Build a Day That Moves You Forward
The Vanguard Impact Summit is designed around practical learning, meaningful conversations, and tools you can apply in the real world.
Explore the full agenda, discover sessions across five learning tracks, and choose the conversations, workshops, and learning experiences that matter most to you.
One Day. Five Tracks. Built for Real-World Application.
The Vanguard Impact Summit is structured to give attendees flexibility throughout the day.
Across five learning tracks, you can move between sessions and workshops depending on what you want to learn and where you want to spend your time.
Every session has been developed with practical application in mind.
The goal is simple: Leave with ideas, tools, and strategies you can actually use.
Full Agenda
Times are listed in Eastern Standard Time (Toronto/New York, North America).
Agenda Details
Growth is influenced by more than strategy. It is shaped by how we respond to pressure, uncertainty, and visibility over time. This opening keynote explores the internal patterns that affect consistency, decision-making, and long-term sustainability, helping attendees approach the rest of the Summit with greater clarity and intention.
Speaker: Sara Roccisano
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
As AI becomes part of everyday work, understanding when to think, augment, or automate is becoming an essential skill. This session explores how AI affects attention, memory, and problem-solving, while providing a practical framework for deciding when to use your own expertise, AI tools, or automation.
Speaker: Algernae King
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Confidence Under Pressure: A Simple Regulation Framework
You’re in a meeting. A senior leader turns to you and asks for your read. Your face gets hot. Your thinking goes flat.
Most people wait for the heat to pass before they speak. They’re waiting to feel calm. Calm isn’t coming. The meeting is moving.
Confidence under pressure is a choice you make, not a feeling you wait for. This micro learning session gives you one repeatable move to get you to that choice: a 3-breath reset you can use in the meeting you’re already in, without anyone noticing. You’ll practice it live and leave knowing exactly where you’ll use it this week.
Speaker: Debra Mitchell
Better Decisions in Five Questions: A Micro-Framework for Alignment and Clarity
Every decision we leave unmade takes up space. It follows us into meetings, keeps us up at night and quietly adds to a mental load that’s already full. Most of the time we aren’t stuck because we can’t decide. We’re stuck because facts, fears and other people’s expectations are all tangled together.
In this micro learning session, culture strategist Prayalini Sathanantham walks you through five questions that separate what’s true from what’s noise, and what’s yours to act on from what isn’t. Bring one decision you’re facing right now. You’ll work through it question by question in real time, then leave with one clear action within your control and a simple framework you can reuse whenever you feel stuck.
Speaker: Pri Sathanantham
Three Visibility Staples for Low-Energy Seasons
Consistency matters, but not every season allows for maximum output. Discover how to maintain meaningful visibility and momentum when your energy, capacity, or available time is limited, what actually maintains energy over time, and how to prioritize a small number of high impact actions.
Speaker: Shelley Lamothe
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Careers Track
Influence isn’t about having the loudest voice, the best idea, or the most senior title. It’s built through trust, everyday interactions, and how people experience working with you.
In this practical session, participants will explore a different approach to influence, one that focuses less on convincing people and more on being intentional about how we communicate, understanding perspective, and building trust. Using the Intent–Interpretation–Impact framework, participants will learn how to think more intentionally before bringing forward an idea, navigating a difference of opinion, or trying to create change.
We can’t control how someone else receives what we say, but we can get clearer on our intent, get curious about how our approach could be experienced, and make more intentional choices about how we communicate.
Participants will leave with a simple tool they can apply to real conversations, ideas, decisions, and changes, whether they’re an employee, leader, executive, or entrepreneur.
(limited to 180 attendees)
Speaker: Deanne Gagnon
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Strong work does not always explain itself. In this interactive workshop, Dr. Rose White helps participants turn everyday work into clear, credible career stories that other people can recognize, remember, and repeat. Participants learn the 4C Career Story framework – Context, Contribution, Change, and Connection – and practice moving from task language to value language without exaggerating results. The session includes guided activities that help attendees build one 4C story, identify words that unintentionally minimize their contribution, create a personal Contribution Bank, and adapt the same evidence for a manager, interviewer, senior leader or sponsor, and peer or partner. Participants also practice a 30-second spoken version and choose one action from a seven-day visibility challenge.
The emphasis is not on being louder or more performative. It is on making real work easier to understand, carry, and advocate for in performance discussions, interviews, networking conversations, promotion conversations, and day-to-day career settings.
(Limited to 120 attendees)
Speaker: Dr. Rose White
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Most senior leaders have been told that workplace politics is something you either have a talent for or do not. Read the room. Manage your image. Pick your moments. The advice assumes the problem is you. It usually is not.
Most of what gets called politics is misalignment: unclear expectations, competing incentives, and decision pressure nobody has named out loud. Those three forces feel personal when you are inside them. They are not. They are structural, and structural problems do not respond to personality adjustments.
This session gives you a different read on the room, and two tools you can use the same week you learn them. The Alignment Check is a three-question scan you run in the moment, before you react, to see what is actually happening underneath the tension. The Response Framework is a three-move sentence structure you use when you have to open your mouth and the stakes are real.
Lauren Wu spent two decades as a privacy and technology attorney in rooms with regulators, engineers, lab directors, and executives, where the decisions made affected whether people were safe. She learned this the hard way: She edited herself for years and watched the outcome stay exactly the same. She will tell you what that cost, what it cost her organization, and what she does now instead.
The session is built for those who are tired of choosing between being effective and being themselves. You will leave with language you can use in your next difficult conversation, and a clearer sense of what you are actually up against.
This is not a session about being more strategic, more armored, or more palatable. It is a session about seeing the system clearly and responding with consistency.
(Limited to 180 attendees)
Speaker: Lauren Wu
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Most workplace communication breakdowns start before anyone opens their mouth, in an overstimulated, tapped-out nervous system. When emotions run high, the brain’s capacity for clear, measured communication drops fast, and the default becomes escalating, over-explaining, or shutting down entirely.
In this workshop, participants practice a two-step reset that brings the nervous system back online in under a minute, then learn six specific language moves that let them hold their position without triggering defensiveness or damaging the relationship. Working through a real high-emotion scenario, participants leave having already drafted and refined language they can use this week, not a template to fill in later.
(Limited to 120 attendees)
Speaker: Jamila Godfrey
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Entrepreneurship Track
Most conversations about business partnerships are framed as a numbers game.
How many strategic alliances, how many cross promotions, how many referral partners feeding the funnel.
What that framing leaves out is a question that matters: is this partnership adding to your business or quietly draining the energy that built it in the first place.
Fourteen years as a marketing strategist and two cancer diagnoses taught Bron Watson exactly what a depleting partnership feels like in the body before the spreadsheet ever shows it.
Bron will share The Three Filters, a practical framework for evaluating any partnership on capacity, alignment and reciprocity, plus the language to renegotiate or exit one without burning the relationship down.
(Limited to 180 attendees)
Speaker: Bron Watson
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Most entrepreneurs do not have a money problem. They have a positioning problem. They undercharge for their expertise, say yes to every request out of fear, watch projects expand without the invoice expanding with them, and end each year busier than the last with little financial growth to show for it. This session names that pattern directly and gives the audience a practical way out of it.
The workshop is built around the P.A.I.D. Framework — Positioning, Access, Intentional Pricing, and Discipline. For each area, Ray Matthews will walk the room through the problem, the winning solution, and specific strategies they can put into practice that week: how to write a one-sentence position that replaces a job description, how to upgrade the rooms they are in, how to move from hourly rates to packaged offers with a flat investment, how to quote a price and stop talking, and how to build a change-order clause that ends scope creep before it starts.
(Limited to 120 attendees)
Speaker: Ray Matthews
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Growth often creates new challenges before it creates new opportunities. This session explores the systems, delegation strategies, and support structures that help businesses grow without increasing chaos or founder dependency.
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Identify at least two signs that their current systems, delegation, or decision-making structure is no longer supporting their stage of growth.
- Assess their current scaling readiness across operational structure, founder cognitive load, nervous-system load, and internal capacity.
- Recognize where founder dependency is creating bottlenecks, reactivity, or unnecessary decision fatigue.
- Define one structural shift, such as clearer ownership, systemization, delegation, communication boundaries, or protected CEO focus, that can support their next stage of growth.
- Apply a capacity-aware approach to scaling that supports expansion without increasing chaos, over-functioning, or founder dependency.
(Limited to 180 attendees)
Speaker: Veena Ramaswamy
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Before investing significant time, money, or energy, it helps to know whether an idea is viable. This workshop helps participants design simple, practical tests that generate meaningful feedback and reduce unnecessary risk. (Limited to 120 attendees)
Speaker: Loann Phoenix
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Marketing Track
Trust shapes every decision your audience makes; who they follow and engage with, who they buy from, and who they recommend to others, often without them even realizing it. In this Marketing track session, Andrea Chase will help you explore the psychological drivers behind those split-second decisions, from the principles of persuasion and influence, to the mental shortcuts people use when evaluating a new brand or offer.
You’ll leave with the TRUST Framework; a hands-on, 5-part tool you can apply immediately to your marketing, messaging, and digital presence to identify exactly where you’re building trust well, and where you might be quietly losing it. Whether you’re growing a personal brand, launching a new product or service, leading a team, working in Marketing, or building client relationships, this session is designed around real-time audience interaction.
Come ready to participate in the conversation, and leave with insights you can put to work immediately to improve the trust people put in you.
(Limited to 180 attendees)
Speaker: Andrea Chase
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Everyone is talking about how you need to tell your company’s story and build a community of followers to be successful. But what do those things even mean to a business owner or decision-maker, and especially one in an industry that isn’t glamorous?
The truth is, the internet is filled with hypothetical scenarios for these two strategies…but no real-world examples or practical tools to get you started. In this workshop, we’ll explore real examples of organizations who are leveraging storytelling and community building to create a powerful brand. We’ll take their processes and apply them to our own organizations, creating a proven framework that can work for you, too.
And you don’t have to sacrifice your personality and abandon your background when telling your story. In fact, quite the opposite: the strongest brands use these components to create rich stories that are unique and memorable.
This workshop is loaded with practical examples, interactive polls, and hands-on exercises to set you up to create a brand that can’t be replicated.
(Limited to 120 attendees)
Speaker: Alicia Disantis
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
You’ve got the idea. You’ve got the launch date. You’re even excited! So, why does it still feel so overwhelming? Because the planning started in the wrong place.
Cerys Thompson has spent sixteen years watching businesses launch the next big thing, and just as many miss the mark. In this session, she shares the three principles most launches skip so you can stop wondering what you “should” be doing and start moving with a plan that actually works for you.
You’ll leave with:
- A simple starting point before you dive into tactics
- How to spot the signs you’re getting overwhelmed and distracted – before it turns into burnout
- Three principles you can use before your next launch, campaign or initiative goes out
(Limited to 180 attendees)
Speaker: Cerys Thompson
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Marketing is the backbone of how our businesses are found, but it can also feel like a never-ending to-do list. A full-time job on top of your actual job.
As technology evolves, buyer behaviour changes, and so do the ways we can market our businesses. New tactics are constantly added, while old ones are rarely removed. Over time, marketing becomes more complicated than it needs to be. But it doesn’t have to be.
In this interactive workshop, participants will take a moment to slow down, step back, and audit their current marketing activities based on impact, effort, and alignment with the people they actually want to reach. The people who are most likely to buy, not just like your posts.
Using the Stop, Start, and Simplify framework, participants will identify what is contributing to results, what is creating noise, and what could become more focused and sustainable. They will leave with decisions based on their own needs, not generic marketing advice, and one or two priorities to test over the next 30 days.
(Limited to 120 attendees)
Speaker: Ana Pautassi
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Personal Development Track
Perfectionism often disguises itself as high standards while quietly limiting action, visibility, and growth. Explore practical ways to recognize perfectionist patterns and build a more effective, sustainable form of confidence.
This session will help women understand that a sudden shift in life goals can flip your world upside down, but it can also sharpen your awareness in ways you didn’t expect. The speaker will share a real-life example of experiencing a traumatic brain injury and learning to rebuild, despite imperfections in how the brain works.
Attendees will learn to distinguish between perfect and right life experiences, define what acceptance means on an individual level, and explain how good things can come from bad circumstances
(Limited to 180 attendees)
Speaker: Mandi Swanson
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Some days feel draining not because of what you do, but because of how your energy is spent. Learn practical ways to identify unnecessary depletion, establish boundaries, and protect your capacity in demanding environments. (Limited to 120 attendees)
Speaker: Amanda Marino
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
There are seasons when the person you have been no longer quite fits, but the person you are becoming isn’t fully clear yet.
It can happen during a career change, a shift in family or relationships, stepping into leadership, building or leaving a business, reaching a long-held goal, or simply realizing that what once defined you no longer does.
These transitions can leave even highly capable people asking: Who am I now, and what do I actually want from here?
Identity in Transition is a reflective but grounded session for navigating the space between who we have been and who we are becoming. Participants will explore the identities, roles, expectations, patterns, and definitions of success that have shaped how they move through the world, and consider which of those still belong in their next season.
Prior to the session, participants will complete Tyler Skinner’s Make a Move Quiz and bring their individual results with them. During the session, they will use those results as a personal reflection point to explore an important distinction: Is this who I am, or is this simply how I’ve learned to operate?
Rather than rushing to reinvent themselves or immediately answer “What’s next?”, participants will be invited to recognize what has served them, what may no longer fit, and what they want to intentionally carry forward as they become who they are next.
(Limited to 180 attendees)
Speaker: Tyler Skinner
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Meaningful change rarely happens through one giant leap. This workshop focuses on identifying small, intentional actions that create momentum and help move important goals forward, even when confidence or certainty is limited. (Limited to 120 attendees)
Speaker: Chantell Crooks
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Integrated Track
Most of us have had the opportunity to be visible. Speaking up in a meeting. Speaking at an event. Making the case for our own value, to an employer or to a client. And something tightens. Sometimes we say it anyway. Sometimes we talk ourselves out of it on the way to saying it, and afterwards we cannot quite explain why.
We call it nerves, or wanting to get it right, or being detail-oriented. What is actually happening is older and more physical than any of those words. The brain reads being seen as a risk, and it responds before we have had a say in it.
This session looks at what that costs us, and why it costs more than the moment itself: the three things the brain is reading when it decides how big the risk is, and the four ways we protect ourselves when it does. All four are overperformance. And what they are protecting us from has a name most of us have heard, and quite a few of us have dismissed. Imposter syndrome is a nervous system response, not a confidence problem. That distinction is what my work rests on, and it changes what actually helps.
We finish by working through the Regulation Before Visibility Framework against a real moment each of us has coming up. We leave with a name for what happens to us in those moments, and something to do about it in the two minutes before the next one.
(Limited to 180 attendees)
Speaker: Caterina Perry
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Many of us are leading in several places at once: in our careers, our businesses, our families and our communities, often without clear boundaries or recognition. The hardest part isn’t only the volume. It’s the competing expectations and conflicting priorities pulling us in different directions at the same time.
In this interactive workshop, culture strategist Prayalini (Pri) Sathanantham guides you through the Intersection Framework: five structured steps to map every role you hold, spot where tension and overload are building, and make grounded decisions about where to lead, where to share and where to step back. We’ll also look at the seasons when trade-offs aren’t an option and every role has to continue, with practical ways to sequence your effort, redefine “enough” and communicate your constraints.
You’ll work in a guided workbook throughout. You’ll leave with a clear picture of what you’re carrying, one or two intentional trade-offs, strategies for the roles that can’t give, and a plan for communicating your decisions.
(Limited to 120 attendees)
Speaker: Pri Sathanantham
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Most of us set goals based on what feels realistic or appropriate for someone like us; however, that sense of what’s possible is rarely neutral. Our ambitions are filtered through our identity, including messages we’ve absorbed from our culture, upbringing, gender, lived experience, and more. In this interactive session, Authenticity Coach Jennifer Wade helps participants name one identity-based assumption that may be narrowing their ambition and identify one concrete step toward realizing an ambition that genuinely belongs to them.
Whether it be an unconscious story about what you believe you deserve, what you believe you’re capable of, or what’s possible for you, Jennifer’s Identity-Ambition Clarity Exercise will help you notice and challenge the hidden assumptions shaping your ambition by examining evidence from your own life.
(Limited to 180 attendees)
Speaker: Jennifer Wade
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Bias, microaggressions, and structural friction do not affect everyone in the same way, and there is no single right response. In this interactive 30-minute integrated workshop, Dr. Rose White gives participants a practical decision-making process for navigating difficult moments while protecting safety, capacity, and energy.
The session centers context, culture, identity, power, pattern, consequences, and personal capacity rather than assuming that immediate confrontation is always the best option. Participants learn the C.H.O.I.C.E. Map: Clarify the moment; Hold the context; Outline options; Inventory risk and energy; Choose by goal and capacity; and Engage, exit, or revisit. They also examine a spectrum of response options – direct, indirect, delayed, collective, and non-engagement – and apply a Risk + Energy Scan to one real, fictional, or composite situation. The session includes practical language examples, a sustainable-response exercise, and boundary and recovery strategies.
Participants are never required to disclose identity details or painful experiences.
(Limited to 120 attendees)
Speaker: Dr. Rose White
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Live Demonstration + Mini Practice
You leave the Summit energized, with pages of notes and ideas you can’t wait to use. Then you look at everything you wrote down and think, How am I supposed to implement all of this on top of the packed calendar I already have? The problem may not be time management. Having multiple good options can actually make choosing one harder, and your brain has a few interesting ways of avoiding the decision altogether.
This skills lab combines a 30-day planning process with neuroscience insights in Layman’s terms. You’ll decide what to act on first, break it down into the smaller steps it will actually take, and build a plan your brain is more likely to follow when real life shows up.
Speaker: Joyce Layman
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Clarity does not automatically translate into action. Even when we know what needs to change, loyalty to the identities that shaped our success can lead to hesitation, overthinking, and a return to familiar patterns. Through personal storytelling, guided reflection, and practical application, Angelica Ventrice will explore how identity influences follow-through and why waiting for certainty can keep us from moving forward. Attendees will learn to recognize the identity patterns affecting their choices, distinguish genuine alignment from urgency or external expectations, and identify one meaningful action they can take within the next 24 to 72 hours. They will leave with a clearer understanding of what may be standing between insight and execution, along with a grounded sense of agency over what happens next.
Speaker: Angelica Ventrice
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
Wrap up the day with a relaxed virtual celebration featuring networking, conversation, and connection with fellow attendees, speakers, sponsors, and partners. Come celebrate, make new connections, and continue the conversations that started throughout the Summit.
Session content is subject to refinement and change.
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