Keynote Speaker Dr Lucy Hone

A renowned global expert on resilience, the Director of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience, and blogger for Psychology Today, Lucy offers a one-of-kind perspective - sharpened through academia but also deeply personally applied in response to a devastating tragedy. Her focus on helping people and organisations create practical resilience strategies is a call to action in light of so many feeling resilience fatigues.

Lucy’s mission to translate the best of resilience psychology for everyday practice inspired her to create a keynote entitled, Three Secrets of Resilient People, which became one of the most-watched TED talks during the pandemic, with over 9 million views and has been translated into 15 languages.

Known as a respected change agent on this very timely topic, Lucy is also an award-winning ‘pracademic’ with a Master’s degree in resilience psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in wellbeing science/public health from AUT University in Auckland.

Her ground-breaking research is published in leading peer-reviewed international journals and frequently cited by others. She now assists a host of organizations ranging from Fortune 500s, government agencies and law firms to community groups and schools to design and implement wellbeing and resilience initiatives, re-shaping how resilience is viewed and creating sustained and meaningful change.

Describing her role as a ‘pracademic’ Lucy explains, “Too many resilience researchers don’t know how to communicate their studies, and too many presenters don’t really get the nuances and theories underpinning the science. I love being a pracademic, who truly gets the evidence, but also relishes the challenge of presenting it to people to make their everyday lives better.”

A Bestselling Author, Lucy’s books include Resilient Grieving, which details how she coped with her own unimaginable personal loss, and her latest book, The Educators’ Guide to Whole-School