“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
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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 is an international-bestselling author, keynote speaker, workshop facilitator, resilience expert, and professor at Georgetown University. She shares a framework for human resilience forged not just in research laboratories, but in war zones, contemplative retreats, and her own hard-won journey through trauma and dysregulation. A former U.S. Army intelligence officer and Harvard-trained scholar, she has spent more than two decades translating cutting-edge neuroscience into practical tools that help leaders, organizations, and teams perform at their best—even under the most demanding conditions.
Liz's work is grounded in a single, paradigm-shifting insight: that most leadership failures, ethical breakdowns, poor decisions, and destructive conflicts share a common hidden root cause— dysregulation in the mind-body system. Her talks don't just explain why this happens. They give audiences the embodied skills to change it.
Known for her grounded presence, her ability to weave hard science with deeply human storytelling, and her rare credibility across military, academic, corporate, and contemplative worlds, Liz connects with audiences that few speakers can reach. Her unique journey— including a near-death experience while peacekeeping in Bosnia, her temporary loss of eyesight, and more than 25 years of contemplative practice in the United States and Myanmar—gives her framework a depth and authenticity that resonates long after the talk ends.
Drawing on this lived experience, Liz created Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT)®, a research-backed resilience training program taught worldwide to corporate executives, senior government leaders, military personnel, diplomats, humanitarian aid workers, and first responders—including in Ukraine during the current conflict. MMFT research is published in top-tier scientific journals and has been featured in the media, including on 60 Minutes, ABC Evening News, National Public Radio, and in Time and Forbes magazines.
Liz is the author of the international-bestselling Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive during Stress and Recover from Trauma and the award-winning Paths to Peace, about ending intractable wars. She holds a PhD from Harvard, an MBA from MIT Sloan School, and a BA from Yale, and has been a professor at Georgetown University since 2000. She is also a certified practitioner of Somatic Experiencing, a body-based trauma therapy. Earlier in her career, she served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in South Korea, Germany, and on two peacekeeping deployments in the Balkans.
Speech topics
Speech topics
Rethinking Resilience: A Science-Based Approach for Thriving Under Pressure
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Online Training Course
Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training
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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Request booking info
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