Guest columnist –Daniela Israel

On a rainy afternoon in São Paulo, I found myself inside Vibra São Paulo among thousands of people who, for one day, chose to stop running and start listening.
The event? Mind Summit 2025, a gathering that brought together professionals from different fields to reflect on human potential and mental health in the future of work. It proved that business, science, and soul can, and indeed must, share the same stage. A collective invitation to pause: to think, to feel, and to imagine.
The day began with an unusual energy for a corporate event. Conductor Guilhermo Santiago led the audience through an unexpected musical experience. He invited us to create music from nothing but recycled materials, our hands, our breath, and our courage. All of us discovered rhythm in cut plastic bottles and pencils, and harmony in our own laughter. Santiago reminded us that “encantar,” to enchant, comes from “cantar para dentro”, to sing inward. And for a few minutes, the conference became a symphony of humanity rediscovering its inner melody.
If leadership, innovation, and mental health share a secret, it is this: we are all instruments, and without pauses, without silence, there can be no music.
Santiago’s participatory orchestra reminded me that creativity and collaboration arise precisely in those intervals, in the spaces where we dare to listen.
From there, the conversation turned to the future of work, a future that, ironically, we are struggling to imagine. As one speaker asked: What happens to our mental health when we can no longer picture our own lives five years from now?
Anxiety, it seems, flourishes exactly where imagination dies. The anguish of living at the mercy of the unpredictable is real and, as experts reminded us, human biology has not yet adapted to the 21st century. Our primitive mechanisms of defense and social comparison are triggered constantly, amplified by social networks and information overload. Creativity and innovation, so essential to our modern times, cannot bloom in a body stuck in constant alert.
Adam Grant reinforced that leading transformation in this era requires intellectual humility: the ability to watch the world evolve and evolve with it. Yesterday’s best practices can become tomorrow’s worst habits in the blink of an eye.
Michelle Schneider summarized the essential skills of the future in four pillars: an innovative mind, technological literacy, emotional intelligence, and mental health.
And Jan Emmanuel De Neve, from Oxford University, presented consistent data showing that well-being and economic results are causally linked: happier companies are also more productive and more profitable. He defended well-being as a competitive advantage and reminded us that although most organizations acknowledge its importance, few truly prioritize it through tangible daily actions.
Professor Amy Edmondson, from Harvard, added an essential layer to the discussion by speaking about psychological safety. Creating safe environments, she said, is not about making everything comfortable but about cultivating spaces where people care enough to act with courage, to give and receive honest feedback, admit mistakes, ask for help, and learn from one another. Innovation, she showed, is born from this blend of trust and vulnerability, from a kind of harmony that only exists when each instrument allows itself to play fully.
And Tal Ben-Shahar, through his philosophy of positive psychology, echoed through every talk: happiness is not the absence of pain but the presence of purpose.
Perhaps that was exactly what Mind Summit 2025 reminded me of: that in an age of so much technology, what still sets us apart is imagination and affection, human gifts that no artificial intelligence can reach.
I left the event under the same rain that had greeted me in the morning, with the feeling that, to remain both relevant and healthy in this new era, we must relearn what Maestro Guilhermo taught us: to sing inward and turn the noise back into music.