Dan Lerner

Cutting edge science now shows that when we pursue our passions in the correct way, we can realize the highest levels of personal and professional success.

In this talk, positive psychologist Dan Lerner defines two types of passion: harmonious, and obsessive. When you’re harmoniously passionate, you not only love what you do, but you are more focused, energetic, and productive, and live a far more fulfilling life. Conversely, obsessive passions are marked by a compulsive, dogged pursuit of achievement, leading to guilt, shame, pessimism, unhappiness, and, far too often, early burnout.

Drawing on a diverse cast of iconic cultural figures—from Richard Branson to Maya Angelou, Roger Federer to Whitney Houston—Dan illuminates the difference between healthy and dangerous passions, how and why to ignite, explore, and stoke your healthy ones, and even how to find passion in work that you may have given up as passionless long ago. And if you’ve fallen into patterns of blind obsession, Dan helps you transition out. Ultimately, this keynote is a fiery, fun, and practical primer on how to live a successfully passionate (and passionately successful!) life.

The peak moments in your life are not when you’re on vacation, when you’re kicking back and things are easy, or when your stress levels drop to zero. They occur when you’re pushing your physical and mental limits. When you’re using all your strengths to tackle a challenge that’s tough but truly meaningful. The moments when you feel most alive are the moments when you are fully engaged.

In this interactive, eye-opening talk, positive psychologist Dan Lerner reveals how to find your unique strengths—and how to use them to attain the massive advantages that come from the state of engagement (often referred to as “flow” or being in the “zone”). He uses the “Aware, Explore, Apply” process to help you find your top strengths from a scientifically backed list, and shows you how you can use these strengths to get engaged at home, at work, or at school today.

He pairs anecdotes from real people—from everyday folks to iconic cultural figures like Kobe Bryant, from comic book superheroes to the three remarkable female mathematicians made famous in the Oscar-winning film Hidden Figures—with data that shows you how using your strengths for engagement can boost teamwork, talent retention, and goal achievement. And he shows how this can all be realized with just a few tweaks to how we bring ourselves to anything that we do. Sometimes being our best means better understanding ourselves. Delivered with Dan’s trademark energy and excitement, this keynote is a primer on how to make that happen for every listener in the room.

For many students, the college experience has shifted from four years of thriving to a harrowing journey merely to survive. Rates of depression and anxiety among students are skyrocketing, expectations and competition are more intense than ever, and with online distractions and social media providing entirely new obstacles, today’s campus is markedly different from that of yesterday.

Featuring highlights from Daniel Lerner’s popular NYU class “The Science of Happiness” (the largest non-101 at the university), this talk will help students make the best of these crucial four years, both inside and outside of the classroom (and offers parents key tips to helping this happen, as well). Fast-paced, engaging, interactive, and immediately applicable, Dan shares with audiences how to cultivate greater optimism, resilience, willpower, and better relationships. He also reveals the science behind why positive thinking can lead to better grades, a more satisfying social experience, better levels of performance on the stage, field, and in the classroom, and even higher post-grad salaries.

Touching on key aspects of the post-secondary experience—roommates, dating, diet, work, exercise, sleep, study habits, grit, and passion—this talk will help students and parents understand the habits that can get today’s co-eds out of the mode of merely ‘surviving,’ and into that of ‘thriving’—in both college and beyond. This is the talk graduates wish they could have heard while still in school. With the science of positivity, Dan is changing the way students see school for good.

Stress. We all deal with it, and we all deal with it nearly all the time. But what if, instead of trying to get rid of it, we can actually use it to be our very best at work and in life?

In this eye-opening keynote, Dan Lerner shows us that it’s our relationship to stress that can be the difference between suffering and succeeding, and helps us understand how to make stress work for us. Why do top achievers such as Steph Curry welcome stress? Why does trying to relax stress us out even more? We can make stress our friend simply by changing the words that we use to describe it or subtly shifting our perspective, he says.

In this accessible, cutting-edge talk, Dan draws on research to reveal that the key to controlling stress often isn’t in lowering the levels, but learning how to manage our reactions. He tells stories of real people who have learned to harness stress to achieve their goals, and shows us how we can do the same at work and in every other context. Audiences will walk away inspired to lean into this surprising superpower and reach their full potential.