Why Health Traits Are Born, Not Made with Jurie Rossouw

Neuroscientist and resilience expert Jurie Rossouw explores how true resilience is less about “toughening up” and more about learning to advance despite adversity through deliberate self-care and skill-building. He frames influence as educating others so they can make better decisions, rather than inspiring or pressuring them with slogans. Jurie shares how his own struggles with depression as a teenager pushed him into decades of research that eventually led to the Predictive Six-Factor Resilience (PR6) model, built around six domains: vision, composure, reasoning, tenacity, collaboration, and health. He sees vision as the anchor that gives people a sense of purpose, while health quietly powers everything else by shaping how well the brain functions under pressure. Along the way, he reflects on population-level insights like Australia’s relatively low composure and strong health scores, how workplaces sometimes mistakenly expect resilience instead of supporting it, and his belief that resilience, properly understood, is a blueprint for sustainable self-care that everyone should have been taught at school.