Mario Alonso Puig: Personal wellbeing, challenges of studying and working from home

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
Welcome to the EnlightED Podcasts, the worldwide conference that focuses on the challenges of education in the new world. Driven by Fundación Telefónica, IE University and South Summit, it gathers leading experts in education, technology, and innovation.
Whether at school, university, work, or in our own home, what can we do as individuals, as a collective, or as a society to be better and happier? Five experts in training from very different fields, including the doctor specializing in neuroscience and positive psychology, Mario Alonso Puig, provide us with specific recipes for growth in the face of uncertainty and adversity in a highly inspiring talk.

**Lucía** (0:56)
I am here in the Telefónica Foundation space with two renowned experts in human behavior, I would say, beyond just how we work and how we live in this new normality. I am accompanied to my right by Mario Alonso Puig, doctor, doctor in medicine, surgeon, with a long career as a surgeon, and then he started to travel to the depths of human behavior, and working hard and investigating how we human beings respond to times of uncertainty, challenges, changes. It doesn't sound right, right?
And to my left, I have Rory Simpson, Director of Telefónica University, Director of Learning in Telefónica, where I also work, as Marta has told us, we work in the corporate university, it's the center of humanism and the soft skills in Telefónica. We work with the company leaders and the whole company, as we. Will see later. And it has an extensive experience in adult learning, the executive education, both from the business school world, where I worked for many years, and from the corporate world, from Telefónica and other companies. And also, since several years ago, just like Mario made his journey from the exercise of medicine, he made his journey from the teaching aspect to the well-being of the person, the well-being of the human being in the environment of the organizations and how we can enhance it and make it bigger. So, here we are ready to have an interesting dialogue about how to work for that well-being of the person in this new normality. The topic of the table was about working, studying from home, but I think we can take it further.
It's a mixed world that maybe we are not so used to and we have to learn to navigate it. We were saying that maybe we are going to take off our masks because we are in a safe environment, we are far away and we have space. So if you think so, we can take off our masks. And I would like to start by giving way first to Mario, to tell us, from the trip, what you have done, from medicine, the exercise of medicine, to that study of human behaviour and the response of the human being in the face of changes, uncertainty. What is your general vision about the subject that we are dealing with today?

**Mario Alonso Puig** (3:44)
Well, good afternoon to all. It is an honour to be in this space, in EnlightED. Good morning, good evening, also to our friends, brothers from other countries that are here today, equally present for us. And when we talk about topics like new ways of working, if we are talking about telework, I think we have to expand our vision. It is a new way of living. The human being has an extraordinary attachment to that world, which is a familiar world and which is called, in a confusing way, a comfort zone. The comfort zone is not necessarily comfortable. The comfort zone simply marks a familiar environment, that is, something known.
And truly, although the human brain is perfectly prepared to face the challenges, the changes, the uncertainty, the volatility, the complexity, all that, the human mind, due to a series of conditions, is not at all comfortable with the changes. So, the situation we are living in today transcends the labor world and reaches the relational and vital world So, what we need to do is to discover what we can do to navigate this storm with serenity, enthusiasm and confidence.
Maintaining serenity, illusion and confidence seems to be something deeply counterintuitive. Once, a media outlet said to me, with this reality, what are we going to dream?
As I said, it doesn't make any sense to dream anything. I think it's more beautiful and useful to ask another question. What kind of dream do we have to dream precisely to transform this reality?
First, that when he goes through a moment of uncertainty, a complex moment that he cannot control, that is experienced as suffering.
There is a very well-known syndrome since the Vietnam War, the post-traumatic stress syndrome, that occurs relatively frequently in people who have experienced critical situations. There, for example, a war conflict has also occurred in people trapped in cars after accidents, after earthquakes, etc. And one of the things that caught our attention is that a percentage of people, nothing insignificant, despite having gone through similar horrors, after that, as human beings, had grown. And this concept that was not valued, was not considered as a possibility, it started to attract attention. It's what is called post-traumatic growth, growth after a difficult situation. Obviously, what we are all living is quite traumatic, not only because of human loss of lives, not only because of the disease itself, although people recover, but also because of economic losses, because of people who see their companies, who have created them with so much affection, with so much commitment, with so much effort, because they start a process of fall, that they don't know how to stop. It's a truly traumatic moment. And trying to deny that reality is like denying that we are in this space and pretending that we are in another. We are in a reality. In this case, the space is pleasant. The space, however, the context in which we live, is a difficult context. So, this is where we have to launch a concept called resilience. It's a strange word, in English it's resilience, that is, it's more or less the same.