Cornelia Cannon Holden
Cornelia Cannon Holden is the founder and CEO of Mindful Warrior where she oversees the strategic direction, culture, and global operations of the Sun Valley, Idaho–based performance coaching and culture design company. Since the company’s founding in 2004, Cornelia has spent nearly two decades collaborating with elite athletic coaches, forward-thinking executives, industry leaders, and pioneering educators to address leadership and team effectiveness. She brings an analytic rigor and a mindful presence to the complex problems facing her clients by coaching them to link behaviors to culture design and performance outcomes. Cornelia coaches and consults clients at all levels of an organization—from board members to first line leaders. Her work includes coaching in leadership development; workshops in diversity, equity and inclusion; advancing women and underrepresented minority leaders; and facilitating organizational change management. She leads behavior change initiatives inside organizations, which clients consistently describe as transformational. Cornelia is recognized for her expertise in equipping leaders to develop mindset and behavior changes required to effect lasting culture transformation, value creation, process adoption, and performance optimization.
Drawing on her extensive educational background and experience, Cornelia has worked with clients in a wide variety of industries including Olympic and U.S. national athletics; globally renowned boarding schools and universities; national not-for-profits; and top-10 tech and private wealth management firms. Applying the Mindful Warrior Culture Design model, Cornelia helps her clients to devise and deploy innovative business solutions as they build behavioral neuroscience-informed sustainable management systems. She has deep experience in advancing performance objectives and enhancing operational excellence at individual, team, and organizational levels.
Integrity and innovation are in Cornelia’s DNA—her work ethic is fueled by her visionary spirit. Cornelia grew up in her great-grandparents’ house in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She is inspired by her eponymous great-grandmother, Cornelia James Cannon, who was an author and social reformer and her great grandfather, Harvard Medical School Professor Walter Bradford Cannon, the visionary physician-researcher who coined the term “fight or flight response” and developed the concept of homeostasis. Cornelia credits her penchant for developing cutting-edge techniques that advance purpose-driven excellence to her forebears—a lineage of New England academics, doctors, and lawyers also celebrated for their athletic achievements.
Cornelia inherited a love of athletics and began ski racing when she was just six years old. She won a NCAA Division II giant slalom ski racing title but, at the age of 21, was gravely injured in a ski accident. Challenged by a coup, contrecoup traumatic brain injury, she spent the next decade studying and healing her central nervous system. Seeking an in-depth understanding of the intersection between the Eastern and Western wisdom traditions that supported her recovery, Cornelia earned a Master of Divinity degree from the Harvard Divinity School (HDS) in 2003. She complemented her theological studies at HDS with graduate courses at Harvard Business School (HBS). As an extension of her studies at HBS, Cornelia worked for a year at The Bridgespan Group, a subsidiary of Bain & Company, where she was introduced to management consulting. Her interdisciplinary education sparked Cornelia’s desire to create a model of performance excellence that integrates mindfulness, elite athletic training techniques, business acumen, and emotional-spiritual intelligence.
During her tenure with USA Hockey, the women’s national team achieved its first-ever world No. 1 ranking. After the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, and building on her work with the women’s national ice hockey team, Cornelia continued to develop leadership programs for emerging and established leaders. Cornelia is a certified NeuroTransformational Coach, and completed her training as a Co-Active Coach through the Co-Active Training Institute (CTI). She lives in Idaho with her family.
For more information on her more than twenty years of professional development, click here.