Clare Kenny, Head of Wellbeing Strategy at PVL, is a keynote and TEDx speaker, wellbeing consultant, and mental health expert. She focuses on addiction, wellbeing, and fostering mentally healthy workplace cultures. Clare combines personal experiences with professional expertise, having faced her own challenges with addiction, anxiety, and burnout. She has developed tailored wellbeing strategies for various organisations, including Channel 4, Warner Media, KPMG, Knight Frank Promise, and Medtronic.
Clare's journey took a significant turn in 2015 with the loss of her mother, which led her to prioritise her mental health. She left a high-pressure job characterised by long hours to create her own business aimed at helping organisations cultivate environments where employees can thrive.
Her background includes roles in learning and development and leadership consultancy, with senior positions in Europe and Asia. Clare has served as Head of Global Account Management at digital training agency TKE and Head of Client Operations at leadership consultancy YSC, part of Accenture. Most recently, she led the global wellbeing strategy at Burberry. Clare is committed to driving meaningful change in workplace wellbeing.
Our always-on culture has helped to create a world of work (and beyond) that is fully at odds with the conditions human beings need to thrive. In this talk, Clare Kenny explores some of the evolutionary science behind creating an environment to help humans be at their best and discuss the ways in which the world of work is getting it so wrong. She shares the small changes we can make to start driving better employee wellbeing and sustainable performance.
Children express their feelings loudly and unapologetically. But as they grow society teaches them that messy emotions are unacceptable. By the time we’re adults we’ve learnt to repress our feelings, making us feel worse. In this talk, Clare Kenny discusses the ways in which ‘emotional repression’ has impacted her mental health, leading to anxiety and addiction. She discusses how we can re-embrace the childhood tantrum to fully feel and process our emotions to have a long-term positive impact on our overall wellbeing.
Whether it’s alcohol, drugs, social media, porn, shopping or food, most of us use something to numb and distract ourselves from difficult feelings. This can feel good in the moment but can risk causing long-term physical and mental health issues. In this talk, Clare Kenny shares her own experiences of addiction, sobriety and her ongoing journey of breaking the numbing cycle and learning how to actually feel her feelings.
