Kristin Neff, PhD

Main Stage Speaker

Dr. Neff is an Insight Meditation practitioner and an associate professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Harvard Business Review, among others, and her TEDx talk has been viewed over 1.7 million times. She’s also the co-developer of an empirically supported training program called Mindful Self-Compassion, which is taught by thousands of people worldwide, and the co-author of The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook as well as Teaching the Mindful Self-Compassion Program: A Guide for Professionals. She is also co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Mindful Self-Compassion.

Described by Brené Brown as “a transformative read,” Dr. Neff’s first book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself quickly became the handbook for truly actionable wellness advice. Using solid research, personal anecdotes, practical exercises, and humor, Dr. Neff was able to clearly explain how to rewrite your own destructive scripts so that you can be healthier, happier, and more productive. Its companion, The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook, went on to become a bestseller, providing science-backed, step-by-step guidance for tapping your inner resources and transforming the way you work and live.

In her much anticipated follow-up, Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power and Thrive, she braids a wealth of new research with her personal life story and empirically supported practices, in order to prove that women can use fierce and tender self-compassion to succeed in the workplace, provide caregiving without burning out, be authentic in relationships, and end the silence around sexual harassment and abuse.