Dr. Rich Fernandez on Training the Brain for Resilience and Leadership
It can sound like one of those too-good-to-be-true promises. But a particular set of practices does appear to move the needle on resilience, well-being, and how people lead, and those practices are really a form of brain training. For a long time we didn't frame it that way. Performance and leadership development got discussed through skills and competencies: situational leadership, learning agility, and dozens of other models you could rattle off. The brain itself, the idea of optimizing it or training it, stayed mostly out of the conversation. That's a bit odd when you consider how readily we accept that physical well-being improves with exercise, even small amounts done now and then. Only recently have we started applying that same logic to the mind.
The practices grouped under mindfulness have been shown to support exactly these qualities. So part of what we do is put the evidence in front of people. We show them brain scans and the studies behind them, longitudinal work, correlational work, and other designs, all pointing to a connection between mindfulness and both personal and leadership effectiveness.
When Erik asked what the actual mental training looks like, Rich laid out three areas. The first is attention. You train the ability to focus and stay connected to the present, to whatever you're experiencing in a given moment as it unfolds. That can sound like a pile of buzzwords, but in practice it's concrete: you anchor all of your attention on a single object, often the breath, or you move attention through the body, settling on one region at a time.
The second area is open monitoring, which is really awareness training. Thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions keep pouring through the mind without pause. There's a surprising amount of noise between the ears. Learning to turn attention around and simply observe that stream is itself a skill, and for a lot of people it turns out to be revealing, even transformative.
The third step takes those first two somewhere relational. Attention and awareness practice connect you more deeply with your own experience; from there we carry it into how you relate to other people. That's where empathy and compassion training come in, extending the inner work outward into the interpersonal world.