08:15 — The Five Pillars of Behavioral Resilience™
11:03 — Reframing anxiety as a signal, not a problem
14:20 — Claiming your resilience and the DISC framework
18:55 — Post-COVID discomfort and the fear younger generations face
24:13 — Building real community, and starting small
29:15 — Nagham's story: fleeing Iraq, refugee camps, and arriving in the U.S. at 13
38:46 — Confidence is trained, not innate
42:15 — Burnout recovery: stop adding, start removing
45:46 — Final advice for building resilience in your 20s
47:55 — Where to find Nagham, and the Imkan Academy launch event
Resources & Books Mentioned
A book on happiness by Dr. Arthur Brooks (referenced in conversation; exact title not stated — verify before publishing)
The DISC behavioral framework
About Nagham Alsamari
Connect with Nagham Alsamari
Free Manager Resilience Scorecard
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/leadwithimkan
Instagram: @leadwithimkan
Facebook: @leadwithimkan
YouTube: @leadwithimkan
TikTok: @leadwithimkan
Phone: (734) 560-5434
Imkan Academy Launch Event — August 31: A free, 3-hour event marking Imkan's 3rd anniversary, covering the Reactor Pattern and DISC personality behavior, with guest speakers on the Johari model and a leadership coach closing session. (Per conversation — confirm current date/registration link on imkanleadership.com before publishing.)
Transcript
[00:44] Nagham Alsamari: Thanks, Lori. Hi everyone, thanks for having me. I'm Nagham Alsamari, and I am a behavioral resilience trainer, which means I don't teach people to be tough or grind through things. Instead, I teach the muscle behind every actual reaction that we take. So when we're under pressure, instead of reacting on autopilot, I teach you how to actually choose how you show up instead.
[01:04] Lori Jo Vest: I need this lesson. So tell us a little bit about your business — if someone wants to look you up right now, where would they find you?
[01:23] Nagham Alsamari: Easiest place: imkanleadership.com. I'm also on social media — LinkedIn, and you know, everywhere.
[01:33] Lori Jo Vest: And I would suggest you follow her, because she has wonderful videos and she also has events. We're just going to dive right in — we'll get back to how you can get in touch with Nagham when we're done here. So, what is resilience, really? We all have our own idea of what it means in our heads. How is it different than just being thick-skinned, or stoic, or just "oh, you can't get me down"? What is resilience?
[02:03] Nagham Alsamari: If you look it up in a dictionary, it's going to tell you resilience is the ability to bounce back from challenges, right? To me, that's not a good enough explanation — it's only a partial definition. The thick skin, the toughness — that's good, and it has its place, but that's not everything you need.True resilience, and how I define it, is that when you go through tough times — which every human being on earth does — if you just "bounce back," you've learned absolutely nothing. You've grown zero percent. My definition of resilience is that you bounce forward. You don't just survive the problems you've gone through and go back to point zero where you started. You survive, and you treat that survival as the bridge — not the destination. Survival is the bridge that gets you to become more resilient. When you're more resilient, you've bounced forward. You've learned new skills, you've grown, you've created more opportunities for yourself — because on that bridge of survival, you're picking up lessons and learning from them instead of just running away, trying to get through the day, or get through the year.
[03:50] Lori Jo Vest: I love that. It's not really about just getting through something or buckling down and holding on — you might be missing some of the lessons you could be learning, right?
[03:58] Nagham Alsamari: A hundred percent. And that's why I think you need to be vigilant. The biggest philosophy I teach is Love, Learn, and Let Go. When you've gone through a challenge, you've got to love the experience, because there are lessons to be learned from it, and you can lead others through it. And if you can't handle all of it, just let it go — because a lot of us just ruminate: "why me," and all of that — instead of looking up and seeing that these challenges are actual opportunities and lessons you can learn from and become much better than you are.
[04:44] Lori Jo Vest: Exactly. Actually — let me out myself. I learned a lesson earlier this week. I have a relatively new client I'm not 100 percent well-versed in yet, and there was a meeting of 15 people, and I said something really dumb. It wasn't intentional — there was a piece of information I was missing, and I made a comment publicly that was just wrong. Twenty years ago, I would have thought, "Oh god, I'm so stupid." This time I thought, "Well, I didn't have that piece of information — now I do. Shake it off and move forward." I think self-awareness really played into that. Why is self-awareness the starting point for resilience?
[05:54] Nagham Alsamari: There are five pillars of resilience as I've defined them, and the first is self-awareness — it's the foundation, because you won't be able to pick up on those lessons if you don't have that self-awareness. It's so easy to translate it as something else — to say "oh, I just overthink things," or "I'm a perfectionist" — without actually understanding why you're a perfectionist, what behavior is associated with it, and what you can actually do about it.I was coaching someone, and near the end of our coaching journey I asked her if there had been a transformation. She said, "One hundred percent — I now understand why I seek perfectionism." She was a high-C personality who did a lot of overthinking and analyzing, and now she has the tools to pause herself before she continues chasing perfectionism in her projects. Instead of practically thinking about a solution, we overthink everything to the point where we forget why we started thinking about it in the first place.This is why I call it behavioral resilience, not just resilience — it starts with the strengths you have inside, and how you actually use them on the outside. Once you become more self-aware, you become a much better observer of other people's behavior too — instead of wondering why someone's upset because of something you said, you become more aware of their personalities and why they behave the way they do.
[08:04] Lori Jo Vest: Got it. Should we go right into the other pillars while we're here?
[08:15] Nagham Alsamari: Sure, we're going to go off-script a little. I can go through them quickly, I think it's important. They all connect back to that foundational pillar of self-awareness, because how we communicate has a lot of other components to it. So: second is communication. Third is decision integrity — people make hundreds of decisions every day, and most of the time we doubt ourselves, we're not actually a hundred percent sure of our decisions. Resilience teaches us that. Fourth is burnout recovery, because most of us have no clue how we got to burnout or how to get out of it. And finally, adaptability — a huge one, especially after we all found out post-COVID how necessary that was.
[09:36] Lori Jo Vest: Oh, we did. Did we ever learn to be adaptable, or did we suffer more?
[09:40] Nagham Alsamari: You suffer more if you don't learn how to be adaptable.
[09:43] Lori Jo Vest: I really like how you say it's behavioral. I'm not a therapist, I'd never say I was a psychologist or giving psychological advice — that's not what I do. But I know from my own experience in therapy: you can do talk therapy, where you're just reiterating what you've gone through, and a good therapist is also going to bring a psychoeducation piece — a behavioral education piece — so you understand you have more control over how you think and what you do than you believe. And we do have a lot more control. When you learn those behavioral actions, it just makes life easier. So I really love that you're talking about it as a behavioral thing.Let's talk about anxiety, because so many of us suffer with it. You define anxiety a little differently — you call it a signal, not something that automatically needs to be fixed. I love that, because we all want to know: what do I need to do to get "un-anxious" right now? What does that look like in practice?
[11:03] Nagham Alsamari: I've got to do my own disclosure too — I'm not a therapist or psychologist either, but I've been studying behavior for a long time, starting with myself and my own children, and as a school principal. What I've seen, over and over, is that anxiety is basically telling us there's something going on — something we're uncomfortable doing, afraid of doing, or it's irrational and our brain can't decipher it, can't translate it. Most of the time when we feel anxiety in our bodies, we jump straight to "I'm not well, I need to get treated."Instead, I've learned — and this is how I teach it — anxiety comes in a lot of different forms: a pit in the stomach, hands shaking, heart beating faster, shallow breathing, shoulders creeping up toward your ears. If you notice one of those things, relax for a second and just think: where is this coming from? Is it fear of something, or an actual inability to do something? A lot of anxiety comes from something like your boss messaging you, "We need to talk." We go through overthinking, and our bodies translate all of that into something else, because it goes to the amygdala first. If we give ourselves two seconds to calm down and let the thoughts travel from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex — where we can think logically — we're able to think, "I think my boss wants to talk to me about the project I submitted last week," instead of "everything is about to go wrong."
[13:43] Lori Jo Vest: I had a therapist tell me once, and I've held onto this for decades — "stop going to the end of the movie and making it a tragedy."
[13:55] Nagham Alsamari: Exactly. If you're trying to predict the future — which isn't going to work anyway — and you're not doing it in a negative way, it brings you less anxiety. Sometimes that's the cause of our anxiety, trying to live in the future.
[14:14] Lori Jo Vest: You've mentioned that claiming your own resilience can change your relationship to anxiety. Tell me about that.
[14:20] Nagham Alsamari: What I've found is that most of the way we react to things comes from a place of strength, not weakness. As an example: you're going through your day, you get an email about a skip-level meeting you're not ready for, and you go into overdrive — "what have I done, what mistakes have I made?" The way we react is based on a strength in us. Let's say I'm a high-C personality — using the DISC behavioral framework — high Cs tend to overthink, need more information, analyze everything to a perfectionist point, or withdraw completely. All of those are strengths, and they're needed, because high Cs are highly creative and amazing at analysis — that's why they're needed in companies everywhere. But we use those strengths incorrectly. Under pressure, I might go to every single person in the office to get more information about why my boss is asking for something.
[15:50] Lori Jo Vest: You're talking to a high C — I get it, I've seen it, I've done it.
[15:52] Nagham Alsamari: Building self-resilience means understanding your personality and your own strength, and understanding that the way you're reacting comes from a place of strength. If you take a minute to pause and yield, instead of immediately jumping to a conclusion, you can think, "what's my next step," and respond instead of react. That's served me really well for a long time.
[16:48] Lori Jo Vest: I bet. I'm kind of addicted to self-help — I've got to read all the books, talk to everybody. I think we all have ways of thinking and acting that we could improve so we're a little happier in life. I've been on a quest to be happy since I was a kid — I grew up in a trauma-filled household, and I decided I was going to keep going until I found my happiness. That tenacity has really worked in my favor. But looking back, when I was in my twenties, I didn't have any awareness or self-exploration — I didn't realize how much you can use what's happened to you in the past to create who you are in the future, in a positive way. I think building resilience is part of that — taking what you've learned and moving forward.So, I know there are some issues right now with early-twenty-somethings — the kids who were in junior high during COVID. Junior high is such an awkward time anyway, even surrounded by peers. They had COVID, not going to school, being alone way too much, communicating electronically rather than in person. Some of what we've seen is that that's led to a fear of discomfort — I've watched young people where some small thing happens and it derails their whole day. What causes that? What do you see there?
[18:55] Nagham Alsamari: I love Dr. Arthur Brooks — he just published a book on happiness, and I love his perspective. He talks about gratitude as the antidote to anxiety — that gratitude can't coexist with anxiety. It's already difficult for new generations to come up, because there's something new every generation is exposed to that our generations before don't know, and we have to coexist together anyway. My son is 22 and in college — he went through COVID in high school and a little in college. There is a huge fear of discomfort in human beings anyway, but I see it more in younger generations, because they grew up in a time when, even though COVID was a huge fear, it also made things a little easier for the socially awkward — they don't have to communicate face to face, they just grab their phones and text. Even I, in my mid-forties and a social person, learned during COVID to be a little less social and more reliant on technology — "I can just send words, I don't have to use my voice." Imagine people whose brains were developing during that time, who don't feel they need to rely on socialization.Dr. Brooks talks about how what we need to get out of that is to build actual human connection — not chatting online, not texting, not even video calls — get out and get yourself vulnerable, and connect with other human beings. He actually ran an experiment on that, and people felt a huge difference. It's not easy, especially if you're used to not socializing in person — what do you even say? I went through that myself a little when I was younger, learning English — I was afraid to say the wrong thing because I was afraid people would laugh at me. But I had to learn to get over it, open my mouth, talk, make mistakes, and be okay with it.
[23:08] Lori Jo Vest: What's so interesting is: it's hard to advise other people to make themselves uncomfortable on a regular basis, and that's what it takes to build connection, build relationship, find your community. I honestly think one of the most important things we can do right now, in turbulent times, is join and create your own community — so you have the emotional and social support you need. That could be joining a local women's group, volunteering for a cause you feel strongly about, a grief support group — whatever it is, you create and join communities to give yourself the experience of practice, and to find relationship and support. If you're a young person and you're not doing that, start right now. I remember about ten or fifteen years ago, looking at my husband — I was raising my son, working full time, writing a book and marketing it, completely slammed — and I said, "we don't have community right now." So I went out and created a couple of different places, and now I have a group of friends I'm on a call with every morning at seven o'clock. I know, we're crazy — every single day, hanging out with a group of women doing amazing things. It's a really great way to grow, and to better enjoy your life.
[25:19] Nagham Alsamari: If you find that difficult, what I always tell people is: start small. You don't have to go all out. Pick one activity to do, once a week, and build on that. I run a speaking club where I coach people how to show up with presence and become more confident — not just in speaking, in any situation under pressure — and of course it comes with the behavioral resilience lens. One thing I didn't realize, talking to the members last week, is that the club was designed to teach speaking under pressure and confidence, but what they told me is that they were looking forward to coming and connecting with each other. I thought that was such an amazing thing, because people spend all day at work talking to people — but that's not something they do out of choice. The kind of connection you need to look for is the kind you choose to make time for during your day, not the kind you have to show up to because you have to go to school or work.
[26:37] Lori Jo Vest: Yeah — volunteer at the animal shelter, walk dogs, do things that feed your soul. I think those are really great places to get past some of that discomfort and anxiety, because what I used to feel a lot of that anxiety was — a fear of judgment.
[27:12] Nagham Alsamari: How other people are going to look at you going into a new situation. I learned from one of my self-help courses — of the many I've taken — that the reality is, you think everybody's looking at you; well, they think you're looking at them. We all feel that way. Nobody's judging you — everyone's actually busy judging themselves to begin with, and afraid other people will see how they judge themselves.One thing I want to say too, about that discomfort — how to get yourself out the door: we spend a long time practicing being shy, practicing being unable to communicate with each other, unable to connect. I say "practicing" because we really do — when we constantly tell ourselves "I'm shy," we're practicing being shy. How many times have you said that to yourself and it's actually kept you from doing something? You're practicing. So what if we flip that around, and instead practice saying something positive — "I'm shy, but I'm going to go ahead and give this a try. I'm going to pick up the phone and call her today" — and that'll make you feel much better about yourself, and want to do it again and again. We practice all of these negative behaviors our entire lives without even thinking about it — so this is where self-awareness comes back. If you notice you're practicing these little things you're afraid of people judging you on, just notice them, and practice the other thing instead. I've heard someone say recently that sometimes those negative things — fear, discomfort — are actually exactly the medicine you need. If you can think of them as positive, and just know you won't die — it's not a tiger coming to kill you if you walk in that door and volunteer for the first time.
[29:01] Lori Jo Vest: Nagham, you have such an interesting story, if you don't mind sharing it. It's so meaningful to me that you came to the U.S. at thirteen years old as a refugee, and had lived in a refugee camp for a couple of years. It's a really incredible story of what it means to build resilience. Would you mind sharing a little about that?
[29:15] Nagham Alsamari: Not at all. Most of what I've learned about resilience was back in my childhood, but I didn't have a name for it — I only started understanding it looking back, as an adult, using those experiences as strengths, as strength reminders.I was born in Iraq. In 1990, we left Iraq because of the rebellion against Saddam — because our family had participated in the rebellion, we had to leave the country. I don't know how long it took us to leave, but that time was filled with fearsome memories — I'll just leave it there — of trying to find safety from place to place, trying to find food, trying to find family members, until we found a makeshift camp where the U.S. Army was kind of in charge, so it felt a bit safer. But there were still bombings going off from place to place, and landmines all over — you had to be very careful where you stepped. I was eight years old. Then we went to a desert refugee camp in Saudi Arabia for four years, where we had to relearn how to live in that new environment, and just hold on and pray when the sandstorms hit, because there was nothing else you could do. I still had the dream of becoming a teacher one day, because that's what I really wanted to do as I grew up — along with missing family, and all those thoughts as a child.At thirteen, our family was chosen to come to the United States as refugees. It was great, because my first thought was, "yes, I'm going to become a teacher now, I'm going to go to school" — but I had to learn the language, communicate with people, and I was answering about a million questions about me, because I looked different, in my second language, as a child — while also having questions of my own, trying to learn the language and the culture and how things worked here. Kids didn't understand, and there was a lot of bullying. But I always told myself — I had the wrong definition of resilience back then — I told myself, "I'm going to be resilient, I'm going to endure all of this," because of the goal I had: graduate high school, go to college, graduate at twenty-one. I had that date set for myself. I was going to become a teacher, because in my experience as a student — in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, and here in America — I felt teachers didn't do a great job of inspiring students. So even while I was finding safety, finding food, that goal never left my mind. I thought, one day it's going to become true, and I'm going to inspire kids. Honestly, I felt like that's what kept me going throughout it. And of course, my faith in God — that if He wants us to stay alive, we will, no matter what.
[33:24] Lori Jo Vest: How did you use that to build resilience? Was it just a natural thing? There are so many potential outcomes for someone with a story like yours that wouldn't necessarily look like yours.
[33:30] Nagham Alsamari: I know a couple of people who went through the same thing I did, who always use their stories as scapegoats for their behavior — who say, "well, I had a traumatic childhood, so I couldn't do this or that." My experience has been — I'm very strong-minded, and if people tell me I can't do something, I'm going to show them how I can do it, and I'll come back and show them how it's done.
[34:13] Lori Jo Vest: Me too. I think that comes from my mom and dad — they've always been entrepreneurs, really strongly spirited.
[34:24] Nagham Alsamari: The resilience part is me understanding — I think I was in my early twenties when I realized it takes two things: the mindset, and the behavior outside. Both of those work with each other — it's not just how you think, because we always have these self-talks, and they're mostly negative, and they don't do anything positive for us. That's when I started seeing patterns in my life — every time I go through a challenge, I fall down, and when I pick myself back up, I've learned something new. When I saw those patterns repeating, I learned something really powerful: anticipation. I told myself, "Nagham, life is not easy — from now on, I'm going to anticipate that I'll see more challenges." Even right after getting back up from one, even when I feel really powerful, I'm going to anticipate more challenges are coming, and use this learning to help me through them. That was my biggest eye-opener, and that's when I started reading and learning more about resilience.
[35:53] Lori Jo Vest: That makes a lot of sense. Part of it is who you are — that bright light you had from the beginning — and part of it is the ability to hold onto that hope and keep moving toward it. I think by the time you get to my age — I'm in my sixties — you're like, "yeah, life is brutal, chaotic, and incredibly beautiful all at the same time," and you have to accept that you'll go through brutal times, beautiful times, chaotic times, and it will constantly be like that. It's up to you to level-set where you're going to be during times like those. You've done an incredible job coming from a background like yours and creating something that uses that trauma and pain to help other people — that's pretty amazing, Nagham.One thing I wanted to mention — during one of the times we were in Iraq, running from the violence, there was a place we stayed where there was a girl about my age who'd been shot through both thighs, one bullet in, one out the other side — and she was basically paralyzed. I don't remember the paralysis so much as I remember her face — there are times I close my eyes and I still see her. She had such a pretty smile, such a great, positive outlook on life. I'd look at her and compare my life, and think, "she can't even walk — look at that, I can walk, I have my legs." I think that's also where I picked up gratitude — to be thankful for what I have, and what others don't. It's not always easy — it doesn't always come to you to become more resilient. This is why I teach it now, because I feel like people need somebody to nudge them in the right direction, to help them understand that what they've got is a strength they can build on, not something to be afraid of.
[38:30] Lori Jo Vest: I love that — great story, and it's so meaningful. So, digging back into our outline — you said confidence isn't something you're born with. How is confidence, resilience, built, and how do you keep and maintain it?
[38:46] Nagham Alsamari: Just like you maintain shyness. There's a myth about extroverts — that they're automatically confident or good speakers. Not true. You may be an extrovert, have no fear of the mic or speaking up, but not be the most engaging person in the room. So confidence is something you can train, just like resilience. Just like you've told yourself "I'm shy," tell yourself you're confident — but that's not enough on its own. It also takes learning who you are, and bringing your strengths up to the surface. If I say "I'm an overthinker" and think of it negatively, I hold myself down. Instead, I say, "I analyze things — I'm an overthinker, but I analyze things to understand better, and I can put that to use in some ways, even if I don't need it for my confidence right now." This is why I train in my club through a behavioral resilience lens — it's not just about eye contact or how you present your body, it's about composure, understanding yourself from the inside, and holding yourself up on the outside.One person I trained had an interview coming up, and she was worried — she wanted to feel confident going in, so she was looking at questions and asking other people about their experience. I told her: close it off, don't listen to anyone or look at questions — that's all noise. Look at yourself: how long have you been doing this job, what got you into it in the first place? As she started talking, I could see her beaming, I could see the passion in her face — that's how you bring back composure, by going back inside and pulling out that strength. She felt so comfortable talking in front of the interviewers because she was building on her own passion. Confidence isn't something you're born with or not — it's something you can train and work on your whole life, but you have to maintain it. It's like Spanish — I took it in high school and college, was really good, then stopped using it, and now I don't really understand it.
[41:52] Lori Jo Vest: I just picked up Duolingo for my high school and college French — it comes back, you'd be surprised, and Duolingo is free. I'm bringing my French back with little daily exercises — it's fun, a good side hobby.
[42:10] Nagham Alsamari: Another way to entertain yourself and challenge your brain.
[42:10b] Lori Jo Vest: I want to circle back to burnout recovery — we didn't talk a lot about that, but before we wrap up, let's talk about what it is. You say it's a pillar of resilience, and if you can address it, you can actually pull yourself out of it — correct?
[42:15] Nagham Alsamari: Yeah. First, most of the time we don't recognize whether we're stressed out or burnt out. Burnout can be situational — if I'm burnt out at my desk because of a project, I'll feel better once I finish it, and that burnout will leave me until the next project. It can also be environmental — you work in an environment that induces burnout, and every time you go into it, or are about to, you feel it. Most of the time, we overdo everything — our plate is so full, and we think, "I'm so burnt out, I need a massage, I need a vacation" — but what you're actually doing is adding even more. If you're burnt out, your plate is already more than full — you need to start removing, not adding. Look inside and see what you don't need. We tackle everything as it comes, and that's the problem — it doesn't help us get through the day. We need to stop and assess: does this meet the two conditions of urgent and important? If yes, it's a priority. If not, you can schedule it, delegate it, or get rid of it altogether. Most of the time, our calendars are filled with things we think are important that really aren't, and that's what's causing the burnout.The other thing is how we react to what's said to us. If Lori says something to me this morning, I might start ruminating and overthinking about what she meant, wondering if it's about something I said last week — but if I actually talk it out with her, or with someone else, I ease myself up, instead of hanging onto it.
[44:20] Lori Jo Vest: I have a prop from an earlier social media project — this is the typical woman's to-do list. It's gigantic — it just keeps going. I agree, taking things off that list is huge for your sanity. How many things do you make yourself responsible for that maybe you could let go?
[44:59] Nagham Alsamari: Things that maybe aren't yours — like imagining or trying to predict how other people are going to feel if you say or do a certain thing. I finally learned to say that other people's feelings are their responsibility. If you're conducting yourself in a way that's compassionate and appropriate, don't try to manage other people's feelings — that's another thing you're doing that you don't necessarily need to do.
[45:21] Lori Jo Vest: We could go on and on — this is going to be a really long episode, and it's going to be one of our best. So, wrapping up: do you have any final word of advice for someone in their twenties trying to build resilience?
[45:46] Nagham Alsamari: I'd say start with self-awareness — not the outward "I know I take my time" or "I'm loud" — I mean dig deeper to understand why you do the things you do. Why do you talk the way you do? Why are you loud? Is it because you haven't been heard before, or because no one's allowed you the space or the room? What are the reasons behind it, and what have you been practicing your whole life? Start with self-awareness, become a little more observant of your own behavior, and know that resilience requires that you anticipate problems and challenges happening. Life is full of challenges, and just sleeping and thinking "I'm having a wonderful day, nothing's ever going to happen to me" is a mistake. If you anticipate that challenges are going to happen, and you're willing to dig deeper into your brain and find where you've been great, and use that to your advantage — then you'll be okay.One other book I want to recommend is by Dr. David Schwartz — an amazing read, I actually listened to it on the way to everything that made me nervous. It's called The Magic of Thinking Big. One thing — and Lori, you actually reminded me of it as you were talking — he calls negative self-talk "mismanaged negative imagination."
[47:26] Lori Jo Vest: Oh, I like that.
[47:29] Nagham Alsamari: If it's left up to us — but reading that book really helps put perspective on how we think, and how thinking bigger and more positively can help us see through things, not just around them.
[47:39] Lori Jo Vest: I love it, great way to wrap up. So where can people find you and your work?
[47:55] Nagham Alsamari: I'm on LinkedIn and Instagram — @leadwithimkan — or imkanleadership.com is my website. August marks the third anniversary of Imkan, and on August 31st we're celebrating with the Imkan Academy launch — a three-hour free event where I'll be breaking down something called the Reactor Pattern, and going deeper into DISC personality behavior. I'm having a couple of guest speakers — Voices of Resilience — who'll be talking about the Johari model, and we'll close the day with a leadership coach talking about rising up from routine and doing something with your life. The whole event is free — there'll be networking and prizes, and I'd love for everybody to join. I can send you the link for the show notes, Lori.
[48:40] Lori Jo Vest: I will put it in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us today — this was absolutely delightful. I've learned a lot, and I'm sure our audience has too. We'll put information on how to reach you in the show notes with links — go get to know Nagham on LinkedIn, follow her on Facebook, wherever you are. Find Nagham, and she will help you learn more about resilience — her videos are amazing. And if you're listening or watching this on YouTube, please do me a favor and subscribe — hit that subscribe button, give me a like, maybe a comment if you're really feeling it. We'll be back soon with another episode of Work Mom Says Don't Be an Idiot, where we teach you how to play the emotional contact sport of business, so you can experience less drama and more success. We'll see you again real soon.
Who Is Our Ideal Listener?
This podcast is for young professionals who want to learn to play the emotional contact sport of
business and experience less drama and more success.
How can you be more logical and less emotional? Be strategic, and Work Mom Says can help you.
“I tell people to back up, put down the magnifying glass, and look at the big picture when you’re
responding to something,” said Lori Jo Vest, Work Mom. “In doing this, you will understand that
what’s really upsetting you right now will be something you don’t even remember next week.”
What Value Can People Get From Listening to This Podcast?
On Work Mom Says, we also offer tips and tricks for creating connected positive relationships
that last over time. People will want you on the team if you can create connected positive
relationships and work environments. You become an asset, and you will be more successful
when you’re an asset.
“I also like to talk about developing traits like optimism, persistence, tenacity, stick-to-itiveness,
sticking with things, and approaching every project with a curious mind instead of a fearful
mind,” said Lori Jo Vest, Work Mom.
Why Do I Do This? A Few More Words From Work Mom
I also want to help young professionals realize that many things our culture prioritizes aren’t
really important. We talk a lot about what should be important and how to present your best face
at the office so that you can succeed.
I’ve learned so much throughout my career, and it’s gratifying to share that with young professionals and help them avoid some of those mistakes and get to that success sooner.