The keynote speaker Christine Carter, Ph.D., was at one point of her life successful and happy by many measures; she had a beautiful family and was the director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California in Berkeley. She had spent a decade studying the research around happiness, positive emotions, and elite performance. Despite all this Christine suffered from stress and anxiety. So she set out to use those techniques she had studied on herself. This journey to live courageously and authentically was a huge success and Christine wrote her book “The Sweet Spot” about this. Christine has also written “Raising Happiness” which shares her insights into parenting. The parenting she encourages is one that fosters compassionate imagination: emotional literacy, kindness, creativity and requires deep feeling, deep learning, and active listening.

Christine shares her tips for living a happy life in her award-winning blog “Brave Over Perfect” and is a contributor to US News & World Report and Greater Good Magazine. Her work has been widely recognized; it has earned her two nominations from the American Sociological Association for public sociology and an award from the Council on Contemporary Families. Her work has also been published on the Huffington Post, PsychologyToday.com and several other websites. She has been quoted or featured in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, the Boston 
Globe, The Wall Street Journal, as well as Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, Parenting, 
Men’s Health, Martha Stewart’s Whole Living, Fitness, Redbook, and dozens of other 
Publications.

The sought-after speaker Christine Carter has given several TEDx talks and appeared on the “Oprah Winfrey Show,” the “Dr. Oz Show”, the “TODAY” show, the “Rachael Ray Show,” “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” “CBS Sunday Morning,” “ABC World News with Diane Sawyer”, PBS, as well as NPR and BBC Radio.