Finding Happiness with Hugh van Cuylenburg

Tracey Challenor:

Hello, I’m Tracey Challenor. Welcome to the Life Education podcast series. You may have heard of The Resilience Project. It all started when former school teacher Hugh Van Cuylenburg began to look at what could be done to address the growing rates of anxiety and depression in Australia. Inspired by a trip to India where kids seemed remarkably positive, Hugh developed an innovative program that is now delivered to hundreds of schools and companies, and is also utilised by the nation’s top sporting teams to boost player wellbeing. Well, since The Resilience Project began, Hugh has delivered thousands of presentations on the key ingredients to happiness, and is the author of a new book on The Resilience Project. And we’re delighted to have him with us today. Hi, Hugh. Thanks for joining me.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

It’s a pleasure, Tracey. I’m a very big Life Education fan, so this is exciting.

Tracey Challenor:

Oh, that’s great to hear. We’re a huge fan of your program as well. And I must tell you, I’ve just finished reading your book, which is fantastic. So inspiring and humorous. It’s a great read.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

Ah, that’s very nice of you. Thank you.

Tracey Challenor:

And from small beginnings with The Resilience Project, you’re now in something like 500 schools, I believe?

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

I think the program is, currently, we’ve got 200,000 kids around the country doing our curriculum every day, which is really nice to know that there’s 200,000 kids around the country practising positive mental health strategies. I’m not sure how many schools that equates to. I know I’ve visited a lot myself. I think I’ve been to 1500 schools over the last 10 years, which is similar to, we were just saying before, I love driving past a school and seeing the Life Education van outside the school. So it’s a real privilege to be working in schools, I have to say.

Tracey Challenor:

Yeah. And knowing that you’re making that impact as well. Hugh, sorry to start off with such a heavy question, but I wanted to get a sense of your motivation behind The Resilience Project. And we know from organisations like Beyond Blue that there’s something like one in seven Aussie kids experiences a mental health issue, which really translates to tens of thousands of school students around Australia. As a teenager, you saw firsthand the torment that your youngest sister, Georgia, suffered because she was battling anorexia. How did that experience affect you and your family, and how did that drive your work as a mental health advocate?

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

Yeah. It’s a really great question. I had this distinct memory in my life as a 16-year-old sitting around the dinner table. It was a very hot, very, very hot summer’s night. And my mum and my sister had had one of their nightly arguments about food. And I just distinctly remember having this feeling of, “Mum and Dad aren’t happy anymore.” Or, “This family isn’t happy anymore.” We had the most incredible childhood. I had the most beautiful memories of my childhood. We had this big garden. And we had a… We just had everything, and I was just so happy, but I remember the point where I thought, “Gosh, I don’t think we’re a happy family anymore.” It’s because of my sister’s, not because of my sister, but because of my sister’s mental illness that just ravaged her, this eating disorder.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

And I, very soon after that, became quite fascinated with the question, what is it that makes people happy? I don’t see myself as a mental health expert. I don’t see myself as a resilience expert. I just have always had this deep fascination with the question of what is it that makes us feel happy, and I’ve always paid very close attention to the things that tend to make people happy. So I suppose it started all the way back when I was 16 and I had no idea to the answer of how do you just make people happy? But I was fascinated from a really young age.

Tracey Challenor:

Yeah. And you mentioned in your book that it wasn’t until much later that you were able to understand the complexity of Georgia’s mental illness. It would have been very difficult to process as a 16-year-old. And you said that you thought, “Why doesn’t she just eat and she’ll feel better?” But that experience, you kind of vowed to try and always see things from other people’s perspective, didn’t you? You developed an empathy at a very young age, by the sounds of it.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

Well, yeah. I mean, it was 1996 when I was 16. So back then there was no talk of mental health in schools. We weren’t really discussing. I mean, I never really heard of mental illness before. I didn’t really know what it was. And I think I felt a little bit of resentment towards my sister that she had done this – my view was it was her fault, back then I felt. If she had food, then she’d get better and we’d be happy again. So I think I was quite angry at her, not properly understanding mental illness. It wasn’t until two years later when she was in hospital and she was, I mean, she was weighing in, I think it was around 31 kilograms. And the doctor explained to me that she was dying, essentially.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

And that’s when I first properly understood that mental illness wasn’t as simple as, I remember thinking as a teenager, when I heard about people who had cancer, I just think, well I feel sorry for them because there is nothing they can do here. Whereas my sister, if she ate food, that’s it, she’d get better. So that was very confusing to me as a teenager.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

But then when I saw her in hospital, essentially, what was described to me on her death bed, that’s when I understood that it was so much more complex than that. And I mean, I was 20, you could argue that I was quite late to understand that, but I think it was tied up in a whole lot of other stuff that I just didn’t want to, I was just angry at my sister, I think, but when I saw her on her deathbed, that’s when I thought, gosh, I need to be a lot better at compassion and empathy, I suppose. I didn’t articulate it. I didn’t sit there thinking to myself, gosh be more empathetic, but I remember this feeling of, gee I’ve been really selfish here. Throughout the last six years of my sister’s life. And it wasn’t as simple as that. I didn’t just click my fingers and all of a sudden become this compassionate, loving, older brother who was perfect older brother, but I certainly understood that what she was going through wasn’t her fault.

Tracey Challenor:

Yeah. Oh, it would have been an incredibly harrowing experience for your whole family. And we should say that Georgia’s doing great now, isn’t she? She’s on top of…

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. She’s, I mean, gosh, you talk about the picture of resilience, there is no more resilient person I know. The stuff that she went through as a kid that resulted in her having this mental illness and then to see what she’s doing now with their life. And she actually says she’s quite grateful for everything that happened to her as a kid because she wouldn’t be doing the stuff she’s doing now. She was on the news over in LA last week because she’s just designed this mural to celebrate the Black Lives Matter movement over in LA. And it’s just extraordinary. She’s always doing things for other people. So yeah, she is doing really well now.

Tracey Challenor:

Oh, that’s so great to hear. Hugh, early on in your career as a teacher, you had a pretty amazing life- changing experience when you went to India. And to say that the kids’ schooling environment couldn’t have been more different to what Aussie kids experience is an understatement. And just to paint a picture for people, the children sat in the dirt in a mud brick classroom. They had broken down play equipment. Most of the village had no running water and electricity. But despite all of that, you noticed that the children seemed to be so happy. What was it about these kids in India that was so remarkable? And what did the experience teach you?

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

Yeah, it was actually, it was the whole village that really, when I have this memory of arriving in this village, it’s called Thicksey. It’s up in the far North of India, up in the Himalayas. If you’d look up Google images and look up this village, it’s extraordinary. T-H-I-C-K-S-E-Y. The images, you’ve never seen anything it, but I remember arriving there in the village and whilst I was a little bit stressed about the fact there was no running water, no electricity, and we’re sleeping on the floor for a couple of weeks, I remember feeling incredibly calm, just being there. Thinking gosh, I feel so calm here. And I remember I didn’t think about it at the time, I look back at that and realise that if I had taken them, coming from that village, and brought them to Australia, and a city in Australia, I can’t help but feel like they’d feel incredibly stressed and anxious.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

And it just made me think about, in Australia right now we are the second most medicated country in the world for anxiety disorder. So, it kind of makes me think that they’re doing, I mean, I look at them and feel, gosh it’s so basic here, back as a 28 year old, but now, as a forty year old, I look back and think, I think that they’re a lot closer to having it the right way than we are because me going there, I felt really calm. I know if they came, well when I came back to Australia, I felt really stressed straight away and quite anxious.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

But anyway, that’s sort of a bit of a diversion from your question, but I remember getting into the classroom and they had so very little to call their own, but the joy I just saw in the classroom, I mean I’d only been teaching for about, I think it was about four years back then, but there’s just a really discernible difference. When I got to the school, I just thought, there’s a joy in those kids here. They’re just so happy. And I remember thinking it’s so different to what I’m used to back in Melbourne. I’ve taught at great schools. I was very lucky to teach in some beautiful schools. That’s not a go at the schools I was in. The kids were just so unbelievably happy. I remember thinking, I don’t know how this is possible because there’s no electricity here, but my gosh, they’re happy.

Tracey Challenor:

You talk in your book about how a couple of the kids were showing you their playground, and the equipment was just, it was just a mess, really, wasn’t it? Quite depressing. And yet they appreciated it so much. They thought it was fantastic. And they were saying, “Look. Look at this.” And at first you thought they were kind of saying, “Look at this. Look how bad it is.” But they were actually saying, “Look how fantastic our playground is.”

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

Yeah. They were pointing. I remember them saying, “Sir, come see the playground.” I said “I’d love to see your playground.” And they took me to the swing, which was, so one of the swings was hanging. So there are two chains dangling down to hold the swing, and it was only attached at one chain, so it was dangling straight down. And the other one was about to sort of snap off, so it’s on a huge angle. It actually looked quite dangerous. And they are standing in front of it with a big smile, but I didn’t look at their faces. They were pointing with their thumbs over their shoulder saying, “Have a look at this.” And I thought they were saying, “Look how bad this is. All we’ve got are broken swings.”

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

But then I looked at their faces and I realised they were actually saying, “Sir, check this out. We’ve got swings.” And I’m over thinking my gosh, that is just unbelievable. I wasn’t focusing on the things they were doing at that stage to be happy, but I look back on it and just think, that’s gratitude. And that’s the first big lesson I had. It’s like, pay attention to what you’ve got, don’t worry about what you don’t have. And that was massive.

Tracey Challenor:

And the kids there seemed to have mastered the art of inner peace as well. You mentioned that they start the day with meditation. I mean, that seems quite remarkable.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

It does. And I didn’t know what it was at first. I thought they were singing. I thought it was a song they started the day with because there’s a bit of chanting in it and it’s in Ladakh [Tibetic language spoken in the Ladakh region of northern India]. So, I didn’t understand what they were actually saying. But I thought it’s a song, but I realised after a while it was a meditation that they were doing. To be really honest with you, Tracey, 12 years ago, when I was explained it was meditation, I remember thinking what a ridiculous waste of time. Those poor kids. That’s just half an hour in the morning. But then I realised it was optional. They didn’t actually need to be there, but every single child turned up, and that’s when I realised it was something very different to anything I’d ever experienced before. Because again, this is back in 2008, when mindfulness didn’t have the presence in schools that it’s got now. So, I remember for quite a while thinking, this is a bit silly, until I actually experienced it.

Tracey Challenor:

For yourself. And you can’t really have an experience like that without it staying with you for life. I mean, immersing yourself in a village and then coming back to Australia. You just wouldn’t be able to take things for granted anymore. Even walking to the kitchen and turning on a tap and seeing fresh running water run out is something to be thankful for every day, isn’t it?

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

Yeah, it is. I mean, that’s the stuff that they had a day where they took us down. It was like the one school excursion that I had for the year, and they went to the river, and I remember thinking, God, what are the learning outcomes here? There’s no structure to this day. We’re just hanging out at a river. I don’t understand what we’re trying to take from this. As a fourth-year teacher, I was so focused on the learning outcomes. And what’s the lesson plan here? What are we actually trying to achieve? I remember writing an email to someone, to a teacher back in Melbourne saying, “It’s so ridiculous. There’s no structure to their learning.”

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

But I look back on it and realise they were actually celebrating. The whole trip is about celebrating the fact that they had a river to get water from. And how lucky were they? That was their thing. Like how lucky are we? We’ve got this. There’s no plan. Let’s just celebrate the fact that we’ve got a river, and they did it every year, apparently.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

So I didn’t get that at the time. I mean, this is where they get their water from. This is where they go to get their water from for the day. They go to this river and they wanted to celebrate it every year. We don’t have a day in our calendar where we celebrate taps. It’d be a strange day.

Tracey Challenor:

Maybe we should. Hashtag gratitude. Turn on your taps.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

Yeah exactly. I mean, I tried to explain to someone about our taps, and I remember it just went over their head completely. I remember them going, “Yeah, yeah. We’ve got that too. We’ve got a river.” We have water that comes out of our walls at the exact temperature that we wanted. Actually it’s a good reminder we’re having this conversation right now because my wife and I were whinging yesterday about how one of the taps in our house, whatever temperature you want, that’s what the temperature, it comes out the opposite. And it’s a bit annoying at the moment. So it’s a good reminder to have this conversation, but we have water that comes out of our walls that doesn’t need to be boiled. Like they have to boil the water. And it’s at the temperature we want. That is extraordinary. We are so lucky, but we don’t pay attention to things like that. We’re more likely to pay attention to the fact that our iPad’s ran out of battery or we can’t get our Wi-Fi to work properly for some reason.

Tracey Challenor:

Or you can’t find your phone.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So yeah it was amazing. You’re right. It’s very hard to have that experience and not be changed by it. And I mean, I owe most of the credit to my ex-partner who was the one who said we should go there in the first place and then said we should actually stay for a long time. I was a little bit more sheltered and not overly keen on the experience at first, but she was one who really sort of said, “No, we should do this.”

Tracey Challenor:

Amazing. And Hugh, at the heart of The Resilience Project is the GEM principle. The idea that gratitude, empathy and mindfulness can really change the way we look at life. And when you started weaving these principles into your teaching when you came back to Australia, and before that as well, you noticed that your students literally walked taller. Their self-esteem grew. You’ve always had that strong belief, haven’t you, that when kids have good mental and emotional health, everything else seems to fall into place. They do better at maths, at literacy, they socialise better. Why do you think resilience is the most important life skill a child needs to learn and grow?

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

So, there’s a couple of things. One of my first experiences I had as a teacher was I had a girl in grade five. She really battled academically. Literacy and numeracy in particular. And the school I was at had a big focus on that. And she just really struggled. And I remember I really wanted to, that that was my sort of focus, but she also had some pretty big issues, friendship issues at the time. And I was so fond of the family that I put a fair bit of work into her and her friendship issues. And looking back, it was probably a disproportionate amount of time on sorting out her friendship issues and getting that sorted for her. But I remember when that fell into place for her, her literacy and numeracy just started to click and she just had so much more intellectual energy, I suppose, for literacy and numeracy, when the other things were going well.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

And at the time I thought, okay, so it’s friendship issues. That’s really big for girls at this age. But I kind of looked back and realised it was just the emotional health or her mental health, it was struggling when she was dreading coming to school so much because of these friendship issues. And then I remember thinking a bit later on, well, it’s probably not so much the ability to make friends and to have friends. It’s probably resilience, as far as, if you can cope with what’s happening in the playground and then get into the classroom and sit down and have literacy straight after lunch, and then be able to focus on that. That’s probably resilient. It’s more about resilience than it is the ability to fit in socially.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

I think it’s unfair to put pressure on a kid to say you have to fit into this social group when there’s only in their class, 25 different options for friends or whatever. That can be a bit limiting, and that’s only three or four groups. So if you don’t fit there, then that’s a bit of unfair expectation to put on a child, but to be able to teach them resilience, so if they’re struggling socially, they can bounce back from that and focus in the classroom, I think that’s what it comes down to. I mean, really, at the heart of resilience is positive emotion.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

So, Barbara Fredrickson [American psychology professor], who’s done a lot of research in this area, says that the key to being resilient is positive emotion. And she discovered this soon after, her research focused on resilience, just very soon after 9/11 over in New York, where she’d just done a whole lot of resilience measures with individuals in New York. And then she went and revisited them very soon after 9/11.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

And what she found was the people who bounced back the quickest from that tragedy of that horrific time in New York were the people who experienced the most positive emotion. So at the heart of gratitude, empathy, and mindfulness, it’s all about cultivating positive emotion. So gratitude. When you focus on what you’ve got, you pay attention to what you’ve got, and you don’t get brought down by the things that you wish you had or things you don’t have. You’re more likely to experience positive emotion. If there’s someone who just says, “Well, I’ve got a tap. I’ve got a tap and I’m so lucky to have this.” As opposed to what I was like last night was, “Why the hell is only warm water coming out when I want cold water?” That’s a really nice example of how you can experience more positive emotion.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

And empathy, the second one, when you’re being kind to people. Well, quite literally the neuroscience says that when you’re kind to people, I mean, I know empathy is a bit more complicated than being kind to people. It is when you feel what someone else feels. But when you feel what someone else feels, you’re more likely to be kind, in fact, I’ll give you a great example. Two weeks ago, when my son and I were at the Queen Victoria Market down in Melbourne, there’s a homeless man who, my son’s three and a half, and I’ve been explaining, he wanted to know why you’re sleeping on the side of the road. Now he’s three and a half, so when I first told him, I said, “He doesn’t have a home, so he sleeps on the side of the road.” My son said, “Oh, that’s funny.” And not in a cruel way. He just said, “That’s funny he sleeps there.”

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

And I said, “I actually think it’s quite sad because when it’s cold at night, it must be really…” My son thought about it for ages. And then, we go every Sunday, my son and I. It’s a bit of a tradition we have, to the market, and we eat donuts. But we were on the way and he said, “Will the man be cold today?” And I said, “What man?” And he said, “The man at the market.” And I said, “Oh yeah, he will be.” And I said, “Should we do something for him?” And my son said, “Do you want to give him money?” Should I always give him money. And I said, “What else would he like?” And he said, “Maybe food.” And so we stopped at a bakery and we bought him a loaf of bread and we gave it to him. We actually chatted to this man for about, not too long, maybe about five minutes. He’s a lovely man called Daniel.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

And that night when my son and I were in bed together going to sleep, I said, I always say, “What was your favourite thing about today?” And he said, “Giving the man bread.” And it was an amazing moment because it was kind of, that’s the positive emotion. I mean, it’s not why we did it, so we would feel good, but it showed what happens to your brain. Like it sort of lights up in oxytocin and you feel happy and joy. So much so, that 10 hours later my son said his favourite thing of the day was giving this man bread. So that’s positive emotion, again. And mindfulness [inaudible 00:20:27] teaches you to just be calm and be present. We’re surrounded by so many wonderful things every moment in our day, but we’re not very likely to pay attention to them. We kind of miss the things that are happening around us because we’re not overly present. And mindfulness is another way of cultivating positive emotion. So there’s a very, very long answer to your question, Tracey, but…

Tracey Challenor:

But what a lovely example of empathy in action too. That’s a beautiful story.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

Yeah, we have, obviously all the different conditions in Australia in 2020. Sometimes we can’t get to the market and my son and I sort of discuss how this man’s going. I know Benji, my son, thinks about him a bit, which I really love so much, because I think it just shows we can start practising this stuff from a young age as well.

Tracey Challenor:

Getting back to the positive emotion with children, in your book you say there are three things that instantly shift our mood: music, exercise, and laughter. And I can so relate to that. When you were a teacher, you often tried to bring these three elements into the classroom. Talk us through the berries and cream dance. What was that all about? Why was it such a valuable exercise?

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

So everyone listening, if you look up berries and cream dance on YouTube, it’s one of the most extraordinarily weird and bizarre things you’ll ever see. So music, exercise, and laughter. When I started teaching, I felt like a lot of the kids that I’m teaching were very focused on study and very serious, and it was a quite academic school I was at.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

And I felt like they just sort of needed to just smile a bit more, laugh a bit more. And so I didn’t know the research behind it, but I know for me personally, and everyone listening will know that, if you’re in the car on the way to work and you’re not looking forward to going to work and a song comes on that you really love on the radio, it just changes everything. You feel your mood shift straight away.

Tracey Challenor:

So true, yeah.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

Or if you’re not feeling good and you get your runners on and you just go for a run, everyone knows that feeling of straight after exercise. For me personally, there’s just no better feeling. And then laughter, well, gosh, it’s instant. The second you start laughing, everything changed for you. So, I just love those three things. And so I brought them into the classroom at every single opportunity. Like I tried so hard. I wanted them laughing all the time. In fact, I really felt like every lesson had to start with a laugh, which sounds a bit silly. But then exercise, there was part that was covered in PE. So the Berries and Cream dance, back in 2000 and… When was it? 2006 when I was teaching these students, we had this thing called YouTube Tuesday. And I think it was just because I tried to pad time at the end of the day. I always felt that 3:15 to 3:30, it was just dead time.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

At least everyone was emotionally had packed up, including myself. So, I’d say that the students could submit a video that we would all watch, and they’d have to explain why we were going to watch it. And they were doing really serious stuff because they were so academic. It was like this violin piece or this maths lesson, or this… And I was like, no, no, no that is not the point. We’ve been doing maths and music all day. Let’s do something weird. So I said, “I’ll share the kind of videos that I want.” And one of my mates had just sent me this YouTube video weeks ago, and he said, “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.” And I loved it so much. And I thought I’m going to show them that. It’s this strange, I don’t even know how to explain.

Tracey Challenor:

It is bizarre, Hugh. I looked at it the other day.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

And so the kids’ faces. They’re watching this man do this berries and cream dance, this bizarre dance. It was so different to anything they’d ever experienced. But [24:00 inaudible] started to giggle and by the end they were just laughing so much. And I remember saying to them, “Okay, so next step is you are all going to learn this dance tonight. This is your homework.” We had homework. I said, “Scrap your homework.” I wanted to take the parents on the journey as well, and the parents to experience this as well, so I said, “No more. There’s absolutely no more homework for tonight. Your homework is to learn this dance, learn the song, and we’re singing it tomorrow morning. And we’re all doing the dance together.” And they were so excited.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

But I heard them telling their parents there’s no homework. We’ve got different homework. Wait until you see the homework. I heard them telling their parents outside. Parents were probably quite concerned. And the next morning I remember they came in, I pretended I’d forgotten completely, and I was being very serious, and they’re all like really excited. And I said, “Come on girls. We’re being serious here.” And anyway, so I waited about an hour and a half, and they were busting to do the dance, and I ended up putting it on for them.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

And you should have seen them. Like it was just they were screaming with laughter. It took us five minutes out of that morning to do that dance and to sing the song and they were just going absolutely berserk. They were going bonkers. But I just felt like the rest of the day, they were just in the best head space because they’d done something really silly, but it involved exercise, music, and laughter. All three together. So any time you can work out a way to combine that in your house with your kids, it is huge. We’re all looking for ways in 2020 to kind of create good moments in the household. Well music, exercise and laughter. If you can combine those, you are on a winner.

Tracey Challenor:

You sound like the best teacher ever. And you still have kids coming up to you, don’t you? At various presentations and reminding you about things that you did in the classroom with them?

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

It’s funny. I do. I do. It’s very nice you say that about my teaching, but I do have kids come up to me a lot and they all say to me, I don’t think we learned anything around maths at all in that year and I, I was not a good… Oh my gosh, I struggled so much with maths. And I remember the first offer I had grade fives. I thought that’s a problem because I think my math skills were a bit below grade five. So, I would literally be practising myself the night before I teach a lesson thinking, how does this work again? What do you mean convert decimals to fractions? Why would you need to do that ever? I don’t get why I’m doing this. So I wasn’t great with that stuff. So it’s very nice you say that, but I know we had a very good time.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

I actually got an Instagram message, a direct message from one of the girls I taught, who’s been living in London. She’s now, gosh, she’d be 24 I think now. My goodness me. That’s just extraordinary. And she’d just returned home from London. It was the start of the year. No, it was only a couple months ago. And she wrote me this long message. Because she’d bought the audio book – The Resilience Project, and she’d listened to it on the plane all the way home. And she said, “I just had tears streaming down my face thinking, I was just remembering what it was like to be in your classroom.” Because a couple of the chapters are about, and it was about her and her friends, and she said, “Oh, I just had the best time. And I didn’t realise that you were practising this stuff for this.” And I said, “Oh, I didn’t know either. It was just instincts.” And she said, “Yeah, I didn’t learn math.” She said, “I still blame my lack of numeracy skill on you, but I certainly had a good time.”

Tracey Challenor:

Hey, they’re emotionally resilient. That was the aim of the game.

Hugh van Cuylenburg:

Yeah, but it is wonderful when I bump into kids say, “Hey teacher.” You know you bump into kids you used to teach and it’s a very special thing.

Tracey Challenor:

You’ve been listening to the Life Education podcast series for parents. And I’ve been chatting with Hugh van Cuylenburg, founder of The Resilience Project. If you’d like to hear the rest of my chat with Hugh on gratitude, empathy, and mindfulness, and positive mental health, tune in to part two of this podcast. Next time Hugh joins us, we talk about how to become more in the moment by disconnecting from our screens. And the one simple thing you can do to bring more positivity into everyday life for both you and your family. I’m Tracey Challenor. Hope you can join us then.