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Resilience, Purpose & Power presented by Your Mentall Matters


Inside VibeSociety Studio, a group of personal-development-driven athletes and entrepreneurs gathered for Resilience, Purpose & Power, a panel hosted by Your Mentall Matters. The discussion brought together three young professionals who are redefining how mental wellness fits into performance culture—one of many such conversations emerging across Chicago’s creative and athletic communities.

DJ Brown, founder of Your Mentall Matters and a former Division I athlete, opened the evening with a clear purpose. His organization, he explained, exists to “change the culture around mental health” for people who live under constant expectation—athletes, entrepreneurs, and high achievers. “We’re taught to keep moving,” he said. “But no one tells us how to recover.”


The conversation, moderated by Liv Peterson of LIV MORE Media, focused on the practical side of that recovery. The panelists—Stephany Chaca, Amir Madison, and Corey Phillips—each described how the idea of wellness shifted once ambition stopped being enough.

Stephany, founder of Fox Training Studio in Lakeview East, said her relationship with health changed when she realized exercise alone couldn’t solve emotional exhaustion. “I used to train to outrun anxiety,” she said afterward. “Now I treat movement as a way to listen to what my body’s telling me.” Her studio’s programming reflects that adjustment—structured progressions, smaller classes, and an emphasis on belonging over performance.

Amir, a former professional football player, offered a version of the same lesson. Years of injuries pushed him toward yoga, a practice he first resisted. “At the time, I thought slowing down meant weakness,” he said. “It ended up being the thing that kept me in one piece.” Today he teaches mindfulness through Yogi Athlete and community workshops under the nonprofit Eat, Move, Meditate, which he recently expanded from Los Angeles to Chicago.


For Corey, a senior at North Central College and founder of Social Storm, mental health and entrepreneurship overlap. His organization has reached more than 2,000 young people with financial-literacy programs tied to self-management and confidence. “Discipline is peace,” he said. “It’s not about doing more; it’s about doing with focus.”

What connected the three wasn’t shared industry but shared posture: a willingness to slow the city’s constant forward motion long enough to ask what endurance actually means. In a city that prides itself on grit, their message landed as both counterintuitive and familiar. Chicago’s story—industrial, athletic, entrepreneurial—has always been one of recovery after effort. The difference now is that recovery itself is becoming part of the strategy.

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Throughout the discussion, faith and community surfaced as stabilizers. Stephany spoke about her parents’ migration from Ecuador and the work ethic that shaped her response to difficulty. Amir linked his mindfulness practice to gratitude, describing mornings that begin without screens or noise. Corey framed his discipline as service—using structure not only to succeed but to help others stay consistent.

Their advice, distilled, was uncomplicated: treat mental health as daily maintenance, not an emergency response. Take quiet time before the day starts. Seek help early. Surround yourself with people who balance, not drain, your energy.


By night’s end, the room felt less like an event and more like an exchange of methods. There were no motivational slogans, no staged emotion—just an emerging consensus that wellness is as technical as any other skill. DJ Brown summed it up plainly afterward. “We’re trying to make mental health something you train for, the same way you’d train your body or your business,” he said. “That’s how we make it normal.”

The conversation captured a broader moment in Chicago’s evolution: a city once defined by stamina learning to pair effort with restoration. If its old motto was keep pushing, its new one might be keep breathing.

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