Fortitude: The Myth of Resilience, and the Secrets of Inner Strength: A Sunday Times Bestseller

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That's where I think it's worth reminding yourself of even in that worst-case scenario, "I still love to play netball, I've still got a son and a family that I love very much", and almost I think that worst-case scenario planning, alongside that zooming out, to just remind yourself as well not to forget about those other things. I've had the odd moment in my career where I was so focused on work that if that had gone wrong, and fortunately it didn't, I don't think I would have been left with very much. There is a long-held assumption that in groups we lose our sense of self. This misgiving has led many to believe that standing alone is the best route for optimal outcomes and personal success. Bruce Daisley argues that while groups can be capable of acts of cruelty, they can also aid happiness, identity and fortitude. On the reverse, loneliness has remarkable negative consequences on our psyches; our minds interpret isolation as being rejected by our tribe which can become mentally debilitating. What you discover is that UK Sport did this remarkable piece of work, and this is what I couldn't get out of my head, that studied 16 British super-elite athletes, and they say all of them household names. All of them, of the ones they studied, all of them had a significant moment of childhood trauma. To just emphasise that that's not universal, the ones that they compared them to, who were the silver medallists, the bronze medallists, the people who did well but not quite win gold, only one in four of them had a moment of significant trauma. Naomi Osaka, tennis player, has said she's asked herself, "What am I if I'm not a tennis player?" Through that, you can really see the dangers of enmeshment, because we see ourselves thinking, "I'm a provider for my family [or] I'm someone who's going to work hard and make my mum proud of what I accomplish at work [or] I'm going to be able to get the money for a deposit on a flat because I'm striving so hard". We see all of these things as a way to paint this redemptive image of ourselves. I got sent on my company’s resilience training and I don’t feel any better,’ one worker at a major technology company told me.

Bruce Daisley | LinkedIn Bruce Daisley | LinkedIn

Bruce Daisley interviews psychologists, neuroscientists and work place experts to understand how we can improve our jobs. The series has a focus on science and experts, over gurus and opinions. Fortitude explores and validates what most of us who work with people feel in our gut when it comes to debunking doctrine about resilience and singular toughness. A fantastic contribution. Dr Pippa Grange, author of 'Fearless', former Head of People & Team Development at The Football Association Simultaneously, Vincent Felitti said something which is just astonishing. He was dealing in a weight loss clinic, and he had patients who were 300 lbs, 400 lbs, you know, people really struggling with obesity, and he found himself accidentally asking a question of one of them, which was related to her sexual history. And effectively, he discovered firstly that this patient had been abused by her grandfather, but then he started asking other patients. He found 55% of his patients had experienced sexual abuse as children. Talking with Chris about the subject of coming through trauma, Bruce spoke about a study regarding UK Sport, the organisation that puts Team GB competitors at the Olympics. He said: “They identified a group of gold-winning, retired British olympians… These are household names…. They compared them to people who went to the Olympics with Team GB but won a bronze, and what they found was, these super-elites, these gold medal-winners, 100 percent of them had experienced a significant moment of childhood trauma. Comparing to those who won the bronze, only a quarter of those had had the same.”

This is a truly refreshing, captivating and important book that shifted my perception on a topic I thought I knew! A must read.' Steven Bartlett, entrepreneur and host of The Diary of a CEO This interesting book lifts the cover on the resilience myth that we've all been sold, and shines a light on how and why resilience is not what we think it is, and not what we should aspire towards.

Fortitude by Bruce Daisley - Penguin Books Australia

Bruce Daisley interviews psychologists, neuroscientists and workplace experts to understand how we can improve our jobs. The series has a focus on science and experts, over gurus and opinions. Chris and Bruce talked about Liverpool FC’s manager Jurgen Klopp, with the author of Fortitude saying: “People who don’t know anything about football, know that this smiling guy from the news just seems to be this beacon of warmth and radiance. And the one thing that was really interesting about him, when he was at his last club, a club in Germany, he told the people organised it, ‘We’ve got to move from this sense of me to this sense of we.’ Really interesting." I was particularly interested in the section which looks at the influence of control, having a sense that someone is in control of their own lives and decisions can make it easier to deal with adversity. Whereas having actions dictated to you or feeling that options have been limited by forces outwith your control disempowers people and makes it harder to access inner strength.Bruce Daisley: There's a wonderful guy who passed away a couple of years ago, called Enrico Quarantelli, and Enrico Quarantelli was obsessed with natural disasters and when things went wrong. It's almost like, if you've got an earthquake or people flying out of somewhere, he was the lone car driving in the other direction. He was obsessed with going to see when things went wrong. Is "resilience" more than blaming victims and telling them they need to act stronger? This wonderful book is Bruce Daisley's personal quest - through his personal experiences and his appetite for digesting rigorous research - to learn about the overused concept of resilience. What Bruce learns is intriguing and important, and hopefully will help us become better parents, leaders, and friends. Professor Daniel Cable, author of 'Alive at Work' Helen Tupper: So, on those three foundations of fortitude, we've covered control, we've talked about identity, and the third one is community; and I think this is the biggest " A-ha!" moment for me in the book, because to your point about resilience and individualism and all that kind of stuff, "Go focus on this alone and put your mindset right, and you'll be fine with resilience"; actually a lot of what you cover in the book is the importance of the relationships you have around you, the role of community in that. A book that confirms what I've always believed, that we can't be resilient on our own. In fact resilience is about all of us being stronger than any of us. Gary Lineker But the actual experience of a trauma, an adversity, is an incredibly harmful one. And through those two things, I think you can see a path to understanding where our response to adversity comes from. For me, all of that is about identity, because all of that -- if you hear Kelly Holmes, Kelly Holmes will say, "Sport became my identity". She was adopted, she had parental abandonment, she was very severely bullied at school, I think latterly we clearly learned that she's been wrestling with issues with her own sexual identity and feeling ashamed about that. And so, you look at all of those things and you go, "Well actually, her then channelling all of her interest into sporting excellence, now you recognise that redemptive power of that power of identity, I think".