Resilience isn’t about avoiding hardship—it’s about growing through it. Whether you’re navigating personal loss, chronic stress, or just trying to stay afloat in a chaotic world, developing emotional resilience can make all the difference. To support your journey, I’ve compiled a list of free resilience workbooks for teens and adults—resources designed to help you build mental strength, emotional flexibility, and healthier coping skills. These guides are ideal for individuals, therapists, educators, or anyone looking to cultivate a stronger sense of inner calm and grit.
“Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient.”
–Steve Maraboli
Please note: These are external resources and are not affiliated with my site. Be sure to review each for suitability, and as always, follow all copyright guidelines when using or sharing materials.
1. Discover the Resilient You, 7 pages
2. Manage Stress Workbook, 20 pages
This workbook was designed by the National Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention (NCP) for managing stress more effectively.
3. Mind Matters: Resilience Toolkit, 15 pages
Hard knocks, misfortune and adversity are things all humans have in common. We all are asked to cope with difficult times at some point in our life. Resilience is defined as the ability to adapt well in the face of adversity, trauma, loss or significant stress, bounce back from it and learn from it.
4. Resilience Toolkit, 52 pages
This resource is an initiative of Glasgow CHP South Sector Youth Health Improvement team developed in partnership with The South Strategic Youth Health and Wellbeing Group. This Emotional Resilience Toolkit provides practical guidance in promoting the resilience of young people as part of an integrated health and wellbeing programme. The resource is designed to be used by workers and volunteers working with young people aged 10 and over.
5. Resilience Workbook, 69 pages
This workbook provides a practical and entirely educational approach to improve personal resilience. The material is organized as a series of resilience exercises that support World Health Organization recommendations for suicide prevention. The exercises and the learning methods develop problem solving abilities and bring awareness to the importance of social support by applying positive coping skills to create less stressful outcomes to real life challenges. The materials can be used with all audiences to include organizations, educational settings, and families.
6. The Resiliency Toolkit, 297 pages
The Resiliency Toolkit is a comprehensive, evidence-informed workbook featuring 73 tools and worksheets designed to help people develop the emotional, mental, and behavioural skills needed to overcome life’s challenges. Created by Angela M. Doel, MS, this resource blends therapeutic techniques from CBT, ACT, solution-focused therapy, and positive psychology to support individuals in becoming more resilient, hopeful, and emotionally well.
7. The Resilient Life, 72 pages
8. Understanding & Building Resilience, 9 pages
The simplest way to define resilience is the ability to “bounce back” from life’s difficulties – to adapt well in the face of adversity or significant sources of stress, such as family and relationship issues, major health problems or financial hardships.
“Resilience is not what happens to you. It’s how you react to, respond to, and recover from what happens to you.”
– Jeffrey Gitomer
Supplementary Materials
Disclaimer: The following supplementary materials are intended to be used exclusively in conjunction with corresponding workbooks which must be purchased separately. They are designed to support the content and exercises within the workbooks and are not intended to be a standalone resource. Unauthorized distribution, reproduction, or use of these materials without the accompanying workbook is prohibited. Please respect copyright and intellectual property laws.
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For highly-rated resilience guides and workbooks that can be purchased on Amazon, see below:
4.7 stars on Amazon, 1,961 reviews
Publisher’s description on Amazon: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A masterpiece of warrior wisdom: how to be resilient, how to overcome obstacles not by “positive thinking” or self-esteem, but by positive action. The best-selling author, Navy SEAL, and humanitarian Eric Greitens offers a self-help book unlike any other.
“Eric Greitens provides a brilliant and brave course of action to help navigate life’s roughest waters.”—Admiral Mike Mullen, seventeenth chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
In 2012, Eric Greitens unexpectedly heard from a former SEAL comrade, a brother-in-arms he hadn’t seen in a decade. Zach Walker had been one of the toughest of the tough. But ever since he returned home from war to his young family in a small logging town, he’d been struggling. Without a sense of purpose, plagued by PTSD, and masking his pain with heavy drinking, he needed help.
Zach and Eric started writing and talking nearly every day, as Eric set down his thoughts on what it takes to build resilience in our lives. Eric’s letters — drawing on both his own experience and wisdom from ancient and modern thinkers — are now gathered and edited into this timeless guidebook.
Greitens shows how we can build purpose, confront pain, practice compassion, develop a vocation, find a mentor, create happiness, and much more. Resilience is an inspiring meditation for the warrior in each of us.
“This book is a gift not only to Greitens’s comrades-in-arms, but to readers everywhere.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
4.6 stars on Amazon, 1,415 reviews
Publisher’s description on Amazon: These days it’s hard to count on the world outside. So it’s vital to grow strengths inside like grit, gratitude, and compassion—the key to resilience, and to lasting well-being in a changing world.
True resilience is much more than enduring terrible conditions. We need resilience every day to raise a family, work at a job, cope with stress, deal with health problems, navigate issues with others, heal from old pain, and simply keep on going.
With his trademark blend of neuroscience, mindfulness, and positive psychology, New York Times bestselling author Dr. Rick Hanson shows you how to develop twelve vital inner strengths hardwired into your own nervous system. Then no matter what life throws at you, you’ll be able to feel less stressed, pursue opportunities with confidence, and stay calm and centered in the face of adversity.
This practical guide is full of concrete suggestions, experiential practices, personal examples, and insights into the brain. It includes effective ways to interact with others and to repair and deepen important relationships.
Warm, encouraging, and down-to-earth, Dr. Hanson’s step-by-step approach is grounded in the science of positive neuroplasticity. He explains how to overcome the brain’s negativity bias, release painful thoughts and feelings, and replace them with self-compassion, self-worth, joy, and inner peace.
4.5 stars, 2,074 reviews
Publisher’s description on Amazon: In Do Hard Things, Steve Magness beautifully and persuasively reimagines our understanding of toughness. This is a must-read for parents and coaches and anyone else looking to prepare for life’s biggest challenges.”—Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers and Talking to Strangers and host of the Revisionist History podcast. From beloved performance expert, executive coach, and coauthor of Peak Performance Steve Magness comes a radical rethinking of how we perceive toughness and what it means to achieve our high ambitions in the face of hard things. Toughness has long been held as the key to overcoming a challenge and achieving greatness, whether it is on the sports field, at a boardroom, or at the dining room table. Yet, the prevailing model has promoted a mentality based on fear, false bravado, and hiding any sign of weakness. In other words, the old model of toughness has failed us. Steve Magness, a performance scientist who coaches Olympic athletes, rebuilds our broken model of resilience with one grounded in the latest science and psychology. In Do Hard Things, Magness teaches us how we can work with our body – how experiencing discomfort, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action can be the true indications of cultivating inner strength. He offers four core pillars to cultivate such resilience:
- Pillar 1: Ditch the Façade, Embrace Reality
- Pillar 2: Listen to Your Body
- Pillar 3: Respond, Instead of React
- Pillar 4: Transcend Discomfort
Smart and wise all at once, Magness flips the script on what it means to be resilient. Drawing from mindfulness, military case studies, sports psychology, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, he provides a roadmap for navigating life’s challenges and achieving high performance that makes us happier, more successful, and, ultimately, better people.
Additional Therapist-Recommended Resources for Resilience
