Work with Lisa
Most people doing important work in the world do it out of love. Love of people, nature, ideals, or life itself.
But the world is also working on them. Crises, complexity, relentless change, and uncertainty aren't just exhausting; they erode the very capacities people need to meet them.
How they think. How they stay present. How they act.
The result is a growing gap between the challenges organizations face and the capacities of the people charged with meeting them. Decisions get harder. Teams lose momentum. The sense that their work can make a difference quietly slips away.
Closing that gap is the work Lisa Bennett does — all built around one core idea: we save what we savor.
Her work takes three forms:
The Staying Power Workshop Series
The Savor the World Keynote
Embedded Advisory Relationships
The Staying Power Workshop Series
Closing the Human Capacity Gap in Mission-Driven and Purpose-Led Organizations
A leader shows up for work with good intentions, exemplary knowledge, and commitment at an all-time high. But the ongoing pressure takes its toll. Clarity suffers. Depletion creeps in. The belief that effort translates into impact begins to erode.
Staying Power addresses this directly — helping leaders and teams restore and strengthen the human capacities that sustained pressure erodes, so they can think more clearly, stay more grounded, act more purposefully, and sustain that over time.
Want the full program overview? [Download the PDF.]
This is the cycle at the heart of everything Lisa does. Most people doing important work move through Save, Strain, and Recover — and then start again. Staying Power restores the missing step: Savor. When savoring becomes part of the cycle, clarity returns, purpose deepens, and the work becomes sustainable.
The Framework:
Three Steps to Closing the Capacity Gap
Change the Narrative
The stories we tell shape our thinking, beliefs, and behaviors. The prevailing narrative of our time — that the world is in perpetual crisis — is not unfounded. But research on declinism shows that when people believe something is in irreversible decline, they tend to disengage.
Staying Power introduces a powerful counterpoint: savoring. The psychological basis of positive experience and the subject of a growing body of social psychology and neuroscience research, savoring both enhances and goes beyond coping — with skills that can be measured, taught, and developed.
Strengthen Core Skills
Three core capacities must be engaged for people to effectively meet great challenges: perspective, presence, and power.
Perspective — cognitive capacity to make sense of complexity, right-size challenges, and focus on their piece of the problem.
Presence — emotional and social capacity to maintain stability through ongoing uncertainty, change, and crisis.
Power — agentic capacity to act effectively, drive outcomes, and sustain effort over time.
The good news: research across psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy demonstrates that capacity is not fixed. It can be restored. And it is strengthened through connection.
Add the Secret Sauce
Sustaining staying power requires one more step: reconnecting with what ignites new possibilities. That means leading with wonder.
While worry — the primary emotion people feel in relationship to the world today, according to Gallup — undercuts our sense of possibility, wonder unleashes it.
Wonder is the counterpoint to worry. And it is woven throughout the Staying Power program.
Perspective · Presence · Power
These are the three core capacities that determine how effectively people meet great challenges.
When sustained pressure erodes them — as it inevitably does — decision-making suffers, communication breaks down, and the sense that effort translates into impact begins to fade.
Staying Power is designed to restore and strengthen all three, building the foundation for sustained effectiveness even as challenges continue.
The external challenges won't disappear. Staying Power addresses what they do to us.
Cascading crises, relentless change, and persistent uncertainty erode the internal capacities people need to meet them. That's what Staying Power restores.
External Challenges
Cascading crises
Relentless change
Dizzying complexity
Persistent uncertainty
Significant setbacks
Internal Consequences
Declining clarity
Rising depletion
Reactivity
Eroding sense of agency
Loss of perspective
Capacities Restored
Clear thinking
Sustained energy
Emotional steadiness
Deeper agency
Renewed purpose
Outcomes
Leaders and teams who complete Staying Power are better equipped to:
Identify and reframe the narratives that undercut their effectiveness
Right-size their perspective on the challenges they face
Minimize emotional hijacking and other destabilizing dynamics triggered by ongoing pressure
Deepen their sense of agency and help others do the same
Uncover new possibilities and reconnect with what makes the work worth doing
Create a practical plan for sustaining themselves and their teams
Format
Staying Power can be delivered over multiple days, a full day, or a half-day session.
Supplemental materials include pre-workshop videos, guides, and a diagnostic, as well as a post-workshop summary, prompts, and a playbook.
“Worry undercuts our sense of possibility; wonder unleashes it.”
Savor the World
A Keynote for Conferences and Other Gatherings
Forget saving the world. We need to savor it — right amid today's many crises and uncertainties. Not instead of the hard work. Because of it.
This keynote makes the counterintuitive case that restoring the capacity to savor is not self-indulgent for people doing hard work. It is what unlocks staying power. And it lays the foundation for the perspective, presence, and power needed to meet challenges that are bigger than any one of us.
Through research, stories, and practical insight drawn from hundreds of interviews with purpose-led leaders, neuroscientists, psychologists, Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, and Nobel Prize-winning scientists, this talk helps audiences loosen the grip of exhaustion and rediscover the capacities that keep them effective, grounded, and genuinely engaged.
What audiences walk away with:
A reframe that reduces guilt and restores permission to take care of themselves
An understanding of the Save → Strain → Recover → Savor → Save cycle and how to work with it
The three capacities — perspective, presence, and power — and why they matter now
Practical approaches they can use immediately
Formats
20-minute or 45-minute talks. Q&A optional.
Available in-person, virtual, and hybrid
Embedded Advisory
For Purpose-Led Organizations That Want an Ongoing Thought Partner
Some of the most important work happens not in a single session but over time — in the ongoing conversations, the strategic inflection points, the moments when a leader needs a trusted outside perspective.
Lisa works with a small number of mission-driven and purpose-led organizations in embedded advisory relationships, serving as a thought partner in communications strategy, narrative framing, facilitation, and capacity-building for leaders and teams advancing critical missions under challenging conditions.
This typically takes the form of a monthly or bimonthly engagement — part strategic advisor, part communications partner, part facilitator — sustained over six to twelve months.
What People Say
“Lisa is a great collaborator.”
“Facilitation is an art and a science. Lisa has both in abundance.”
“Lisa understands that working with challenging topics requires meeting people where they are and helping them move forward in small, genuine steps. ”
“Powerful and persuasive”
“Lisa is able to create completely new ways to engage audiences such that they can listen, hear, and then internalize.”
“Lisa is a gifted speaker and writer.”
“Lisa has an incredible talent for guiding conversations in a positive, forward-looking direction while ensuring everyone feels heard.”
“Highly recommend!”
“If you’re lucky enough to work with Lisa Bennett, you’ll experience something rare: a leader who raises hope while building real capacity for purpose-driven change. Lisa doesn’t just inspire — she equips.”
Partial Client List
American Psychological Association · Brown University · California Academy of Sciences · Chambers for Clean Energy and Innovation · Conferences for Women · Cornell University · Earth Knowledge · FrameWorks Institute · Human Rights Campaign · Packard Foundation · Protect Our Winters · Southern Poverty Law Center · Woodwell Climate Research Center · and others.
Ready to bring this work to your organization?