What does it actually take to become a mature, resilient, self-aware human being—and why does it matter so much right now?
This week, Max Borders sits down with Michael D. Ostrolenk—master coach, psychotherapist, and founder of Resilience Optimized. They explore pressing questions about personal development, masculinity, and what it means to show up well in the world.
The Broken-People Problem
The conversation opens with an uncomfortable observation: there seem to be a lot of people trying to fix the world who haven’t done much work on themselves. Ostrolenk identifies two telltale markers—emotional dysregulation and what he calls “tunnel blindness,” an inability or unwillingness to engage with worldviews outside one’s own ideological bubble. His prescription isn’t to stop caring about the world, but to do the inner work before focusing on the world’s problems.
How Change Actually Happens
Rather than dwelling on why people behave the way they do (the psychodynamic “my mother, my father” approach), Ostrolenk focuses on how—specifically, how people physically and emotionally experience their own reactions. By developing somatic awareness of what anger, anxiety, or defensiveness actually feels like in the body, people can begin to create a crucial gap between stimulus and response. That gap, he argues, is where freedom and maturity live.
The Problem with Modern Therapy
Max raises the provocative thesis of Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy—that a lot of contemporary therapeutic practice makes people worse by locking them into a victim identity organized around their wounds. Ostrolenk largely agrees. He describes his own four-part framework (wound healing, self-regulation, evolution of consciousness, and physical optimization) and argues that therapists too often get stuck on the wound piece, keeping clients cycling in a merry-go-round of pathology-as-identity rather than moving them toward healing and growth.
Resilience 2.0
Together with former Army Ranger J.C. Glick, Ostrolenk has developed what he calls “Resilience 2.0.” While Resilience 1.0 is the David Goggins model—hard training, mental toughness, discipline—2.0 integrates that with something harder for many men: the capacity to sit with one’s own inner experience without reaching for a distraction. Porn, alcohol, overwork, endless scrolling—these are all ways of avoiding what’s actually going on inside. And what’s going on inside, Ostrolenk insists, is valuable information.
Victimhood and the External Locus of Control
The conversation turns to the cultural epidemic of victimhood mentality—the way social media amplifies and rewards the performance of grievance. Ostrolenk connects this directly to a weak internal locus of control. True sovereignty, he points out with a certain dry humor, isn’t what a man thinks it is when his wife can push his buttons at will. Real self-mastery means being able to observe your own psychophysiology and choose your response rather than being at the mercy of whoever last said something that triggered you.
Smiling at Adversity
Bad things happen. That’s not a flaw in the design. It’s the design. Ostrolenk’s approach draws on both the psychological literature on post-traumatic growth and ancient wisdom traditions (he and Max spend a wonderful few minutes on the Tibetan Buddhist story of Milarepa, inviting his demons in for tea). The key shift is from “why is this happening to me?” to “what is this happening for me?” This is not toxic positivity, but a mature orientation toward adversity that enables growth.
Healthy and Unhealthy Masculinity
On the question of masculinity, Ostrolenk frames it as a continuum rather than a binary. At one extreme: withdrawal (”taking your toys and going home”). At the other: hyperaggression. The healthy middle is genuine assertiveness—knowing what you want, expressing it clearly, and doing so without either shutting down or blowing up. Aristotle would recognize this as the golden mean; Ostrolenk just works with couples who haven’t found it yet.
The Virtue of Curiosity
Asked for his single most important piece of relationship advice, Ostrolenk lands on curiosity. Most relationship conflict is ignited by misinterpretation—assuming the worst intent behind a partner’s words or actions and then reacting to that interpretation rather than checking it. Being genuinely curious (not strategically curious, not lawyer-curious) before you act is, he says, one of the most powerful tools available for defusing conflict before it starts.
Michael Ostrolenk is the founder of Resilience Optimized and co-leader of Team Fudoshin, a men’s development group integrating warrior discipline, somatic intelligence, and depth psychology.
