Hugh van Cuylenburg

Most people who work in mental health chose the field for a reason. For Hugh van Cuylenburg, there were two: a year in the Himalayas that showed him what resilience really looks like, and a sister whose eating disorder showed him what its absence costs.

Living alongside students in one of the world’s most underprivileged communities, Cuylenburg encountered children who had almost nothing. No material comfort, no certainty, no safety net. Yet they radiated a joy and groundedness that stopped him in his tracks. He returned to Melbourne with a question he couldn’t shake. Why are the people with the least so often the happiest? And what can the rest of us learn from them?

That question became The Resilience Project, one of Australia’s most respected mental health organisations. It partners with more than 1,200 schools a year and work with hundreds of workplaces to deliver evidence-based programs built around three simple but powerful pillars. Gratitude, Empathy, and Mindfulness. GEM, as Cuylenburg calls it, isn’t a corporate wellness framework. It is a philosophy forged from lived experience.

Growing up, Cuylenburg watched his sister battle a severe eating disorder that brought his family to its knees. Dinner tables that were once a place of warmth became battlegrounds. A family that never fought suddenly fought almost every night. When she was hospitalised and he saw her surrounded by tubes, he cried in a way he hadn’t before. That shifted something in him permanently. He went from a teenager who didn’t understand what was happening, to a young man who understood it all too well, to an adult who has spent decades helping others find their footing in exactly that kind of darkness.

Hugh van Cuylenburg doesn’t present resilience as something the strong possess and the weak lack. He presents it as something we build, slowly and imperfectly, through the very experiences that threaten to break us.

A bestselling author and co-host of The Imperfects, one of Australia’s most beloved podcasts, Cuylenburg has spent more than two decades working across education, elite sport, and corporate Australia. He has worked closely with the Australian Cricket Team, the Matildas, the Queensland Maroons, the Australian Olympic Team, the Diamonds, and hundreds of workplaces nationwide.

Hugh van Cuylenburg was recently nominated a 2026 Victorian Australian of the Year.