MN, NP-PHC
Clinician · Author · Speaker · Systems Strategist
Making hard things speakable.
Moving people from insight to action.
Verena Rizg is a clinician, the author of The Cost of Capable™, and a keynote speaker on the hidden cost of high performance, belonging, relational health, and leadership. With sixteen years of clinical work across corrections, acute care, community health, and migrant health, she founded the first BIPOC-focused clinic in the history of the Canadian Armed Forces. She is the architect of The Cost of Capable™, a clinical and organizational framework for individuals and institutions contending with the cost of contingent belonging. Verena writes, teaches, and speaks on belonging, relational health, care delivery, and leadership.
More about Verena → Watch the 2026 Dalhousie convocation address →
Trusted by institutions because her work holds up. Remembered by people because it reaches them.
A framework. A book. A body of work.
Built from sixteen years of clinical practice — federal corrections, migrant health, community care — and the patterns Verena watched people carry in silence. A diagnostic vocabulary for individuals and institutions contending with the cost of contingent belonging.
Enter the frameworkReflections on belonging, relational health, and care delivery. Sent when there is something worth sending.
Subscribe“It sparked a number of meaningful conversations throughout the remainder of the conference and gave participants a language and framework to discuss something many had experienced but hadn’t previously been able to articulate.”
Claire Lessel, CPHR
Chair, ACCEL 2026
“I use it almost daily with my clients and over the dinner table with my family. It helps people understand that their exhaustion is not a personal failure, and that their capacity may have come at a cost that deserves attention, care, and healing.”
Karen Rezk, RP, RN, MScN, MDiv
Founder & CEO, Ubuntu Psychotherapy and Wellness
“Her insights were both thought-provoking and inspiring. The feedback I received from those in attendance was extremely positive.”
Margaret Melanson
President & CEO, Horizon Health Network
“A doorway into a new way of seeing ourselves, our relationships, and the systems we live within.”
Rhiannon Rosalind — Founder & CEO, Conscious Economics · former CEO, The Economic Club of Canada
Featured Keynote
The people who can always handle it are paying for it — and almost no one has named the cost.
This keynote traces how capability becomes expectation, and expectation becomes burden, then gives audiences the language to see it in themselves and the people they lead.
For healthcare, leadership, government, and policy stages.
Bring the book with you — volume orders for teams, cohorts, and conferences put The Cost of Capable™ in every seat.
Most organizations don’t have a communication problem.
They have a truth tolerance problem.
What’s left unsaid doesn’t disappear.
It shapes culture, decision-making, and care.
Verena works inside those moments,
where pressure reveals what’s not working,
and where people are expected to perform instead of respond.
She helps people understand what’s actually happening between them,
so they can move forward with clarity, not assumption.
If your people are carrying more than the system knows how to name, much less support, bring Verena in.
For institutions ready to move beyond surface-level solutions and do work that actually holds.
