Speaking

Most people underestimate what they can do and overestimate what it will cost them. Alla has spent fifteen years at the point where those two errors meet: 300,000 people who signed up to change something, and the record of who actually did.

This talk takes potential out of the motivational register and puts it back into evidence. What the research says about capability and effort. Why the gap between knowing and doing is structural rather than a failure of will. What changes when people stop treating growth as a project with a deadline.

People can describe gratitude, resilience and presence accurately and still not experience any of them. The science is widely known by now; the living of it is not.

Alla presented this work at the IPPA World Congress in Vancouver, and it remains the center of how she teaches. The argument is that the standard delivery of positive psychology stops at comprehension, and comprehension is where most well-being programs quietly fail. What makes a practice stick is that the body learns it, through repetition, physical ritual and small deliberate design.

This is also the most practical of the three talks. The audience does the work in the room rather than hearing about it.

Most advice about well-being assumes a stable life. Alla built this material where that assumption does not hold.

When the full-scale invasion began she founded Positive Psychology for Ukraine and created Resilience 2.0, a seven-week program delivered free of charge. More than 100,000 people took part. What the two years that followed produced is not a theory of resilience but a record of which practices survived contact with real uncertainty and which collapsed immediately.

The talk is not about war, and it is not heavy. It is about the ordinary uncertainty most audiences are living in now: restructuring, relocation, careers that no longer have a shape. The findings transfer, because the mechanism is the same.