Founder of Resurgo Training Solutions | Certified Speaking Professional | Author | Adaptability & Resilience Expert | Executive Coach | Corporate Trainer | Team Builder | Leadership Developer
The year was 2001. Mark Black was 23 years old, living out of a hospital room in Toronto, one thousand miles from his mother, his siblings, and everything familiar. His father had relocated with him, the two of them waiting together in a city that wasn’t theirs, for an organ that might never come. Doctors had already told Mark what the alternative looked like: without a heart and double-lung transplant, he had less than a year. Six months of that year passed inside hospital walls. Then the call came.
Most people, having survived something like that once, would spend the rest of their lives talking about it. Mark Black spent the rest of his life proving it.
A Speaker Whose Credentials Are Written in Scar Tissue:
Mark Black is a Certified Speaking Professional, author, and the founder of Resurgo Training Solutions, based in Dieppe, New Brunswick. He has delivered more than 800 keynotes for organizations including Mercedes-Benz, ExxonMobil, and AstraZeneca, and he has done it while carrying a heart and lungs that were never originally his. When he stands on a stage and tells an overwhelmed leadership team that change is survivable, he is not speaking in metaphor.
From a Classroom That Never Quite Fit to a Stage That Did:
Mark’s path to that stage was not a straight line, but in hindsight, every step pointed in the same direction. He completed his undergraduate degree in English and Sociology at Mount Allison University in 2000, then added a Bachelor of Education from the University of New Brunswick the following year. Teaching was the plan. It made sense for someone who had spent years learning how to communicate under pressure, how to hold a room, how to make complicated things feel manageable.
But the transplant changed the timeline, and more than that, it changed the question Mark was trying to answer. He had survived something that most people only read about. He had sat with fear long enough to understand its actual anatomy. And he had come out the other side with something more useful than a story: he had a framework, built from lived experience, for how people actually get through the worst versions of the moments they were dreading.
He founded Resurgo Training Solutions in 2005. The name itself signals intent. Resurgo is Latin for “I rise again.” That was not branding. That was a mission statement.
In the years that followed, Mark built the business the way most speakers do: volume first, then refinement. But when his children were born, the calculus shifted. Being home mattered more than being booked. Rather than accept that trade-off as a loss, he restructured entirely, raising his fees and speaking less frequently at higher impact. The business didn’t shrink. It sharpened. He also moved away from one-on-one coaching toward group formats, recognizing that repeating the same advice to different clients one at a time was a ceiling, not a model. The group approach let him serve more people with more depth, without spreading the work thin.
Then, years after the first transplant, his body needed help again. This time, his brother stepped forward and donated a kidney. Mark received it, recovered, and returned to the stage. The speaking calendar, he has noted, never fully stopped.
Eight Hundred Keynotes and One Question That Never Changes:
The organizations that bring Mark Black in are not, as a rule, in crisis. They are in the middle of something harder than crisis: the prolonged, grinding uncertainty that doesn’t resolve cleanly, the kind that wears teams down slowly and makes even capable leaders second-guess their footing. Layoffs that haven’t been announced yet. Restructures that are coming but not confirmed. Industries shifting faster than strategy can keep up.
Mark has stood in front of those rooms more than 800 times. “Resilience is not an innate trait you are simply born with,” he tells them. “It is a collection of skills and mindsets that anyone can learn and practice.” That distinction matters more than it sounds. If resilience is something you either have or you don’t, then the conversation is over before it starts. If it’s something you build, then there is work to do, and work, for most executives, is a more comfortable place to stand than hope.
His framework, detailed in his book The Resilience Roadmap, moves through seven specific steps: Acknowledge, Agency, Accept, Adapt, Aspire, Act, and Assess. The sequence is deliberate. Acknowledgment comes first because denial, as Mark puts it plainly, prevents people from addressing what is actually in front of them. Agency comes second because without the belief that you can affect your own outcome, the remaining five steps are academic. The framework does not ask people to feel better. It asks them to move.
One example from his client work captures why this matters in practice. He was brought into an organization where layoffs were imminent but had not yet been announced. The entire team was operating in a state of high anxiety, aware that something was coming, unable to prepare for what they didn’t officially know. Mark delivered a presentation built around his own experience of waiting, of sitting with an outcome he could not control, and finding the specific actions that were still available to him. “My story of personal adversity offered perspective,” he says, “while the practical strategies gave them the confidence and frameworks needed to handle their future.” The organization rebooked. That is the metric that matters most in his business, and it is the one that has held across two decades.
He was elected Councillor at Large for the City of Dieppe in May 2026, adding civic leadership to a portfolio that already includes a past presidency of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers and a Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal. The throughline across all of it is the same: show up, do the work, assess what’s working, and adjust.
The Answer Was Never Complicated:
The executives who hire Mark Black are often looking for something sophisticated. A new model. A proprietary system. A framework complex enough to justify the budget line. What they tend to get is something that feels, on the surface, almost too simple: seven steps, clearly named, grounded in the understanding that resistance to change does not protect you from change. It only makes the change harder to survive.
Mark Black has survived harder things than most of the rooms he walks into. He survived them with someone else’s heart beating in his chest, with his father beside him in a hospital far from home, and with his brother’s kidney keeping him standing years later. He has earned the right to make it simple.
The question he keeps returning to, in boardrooms and on stages and in the work he does with leaders navigating their own versions of uncertainty, is not whether change is coming. It is whether you are building the capacity to meet it before it arrives.
Mark Black, CSP, is the founder of Resurgo Training Solutions and Councillor at Large for the City of Dieppe, based in Dieppe, New Brunswick. He works with organizations facing disruption, helping leaders and teams build the skills and mindsets to perform under pressure and come through stronger. To connect with Mark or learn more, visit www.markblack.ca or find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/iammarkblack/
