MARK MOHAMMADPOUR, EDUCATION KEYNOTE SPEAKER AND TEAM FACILITATOR
Build a Healthy, Confident, and Connected Culture for Educators
Mark works with K-12 and higher education teams that care about their students and want to live a healthy culture at work.
Trusted by K-12 and higher education organizations.
“Working with Mark was absolutely fantastic. Mark really looked to address the needs of our attendees. We are super grateful for Mark!”
— Raj White, National Association of College Auxiliary Services (NACAS)
About Mark
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A former communications executive who led teams and strategy for global brands like Adobe, Microsoft, and Samsung, Mark lost 150 pounds and has kept it off for more than a decade. Mark combines Fortune 50 leadership experience with certified health coaching expertise.
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His Keynote Conversations blend full attendee engagement, actionable insights, and current research.
Today, his most requested topics, 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.
Mark has worked with K-12 districts, university leadership teams, and education associations, and he understands that educators have heard many promises in many professional development sessions.
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He builds his programs with one assumption built in: your staff will be skeptical until the first five minutes prove otherwise. His frameworks are grounded in the same research that drives outcomes in clinical and corporate settings, and translated into language that resonates with classroom teachers, department chairs, and district administrators alike. He also understands that in education, “retention” isn’t just an HR metric: it’s the difference between a thriving school and a community in crisis.
Who We Help
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The Goal: Listen, learn, and act with intention to stabilize employee well-being and retention.
The Result: Improved student outcomes and a culture where educators and staff want to stay.
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The Goal: Navigate the "Enrollment Cliff" and protect faculty mental health.
The Result: High-performing administrative teams and reduced "academic burnout."
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The Goal: Providing Professional Development that actually sticks for your members.
The Result: Increased member loyalty and high-impact conference programming.
What We Address
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Staff burnout that shows up in turnover, missed deadlines, and quiet resignation.
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Leadership teams who don't have the time or structure to take care of themselves, let alone their people.
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A generation of employees who see campus jobs as transactional, not vocational.
“Not only did Mark tailor the content to the specific needs of our group, but he seamlessly integrated the three topics: personal well-being, building empathy, and team well-being into one session, keeping everyone engaged. I consider Mark to be an expert in his field.”
— Anthony King, Assistant Dean of Strategic Engagement, UC San Diego
How to work with Mark:
Keynote Conversation
Start here. An interactive session built around your people and your industry. 45 to 90 minutes, steeped in data, insights, humor, and engagement. Your audience walks out with something they can use the same day.
Team Facilitation & Offsites
Go deeper. Mark sits with your team and names what's been going unsaid. No personality colors. No letter types. No trust falls. Half-day, full-day, or multi-day. You leave with a written plan: decisions, owners, dates.
Three-Point Impact™
Make it stick. Mark’s signature program. Includes one keynote, a facilitated team session, and follow-up coaching on priority topics. This is a long-term investment that builds healthy, confident, and connected teams.
Keynote Conversation Topics
Mark's Leadership Keynote Conversations
The Buoyant Leader
Turns pressure into the thing your steadiest leaders are known for.
Education leaders are carrying a student mental health crisis, staff burnout, and their own quiet exhaustion at the same time. Under that kind of pressure most leaders push harder. The steadiest ones do the opposite, and their people feel it. Your educators work through a real high-pressure moment together and practice staying clear enough to make the right call.
Why now: 77% of workers reported work-related stress in the past month, and 57% reported effects tied to burnout. (American Psychological Association)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Stay steady with a routine they can run on the hardest days of the year
- Read stress as a signal and use it to make a sharper call
- Use calm as an advantage, so their staff can feel it and follow
Pairs with Leading with Clarity and Calm: Built for an in-service or PD day rather than a one-and-done session: live scenarios and group coaching, so your leaders practice the frameworks instead of just hearing them.
Lead With Empathy
Turns empathy into a performance skill leaders can use under pressure.
Education is the most empathy-intensive profession there is, and nearly all of it flows toward students. Your educators practice it live, in the moments where it is hardest with each other: the colleague running on empty, the conversation with a family that went sideways, the team member who has stopped speaking up in meetings. They leave with moves they can use in the next conversation, not a definition.
Why now: Employees with highly empathic senior leaders report being innovative 61% of the time, compared with 13% under less empathic leaders, and 76% report being engaged, versus 32%. (Catalyst)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Use perspective-taking to connect across roles, grade levels, and departments
- Build the trust that gets staff speaking up sooner
- Apply specific moves in the very next difficult conversation
Pairs with The Empathy in Action workshop: A follow-up session for administrators and department leads: paired conversations and real scenarios, where they practice hearing the thing underneath what was said.
Lead a Healthy Culture of Well-being
Makes well-being how your team works, not a perk you offer.
The highest-achieving schools didn't add a wellness initiative. They changed how they run meetings, onboard new staff, and give feedback. Your educators examine their everyday habits and decide together, in the room, which one they will change first.
Why now: 52% of employees say their employer doesn't support their well-being in meaningful ways, and 69% of executives admit they have no way to measure it. (Deloitte)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Treat educator well-being as a student outcome, not a budget line item
- See how small leadership choices build or drain a staff
- Run meetings, onboarding, and feedback so they build energy
Pairs with The Team Culture OS workshop: Your leadership team walks through its own meetings, onboarding, and feedback habits, decides which one to change first, and agrees on how they'll talk about energy and workload from then on.
REWORK: The Future-Ready Leader
Rebuilds the leadership playbook for a modern workplace.
The leadership habits of the last decade are working against the people using them. Your educators move from a compliance mindset to a capacity mindset, rebuilding their approach around energy and clarity, then testing the new moves together before taking them back to their own teams.
Why now: Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, the second straight annual decline and the lowest level since 2020. Manager engagement has dropped nine points since 2022. (Gallup)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Lead around capacity, not compliance
- Treat purpose and belonging as daily practices, not PD-day topics
- Build the motivation a staff creates together instead of waiting for it
Pairs with The REWORK Sprint workshop: Leaders map where their energy actually goes, pair up with someone outside their own team, and leave with a 30-day plan they run together.
Work in Sunlight
Reconnects your people to the work and to each other.
Disconnection is the new burnout, and in schools it shows up as quiet resignation long before anyone hands in notice. We name where belonging is slipping and build the habits that rebuild it, right there in the room.
Why now: Employees with a strong sense of belonging show 56% higher job performance and 50% lower turnover risk. (BetterUp)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Measure performance by energy, clarity, and connection
- Build small daily habits that keep belonging alive across the year
- Run a shared, staff-built plan for staying connected
Pairs with The Sunlight workshop: Built for the long stretch between in-service days: small daily habits, regular peer check-ins, and a connection map the staff builds together, so belonging survives the middle of the year.
The four facilitation topics teams ask for most.
Offsite themes
For teams seeking clarity and purpose
Gets everyone pointed at the same thing, in writing, before anyone leaves the room.
When you're merging departments, onboarding new leadership, or pivoting strategy, an offsite is the fastest way to align the compass. Mark designs the session to cut through the confusion instead of talking around it.
Why now: Across 124 organizations, only 28% of the executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could name three of their company's strategic priorities. (MIT Sloan Management Review)
- Before: A short team pulse and a conversation with you about what success looks like in the first 90 days.
- The offsite: Working sessions on mission, vision, and values that end in a written Team Charter.
- After: A 30/60/90-day plan and a follow-up guide, so clarity turns into consistency.
What the team walks away with:
- A shared purpose everyone can say out loud.
- Clear norms for how decisions get made and communicated.
- A foundation for a culture of well-being and accountability.
Pairs with the Lead a Healthy Culture of Well-being keynote and The Team Culture OS workshop. The keynote makes the case that culture is built through everyday decisions rather than programs. The offsite writes your team's version down. The workshop keeps it running after you leave the room.
For teams building confidence
Builds the nerve to say the thing in the room where it gets decided.
Your people are good at the work. They're less sure of themselves in the room where it gets decided. This offsite builds the confidence to speak up, be heard, and be trusted, under pressure and in front of leadership.
Why now: 61% of employees say they regularly watch colleagues stay silent rather than share a differing opinion, and 45% name psychological safety and trust as their single biggest concern at work. (Radical Candor, 2026 workplace report)
- Before: Each person picks a real upcoming conversation they're nervous about: a board update, a budget ask, a hard piece of feedback.
- The offsite: Hands-on work on influence, storytelling, and presence, ending with a live practice round in front of the group.
- After: A 90-day follow-through plan with checkpoints, so the confidence sticks.
What the team walks away with:
- Practical tools for influencing at the executive level.
- More clarity and more calm when the stakes are high.
- A team that speaks up before the hallway conversation.
Pairs with the The Buoyant Leader keynote and Leading with Clarity and Calm workshop. Confidence rests on calm. The keynote gives the room the idea and the language for it. The offsite gives them the reps, in front of people whose opinion they care about.
For executive teams and boards
Gets the hard decision made instead of postponed again.
High-stakes environments require high-stakes conversations. Mark provides the neutral structure that keeps dominant personalities from hijacking the agenda, so the hard decisions actually get made.
Why now: In a survey of more than 1,200 managers, 61% said at least half the time they spend making decisions is wasted. The strongest predictor of fast, high-quality decisions was the presence of real debate. (McKinsey & Company)
- Before: An anonymous team survey to surface where communication is strong and where it's stuck.
- The offsite: Structured work on the real disagreements, ending in a written operating agreement for how this team decides.
- After: A leadership health check at 30 and 60 days to track whether it's holding.
What the team walks away with:
- Faster decisions, because the real disagreement finally gets said out loud.
- Shared expectations and healthy boundaries.
- Stronger trust, transparency, and performance.
Pairs with the Lead With Empathy keynote and The Empathy in Action Lab workshop. Hard decisions need people who can hear the thing underneath what was said, especially when they disagree. That is the exact skill the keynote introduces and the lab drills.
For teams rebuilding after a hard year
Repairs the trust the last year quietly cost you.
A reorg. A round of layoffs. A leader who left. High turnover that never quite stopped. When a team has been through it, the work keeps going, but the trust doesn't. This offsite is about the health in healthy teams are wealthy teams: psychological safety, well-being, and repairing what got fractured.
Why now: Across 146 companies that conducted layoffs, employee confidence in the organization fell nearly 17 points, and engagement took 12 to 24 months to return to where it had been. (Harvard Business Review)
- Before: An anonymous pulse on how people are actually doing, plus a private conversation with you about what's been hardest.
- The offsite: Honest conversation about what the team has been carrying, guided so it stays safe and productive, ending in agreements on workload, boundaries, and how this team looks after each other.
- After: A well-being check-in at 30 and 60 days, so the agreements hold instead of fading.
What the team walks away with:
- Permission to say what's been hard, and a team that can hear it.
- Shared boundaries around workload and availability.
- A team that trusts each other again, and a leader they trust to keep it that way.
Pairs with the Work in Sunlight keynote and The Sunlight Series workshop. The keynote reconnects people to the work and to each other in a way that feels safe because everyone is in it together. The offsite repairs what got fractured. The series keeps belonging alive through the months that follow.
Any theme below can run as a half-day, full-day, or multi-day offsite. Mark builds the agenda around what your team actually needs.
“He has the ability to make people want to press pause, take a look at their priorities and understand the importance of making time for health and personal wellness. Mark is engaging, encouraging and inspirational.”
— Betsy Fuller, Director, School/Community Relations, Lakota Local Schools
Contact Mark about your event.
Email Mark at mark@chasingthesunpdx.com, call him at 360.609.1077, or fill out the form below.
Mark will respond to you within one business day.
Frequently asked questions:
How can school districts improve teacher retention and reduce burnout?
By fixing the conditions rather than asking teachers to manage it on their own. Mark helps K-12 districts move past one-and-done PD days and get administrators aligned on what teachers are actually being asked to absorb. When educators feel supported and safe to speak up, staffing steadies and student outcomes follow.
What is the link between educator well-being and student success?
When teachers are worn out from caring for kids all day, or have quietly stopped trying without leaving, the whole building feels it. A healthy school culture is the foundation student success sits on. Give staff the tools to lead under pressure and the learning environment steadies with them.
How do you make professional development stick across a school year?
Most of what people hear in an August in-service is gone by October. Mark builds the follow-up into the calendar instead of hoping it survives. Staff help write their own communication norms and boundaries, which makes the work part of the daily rhythm of the building rather than a day off the schedule.
Do you present at district in-service days and administrator retreats?
Yes. Mark works with K-12 districts, education associations, and higher education teams. Formats range from a keynote at an all-staff in-service to a multi-day administrator retreat, and sessions are built around what that district is dealing with this year.
How much does a keynote for a school district or education conference cost?
The fee depends on the format, the length of the session, travel, and whether you add a follow-up workshop or coaching. Email mark@chasingthesunpdx.com with your date, location, and audience size, and you will have a number back within one business day.
