The Cost of Capable™ Live
Thursday, October 8 · Toronto
Limited capacity.
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.
What the evening is
- Spoken word
- Live Q+A with the Author
- Audience discussion
- A signing
You leave with a signed print edition, personalised to you.
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.
What you leave 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
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.
Hosted by Rhiannon Rosalind
CEO of Conscious Economics and former CEO of the Economic Club of Canada.
She discovered the work, flew to Halifax to host that launch, and is convening this evening because she believes it belongs in every sector.
“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
On the night
Rhiannon Rosalind
Host — Founder & CEO, Conscious Economics
Live Q+A with the Author
Founder & CEO of Conscious Economics, Founder of Lunar Studios, and former CEO of the Economic Club of Canada — a stage from which she convened some of the most consequential voices of our time, including Barack and Michelle Obama and Amal Clooney.
The youngest woman ever inducted into Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100 Hall of Fame, she has spent two decades building rooms where economics and human capacity meet. On October 8, she holds this one.
Verena Rizg
Spoken word — author of The Cost of Capable™
Clinician, author, speaker, and systems strategist. Sixteen years of clinical practice stand behind the book and the stage where her writing first began.
This is 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, Toronto
$111
Limited capacity.
Halifax sold out.
Reserve your place →After registering, check your inbox for a confirmation from Verena — separate from the Luma receipt. Check all folders, and add verena@verenarizg.com to your contacts.