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WLC Breakout Sessions

In addition to our morning, luncheon, and afternoon keynote speakers, we invite you to attend two WLC Break Out Sessions, where you can dive deeper into breaking through areas of your personal and professional life.

Breakout Session A: Yvonne Camus

Practicing Grit: Concrete Strategies for Cultivating Success. How can a businesswoman and mom outperform the U.S. Navy Seals? Here’s how: through grit, determination, and resilience. With two decades of executive experience in the highly competitive fitness industry, and a triumphant finish in the world’s most grueling endurance challenge, YVONNE CAMUS shows us how the principles of teamwork, diversity, and perseverance create high-performance success—even in the most unlikely conditions.

Yvonne Camus was the sole female member on the first rookie team to ever complete the Eco-Challenge: the world championship of adventure racing conceived by Survivor’s Mark Burnett. The single mom and senior executive trained obsessively for an expedition that, up until then, even the U.S. Navy Seals hadn’t been able to complete. Their odds of finishing were placed at a disheartening zero, but that didn’t stop Camus and her team from rising to the challenge. Punchy, deeply moving, and often quite funny, Camus draws on her experience of training, preparation, and execution to illustrate the value of perseverance. In the process, she helps us realize the potential for grit and greatness in ourselves, in our co-workers, and in our entire organization. Her talks help us understand how we can recreate high-performance outcomes, even when the odds are stacked against us.

Camus served as the COO of SPINCO, Canada’s largest indoor cycling brand, where she handled day-to-day operational management and implements enterprise-wide procedures. Previously, she was COO of the fitness club World Health, where she oversaw more than 600 employees, and World Health’s sister companies, Orange Theory Fitness and Fresh Fit Foods.

Breakout Session B: Sylvia Baffour

Dare to Care™: How to Inspire & Influence with Emotional Intelligence. Sylvia Baffour is an Emotional Intelligence Coach, Professional Speaker, and Trainer recently ranked by HubSpot among the Top 15 female motivational speakers alongside the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Mel Robbins.

Sylvia has traveled far and wide. She’s visited more than 38 countries, lived in eight, and speaks five languages. Her global experiences give her a unique perspective and ability to connect with diverse audiences around the world. In 2014, she ranked among the top 18 speakers at the World Championship of Public Speaking held in Malaysia, where she competed against 35,000 contestants from 126 countries.

For the past 19 years, Sylvia has leveraged tools and strategies from her Dare to Care™ Framework to help individuals and organizations build thriving work cultures with emotional intelligence. Clients who have benefited from Sylvia’s expertise include Whirlpool Inc., Lockheed Martin, Capital One, Doctors Without Borders, the World Bank, and the Department of Defense, to name a few. She is the host of an emotional intelligence podcast show and is the author of I Dare You to Care, a book focused on using emotional intelligence skills to inspire, influence, and achieve remarkable growth.

Breakout Session Speaker C: Wendy Bird

Unstick Your Stuck. Starting with the baseline of exactly where you are today, this breakout session will offer FIVE key principles to unstick YOUR stuck! A hands on session with a condensed workbook which will empower you to move through 2024 with clarity, resilience and motivation.

Unstick The Stuck:Have you ever wondered why some days feel like the movie Groundhog Day?

You’re slugging through each day feeling disconnected from those important relationships in your life, work, romantic, and even friends…

…with most days ending in a Netflix binge.

Wendy helps guide people seeking to unstick their stuck places in life. People who know there is a way to feel deeply connected with work colleagues, demanding projects, their spouse, partner, and even overall life…yet can’t seem to get there. We all know that when we avoid difficult conversations, we simply trade short-term discomfort for long-term dysfunction.

And no one wants that.

Come learn the FIVE key tricks to unsticking those stuck places in life and truly starting to thrive! (this session will include an actionable workbook and Intention).

Breakout Session Speaker D: Nyaunu Stevens and Sandra Vonniessen-Applebee of National Conference for Community and Justice

Helping Humans, Human Better, Together: Understanding and Reaching Across Identity In our current polarized climate, we are all asking the question – how do we talk to each other? How do we reach across our identities and have interactions that provide space for us all to presentourselves with our best intentions while still allowing room to make mistakes, learn, and grow? As humans we don’t often get a chance to speak openly about our identities. Words matter and our word choices are filtered through our identities, which are central to who we are and form a lens through which we see the world, shaping every human interaction we engage in. How does our identity influence and impact how we show up, engage with others, and move through the world personally and professionally? What gets in the way? Many of us navigate workplaces and social spaces where we are in constant contact with people who have identities very different from ours, and demand that we engage in identity dialogues that we are not always ready for or don’t have the skills to successfully
manage.

Join equity leader NCCJ’s Director of Programs Nyaunu Stevens and Director of Operations Sandra Vonniessen-Applebee in an interactive and engaging conversation about nine social identities, how we can better understand our identities, and how we can use that knowledge to form connections across social differences. Bring your curiosity, your voice, and your questions to co-create a safe, brave space to learn how to navigate challenging identity-based situations with graceful authenticity.

Outcomes

Develop a deeper personal awareness and understanding of nine social identities – race, class, gender, sex, sexual orientation, age, ability, religion, and body size – where do you hold agency, and where are you marginalized.
Gain practical skills for navigating identity dialogues gracefully and authentically to cultivate inclusion and belonging.
Discover actual ways you can overcome obstacles to effective communication based on identity, deepen your conversations and your connections

Contact Info

Women's Leadership Conference

588 Longmeadow Street
Longmeadow MA, 01106 wlc@baypath.edu