Michelle Gielan has spent the past decade researching the link between happiness and success. She is the bestselling author of Broadcasting Happiness: The Science of Igniting and Sustaining Positive Change and was named one of the Top 10 authors on resilience by the Harvard Business Review.
Michelle is an Executive Producer of “The Happiness Advantage” on PBS and a featured professor in Oprah’s Happiness course. She formerly served as anchor of The CBS Morning News, and her research has received attention from dozens of media outlets including The Washington Post, FORBES, and The New York Times. She holds an advanced degree in positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. from Tufts University in Computer Engineering.
Michelle has two main areas of research she speaks about during her keynotes: The science of happiness and resilience. Michelle shares the research she began a decade ago at UPENN on the power of an optimistic mindset to fuel success and well-being. She highlights studies she’s published in Harvard Business Review on how a positive mindset can drive a 31% increase in productive energy, 19% improvement in diagnosing, 3x greater creativity, 5x less burnout, and a 23% decrease in the negative effects of stress. Weaving that work together with poignant stories, Michelle presents a science-based case showing that being positive and sharing that optimistic mindset with others is central to success. Drawing from her work at hospital systems, major corporations, and nonprofits, Michelle will train your attendees how to inoculate their brains against common stresses and negative people, and show how interconnected teams create cultures of high performance, optimism, and sustainable resilience.
Michelle’s talks are highly engaging and incredibly inspiring, packed with stories, research, practical ideas, and fantastic videos attendees can’t stop watching. Michelle leaves the audience with three simple actionable tools (the same ones she shared during Oprah’s happiness course) they can start doing right away to train their brain for optimism and resilience, as well as access to digital resources and her online optimism assessment. Michelle’s sessions are extremely highly rated, and she regularly gets glowing emails from clients and incredible stories from attendees about how they put the research into action. Clients include AMEX, Google, Boston Children's Hospital, Facebook, BlueCross BlueShield, Colgate Palmolive, Merck, and P&G, all giving tremendous feedback.
