Dr. Rich Fernandez on Mindfulness, Resilience, and Well-Being at Work

I only touched on a handful of them, but mindfulness, resilience, and well-being practices are going to take up more room in the life of organizations as time goes on. My sense is that they won't just grow more common. They'll move from being a nice extra to being something companies can't do without. A solid benefits package or a retirement plan already does that work: it helps people feel secure, cared for, and willing to give their effort. As the conditions we work under keep tightening, with the pressure, the constant connectivity, and the sheer level of demand, paying attention to these practices starts to look like the same kind of basic requirement.

Companies that want to stay in the game, and that want to attract the sharpest people, will find they can't skip this. I'll end with one thing that captures it pretty cleanly. During my time at Google, the people function I worked in held to a particular idea, and it's still there, more as something to reach for than something fully arrived at: to build the happiest, healthiest, and most productive workforce on the planet. Happiest, healthiest, most productive. The logic runs in order. You don't reach the third one, the most productive, without first having the first two in place. Optimizing for performance, for output, for new ideas, turns out to be the same thing as optimizing for mindfulness, resilience, and well-being.

Erik closed the conversation by thanking Dr. Rich Fernandez for joining A Psychology Of The Future, noting that people would get a chance to learn about his work and that perhaps a client or two might come out of the conference. He said he'd follow up after the call to check in. Rich thanked him back, said it was a pleasure, and signed off.