Turia Pitt

Turia Pitt approaches recovery the way she was trained to approach a mine plan, which is the reason her resilience material is more specific than most.

She completed a Bachelor of Engineering in mining and a Bachelor of Science at the University of New South Wales in 2010 and was working as a mining engineer when, on 2 September 2011, she was caught in a grassfire while competing in a 100-kilometer ultramarathon in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. She suffered full-thickness burns to sixty-five percent of her body, lost all the fingers on her right hand and two on her left, spent a month in an induced coma and six months in hospital, and underwent more than two hundred operations. For two years afterward she wore a full-body compression suit and mask, removed for one hour a day.

What she did next is the material. In 2014 she walked the Great Wall of China, in 2015 the Inca Trail, in 2016 the Kokoda Track, and in May 2016 she finished Ironman Australia, then in October the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii, in fourteen hours and thirty-seven minutes. None of it is presented as triumph. It is presented as a sequence of decisions and training blocks, each broken down into what was actually done, which is what an engineer would do and what most resilience speakers do not.

She has written three bestselling books, Everything to Live For, Unmasked and Happy (and Other Ridiculous Aspirations), coached more than forty thousand people through her digital courses, hosts a podcast, and is an ambassador for Interplast Australia and New Zealand, which provides reconstructive surgery in the Asia Pacific region.

She is based in Australia and speaks internationally, in person and virtually, and the travel question is answered below. She suits corporate audiences facing sustained pressure rather than a single crisis, and her sessions are most often booked for leadership conferences, sales meetings and organizations in the middle of a long, hard change.