What makes some people resilient, and others not? How can we build resilience? And how can we make psychology scalable?

Prof. Danny Hamiel is a clinical psychologist by trade and a researcher. Danny's bigger picture is to promote well-being on a larger scale. He is the head of the Cognitive-Behavioral unit in the Tel-Aviv university mental health center and is the director of the unit for school interventions at the Cohen-Harris Center for Resilience, which has been chosen by the Israeli Ministry of Education as the national program for school interventions to promote resilience and help children deal with daily stressors and to cope with trauma. These programs are especially important in cities that are at high risk for mass disasters.

Danny has devoted his life to developing programs and interventions that promote well-being in the community and that are scaleable, and we speak about how he thinks we can apply the insights of psychology in a way that improves many people's lives rather than just a few. We spoke about CBT, which is a more modern approach to psychotherapy, and what he thinks makes third-wave CBT the way to go. Danny really opened my eyes in this conversation to the strengths of CBT and the amazing changes it can help people make, in a relatively short time frame, by putting most of the focus on the here-and-now.