Resilient by Design: Supporting Meaning and Sustainability in Helping Professions

Practical, neuroscience-informed strategies to help professionals sustain capacity, manage ongoing stress, and remain engaged in meaningful work. This three-part training series provides a neuroscience-informed, trauma-responsive approach to understanding and addressing chronic stress in helping professionals. Participants will examine how stress impacts cognitive, emotional, and physiological functioning and will learn practical strategies to support regulation, resilience, and sustained professional engagement.

The course integrates concepts from polyvagal theory, cognitive behavioral approaches, and internal systems perspectives, and introduces the Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) framework to support self-assessment. Emphasis is placed on experiential learning and the application of a small number of targeted strategies that can be integrated into daily work environments.

Participants will develop skills to recognize stress patterns, respond with greater flexibility, and implement sustainable practices that support both well-being and effectiveness in their professional roles.

Program Components (Between-Session Learning Support)
Participants will have access to a companion app designed to support continued learning and skill integration throughout the program. The app reinforces session content through brief, structured activities that can be incorporated into daily routines.

Between sessions, participants will be provided with short instructional videos introducing additional regulation and resilience strategies, along with guided journaling prompts and experiential exercises to deepen self-awareness and application of concepts. The app is intended to facilitate ongoing practice, support skill generalization to real-world settings, and enhance participants' ability to integrate learned strategies into their professional and personal lives.

The app also utilizes optional push notifications to prompt brief, in-the-moment practice of learned skills. These reminders are designed to support consistency and reinforce the principle that nervous system regulation develops through repeated application over time, rather than through knowledge alone.

Participants will also have access to an online community space where they can ask questions, share experiences, and engage in peer support. This component is designed to enhance learning through reflection, normalize shared challenges, and support continued engagement with course material between sessions.

These combined elements reflect evidence-informed approaches to adult learning and behavior change, including spaced repetition, experiential practice, and social reinforcement, all of which are associated with increased retention and application of new skills.

This program comes with access to a device app that will be provided at the first session to support your growth and skill building with:

• 2–5 minute audio resets for each nervous system state (sympathetic, dorsal, ventral)
• Push notifications to remind participants to check in and do a reset
• Journaling prompts tied to session themes (e.g., "What part of you needs rest today?")
• Progress tracker: optional reflection check-in each week
• Favorites folder for personal go-to practices

Mary Lynn Barrett, LCSW, MPH, is a licensed clinical social worker and resiliency educator with over 25 years of experience training healthcare and human service professionals. She is the creator of Resilient by Design, a ProQOL-informed framework that addresses burnout, compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion satisfaction through practical, trauma-responsive skills. Former faculty in the MAHEC Family Practice Residency Program for 19 years, she co-founded the Southeast ACE Summit and the nonprofit Resources for Resilience. Mary Lynn specializes in translating the science of resilience and nervous-system regulation into sustainable workforce wellbeing strategies.