Your Members Came For the Conference. They’ll Leave Talking About Mark’s Impact
Associations book Mark because his Keynote Conversations don’t end at the ballroom doors.
Trusted By Leading Associations:
“Mark was insightful, engaging, and exceptionally well received by our attendees. He brought a wealth of knowledge to the stage and presented it in a way that was both accessible and thought-provoking.”
— America's Credit Unions
About Mark
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A former communication executive who led award-winning teams and strategy for global brands like Microsoft, Adobe, and Amazon, and who has naturally lost and kept off 150 pounds over 15 years, Mark Mohammadpour combines Fortune 50 leadership experience with certified health coaching expertise.
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Mark’s Keynote Conversations blend full attendee engagement, actionable insights, and current research. Today, his most requested topics, including Leading with Empathy, The Buoyant Leader, and Lead a Culture of Well-being, are built around one belief: healthy employees are your greatest competitive advantage.
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Mark has spoken at association conferences from PRSA and SHRM to America’s Credit Unions and NAHB. He understands that your members are juggling their day jobs while trying to grow as leaders, and that they’ve sat through many keynotes that promised more than they delivered. His sessions are designed with that skepticism in mind: practical frameworks, not abstract theory, built to be used in the office on Monday.
His Three-Point Impact also means your conference programming doesn’t have to end when the keynote does; Mark can extend the value for your members year-round through follow-up implementation and integration resources.
Who We Help
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The Goal: A high-impact, high-energy speaker who over-delivers and is easy to work with.
The Result: Rave reviews from attendees and a “stress-free” programming slot.
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The Goal: Proving the event’s ROI and strengthening the association’s “Value Prop.”
The Result: Increased member retention and a reputation for “must-attend" programming.
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The Goal: Actionable tools they can take back to their company on Monday morning.
The Result: Sustained professional growth and a deeper connection to the association.
What We Address
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Your member satisfaction may feel like they plateau year over year, and you’re looking to test news ideas.
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You may book keynotes that get mild applause but don’t move anyone to act.
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You might be working with a community of members who love the conference but struggle to stay energized the other 11 months.
The Buoyant Leader: Healthy Under Pressure
When pressure rises, most leaders default to pushing harder. The ones their teams trust most do something different; they stay calm, think clearly, and lead from a place of steadiness that others want to follow.
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The Buoyant Leader reframes resilience as a practice. Blending neuroscience, personal transformation, and humor, Mark shows why calm is the new credibility and why the most effective leaders have learned to treat stress as information rather than a threat.
This Keynote Conversation is built for leaders who are carrying more than they’re showing, and who need practical tools, not platitudes, to protect their capacity while leading effectively. Your leaders leave grounded, with moves they can make Monday morning.
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According to the American Psychological Association’s Work and Well-Being Survey, 77% of workers experience work-related stress, and 57% of leaders say it significantly impacts their ability to lead effectively.
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Build resilience as an intentional daily practice — not a trait you either have or you don’t.
Reframe stress as a signal and learn to use it to make better decisions under pressure.
Welcome calm as a leadership advantage, and understand the neuroscience behind why it works.
See resilience as a team strategy: how a grounded leader creates psychological safety for the whole group.
Leave with specific tools to protect energy and sustain effective leadership for the long haul.
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This conversation provides leaders with practical tools to stay grounded and make informed decisions. Using live scenarios and group coaching, participants will practice applying coaching frameworks designed to build confidence and trust with their teams.
Lead With Empathy
Empathy isn’t soft. It’s the single leadership behavior most directly linked to team engagement, retention, and innovation, and most leaders were never formally taught it.
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In Leading with Empathy, your leaders experience cognitive empathy in action; not as a concept to think about, but as a skill to practice.
Through live scenarios, research, and interactive moments, Mark shows how understanding what someone else is experiencing accelerates trust, reduces conflict, and drives performance at every level of an organization.
The session moves fast, stays practical, and leaves your leaders with a new fluency in the language that builds the strongest teams. In an AI-powered world, human understanding is the new differentiator.
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According to Catalyst research, employees with empathetic leaders are three times more engaged, five times more likely to stay, and 61% more innovative — making empathy the highest-leverage leadership skill in the modern workplace.
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Understand the science of cognitive empathy and why it’s now a performance skill, not a personality trait.
Use perspective-taking techniques to strengthen relationships across hierarchy, function, and distance.
Reimagine trust and empathy as performance accelerators — and know how to measure the difference.
Apply empathy skills in high-stakes moments: conflict, feedback, change, and difficult conversations.
Leave with practical tools your team can use the same day to build connection and reduce friction.
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A dynamic conversation where participants learn, test, and practice empathy. Through paired conversations and workplace scenarios, attendees apply perspective-switching techniques, learn actionable steps toward clarity, and practice different recognition approaches.
REWORK: The Future-Ready Leader
Only 23% of employees worldwide are actively engaged, and burnout has risen to 46%. The leadership playbook of the past decade isn’t just outdated. It’s making things worse.
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In REWORK: The Future-Ready Leader, leaders discover what the most effective organizations have figured out: energy, clarity, and connection are the real drivers of performance — not hours logged or pressure applied.
Using The CHASE Model™, Mark shows how to rebuild leadership around capacity instead of control, and why protecting your team’s energy is a business decision.
Through research, real stories, and interactive moments, your leaders leave with a new playbook for a hybrid, high-speed, AI-augmented world.
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According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace, only 23% of employees are actively engaged and burnout has risen to 46% globally — the highest recorded levels in the history of the report.
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Rediscover purpose as a daily practice — something you build, not something you wait to feel.
Recognize belonging as the foundation of performance, not a byproduct of it.
Reimagine motivation as something a team creates together, not something individuals are born with or eventually lose.
Build personal Daily Sunlight Habits that keep energy and connection alive week after week.
Leave with a shared Sunlight Map™ — a concrete, team-built action plan for sustained belonging.
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The REWORK Sprint™ takes the keynote off the stage and into your team’s actual work. In this hands-on follow-up session, participants map their energy in real time, build a personal WellBeing Ledger™, design a Mentor Mesh™, practice Clarity Huddles, and create a One-Page Culture Brief together.
Attendees leave with a 30-day sprint plan and a shared accountability toolkit, so the momentum from the keynote doesn’t stop when the room empties.
Work In Sunlight
Disconnection is the new burnout. And it’s costing teams their best people: not all at once, but one quiet resignation at a time.
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Work in Sunlight is a high-energy, fully interactive Keynote Conversation that helps employees at every level reconnect to purpose, to each other, and to the work that matters most.
Mark shows how belonging isn’t a feeling you either have or you don’t — it’s something leaders create deliberately, through the daily choices they make about how they show up, how they recognize others, and how they build a culture where people genuinely want to contribute.
Your team leaves with a Sunlight Map™: a shared, actionable guide to sustaining energy and belonging.
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According to MIT Sloan’s Workplace Culture 100 Report, employees who feel a strong sense of belonging are 56% more productive and 50% less likely to leave, making belonging one of the most powerful levers a leader has.
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Rethink what high performance actually looks like — measuring energy, clarity, and connection alongside business results.
Apply The CHASE Model™ to everyday leadership moments: hiring, onboarding, feedback, and recognition.
See culture as the operating system that drives results, not a side project or an annual survey.
Reimagine leadership as a renewable resource and build habits that sustain influence over the long haul.
Leave with a shared framework and, optionally, a 30-day sprint plan through The REWORK Sprint™ workshop.
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The Sunlight Series™ translates the keynote’s energy into habits your team can actually live. In this highly interactive follow-up session, participants design personalized Daily Sunlight Habits, craft Mission Moments, form Peer Pods, and run Stop/Start/Continue Rituals together.
They leave with a Sunlight Map™, a shared, actionable guide to sustaining energy and a sense of belonging long after the keynote ends.
Lead A Healthy Culture Of Well-Being
Most companies treat well-being as a benefit. The ones winning the talent war treat it as a leadership operating system.
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In Lead a Healthy Culture of Well-Being, leaders learn why the organizations with the highest engagement scores haven’t redesigned their wellness programs — they’ve redesigned how they work.
Using The CHASE Model™, Mark reveals how everyday leadership decisions (how you run a meeting, how you onboard a new hire, how you give feedback) either deposit into or withdraw from your team’s collective well-being.
The result is a culture that sustains itself, not one that requires constant intervention.
Your leaders leave with a practical framework they can start running in minutes and a shared language for measuring what actually matters.
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According to Deloitte’s Well-Being at Work Report, 52% of employees say their employer does not support their well-being in meaningful ways — and 69% of executives admit they have no strategy for measuring it.
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Reimagine well-being as a core business driver — not an HR initiative or a line item in the benefits budget.
See how individual leadership choices compound into cultural health at scale.
Treat energy, psychological safety, and connection as strategic metrics.
Adapt The CHASE Model™ to the moments where culture is actually built: hiring, onboarding, recognition, and feedback.
Leave with a simple, repeatable framework to track and sustain progress starting the same week.
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This hands-on session is a winning investment in your team’s success. Leaders will assess current workflows, meetings, and communication patterns to identify opportunities to optimize energy use and improve communication. Together, they’ll build Well-Being Scorecards and co-create a shared language for energy, focus, and belonging.
Watch Keynote Excerpts
Leading With Empathy Keynote
The Buoyant Leader Keynote
Culture of Well-being Keynote
Let’s Build A Program That Your Members Are Still Quoting In December
Email Mark at mark@chasingthesunpdx.com and we’ll respond within 1 business day.
Frequently asked questions
How can professional associations increase member engagement at annual conferences?
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Associations can drive deeper engagement by moving away from passive “talking head” presentations toward interactive, research-based sessions. Mark Mohammadpour’s “Keynote Conversations” focus on high-participation models that address specific industry stressors, ensuring members feel “heard” and equipped with actionable leadership tools they can implement on Monday morning.
Why should an association prioritize leadership and well-being topics over technical industry training?
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While technical skills are vital, leadership resilience and culture are the primary drivers of member retention. Professional members in high-stakes industries like healthcare, finance, and PR are facing record levels of burnout. By providing a speaker who focuses on sustainable performance, associations demonstrate their value as strategic partners in their members’ long-term career success.
How do you move beyond a "one-and-done" keynote to create lasting member value?
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To promote lasting professional development, associations should seek speakers who use a multi-phase framework. Mark Mohammadpour’s 3-Point Impact Model (Keynote → Implementation → Integration) offers ongoing engagement through post-conference workshops and leadership retreats, transforming a single speech into a year-round membership benefit.
What should a meeting planner look for when vetting a speaker for an association board or committee?
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Meeting planners should look for industry-specific expertise and ease of collaboration. Mark Mohammadpour brings a “Meeting Professional First” mindset, providing comprehensive resource centers (headshots, bios, A/V requirements) and tailored content that aligns perfectly with the association’s specific mission and theme.