“A remarkable, thorough, and important work, tackling the traumas and difficulties of modern times, and offering truly wise and empirically proven remedies for the individual and for our society.” —Jack Kornfield, Ph.D., author of A Path With Heart

ELIZABETH STANLEY

Georgetown University professor, U.S. Army veteran, and resilience expert
Author of Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive during Stress and Recover from Trauma

ELIZABETH STANLEY

TOPICS

TYPE

TED TALKS

Speech topics

Books

Online Training Course

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Elizabeth A. Stanley, Ph.D. is a professor of security studies at Georgetown University. She speaks, teaches, and writes about resilience, political psychology, civil-military relations, technology and security, and international security. Exclusively represented by BrightSight Speakers, she speaks, teaches, and writes about resilience, political psychology, civil-military relations, technology and security, and international security. She’s the author of Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma and Paths to Peace, which won the 2009 Furniss Award for “an exceptional contribution to the field of national and international security.” She’s also the co-editor of Creating Military Power.

After her own healing journey from chronic stress and trauma—during which she lost her eyesight temporarily—Liz developed an evidence-based approach to resilience called Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT)®. She collaborated with neuroscientists to test MMFT’s efficacy among troops preparing for combat deployment. MMFT research has been featured on 60 Minutes, ABC Evening News, NPR, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, and many other media outlets. Liz has taught these tools to thousands in high-stress environments, including corporate leaders, first-responders, healthcare workers, diplomats, military service-members, and members of Congress. She has also partnered with Sounds True to create an online version of the MMFT course.

Earlier in her career, she served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in South Korea, Germany, and on two peacekeeping deployments to the Balkans. Her research has been supported by many funders, including the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and Woodrow Wilson Center.

A long-standing practitioner of mindfulness practices—including months-long silent practice in the United States and Burma—she’s also a certified practitioner of Somatic Experiencing®, a body-based trauma therapy. She holds degrees from Yale, Harvard, and MIT.

ELIZABETH'S PRESS KIT

Speech topics

Rethinking Resilience: A Science-Based Approach for Thriving Under Pressure

Leaders and teams today face relentless uncertainty — yet most professional development ignores the root cause of poor decision-making, reactive conflict, and burnout: mind-body dysregulation. This talk introduces a battlefield-tested approach to embodied resilience, grounded in neuroscience and proven in some of the most demanding environments in the world. Audiences leave with a clear framework and practical tools for staying regulated, accessing choice, and leading wisely under pressure.

Resilient Leadership through Crisis, Chaos, and Change

Nearly three in four U.S. employees face moderate to very high stress at work, and workforce burnout has reached a seven-year high. Yet most leadership development misses the fundamental driver of organizational culture — the state of the leader’s own mind and body. This session offers senior leaders and executives a science-grounded understanding of how their mind-body state shapes the people around them — and a roadmap for building the resilience, adaptability, and psychological safety their organizations need to thrive during disruption.

Reclaiming Our Human Comparative Advantage in the Age of AI

Most senior leaders have made their bet on AI — yet the faster they accelerate adoption, the wider the gap grows between their strategic confidence and their people's capacity to follow. This session reframes the AI transition not as a threat to be managed, but as an invitation to reclaim the capacities no algorithm can replicate, including attentional depth, self-regulation, embodied judgment, emotional attunement, ethical discernment, creativity, and the relational intelligence that makes organizations genuinely adaptive. Senior leaders and their teams leave with a clear understanding of why these capacities atrophied, what it takes neurobiologically to rebuild them, and how to invest in concrete practices to cultivate the regulated, fully-resourced human leadership that the AI era demands.

Specialized Topics

What Your Emotions Are Trying to Tell You — And What Happens to Your Decisions When You Listen
Wired for Connection: The Neuroscience of Conflict and Cooperation
Beyond Bad Apples: A New Framework for Ethical Leadership and Moral Resilience
The Biology of Belonging: How Our Mind-Body State Drives Polarization — and Can Restore Community

WORKSHOP: Embodied Resilience: An Introduction to Mind Fitness Training

Most organizations treat performance as a cognitive challenge — solved by better thinking, harder effort, and more information. But that approach neglects the mind-body biology that determines whether those inputs will actually work. After all, when people are chronically pushed beyond their capacity to recover, they lose access to precisely the capacities organizations need most. This workshop takes a fundamentally different approach — one grounded in the body's own intelligence and the neuroscience of stress, trauma, and resilience. It draws on concepts and skills from Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT)®, Liz’s research-backed program validated with U.S. combat troops, Ukrainians during the current war, and other high-demand populations worldwide. Participants learn to widen their window of tolerance to stress arousal — building the inner resources to think clearly, connect authentically, and lead effectively under pressure. When an entire organization trains together, something beyond individual skill-building becomes possible: a shared language and collective framework that can shift the organization's culture and climate. Participants leave with practical mind fitness tools they can use immediately; the guided audio support to establish a lasting daily practice; and the embodied resilience to meet whatever comes next.

WORKSHOP: Leading from Multiple Futures: Building Adaptive Capacity in an Age of Uncertainty

Most organizations approach an uncertain future the same way they approach every other strategic challenge: by investing more in prediction, prevention, and control. But the future cannot be predicted — and strategies built on false certainty fail precisely when the stakes are highest. This workshop flips the approach: rather than working forward from today's assumptions, it works backward from multiple possible futures to stress-test current strategies, surface hidden assumptions, and identify the adaptive capacities your organization needs regardless of which future arrives. Even the best scenarios fail when leaders default to certainty under pressure. That is why this workshop integrates embodied resilience practices — building the genuine capacity to hold complexity and act decisively when the future is unknowable. Participants leave with both concrete strategic deliverables and the durable inner resources to use them.

WORKSHOP: Resilient Leadership: Tuning the Instrument You Lead With

Most organizations treat leadership burnout as a workload problem — and most solutions address the symptoms while leaving the source untouched. Research consistently points to something more fundamental: When leaders are stressed, dysregulated, and depleted, that inner state radiates outward, shaping the conditions for everyone around them — often invisibly and without anyone intending it. The leader is, in effect, the organization's most consequential and most overlooked performance instrument. This workshop gives leaders both the science and the embodied experience to understand and tune that instrument — shifting not just their own capacity, but the climate of their entire organization. Through evidence-based instruction, guided mind-body practice, and structured reflection, leaders develop three core skill areas: real-time stress regulation, stress and emotion contagion literacy, and — in extended formats — resilient planning. Participants leave with a science-based understanding of what drives today's burnout crisis, practical tools they can use immediately, and a sustainable personal practice for long after the workshop ends.

Books

Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma

A pioneering researcher gives us a new understanding of stress and trauma, as well as the tools to heal and thrive. With stories from the men and women she’s trained, as well as her own striking experiences with stress and trauma, Liz gives readers hands-on strategies they can use themselves.

Paths to Peace: Domestic Coalition Shifts, War Termination and the Korean War

Why are wars are so difficult to end? This book develops a theory about the domestic obstacles to making peace—and tests it in an in-depth analysis of the ending of the Korean War.

Online Training Course

Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training

Join Liz for the online MMFT course with Sounds True to:

Build your resilience, by recovering from prior stress and healing from trauma
Improve your decision-making and ability to access choice during challenges
Create more effective relationships, especially during stress and conflict

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