The Cost of Capable™ Live
Thursday, October 8 · Toronto
Sold out.
Bring the work to your organization →The evening
- Spoken word
- A walkthrough of The Cost of Capable™
- Live interview, facilitated by Rhiannon Rosalind
- Audience Q&A
Opening · Rania LlewellynMusic · Rachelle ShowHosted by · Rhiannon Rosalind
Thursday, October 8 · 6:00–9:00 PM · Pluto, 60 Sumach Street · Food provided by Conscious Economics
The following day: a clinical session for healthcare providers, October 9
The lineup
Verena Rizg, MN, NP-PHC
Award-winning clinician · Author · Speaker
Verena Rizg, MN, NP-PHC, founded the first BIPOC-focused clinic in the history of the Canadian Armed Forces, recognised with the 2024 DM/CDS Excellence in Defence Award, part of the Celebrating Excellence Awards, the Department of National Defence’s highest form of recognition. She pioneered the nurse practitioner role across every federal prison in Nova Scotia and brings sixteen years across federal corrections, migrant health, acute and community care, and occupational health. A spoken-word poet for twenty years, she wrote The Cost of Capable from what she kept seeing in practice: the people organizations depend on most are the last anyone thinks to ask about.
A wife and mother of two young daughters, she lives in Halifax and believes how we love at home is inseparable from how we lead everywhere else.
Rania Llewellyn
Opening the evening · Two-Time CEO · First Woman to Lead a Major Canadian Chartered Bank · Board Director · Senior Executive Advisor
Former President & CEO, Laurentian Bank · the first woman to lead a major Canadian chartered bank.
Rhiannon Rosalind
Host · Founder & CEO, Conscious Economics · Former CEO, Economic Club of Canada
Founder & CEO, Conscious Economics · Founder, Lunar Studios · former CEO, The Economic Club of Canada.
“Verena has accomplished something incredibly rare. She has created a framework that is intellectually robust while remaining remarkably accessible. Having spent more than two decades convening policymakers, corporate leaders, healthcare professionals, researchers, community organizations and social innovators across Canada, I rarely encounter work that has genuine cross-sector relevance.” — Rhiannon Rosalind
Rachelle Show
Music · Emerging powerhouse, singer-songwriter
Toronto-based recording artist and actress.
What people left with
Language you did not have before. A way to see the person in your life who is paying this cost — and whether that person is you.
“This book will find the part of you that has been quietly holding everything together and finally give it permission to exhale.”
— Karen Rezk, RP, RN, MScN, MDiv · Founder & CEO, Ubuntu Psychotherapy and Wellness
Moving people from insight to action.
For years you have been praised for how much you can carry, and never once asked what it costs.
You are the one everyone relies on. The one who keeps performing, producing, leading, giving, whether or not anyone notices.
You learned early that being needed was the price of belonging. So you kept paying it.
There is a name for that. Verena calls it contingent belonging — the learned belief that safety, worth and acceptance have to be earned through performance, productivity, silence or self-abandonment.
And if you lead people, you have someone like this on your team.
They never miss a deadline. They absorb what nobody else will. They ask for the least and carry the most. You don’t have to worry about them, which is precisely the problem.
Organizations know how to spot poor performance. They seldom know how to spot the person performing exceptionally at an unsustainable cost. Until that person is gone.
Verena Rizg cares for people whose charts say they are fine while their bodies say otherwise.
The migraines. The exhaustion that sleep does not touch. The blood pressure climbing in someone with no risk factors. The anxiety that never quite leaves.
These are not isolated symptoms. They are the physiological cost of over-functioning, and they are showing up in the people organizations depend on most.
In medicine, care is offered when someone stops functioning. But people in survival mode do not have the luxury of not functioning. They are the ones who would have to schedule a breakdown. So the threshold is never met, the chart records functioning well, and no support is offered.
If anything, they are praised for the very thing that is costing them. And the excellent work only brings more work.
We assume high performance is a result of ambition, when for many it is a result of survival. Ambition gets to rest. Survival doesn’t know how. From the outside the two look identical. The cost is not.
Halifax, August 2026 — sold out.
Why the work travels
Every one of them runs on people who carry the most and ask for the least, and every one of them is blind to what it costs. The pattern does not belong to a sector. It belongs to a way of belonging.
This was an evening for anyone who has been the capable one for longer than they can remember — and for the people who lead them.
Leaders, founders, clinicians, executives, artists, caregivers.
And anyone who learned early that belonging had to be earned.
Thursday, October 8 · 6:00–9:00 PM · Pluto, 60 Sumach Street · $111
Halifax sold out.