The new now: building resilience in a world where change is the only constant

 Mariana Norton dos Reis

Cuatrecasas, Lisbon

mariana.norton@cuatrecasas.com

Moderator: Mariana Norton dos Reis  Partner, Cuatrecasas, Lisbon

Keynote speaker: Elke Geraerts  Founder and CEO, Better Minds at Work, Antwerp

Elke Geraerts is the founder and CEO of Better Minds at Work, an international consulting company supporting organisations in their wellbeing, performance and leadership. She has a PhD in psychology and held academic positions at Harvard University, the University of St Andrews, Maastricht and Rotterdam. She is the author of several bestselling books, such as Better Minds: How Insourcing Strengthens Resilience and Empowers Your Brain and The Mental Reset: How hybrid work and life strengthen your resilience.

In this session, Elke Geraerts addressed the challenges of mental health in the current professional environment including law firms and elaborated about the keys ways in which we can strengthen our resilience and empower our brain. Geraerts underlined that there has never been such a high percentage of burnouts and that there is a massive trend of ‘quiet quitting’ in working environments. Geraerts called the attention to the so called ‘bwah de vivre’, or ‘languishing’ as the New York Times called it, being the dominant emotion in 2021 and the need for investing in mental capital to overcome the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI).

The session provided some insights on phenomenon like ‘infobesity’, ‘fomo’, loss of focus, ‘smombie’ and on the need to empower our authentic intelligence, for which the main drivers are focus and connection. Geraerts highlighted that there is no real multi-tasking and the switch cost effect is huge (25 minutes to get back to focus when one received a notification of a message). There is a creativity drain and loss of memory effect caused by the continuous switch tasking and lack of use of slow intelligence. Key points and actions consist of creating a culture of focus, making sure the team feels that the environment is safe and they are able to establish a connection. It is also important to allow people to learn from mistakes and give them tools to reach the right answers.  In summary, we learned that focus is the new intellectual property (IP) and connection is the new EQ (emotional intelligence).