Flourishing After Adversity

Three Red Flags Keeping You Stuck in Hard Seasons (and How to Flip the Script)

Laura Mangum Broome welcomes listeners to Flourishing After Adversity and shares how, after her 27-year marriage ended suddenly following earlier losses and serious illness, she realized her “waiting” wasn’t healing but hiding. She names three common “red flags” that keep women stuck when gratitude feels impossible: m...

How to Find Yourself After a Relationship Ends: Grieving the Roles, Rituals, and Identity You Lost

Host Laura Mangum Broome explores how major relationship losses can leave women grieving not only the person but also the roles, routines, future, and identity built around that connection, quoting “How empty of me to be so full of you” from Louise Hay and David Kessler. 

Drawing from five major losses in five y...

Rebuilding After a Storm: Reconnect with Your Core Values and Passions

Host Laura Mangum Broome explains how, after major setbacks, people can keep functioning yet feel hollow because they rebuild from fear and stay stuck in survival mode, mistaking coping for living. Using the metaphor of a storm-damaged tree with intact roots, she shares her own five-year stretch of breast cancer, losing her teenage son and father, a heart...

Flourishing After Adversity: The 3 Conditions for Post-Traumatic Growth

Laura Mangum Broome introduces the Flourishing After Adversity podcast and explains that the difference between growing through grief and staying stuck is a learnable framework, not willpower, strength, or faith. Sharing her experience of five major losses in five years—including losing her son, surviving bilateral breast cancer and a heart transpl...

The Outcome Guardrail Map: Break Fear of the Unknown and Take the Next 200 Feet

Laura Mangum Broome introduces the Flourishing After Adversity podcast episode on decision paralysis caused by fear of the unknown, explaining it as a neurological survival response when the brain cannot predict. 

Drawing from her experiences with cancer, the loss of her son and father, a heart transplant, and an unexpected divorce, she share...

The 6 Stages of Grief: Name What You’re Feeling and Move Through It

Laura Mangum Broome explains how naming grief can reduce shame and help people move through loss, drawing from her experience of losing her son just before a scheduled double mastectomy while facing cancer. She clarifies that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—are not linear or a ...

The Power of “Yet”: Shifting from Fixed to Growth Mindset After Adversity

Host Laura Mangum Broome explains how adding one word—“yet”—can shift limiting beliefs from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, drawing on Carol Dweck’s research in Mindset. She shares how being repeatedly placed in jobs without training forced her into trial-and-error learning and later revealed she’d b...

Necessary Endings: Use a Hardship Autopsy to Move Forward

Laura Mangum Broome explains that after surviving hardship, people can stay stuck by carrying forward people, habits, environments, or patterns that no longer fit, calling these “necessary endings.” She introduces a “hardship autopsy” as a practical, non-blaming tool to gain clarity and move forward intentionally by journaling through three que...

Toxic Positivity vs. Post-Traumatic Growth: Are You Healing or Performing?

Host Laura Mangum Broome opens with a wound metaphor to explain how forced optimism can cover unresolved pain, then introduces the Flourishing After Adversity podcast and a free resource, “Reframe the Spiral.” She describes how common phrases like “stay positive” can pressure people to bypass grief, leading to anxiety, numbness...

From Victim to Victor: Reclaiming Agency After Adversity

Host Laura Mangum Broome welcomes listeners to the Flourishing After Adversity podcast and shares a free guide, “Reframe the Spiral,” for coping with negative thoughts after setbacks. She explains that a victim mindset is a human coping response to pain but that staying there keeps focus on what was done to you and drains agency, while a victor mindset focu...

Choose Hope Before You Feel It: Taking Action After Adversity

Host Laura Mangum Broome welcomes listeners to the Flourishing After Adversity podcast and offers a free guide, “Reframe the Spiral,” for managing negative thought loops after setbacks. Using a gardener watering bare soil as a metaphor, she explains that waiting to feel hopeful often keeps people stuck because action typically precedes motivation. ...

Fear vs. Anxiety: How to Tell the Difference and Take the Next Right Step

Host Laura Mangum Broome explains that fear and anxiety are different experiences requiring different strategies, using her own experiences with bilateral breast cancer, chemotherapy-related congestive heart failure, and waiting for a heart transplant to illustrate both. Fear is a response to a real, present threat and is specific; anxiety is a respons...

Reinventing Yourself After Adversity: Three Steps to Your Next Chapter

Laura Mangum Broome welcomes listeners to the Flourishing After Adversity podcast and offers a free guide, “Reframe the Spiral,” for coping with negative thought loops after setbacks. Using Olympic champion Scott Hamilton as an example of reinvention after identity shifts and major health battles, she highlights how he turned adversity into pu...

Tiny Experiments: Turning Disruptions Into Forward Motion

Laura Mangum Broome hosts the Flourishing After Adversity podcast and explains how unexpected disruptions can become opportunities to move forward faithfully and intentionally. She shares a recent plumbing crisis caused by tree roots that required jackhammering her bedroom closet floor, forcing her to empty and reorganize her room, reschedule appointments, and choose ...

Tiny Experiments: One Brave Step Without the Perfect Plan

Host Laura Mangum Broome welcomes listeners to Flourishing After Adversity and encourages those facing grief, illness, loss, heartbreak, or unexpected change to keep moving forward faithfully and intentionally. She invites listeners to download her free guide, “Reframe the Spiral,” and shares how saying yes to being a podcast guest after publishing her boo...

Holding Two Truths: How to Process Mixed Emotions After Adversity

Host Laura Mangum Broome welcomes listeners to the Flourishing After Adversity Podcast and shares a free guide, “Reframe the Spiral: 5 Quick Coping Strategies to Shift Negative Thoughts and Reclaim Your Day.” Using her father’s memorial service as an example, she explains that human emotions are often layered—sorrow and joy, dread and r...

Stop Letting Other People’s Opinions Decide Your Life

Host Laura Mangum Broome discusses how fear of others’ opinions can keep people from pursuing dreams and making aligned decisions, sharing a friend’s example of starting a women’s garment business and bracing for family reactions. She emphasizes that while others may have opinions, they don’t carry the outcomes, and encourages focusing on wha...

Decision Triage: How to Stop Overthinking After Unexpected Setbacks

Host Laura Mangum Broome discusses how unexpected updates—like a diagnosis, financial setback, or sudden change—can trigger worst-case thinking and decision fatigue by making you mentally carry what might happen, not just what is happening. She shares a recent family medical scare that escalated from a routine appointment to possible procedures a...

Overwhelmed? Find Your Next Step

Host Laura Mangum Broome welcomes listeners to the Flourishing After Adversity podcast and offers a free guide, “Reframe the Spiral,” for shifting negative thoughts. She explains how overwhelm makes everything feel urgent, fuels racing thoughts and tension, and can cause people to freeze, especially during adversity such as grief, illness, heartbreak, or major change. She recommen...