Book Review - Resilience Recipes by Fleur Heazlewood
I read Resilience Recipes realising that I would have to lead this review with a warning to stay close to a photocopier while reading, or be prepared to write in your shiny new book. This isn’t a book Fleur intends you to read once and then use to decorate your bookshelf – it’s almost as much workbook as it is a book to read, aligning with Fleur’s philosophy that ‘each one of us is unique, so our wellbeing and resilience recipes need to be unique’.
Furthermore, Fleur wants to encourage her readers to take action, not just read more about resilience and wellbeing in a world that returns 325 million Google results just for the former. Drawing on her lived experience of burning out in the corporate world and rebuilding her wellness over a gruelling 2 years, Fleur leads readers through building an understanding of what’s important to us as an individual and then how we can build our wellbeing and resilience around that.
Something that really resonated with me was Fleur’s model of 5 stages of wellbeing, with ‘Thriving’ at the top, through ‘Functioning’ in the middle and all the way to ‘Burnout’ at the other end. Against each of these stages, Fleur has mapped a resilience focus – giving a cheat sheet to the most useful types of activities for wherever we’re at, then leaving what those activities look like in practice to our judgement and tastes.
‘Quick Bites’ gently season this book with short everyday activities that can easily be implemented while we’re still working through some of the bigger stuff. Resilience Recipes is a quick read in that Fleur’s style is engaging and accessible, striking a balance between warmly sympathetic to the challenges of life and authoritative about what to do about them. It’s not a quick read if you intend to work through all the worksheets as you go through the book. To get the most out of it, I’d recommend skimming the whole to get a sense of what’s coming up, then completing the worksheets in order.
Think of Resilience Recipes less as a glossy cookbook where precise measurements and instructions are laid out for you to follow, but more of a guidebook to flavours and cuisines that lets you build on your tastes and preferences to arrive at a dish that’s tailored just for you.
Review by Amanda Dickerson – Copywriter and Editor at Capital Letters
Resilience Recipes: Making space for wellbeing that works by Fleur Heazlewood is available now.
