With growing interest in resilience among mental health care providers, there is a need for a simple way to think about the complex interactions that predict which children, youth and adults will do well despite the seriousness of the challenges they face. A focus on resilience helps us to understand individual adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies, as well as the social and physical ecologies that facilitate processes associated with resilience. Using case examples of young people and adults who have been exposed to high levels of adversity such as family violence, mental illness, natural disasters, forced migration, poverty, racism and other types of social marginalization and political conflict, Michael will show how we can ‘diagnose’ resilience and use that assessment to guide practice. He will show that by thinking about resilience, we are in a better position to design practical interventions that are sensitive to the individual, family, and community factors that influence wellbeing. Twelve factors common to successful coping under adversity and avoiding problems like depression, PTSD, and delinquency will be discussed. This presentation will also present tools that can be used in clinical practice to change people’s social and physical environments in ways that make resilience much more likely to occur.