Recommended Reads

Prosilience - Linda L. Hoopes

In this highly readable paperback, Linda Hoopes offers a practical guide for those wishing to take proactive steps to improve their resilience.  Like a good personal trainer, Hoopes explains the why first - why resilience is so important if we want to thrive in a challenging world. She then steps the reader through a staged approach to building strategies, strengthening “resilience muscles” and making sure the right resources are in place to reinforce and maintain our new capacity to deal with life’s challenges.  Hoopes keeps it real using numerous case studies to demonstrate her points and show the differing outcomes that can result from the choices we make. 

What makes this such a useful book for those willing to grow and improve is the framework for understanding, insight and action that it is founded on.  It’s logical, meaningful and simple.  It feels doable.  It all comes together in the final chapters with tools and exercises that help you build your own prosilience plan, track your progress and reflect on the outcomes.

Hoopes presents a realistic and achievable pathway to improved resilience – for those willing to pick up and read her book and for those galvanised by their own improvement.  That isn’t everyone though. For those who need support and encouragement to start or stick to the journey, Hoopes helpfully suggests a coach or buddy.  I’d go further and suggest that those in the helping professions and coaches themselves could benefit from reading this book and could perhaps make Hoopes’ insights available to those people who aren’t readers or who may be daunted by the title.

“Prosilience is about how you prepare for the next set of challenges before you encounter them.”