Pre-Conference Workshop with Dr. Lucy Hone – Just Added!

Saturday, June 7, 2025, 1:00 – 3:30 PM

$65 + HST.  Each registrant will receive a copy of Lucy’s book, Resilient Grieving

This pre-conference workshop is independent of the conference program. Register Here

Did you know that people who know their strengths are nine times more likely to be psychologically flourishing than those who don’t? What’s more, people who frequently use their strengths are 19 times more likely to be flourishing. 

In this highly practical and engaging workshop, Dr Lucy Hone will guide us through the theoretical foundations, findings, and best practices of strengths psychology. Sharing her own (internationally published) research findings demonstrating the importance of knowing and using your strengths, you’ll discover how to help your clients first identify their own personal strengths and then learn tried-and-tested ways to help them use them more.

Studies show the power of knowing and using our strengths every day in work, love and play, but my own research and practice has revealed the power of taking a strengths-based approach for Resilient Grieving™. Come and join me for a fun, illuminating workshop where you are bound to discover more about you at your best, but also how to bring out the best in others, building their internal capacity and external supports to empower them even in their darkest days. 

You’ll learn:

• what we mean by strengths (latest scientific theories)
• why do they make such a difference to our performance, our wellbeing, and our capacity to handle adversity
• learn your individual strengths – the ways of thinking and acting that make you thrive
• tried-and-tested way of identifying personal strengths and help clients use them more
• discover how knowing each others’ strengths acts as a relationship accelerant and bonder

Keynote Speakers

Grief, Love, and the Will to Go On: Lessons from Resilient Grieving

Dr. Lucy Hone  Regarded as a global thought leader in the field of resilience psychology, tragedy tested everything Dr Lucy thought she knew about resilience in deeply personal circumstances when her daughter and friends were killed in a tragic accident. Adjunct senior fellow at the University of Canterbury and at the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical School, Lucy is an internationally sought-after professional speaker, best-selling author, and award-winning academic. Covid-19 saw her TED talk go viral making it one of the Top 20 of 2020. With clients ranging from Apple and Amazon, to Hospice and the UN, she helps individuals, teams and communities navigate tough times. Her work is regularly featured in global media, including the Guardian, the Hidden Brain, the Washington Post, and the BBC, the Sydney Morning Herald, CBS  and ABC. Author of best-seller, Resilient Grieving, Dr Lucy is co-founder of the hugely popular Coping With Loss programme.  …. More

Death is But a Dream, Dr. Christopher Kerr

Christopher Kerr is the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Executive Officer at Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo where he has worked since 1999. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, Chris earned his MD as well as a PhD in Neurobiology. Outside of direct patient care, Chris’ focus is in the area of patient advocacy. His passion is palliative care and a belief that such care should be throughout the continuum of illness. Under Dr. Kerr’s medical leadership, Hospice Buffalo now serves 1,200 patients a day, the majority of whom receive services upstream of hospice care. Dr. Kerr’s background in research has evolved from bench science towards the human experience of illness as witnessed from the bedside, specifically patient’s subjective experiences at the end of life. To date, the research team at Hospice Buffalo has published multiple studies on this topic and documented over 1,500 end-of-life events, many of which are videotaped. This work was the subject of his TEDx Buffalo Talk which has been viewed 5.4 million times. It has been the subject of numerous reports around the world as well as The BBC, CBC, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, Scientific American Mind, Huffington Post,  NY Times Magazine and Psychology Today. It is also featured in a docu-series on Netflix called Surviving Death and a PBS Documentary called Death Is but A Dream. He is also involved in a third documentary, Edge of Life, to be released in 2025. Dr. Kerr’s work has also been published in a book (Death Is but A Dream) by Penguin Random House which was released in 2020 in over 10 languages.  …. More