What happens when the body stops responding to effort, and everything you built on it begins to unravel? This one is for anyone living with chronic pain, chronic illness, or the slow grief of losing the person they used to be.

Nancy Deyo shares how a spinal injury and 15 years of pain dismantled her high-performance identity, and what she found on the other side. You will leave with a different definition of resilience, less about pushing through, more about aligning with what is real, and permission to rebuild from a truer place.

About the Guest:

Nancy Deyo is a former Silicon Valley CEO, a Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute fellow, and author of the forthcoming memoir Perilous Ascent. After a spinal injury on Mount Kilimanjaro led to years of chronic pain and identity collapse, she now writes and speaks on resilience beyond pushing through.

Key Takeaways:

The strategies that built your success can be the ones that harm you most. Recovery from chronic pain is rarely a straight line upward.
Chronic pain is never only physical. Anxiety, grief, and depression are woven into it, and mental health has to be part of any path to healing.
Identity built on a role or position can collapse when that role disappears, but the loss can become an opening for a truer, more authentic self.
Resilience is not conquering or bouncing back. It is aligning with your present reality, accepting your limits, and learning to move forward within them.
Deeply ingrained habits like pushing can outlast the identity that formed them. Watching for those patterns becomes its own act of self-protection.

Connect With Nancy Deyo:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancydeyo/
Stanford DCI Fellow Profile: https://dci.stanford.edu/fellow/nancy-deyo
Substack: Life Inside Pain — search "Nancy Deyo" on Substack
Forthcoming memoir: Perilous Ascent

Episode Chapters:

[00:00] Before the Mountain — the hard-driving athlete and CEO who outlasted everyone

[04:30] The Collapse at 16,000 Feet — when pushing harder stopped working

[10:00] The Misconception About Recovery — why healing is not a straight line

[15:30] The Emotional Toll of Misdiagnosis — pain, fear, grief, and not being believed

[21:00] Rock Bottom at the Clinic — discharged, alone, and finding the army cot

[27:00] Identity Collapse — what remains when the old self is gone

[31:30] Aligning With Adversity — resilience redefined, and the habits that linger

(timestamps approx.)

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