Dr. Rich Fernandez: Interview Archive

This conversation comes from A Psychology of the Future, an online summit put together by Erik Lenderman, who gathered voices from self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine to talk through the practical side of psychology. In this session, Erik hosts Dr. Rich Fernandez, a psychologist trained at Columbia who went on to lead Executive Education at Google and spent time inside organizations such as eBay and JP Morgan Chase. His work sits at the meeting point of cognitive psychology, human performance, and the way organizations are run. At the time of the interview he was president of Wisdom Labs, a company built around teaching mindfulness meditation to large organizations.

After a short welcome, Erik asks Rich to sketch out where he came from and how he ended up doing what he does now. Rich traces it back to a long-running personal fascination with how people grow and develop, which eventually pushed him toward formal training.

He earned his PhD in counseling psychology at Columbia in New York City. When he started, he pictured a career on the clinical side, and that matched his earlier experience: he had already spent time working in hospitals and mental health clinics. That was the world he assumed he would stay in.

Graduate school changed the picture. Almost right away he ran into a branch of the field he hadn't expected, which was psychology applied to the workplace. For people already working as organizational psychologists this is old news, but to Rich it was a genuine discovery, and it reshaped how he thought about the discipline.

The clinical side he knew well. As he describes it, that work leans toward remediation and some prevention, with a steady focus on pathology. It runs from serious conditions through the middle ground of neurosis and the ordinary, everyday troubles most people carry around.

Organizational psychology pointed somewhere else. What caught his attention was its interest in potentiation, in drawing out and building up what people are capable of rather than mainly repairing what has gone wrong. That shift, from fixing to developing, is what pulled him in and set the direction of the work he went on to do.