Resilience First Aid continues to grow through the work of passionate instructors who bring the program to life in their own communities, workplaces, and professional networks. As part of this growth, we’re excited to introduce Luke Evans as a new RFA Master Trainer.
Luke brings nearly 20 years’ experience across people, culture, leadership, and employee wellbeing, with a global perspective shaped by work across Australia, New Zealand, the UAE, and beyond.
His work sits at the intersection of workplace culture, resilience, and practical human capability. Through his Belief, Biology, Behaviour lens, Luke helps individuals and organisations understand how internal systems shape the way people think, feel, connect, and perform. It’s an approach that aligns strongly with Resilience First Aid, where the goal is not only to build awareness of mental health, but to give people the confidence and tools to support themselves and others earlier.
In this interview, Luke shares the path that led him into resilience training, how RFA fits with his broader work in culture and wellbeing, and why he believes workplaces need to move from mental health awareness to practical capability. He also reflects on what becoming an RFA Master Trainer means to him, and how he hopes to support other instructors as the program continues to grow.
Q&A With Luke Evans
Q. Tell us a bit about your background and the path that led you into resilience, culture, and mental health training.
My work and travels have taken me all over the world, from when I first left Australia at 19 to live and work in the UK, to volunteering in Nepal at 21 and South Africa at 23, through to living and working in the Middle East from 25. Plus, the 47 other countries I have been lucky to travel to in my time. And I have always been in or around the people and culture space during my career, spanning many different work and country cultures. But it was when I was with Virgin Australia Group that I started to focus on culture and employee experience as my job, rather than just as a leader of a team, and how we can build purpose-led cultures to do business for good. This is what took me down my pathway of workplace culture.
From there, I spent a good part of the next decade doing exactly that. After Virgin, I had my own consultancies where we took those same methodologies and supported businesses all around Australia, New Zealand and the UAE to build cultures that mattered. What I found emerging, though, was a constant question people were trying to solve: how do we fix wellbeing at work? So, using my same culture methods, I sat with that problem, and when I was in the UAE for the second time, I deepened in this question. What I found is that wellbeing isn’t the issue, it’s the outcome. And so, in short, I needed to help create a culture of wellbeing. Resilience training was the obvious choice to do this.
Q. Your work often sits at the intersection of resilience and workplace culture. How do you see those two areas connecting?
For me, culture is simple; it is behaviour repeated. And so, when I have helped to build cultures, I always looked at it as behaviour driven by belief. But there was this middle ground we were all ignoring. And that was the system; the biology. So, in my work I focus on three lenses that overlap: belief, biology and behaviour. And resilience lives in biology. It is understanding the mechanics of the system (biology) delivering that outcome (behaviour). Whether it is the individual or a business, we all operate from these three lenses. If we can build the right type of purpose and values (belief) and deliver it through a healthy system (individual or collective biology), we will see outcomes (behaviour) that are aligned.
Q. What first drew you to Resilience First Aid, and how did it fit with the kind of work you were already doing through Emotive Work?
In 2023, I moved back to the UAE for the second time, to head up culture and experience for a group of companies with a twofold mandate: help the group to develop their internal culture and see if we could turn the free wellbeing program they offered into a stand-alone, paid wellbeing business. During that time, I really deepened my knowledge in the world of wellbeing and developed a brand that would help to solve this challenge in the workplace. However, three years prior to this, my eldest brother had been diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer, and so this was always in the background. At the start of 2024, after being in the UAE for nearly a year, I had a feeling something was shifting for him and headed back to Australia to be closer again. Less than two months later, my brother passed. This has a really sobering way of making you review what is important in life.
A few months after coming out the other side of that challenge, I found myself in Australia, lost and wondering what matters to me and the work I do. I had my business, but I felt like focusing on culture alone was no longer effective. People were not in the room mentally or emotionally. They were fatigued, dysregulated, overwhelmed. So I went back to the same question: how do I help solve the “problem” of wellbeing? And that is what led me to resilience. I had been developing my own program, focused on building resilient and relational cultures, and wanted a mentor to help me in the resilience space. After searching through the existing programs, I found Driven and reached out to Jurie to talk about resilience and see what I could learn. And what I found was a program that didn’t need replicating!
Q. You often talk about helping people and teams “start within”. What does that mean in the context of Resilience First Aid?
When it comes to building resilience, workplace culture, or just individual development, it all starts within. None of my work is about trying to change the external. We have very limited control outside of ourselves, and so all my programs focus on this tagline as the starting point. Resilience First Aid aligns perfectly with this. To better support ourselves and others, we must understand what is happening within ourselves or within the collective. I always say to people in any of my work that it is not about who you are, it is just about where you are. So, I find the RFA program to be a great example of how you can start within, both individually and collectively, to help move the needle with mental health.
Q. You’ve been delivering RFA for several years now and consistently receive strong participant feedback. What do you think people respond to most in the training?
As a facilitator, I think our job is not just to be the smartest person in the room. Yes, we need to know the work inside out, as best we can, but our real job is to be deeply curious with the stories of those who are in the room. A lot of my style in presenting is focused on how I can create a safe and engaging environment where people feel comfortable to express and explore, but also one where my focus is to understand them well enough, in a short space of time, to connect them with the work as best as I can. I believe that it doesn’t matter how smart I sound, or how great the data is, if I can’t turn that into something meaningful for the participant and their world, then I haven’t done my job effectively.
The clearest test of this is the range of rooms I walk into. As an example, during a busy stretch last October and November, in the space of four or five weeks, I delivered RFA and tailored resilience workshops to:
- 20 quarry leaders
- 120+ people from a superannuation company
- 8 farm hands
- 5 aged care senior leaders
- 100+ insurance leaders
- 150+ university students studying Engineering, Architecture and IT
None of those rooms are the same, except for the one thing that matters: humans at the heart, all with similar needs and experiences. So the work is about delivering the program in a language people can understand. And that, more than anything, is what people respond to. The feeling that this is for them, in their world, and that they can apply it right away.
Q. RFA is built around practical, proactive support conversations. Why do you think moving from awareness to capability is so important in workplaces today?
For the most part, especially in the context of modern Australian workplaces, I think people are certainly far more aware when it comes to the focus on mental health than we have ever been. We have done a brilliant job of building awareness over the last decade, and we see that in the way people speak and support many mental health initiatives. But awareness only goes so far. I can be aware, but that doesn’t make me confident or feel capable to do anything about it. This is why I love the work we do in RFA. We build capability by deepening people’s understanding of what is happening and then we build confidence by equipping people with the tools to do something about it.
Practical, pragmatic, real. That is what people want. I call it closing the know-do gap. We live in a world overwhelmed with information. But moving from the ‘know’ to the ‘do’ is about understanding the ‘how’, and that is what really matters to people in this work. Not just the data or the definitions, but the tools and strategies.
Q. What does becoming an RFA Master Trainer mean to you, and how would you like to support other RFA Instructors as the program continues to grow?
I’ll be honest, I was surprised when it was first mentioned to me, mostly because I would only track participant outcomes per workshop, for feedback and experience, rather than across the board. So, to be asked to be part of this program based on those participant outcomes is humbling and means a lot to know that the work has been having an impact beyond what I see in the room.
In terms of supporting other trainers, I have already had a few newly accredited trainers join my public courses to gain their accreditation or reach out for support afterwards. I am all about a collaborative approach, so I would love to work alongside others to build their confidence or deepen their understanding of the work, based on my own experience. I always learn something in that process too, so it is a win-win. Beyond that, I would love to be part of the wider conversation about how we keep developing the program, finding ways to build consistency of experience while still letting everyone deliver in their own style.
Q. What do you hope RFA can continue to achieve for workplaces, leaders, teams, and communities?
I would love to see RFA become the primary mental health program for workplaces and teams. The biggest challenge right now is getting people to understand its impact. Many businesses have done Mental Health First Aid (MHFA), which is a brilliant program, but it is built for crisis intervention, something that, thankfully, most people don’t have to use often. So, whilst they are equipped for the crisis, the everyday still goes unmet. They are educated on mental health topics, but they aren’t necessarily equipped for the next day. That is the gap Resilience First Aid fills, in a direct, clear and tangible way, helping people work, connect and support each other better.
My personal hope for RFA is that it can continue to help people to understand that what they think, what they feel, and what they experience (belief, biology, behaviour) are both unique to them, and part of the shared human experience. And the more we know ourselves, and therefore each other, the more we can act from a place of greater curiosity, care and compassion.
Luke’s approach to Resilience First Aid reflects what the program is designed to create: practical skills, shared language, and the confidence to support people before challenges escalate. His facilitation is grounded, relatable, and focused on helping participants connect the material to their own world, whether that’s a leadership team, a workplace, a community group, or a public workshop.
As RFA continues to expand, Master Trainers like Luke play an important role in strengthening the quality, consistency, and impact of the program. They help ensure that more people can experience training that is not only evidence-based, but also deeply human, practical, and immediately useful.
Through his upcoming workshops, Luke is helping more people and organisations build the capability to recognise stress earlier, hold supportive conversations, and create cultures of greater care, curiosity, and compassion.
Luke’s upcoming Resilience First Aid and other workshops are listed on his Driven profile, including live virtual and in-person options. View his profile to explore dates, register for a course, or contact him directly.
