GRACE under Pressure John Baldoni John Baldoni

Steve Almond is the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His essays and reviews have been published in venues ranging from the New York Times Magazine to Ploughshares to Poets & Writers, and his short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Mysteries, and Best American Erotica. Almond is the recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Steve cohosted the Dear Sugars podcast with his pal Cheryl Strayed for four years, and teaches Creative Writing at the Neiman Fellowship at Harvard and Wesleyan. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts, with his family and his anxiety.

One of Canada’s highest-rated clinical psychologists, Dr. Monica Vermani is a public speaker, teacher, and author in the field of mental health and wellness. In her private practice, Dr. Vermani provides a multi-faceted treatment approach in treating adolescents and adults suffering from trauma/abuse, mood, anxiety, substance addictions, and other related conditions and disorders, as well as family and couples therapy. She employs a dynamic range of techniques and evidence-based treatment modalities, including psychotherapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, (CBT), Mindfulness Meditation – Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)/Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Breath~Body~Mind (BBM), and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprogramming (EMDR).

Dr. Vermani’s Start Living Corporate Wellness programs were created out of her belief in the importance of good mental health in the workplace. Start Living Corporate Wellness programs support and facilitate individuals’ efforts to overcome the barriers that prevent them from living their best and most authentic life.
 
Dr. Vermani’s game-changing Start Living Corporate Wellness programs address the underlying mental health issues that impact individual employees and teams. Through a dynamic suite of psycho-education, training, and support, Start Living Corporate Wellness programs keep employees engaged, supported, happy, and whole.

Dr. Vermani believes that good mental health doesn’t just happen, that it deserves the same time, attention, understanding, and effort as our physical wellbeing. To that end, Dr. Vermani’s latest book, A Deeper Wellness, and its companion online A Deeper Wellness Life Lessons mental health program provide the tools to create a deep, authentic sense of wellness and wellbeing. Drawing from her 25 years of clinical practice, she takes readers through the same tried and true multi-disciplinary approach to treatment that has been successful in creating incremental, meaningful change for hundreds of patients and groups. Dr. Vermani has placed her expertise in media outlets including Parade, Vitamin Shoppe, CTV Northern Ontario, HIVE, Hamilton Today With Scott Thompson, and Radio-Canada, The Globe and Mail, Shondaland, HuffPost, and Well and Good. https://www.drmonicavermani.com

Ashley Goodall is a leadership expert who has spent his career exploring large organizations from the inside, most recently as an executive at Cisco. He is the co-author of Nine Lies About Work, which was selected as the best management book of 2019 by Strategy + Business and as one of Amazon’s best business and leadership books of 2019. Prior to Cisco, he spent fourteen years at Deloitte as a consultant and as the Chief Learning Officer for Leadership and Professional development. His newest book is “The Problem with Change.” www.ashleygoodall.com

Barbara Kellerman is a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. She was the Founding Executive Director of the Center, and a member of the Kennedy School faculty for over twenty years. Kellerman has held professorships at Fordham, Tufts, Fairleigh Dickinson, George Washington, Christopher Newport, and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. She also served as Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the University of Maryland.
Kellerman received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A. M.Phil., and Ph.D. (in Political Science) degrees from Yale University. She was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. At Uppsala (1996-97), she held the Fulbright Chair in American Studies. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is author and editor of many books. Kellerman has also appeared on media outlets such as CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, Reuters, and BBC, and has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Harvard Business Review.

JEFF WETZLER is co-CEO of Transcend, a nationally recognized innovation organization, and an expert in learning and human potential. Wetzler combines unique leadership experiences spanning more than 25 years in business and education, as a management consultant to the world’s top corporations, a learning facilitator for leaders around the world, and as Chief Learning Officer at Teach For America.  

Jeff earned a Doctorate in Adult Learning and Leadership from Columbia University and a bachelor’s in psychology from Brown University. Based in New York, he is a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network and is an Edmund Hillary Fellow. His newest book is ASK: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs in Leadership and Life.  https://www.askapproach.com/

Kandi Wiens, EdD is the Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Master’s in Medical Education Program and the Penn Health Professions Education Certificate Program. As a sought-after international speaker, Dr. Wiens is co-founder and chief research officer of Big Sky Leadership Labs, where she leads and conducts evidence-based research on executive performance, emotional intelligence, burnout, and resilience. Her work has been prominently featured in the Harvard Business Review and in several Harvard Business Review Press books. 
 
A Senior Fellow at Penn, Dr. Wiens is Academic Director of the PennCLO Master’s Program and teaches various graduate-level and executive-format courses. She has designed and delivered over 2,000 leadership development programs focused on helping leaders build and leverage their emotional and social intelligence to amplify their positive impact and protect themselves from burnout.
 
Dr. Wiens holds a doctorate from the Penn Chief Learning Officer executive doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania, an M.B.A. from the University of Oregon, and a B.S. in business administration from Montana State University.