Coaching Research Series - High Performance Resilience with Neuroscience. Thoughts for Coaches - Dr Etienne van der Walt

The current business ecosystem is rapidly paced. It is also riddled with a number of ‘pandemics’: The ‘Mental Pandemic’ is rife, causing steep increase of depression, anxiety, addictions and suicide. Burnout is now known as a medical syndrome and is affecting ever increasing numbers of employees and leaders globally. The ‘Great Resignation’ and increased staff turnover, demands a new way of thinking about the way we design our business ecosystems. And it requires a realignment of leadership mindsets to be human-centred, to build truly dynamic resilience capacities. Businesses are made up by and lead by biological organisms, humans with most profound capacity to conserve energy, to provide exponential yield for the energy we assign to tasks. This is the nature of the brain/body system. Great leadership gets this right. Upstream it drives high performance. Downstream it prevents brain/body system inflammation and promotes longevity and thriving. In short, building the dynamic capacity of human resilience in ourselves as leaders and our teams, sets us up for great business performance and gives us the best chance for a long and thriving life. Coaches who facilitate and support leaders to achieve sustainable business success, while thriving as individuals, as teams, as friends as family members and as a society as a whole, need to understand what clinical applied neuroscience has to teach self-leadership and leadership thinking.

In this webinar with specific focus on coaches, neurologist and CEO of Neurozone, Dr Etienne van der Walt will unpack the nature of true resilience and translate it for practical application in today’s world of business leadership coaching and then circle it back to individual optimization for high performance. In the process he will highlight the most important themes that underpins high performance resilience, always simplifying the complex from biological neuroscience to personal self-leadership application. Then Etienne will anchor the practical drivers of resilient, high performance such as sleep, exercise, nutrition, social safety, psychological safety, mindset, mindfulness and high performance energy for practical individual and team integration, equipping coaches to enable leaders to unlock the best version of themselves.

Etienne is an accomplished neurologist and an authority in applied behavioural neuroscience. Etienne’s 14-year career as a clinical neurologist means he has a deep understanding of the anatomy, biology, and physiology of the brain and the human nervous system. In more recent years, his professional and personal fascination with the remarkable discoveries coming from the various brain sciences has led him to believe in the vast potential of this new knowledge to enhance human capacity. The realization of this vision is the founding of Cape Town based Neurozone ®, a neuroscience business dedicated to the application of brain science, analytics and coaching to enhance human capacity.

At the heart of the business of Neurozone ® is a proprietary High Performance Code that informs leaders about the most current behavioural predictors for resilient and high performance ready individuals, teams and organizations. The Code draws on research from neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry etc. and its impact has been validated and is currently being used in various industries to enhance human capacity by focusing on the brain/body system. As a result, Etienne has developed a keen understanding of the neurobiological substrates, principles and insights that underpin team- and organizational performance. This knowledge enables Etienne to blend a variety of subjects into an integrated whole for practical application.

Etienne is the founder of AmazingBrainz™, an organization dedicated to the design of programs for the brain stimulation of young, developing children – especially in disadvantaged communities. Etienne worked as a neurologist in South Africa, the UK, and the Netherlands.

As an avid keynote speaker and masterclass teacher, Etienne engages with senior leaders, where individual, team and organizational resilience and optimizing human capacity takes centre stage.

In addition to his Medical and Clinical Neurology degrees, Etienne also holds BSc degrees in Chemistry, Mathematical Statistics as well as Integrated Physiology and Virology.