Nick Holton

Nick Holton Speaking Topics

• Antifragility: Going Beyond 'Resilience' for Better Outcomes

  We live in a world of accelerating change and challenges, which often require us to adapt and grow (e.g. tech, geopolitics, social culture shifts, etc). While resilience helps us "bounce back" and sustain performance or well-being by managing and then eliminating adversity, antifragility takes this a step further. Antifragility is the property of systems that allow it to thrive in volatile and uncertain conditions, not just endure them. This session will help you understand how to move beyond simply enduring challenges to actively leveraging them for transformation and long-term success. It's about building a good life and actualizing your potential by developing the agility to tackle challenges and use them in values-aligned ways to achieve the life you dream of.

  Attendee Results:

  • Identify the different sets of beliefs and behaviors that guide how human beings respond to challenges, along with their advantages and disadvantages.
  • Gain insights from the latest research on antifragility, distinguishing from traditional forms of "resilience".
  • Understand how your view and processing of an event can shape whether it results in distress, recovery, or post-traumatic growth.
  • Learn to leverage discomfort, constraints, and hardships as circumstances to be embraced as your access to innovation and breakthrough growth.
  • Gain strategies to develop skills for not only enduring, but actively leveraging and growing from unpleasant experiences.
  • Explore a framework to identify helpful habits and behaviors for proactively taking on difficult challenges and embracing the emotions that accompany them.
  • Develop the ability to reclaim agency and control over how you view and engage with difficult situations, regardless of the external conditions.
  • List key contributors to growth after adversity, including social support, emotional processing, values-based action, and reconstructing personal narratives.

• Beyond 'Resilience' for Better Outcomes

  Discover the science of building a truly thriving life, moving beyond fleeting ""happiness"" to sustained well-being and high-level performance. As the co-host of Flourish FM, Dr. Nick Holton has interviewed dozens of the world's leading experts on "the good life". In this talk, Nick shares that cutting-edge research on human flourishing. You will explore how actualizing your potential involves not only relishing pleasant emotions but also engaging with, navigating, and leveraging unpleasant experiences, understanding that there is utility in both for rich well-being and long-term success along with a deep dive into the most commonly noted indicators of a flourishing life across the globe. Most importantly, participants will walk away with a greater understanding of how to use science-backed strategies to build a life of purpose and fulfillment.

  Attendee Results:

  • Learn insights from Dr. Holton's years of experience and dozens of interviews with world leading experts in human flourishing.
  • Clearly understand the leading indicators of a flourishing life according the the Global Flourishing Study and other academic markers.
  • Understand the essential balance of experiencing both pleasant and unpleasant emotions to foster well-being, growth and long-term quality of life.
  • Practice skills and exercises that have demonstrated high efficacy in their ability to positively impact well-being, antifragility, performance or all three.
  • Gain access to additional resources and deep dives into the science of human flourishing. "

• Psychological Flexibility: Mastering the Art of Doing Hard Things

  In a world of constant change and inevitable challenges, the ability to simply "bounce back" -- resilience -- is no longer sufficient. To truly thrive and actualize your potential, you need psychological flexibility – the capacity to engage with, navigate, and even leverage unpleasant emotions and difficult experiences for growth and long-term success. This session delves into the science of human response to adversity, moving beyond merely enduring challenges to proactively using them as catalysts for personal transformation. You will learn how to intentionally cultivate crucial internal resources and external supports to build a purposeful life, even when things are hard and uncomfortable. This approach emphasizes that there is utility in both pleasant and unpleasant experiences, providing you with concrete skills to approach challenges in values-aligned ways.

  Attendee Results:

  • Identify the different sets of beliefs and behaviors that guide how human beings respond to challenges, understanding their advantages and disadvantages.
  • Acquire foundational skills in mindful awareness and attention, including both "top-down" (thinking about your thinking) and "bottom-up" (body-focused) approaches, and learn to conduct basic mindfulness practices to notice thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
  • Develop a basic emotional vocabulary to identify and distinguish between your most frequently experienced emotions, and learn strategies for engaging with them (rather than avoiding or suppressing).
  • Explore and cultivate various mindsets (e.g., challenge vs. threat, growth vs. fixed, tend and befriend, both/and) to proactively grow through challenges by understanding how beliefs impact behaviors, attitudes, and outcomes.
  • Utilize nervous system approaches, including body scanning and breathwork protocols (physiological sigh, box breathing, cyclic hyperventilation) to regulate your physiological state (up-regulate for arousal or down-regulate for calming) when facing intense emotions or challenges.
  • Identify and execute skills for appraising situations, including understanding concepts like counterfactual thinking and the ABCs (Antecedent, Beliefs, Consequences) of thinking to evaluate circumstances and their impact.
  • Practice psychological flexibility by learning the three Ds: Detect thinking traps (cognitive distortions), Dispute automatic negative thoughts with contradictory evidence, and Decatastrophize worst-case scenarios that are highly improbable.
  • Develop the skill of accepting unpleasant emotions without rigidly trying to reframe or escape them, using techniques like the "Passengers on the Bus" metaphor to move forward in alignment with your values despite emotional discomfort.
  • Learn to leverage the positive impact of social connections by identifying network effects and practicing science-backed "giving" behaviors to build a cohesive and supportive environment for growth.
  • Create a structured plan to continue practicing and applying the skills, habits, and mindsets learned to navigate future challenges and foster lasting personal growth.