Hi everyone. I'm very excited to bring Rich Fernandez into the Mindfulness.com family. Rich is one of the pioneers of bringing mindfulness into many of the world's largest companies, including Facebook, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ford, and Google. He's currently the CEO of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, which is an organization developed inside Google that offers mindfulness solutions to leaders around the world. He was previously the director of executive education at Google, head of learning and organizational development at eBay and is trained as an organizational psychologist from Columbia University.

So he has deep expertise in the science of cognitive psychology and human performance. So Rich, it's, it's really exciting to have you here and I'd love for you to give people a sneak peek inside your journey and the content you've created for us. Perhaps just for sharing, some of your personal journey and how you came to the habits of high-performance and, and this particular topic that you'll be sharing with us in Mindfulness.com. Great. Thanks so much, Cory.

It's great to be here with you and with everyone who's listening. So hello everyone. As Cory mentioned, really, I was trained as a psychologist and what was interesting for me was that when I entered into that field of mental health and psychology I entered kind of through a clinical arena where it was a lot about fixing what was wrong. But when I got to grad school, I sort of realized there's this whole other branch that's about potentiating one's strengths. And that is where I kind of put my focus.

It had a lot to do with things like positive psychology, cognitive psychology, and human performance science. And that led me really into this arena of organizational development, organization and leadership development, really, to help people work on those attributes that they already possessed that really needed some potentiating. That's essentially how I got into the science of high performance. On the personal side, you know, I'm a mindfulness practitioner. I was a martial arts practitioner for many years.

Basketball player. So I was always really interested in the things that allowed us to kind of go to the next level in terms of both our performance, not just kind of on the field or on the the practice floor, but also cognitively, also emotionally the factors that lead us to thrive. So when I got to work inside of organizations, some of those influential organizations, I started out for 10 years in financial services, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, then as Cory, you outlined eBay and Google, that was a perpetual question. How to kind of navigate those complex environments and the demands in those kinds of high-performance environments? How to effectively navigate those as a person and as a leader. This was also very much a personal journey, right? I had a young child at the time.

And I was trying to build a career in these high performance kind of organizations. And so the question around what are some of the habits around high-performance became a deeply personal one. And I had the fortune of also working on that in my professional life. Maybe the last thing I'll say is no surprise. I've been a big mindfulness practitioner my whole adult life, and no surprise, many of these habits of high-performance really are rooted in the practices that we commonly call mindfulness.

So I was thrilled, I am thrilled to be able to offer this, you know, here on Mindfulness.com, to dive a little bit deeper into those habits. Yeah, that synergy is particularly interesting to me and I'm excited to dive into that. You know, when you consider the current cultural contexts and where people are at right now, what they might be navigating is, is there anything that feels particularly relevant about what you'll, the teachings that you'll be offering here, or it excites you about how it can really serve folks for, for where they are, where they're at right now? Yeah, absolutely. I think the current context we live in, contemporary culture, tech heavy culture is a unique moment in which these types of habits can be particularly useful. And the reason for that are two primary reasons I see.

Almost everyone I know is seeing the complexity in their lives increasing. Hmm. Right? And this can simply be the inbox you have to work through every day or the amount of content you have to navigate every day. I mean, there's some study out there that suggested we look at our screens, our phone, well over a hundred times a day, a hundred unique times. But probably it's way more than that.

Yeah. And this is kind of a bit of an overload. It's like they say, drinking from a fire hose. Hmm. Right? Where we, our lives are increasingly complex, if not in structure, at least in terms of the content that is flying at us and that we're needing to consume.

Within that, we have to navigate and make good decisions and find ways to thrive amidst this flood of sort of information and demands. I also think that life is pretty demanding wherever you find yourself. Most people would agree that the demands in their life are also increasing as well as the complexity. So with demands increasing complexity increasing, it's even more important than ever to be able to distinguish, as they say, the signal from the noise, to understand what's really important when everything feels so urgent. Right? There's that old expression that the urgent and the important versus the important, what's urgent, what's important.

Everything feels urgent, but some things are more important than others. And so being able to distinguish between those things, I think, is essential. And I think again, mindfulness practices and habits around being able to distinguish these important things allow for us to be our best and to perform our best. So that's what I've tried to do, you know, in the sessions that I've offered is to really think about these in terms of habits that we can bring into our lives, habits that we can integrate to sustain high performance at work or in the world, or simply in our lives. That's great, Rich.

I'm really excited about it. Like I just feel the resonance with everything you're sharing and especially like the importance and the urgency and everything does feel urgent and it's like a constant practice to parse that. So, I'm just excited for people to get to experience this. And they get to experience it in a lot of different formats cause you've got a seven day course, micro-practices, Q and A's. Could you just speak to maybe how these different formats could be helpful? Absolutely.

So it's very intentional that we designed it in these different formats. So, you know, the seven day kind of courses are really designed for a deeper dive. A little bit more of like sharing concepts as well as tools. The micro-practices are things that I've tried to design it so that it can be done in about 30 seconds or less, that anyone can really integrate into the course of their busy life and work. And then the Q&A sessions is just a little bit more, kind of riffing on like why is this stuff important, how does it apply to everyday life? A little bit more informal in terms of the presentation rather than a course.

Between all those three, I think, my hope is that you'll find that these habits become very simple, clear, accessible so that you can easily implement them and integrate them into your life and work. Amazing. Yeah. Well, thank you, Rich. And thank you all for joining us.

Please go ahead, dive into Rich's courses, micro-practices, Q&As. There's a lot there and we really look forward to hearing how it impacts your life. Thanks so much. Thank you.