Lockdown Read of the week
Book: Any Ordinary Day by Leigh Sales
Genre: Non-fiction
Summary: "Blindsides, resilience and what happens after the worst day of your life"

The day that turns a life upside down usually starts like any other, but what happens the day after? Dual Walkley Award-winner Leigh Sales investigates how ordinary people endure the unthinkable.

As a journalist, Leigh Sales often encounters people experiencing the worst moments of their lives in the full glare of the media. But one particular string of bad news stories – and a terrifying brush with her own mortality – sent her looking for answers about how vulnerable each of us is to a life-changing event. What are our chances of actually experiencing one? What do we fear most and why? And when the worst does happen, what comes next?

In this wise and layered book, Leigh talks intimately with people who’ve faced the unimaginable, from terrorism to natural disaster to simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Expecting broken lives, she instead finds strength, hope, even humour. Leigh brilliantly condenses the cutting-edge research on the way the human brain processes fear and grief, and poses the questions we too often ignore out of awkwardness. Along the way, she offers an unguarded account of her own challenges and what she’s learned about coping with life’s unexpected blows.

Warm, candid and empathetic, this bookis about what happens when ordinary people, on ordinary days, are forced to suddenly find the resilience most of us don’t know we have.

(Summary from Penguin)

Click and collect from bookstores or listen on audiobook

Lockdown Listen Archive
Podcast: No Filter with Mia Freedman
Type: Interview
Episode: "If you're struggling right now, this is for you"

Hugh Van Cuylenberg’s job is to teach resilience. He 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. But back in Australia? Well, people found it hard to be happy and they had so much.

Which is how The Resilience Project came to life. He learned that there are three key traits and behaviours that are the keys to resilience. And now he teaches it to others at conferences, in his podcast, The Imperfects, and in his book called The Resilience Project.

So if you’re feeling a bit down right now - or you’ve ever felt a bit down - this one is for you. Language warning - infrequent swearing