Career Resilience

Hugh van Cuylenburg was a primary school teacher volunteering in northern India when he had a life-changing realisation: despite the underprivileged community the children were from, they were remarkably positive. By contrast, back in Australia Hugh knew that all too many children struggled with depression, social anxieties and mental illness. His own little sister had been ravaged by anorexia nervosa. How was it that young people he knew at home, who had food, shelter, friends and a loving family, struggled with their mental health, while these kids seemed so contented and resilient?

It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day demands of your current job and lose sight of the big picture, but with a typical career spanning fifty years or more, you do so at your own peril. It's up to you to chart your own course to professional success. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the 10 most important ones to help you develop yourself, make the right career moves, navigate inevitable detours and disruptions, and turn your professional dreams into reality.

From best-selling author and mental toughness expert Jason Selk comes a mind-training regimen for reframing every problem into an opportunity for productive action. The one characteristic all phenomenally successful people share is mental toughness. Mentally tough people are better at making decisions more quickly and with better results. They possess the uncanny ability to control what goes on between their ears.

How do some people bounce back with vigor from daily setbacks, professional crises, or even intense personal trauma? This collection of articles from HBR includes "How Resilience Works", by Diane Coutu; "Resilience for the Rest of Us", by Daniel Goleman; "How to Evaluate, Manage, and Strengthen Your Resilience", by David Kopans; "Find the Coaching in Criticism", by Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone; and much more.

In this audiobook Yossi Sheffi shows why modern vulnerabilities call for innovative processes and tools for creating and embedding corporate resilience and risk management. Sheffi offers fascinating case studies that illustrate how companies have prepared for, coped with, and come out stronger following disruption - from the actions of Intel after the 2011 Japanese tsunami to the disruption in the "money supply chain" caused by the 2008 financial crisis.

How to be human at work. This four-volume set includes Happiness, Resilience, Mindfulness, and Empathy.

Resilience by Design: How to Survive and Thrive in a Complex and Turbulent World delivers the world's most detailed and research-backed how-to manual to integrate advances from neuroscience and complexity theory with real world expertise, providing practical techniques that you'll want to use every day.

Fascinating and highly listenable, Digital Resilience opens with the infamous 2013 Target attack, which compromised the credit card information of 40 million customers. In hindsight, the hack (like most today) was preventable. Data theft. Downed servers. Malware. Even human error can trigger cyber events anytime from anywhere around the globe. This powerful guide provides the resilience-building strategies you need to prevail - no matter what strikes.

Burnout has become one of the most talked-about workplace topics, and its impact is far-reaching. The 24-7 pace of work, constant demands, and scant resources can easily put busy professionals on a path to burnout, a cycle that has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet most attempts to help focus on quick-fix strategies aimed at individuals. Something is missing. In Beating Burnout at Work, Paula Davis, founder of the Stress & Resilience Institute, provides a new framework to help organizations prevent employee burnout.

Through wide-ranging, and often deeply personal conversation, Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Perry explore how what happens to us in early childhood–both good and bad–influences the people we become. They challenge us to shift from focusing on, “What’s wrong with you?” or “Why are you behaving that way?,” to asking, “What happened to you?”

In Choosing to Prosper: Triumphing Over Adversity, Breaking Out of Comfort Zones, Achieving Your Life and Money Dreams, celebrated company founder and finance leader Bola Sokunbi delivers an uplifting and practical message of success and resilience in the face of formidable obstacles. The book challenges listeners to examine their own financial and personal dreams and find the strength and resilience they need to achieve them. The author provides the tools listeners need to build confidence, find their voice, and realize personal growth.

Bolstered with research, exercises, self-assessments, and real-life stories from people with natural burnout immu­nity and those who’ve cultivated it, Burnout Immunity teaches workers how to positively cope with stress and to enjoy healthier and happier relationships with work.

With its gripping narrative and relatable takeaways, The Grit Factor is both inspiring and pragmatic, a book that will energize and enlighten current and aspiring leaders everywhere - whether male or female.

Based on author Scott Glassman's A Happier You® wellness program, this uplifting guide offers seven skills in seven weeks to supercharge your positivity and short-circuit the cycle of negative thinking.

Professional athletes, surgeons, first responders - all perform remarkable feats in the face of intense stress. Why do they thrive under pressure while others succumb? What separates the two is attitude. Resilient people meet adversity head on and bounce back from setbacks. They seem to naturally exude an inner strength - but studies show that resilience is something that anyone can build.

Resilience is not an innate character trait. Whether you’re in a leadership role or working as part of a team, you need to implement strategies that build and nurture resilience. You need a resilience plan. Award-winning mental health expert Marie-Hélène Pelletier draws on her clinical practice and extensive knowledge in therapeutics and business practices to explore how resilience is the best defense against burnout and how everyone can build it in themselves—not with a one-size-fits-all plan but with strategies to help you create a custom plan.

From beloved performance expert, executive coach, and coauthor of Peak Performance Steve Magness comes a radical rethinking of how we perceive toughness and what it means to achieve our high ambitions in the face of hard things.

In the face of cancer, life comes to a screeching halt for many. But for Alex Kinnear-Mellor, a seasoned professional in brand marketing and communications, it was a call to pen a narrative that veers sharply from the beaten path. "Cancer Works: Balancing Your Career with Not Dying" transcends the conventional cancer narrative, offering hope, humor, and practical advice for those determined to keep moving forward, both in their careers and in their fight against cancer.

Peak-performance psychologist Dr Alia Bojilova draws on her work with the SAS, Olympic athletes, modern leaders and successful entrepreneurs to help you unlock your potential in everyday life. Guiding you through a four-step process - to develop clearer awareness, deeper belonging, broader curiosity and stronger drive - The Resilience Toolkit will help you to embrace the unknown with greater confidence and teach you to recover faster from setbacks.

In Change Proof, business and personal development expert Adam Markel shows how you can move beyond managing change to actively embracing it—and actually using times of uncertainty, crisis, and chaos to create opportunities and stimulate positive growth. You'll learn how to choose change before it chooses you, what it takes (and what it means) to become truly change proof, and how to leverage your relationship to change. This book will help you take the art and science of resilience to the next level—and look forward to future and all the changes it will bring.