Dr. Rich Fernandez on Mindfulness in High-Performance Workplaces
My work carrying mindfulness and well-being practices into the workplace goes back seven or eight years. That path led, roughly two years ago, to a bigger decision. At the time I was teaching mindfulness and emotional intelligence programs at Google, helping bring them to a large number of employees and figuring out how to grow them across the company. What I kept noticing was that plenty of other organizations could get real value from the same tools and practices, and the field itself was still so young that an opening existed to carry this content outward.
So I co-founded Wisdom Labs. The focus there is the science and the data sitting underneath mindfulness and resilience, and then getting that research into the hands of organizations. That is the thread that brings me to this conference, and I'm glad to be part of it.
Erik asked what the environments I'd worked in actually felt like: Google, eBay, JP Morgan Chase. People tend to picture them as tough, high pressure, stressful places to walk into.
All of that is accurate. These are high-performance cultures, and what they prize is the ability to keep delivering at a very high level, steadily, year after year. Layer onto that the sheer speed of some of these companies. My last decade or so has been in technology, and specifically the Internet, which is an industry that moves unusually fast.
The complexity compounds it. There are countless dependencies, some from the competitive pressures of the market, others from the plain reality of what it takes to bring a product or technology to scale. The result is exactly the kind of pressurized setting Erik described. People inside it carry a real amount of stress, though many of them also feed off it as fuel.
That makes for an unusual place to work: a culture where stress is simply the baseline. It isn't automatically a problem. What matters is learning to handle it with some skill, or, to be more precise, learning to navigate it, because you are never going to manage it away entirely. Stress will stay normal in that environment, and getting good at moving through it is the thing that counts.