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

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So, I always used to think, "If I was a kid now applying for a job, I would put my CV on a balloon and send it to someone's office, I would send a polaroid of me making a cup of tea". Most people, at work now, they receive no physical mail. So, you've got basically a whole lane of the motorway that if you want to communicate with someone, you've got a whole lane of the motorway that is completely uncrowded. If you create something that is beautiful, memorable, thoughtful, personal that lands on that, you've got a way of communicating that no one is using whatsoever.

Fortitude | Journey Further Fortitude | Journey Further

The book digs into the details of each role model, case study, and research experiment that, at a cursory glance, look to extol the advantages of being more resilient but are in fact tools to abdicate systemic responsibility to the individual for poor socio-economic & cultural landscapes. 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 doing some walk-and-talks with our team this week, and I always ask everything, "What are you enjoying most at the moment; what gives you the most energy?" and it was interesting that the first thing everyone in the team talked about was how they work, rather than what they work on; so, this sense of, "I feel like I have choice and control over how I work, and if that means I want to volunteer for my kid's swimming, I just make that happen", and how much they appreciated almost not feeling like they had to tell us, or hopefully not having that micromanagement.

Bruce Daisley | Future of Work Speaker | Chartwell Speakers Bruce Daisley | Future of Work Speaker | Chartwell Speakers

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 The second part is, I'd read this work that I couldn't get out of my head, and it was about a study that's very relevant. We're recording this just in the week that Mo Farah has come out and said, "Actually, I'm not the person you think me to be. I'm actually, rather than someone who was sent here by my family and have formed a new life here, my dad's died, my mum effectively sold me into modern slavery, and I came here as a domestic servant. And, from the age of pre-teen years, I was a domestic servant". So, we might look at Mo Farah's story and go, "Well, at least he's been gifted with this good fortune that's lifted him out of this traumatic start in life", but no, they're not an accidental coincidence. An absolute revelation . . . It's with collective support that you can develop resilience. Your own resilience or individual fortitude is not something you do or don't have, it comes from the extent to which you are supported by others. The extent to which people face these issues of resilience is massively divined by the structural inequalities we face. Ed Miliband If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Helen Tupper: So, let's talk about the word "fortitude" for a moment, because this is a book all about resilience, what it is, what it isn't, and what you might need to develop instead, and you've chosen deliberately to call it Fortitude. So, what's the distinction between resilience and fortitude; and why is it an important distinction to make?

What you get then, you get into stories of, okay, right, so here's an interesting profile, that all of these people who won gold medals, and I'm not pointing this specifically at British athletes, but people who won gold medals were trying to resurrect a shattered sense of self. And we also know that people who've had a shattered sense of self might consider that they will restore their sense of self-belief at all costs. In the US Army, the issue was PTSD is off the scale. You're significantly more likely to die from suicide if you're a combat soldier during the course of your life, than you are to be killed by an enemy combatant. So, as a result of that, there was a need for it. The skincare regime, there was a demand for it, and so people created a product. And the interesting thing, what catalysed that exploration for me, is that so many people I know who've done resilience courses have said to me, "It didn't work, I don't feel any different". Okay, that's really interesting, because like a skincare product, it's a charming, lovely idea, we build a routine around it, we've created something that seems in service of self-care; but if it doesn't work, there are fair questions to ask about that.