Book IWD Speaker: Calissa Ngozi

Mental Health, Workplace Performance & Sustainable Success Expert

Calissa Ngozi is a 9x award-winning mental health expert, bestselling author, business owner, organizational leader, professor, and trusted media voice who brings a uniquely human perspective to one of today’s biggest workplace questions: How do we create environments where people can thrive and perform at their best?

With more than 25 years of experience spanning mental health, education, social services, healthcare, rehabilitation, and entrepreneurship, Calissa has spent her career understanding what helps people function, adapt, connect, and succeed. Today, she brings that expertise into organizations to address the human factors behind workplace performance, from leadership, communication, trust, and psychological safety to resilience, engagement, culture, well-being, and sustainable success.

Calissa also understands workplace performance from the organizational side. As a business owner and leader within a multimillion-dollar organization, she knows that organizations have real goals to meet, results to deliver, and change to navigate. Her work bridges those two realities, helping leaders create the conditions people need to do their best work without compromising accountability, expectations, or performance. This balance is reflected throughout her current keynote work, including adaptive leadership, creating cultures where people feel valued, building resilient teams, and uncovering the human factors beneath performance challenges.

She is the author of the Amazon #1 bestselling book, The Oxygen Mask Mindset™: Reclaiming Your Energy in a World That Glorifies Exhaustion, which challenges the idea that achievement has to come at the expense of well-being. Her signature Oxygen Mask Mindset™ and CARE Framework give audiences practical tools for protecting their capacity while continuing to perform at a high level.

A Professor at Mohawk College, Calissa has shared her expertise across television, radio, and digital media, including appearances on CP24, CTV, Global News, Breakfast Television, SiriusXM, The Social, CHCH, and more. She has also served in leadership and community roles, including as a former Board Director with the Ontario Association of Child and Youth Care and as a member of the Pathstone Mental Health Foundation Board.

On stage, Calissa combines deep subject-matter expertise with storytelling, humour, warmth, and practical application. Whether she is speaking about leadership, workplace performance, resilience, culture, mental health, or sustainable success, her message is grounded in a simple belief: when organizations get the people side right, stronger performance follows.

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