SHSMD Connections 2025 General Sessions

Sunday Opening Keynote

The Poet’s Keys: a Guide to Unlocking Innovation

Tucker Bryant, Poet & Innovation Keynote Speaker

The last few years have been a merciless reminder to businesses that complacency will ruin us. Our competition is ferocious, customers expect more from us than ever, and the world is constantly one disruption away from shaking the very foundations of our successes. The truth is, we now have to live on the razor’s edge just to stand a chance of not being left in the dust. Yet, despite these challenges, McKinsey has found that only 6% of leaders feel fully tapped into their teams’ potential to nurture original thinkers who actively shape the future of their businesses.

After a decade alongside world-class innovators at institutions like Stanford and Google, Tucker Bryant has discovered an unexpected perspective professionals can adopt to confront the future with confidence: the outlook of a poet. As a nationally renowned poet, Tucker has identified five powerful tools poets have relied on for millennia to break free from comfort zones and innovate through language—tools that offer business leaders the expanded perspective needed to navigate an uncertain future.

In this signature keynote performance, Tucker reveals how The Poet’s Keys™ empower leaders to unlock enhanced creativity, collaboration, and competitive advantage in the areas of business that matter most. Audiences leave equipped with the tools to build a culture of creative disruption and bold exploration, setting their organizations up to lead the industry rather than remain stuck in outdated models of thinking bound for obsolescence.

Tuesday Keynote Session

Resilient to the Core: How to Improve Your Default Response to Stress to Boost Performance & Happiness

Michelle Gielan, Positivity Expert and Researcher; Best-Selling Author of Broadcasting Happiness: The Science of Igniting and Sustaining Positive Change

Stress has become one of the biggest barriers to high performance on and off the field, yet new research shows 91% of us could improve our default response to stress using simple positive habits. In one of the largest studies on stress of its kind, researcher and bestselling author Michelle Gielan has identified the three major dimensions of your stress response that predict your well-being and performance, and how to quickly shift from stuck to empowered. She shares the new research coming out of positive psychology and strategies for achieving 31% greater energy and 23% fewer stress-related symptoms. Audience members will learn how to identify the three major responses to stress that waste energy and leave us stuck, inoculate their brains against common stresses and negative people, use unavoidable stress to their advantage to boost performance, develop three habits to retrain their brains to be more resilient and optimistic in minutes, and cultivate interconnected teams to create cultures of high performance, optimism and sustainable resilience.