Catherine Price

Award-winning journalist and bestselling author Catherine Price wants to talk about fun—and to help you have more of it. In this presentation, which is based on her critically acclaimed book, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again, Price proposes a new definition of what she calls “true” fun, clarifies how it differs from “fake” fun, and reveals why—far from being frivolous—fun is an absolutely essential component of a happy and meaningful life. She then provides the audience with actionable tips that they can start using—right then at the event itself!—to begin to incorporate more fun into their lives.

In this engaging and practical presentation, which can be done in-person or virtually and as a talk or an informal conversation, Price weaves together scientific research with personal experience and evidence-backed suggestions in order to:

• Define what “true fun” is, and explains why fun is often mistakenly written off as frivolous
• Reveal the many ways in which fun is astonishingly good for us, including reducing burnout, increasing our creativity, productivity, resilience, improving our relationships, and boosting our mental and physical health
• Provide suggestions for how to incorporate fun into a workplace setting in ways that make work itself more collaborative, creative, efficient and joyful
• Explain how to find our personal ‘fun magnets’ and create more space in our lives for fun
• Provide practical, evidence-backed suggestions for how audience members can start creating more fun-filled lives—without feeling overwhelmed

Groundbreaking, eye-opening, and packed with useful advice, Price’s presentation on The Power of Fun won’t just change the way audiences think about fun. It will bring them back to life.  

Sample audience feedback: 

• A breath of fresh air. Life doesn’t have to feel like a drag to be successful. I loved this.
• My favorite session of them all!
• Wow! I practiced Catherine’s techniques later that day. What an impact.
• This was top notch... simple concept that I've never considered looking at it from that angle. Her research on the topic was impactful and meaningful. Also articulated beautifully.

"Catherine is a dynamic and engaging speaker who is able to connect with and inspire audience members from a broad range of backgrounds. She weaves together science, personal anecdotes, practical advice, and humor in a way that makes the subject matter approachable and actionable. Her virtual sessions have been among the best attended and most popular talks in our series, and people are still approaching me months later to thank me for bringing her to speak at our institution.” —Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

The Power of Fun has been included in many noteworthy roundups, including Amazon's Best Books of the Month Pick, Good Morning America, Fortune, and Book Riot. It was nominated for the Next Big Idea Club, and deemed "..the book everyone needs to read in 2022" (and the overall best self-care book of the year) by The Independent. In the words of speaker and #1 best-selling author Adam Grant, “This delightful book might just be what we need to start flourishing.”

For more information, visit https://catherineprice.com/fun

Want to take The Power of Fun to the next level? Price also offers a hands-on “Funtervention” workshop.

Offered either as one longer session or two separate sessions (which can be spread out or offered back-to-back), the Funtervention workshop offers participants the chance to “find their fun” themselves. Instead of simply telling participants what she believes fun is, Price will guide them through a personal process of discovery, via small group/partner discussion and a customized printable workbook that she created specifically for the Funtervention workshops.

Not only will participants leave with a new general definition of fun, but they will better understand what generates fun for them personally, and feel more connected with their colleagues and other attendees in a way that can spark more collaboration and engagement during—and after—the conference. They will leave feeling engaged, inspired, and energized, with a personalized, practical plan in hand for how they will begin to prioritize and build more fun into their own lives, at home, at work, and beyond.

Sample audience feedback:

• "Magnificent"
• "I loved your session!"
• "Thank you very much for teaching me how to incorporate more fun into my life!”

Note: this workshop can also be coupled with access to Catherine’s SMS-based “Find Your Fun” course (which participants can take individually or as a group) as a way to team-build and further put their insights from the workshop into practice. E

Catherine Price, founder of Screen/Life Balance and author of the bestsellers How to Break Up With Your Phone and The Power of Fun, offers a customizable presentation — delivered as a talk or informal chat, either in-person or virtually — on how to achieve better screen/life balance, create a healthier relationship with technology, and lead a happier, healthier life.

After revealing why screen/life balance can be so challenging to achieve (especially now!), Price explains how audiences can create more balanced and intentional relationships with their phones and devices—and how doing so will improve their resilience, relationships, attention spans, creativity, productivity, and mental and physical health. This program combines a lively, compelling keynote with actionable, evidence-backed suggestions that people can begin to put into practice that very day.

Sample feedback:

“Catherine’s session on digital detox and emotional wellbeing was incredibly insightful and well received by attendees.” — Hyatt

"We can’t thank Catherine enough for her amazing insight on living a more intentionally mindful life by 'breaking up with our phones' and finding the silly joys in everyday life. We’ve already gotten a ton of requests for a replay of the event and some amazing input from audience members.” — Intel

"Catherine is a dynamic and engaging speaker who is able to connect with and inspire audience members from a broad range of backgrounds. She weaves together science, personal anecdotes, practical advice, and humor in a way that makes the subject matter approachable and actionable. Her virtual sessions have been among the best attended and most popular talks in our series, and people are still approaching me months later to thank me for bringing her to speak at our institution.” —Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

More information about screen/life balance and How to Break Up With Your Phone:

https://catherineprice.com/screenlifebalance

Do you and your colleagues feel burned out from being constantly “on-call” to technology — but not know how to stop? In this hands-on version of Catherine’s presentation, offered either as a single longer session or two separate sessions, attendees will learn how their interactions with screens are affecting them (and why it’s so hard to achieve balance) and will take the first steps toward creating new, healthier relationships with technology in both their personal and professional lives.

Working individually and collaboratively, participants will begin by exploring their own priorities and what role they want technology to play in their lives (this big-picture view is one of the features that makes Catherine’s approach unique). Then, working both individually and collaboratively, with Catherine as their guide, they will make a concrete plan—and even take the first steps—in creating a new relationship with technology, over which they have control.

Participants will leave feeling energized and inspired—and with a concrete plan.

(Note: this workshop can be coupled with access to Catherine’s SMS-based 30-day “Phone Breakup” course, which participants can take individually or as a team, as a way to team build and put the skills and philosophies of the workshop into practice for the long run.)

Feedback on Catherine’s “How to Break Up With Your Phone” program:

“I still use my phone, of course, but having a saner relationship with my device has freed up time for a much richer relationship with my family.” — Dan Harris, former anchor for Good Morning America and host of the 10 Percent Happier podcast

“Catherine Price is the Marie Kondo of brains. . . . [F]or the first time in a long time, I’m starting to feel like a human again.” — Kevin Roose, tech reporter, The New York Times

"I think it’s so important during this time to re-focus my energy away from my smartphone, set reasonable boundaries and mindfully enjoy the world around me. If you feel the same, [Catherine’s] book may help.” — Halle Berry

“In How to Break up with Your Phone, Catherine Price has written the essential guide for taking control of our lives. . . . Price has established herself as one of the leading writers and speakers on this vital conversation.” — Arianna Huffington

Everyone is familiar with vitamins – many of us have taken them since we were children, after all, and marketers often use the presence of vitamins as proof of the nutritional quality of their products. But what, exactly, is a vitamin? Where did the word come from? Does the presence of vitamins mean that something is healthy? And how has the word’s popularity affected our overall approach toward food? In this talk, which is suitable both for the public and for nutrition- and health-related professional conferences and educational settings, Price argues that, as both individuals and a society, we’ve been seduced by a word. She reveals the fascinating history of the word “vitamin,” including its surprisingly recent coinage (it was made up in 1911 by a Polish biochemist named Casimir Funk), its early use by food marketers, and the many ways it is used to manipulate our buying choices today. Along the way, she demonstrates how we’ve come to associate vitamins with near magical powers, and how, despite having no precise scientific definition, the word “vitamin” laid the foundations for our current detail-obsessed philosophy toward nutrition. She also reveals how “vitamin” has been brilliantly used by marketers and the supplement industry to come to stand in for the much larger category of dietary supplements – leading to a regulatory situation that both threatens the public’s health and defies common sense.

Catherine Price was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 2001, when she was 22 years old. Not only did her diagnosis inspire her career as a science journalist (and her book Vitamania: How Vitamins Revolutionized the Way We Think About Food), but it made her an inadvertent expert in what it’s like to live with an incurable, life-threatening, chronic disease. An enthusiastic supporter of clinical research, innovative therapies, and technologies for blood sugar control — and an advocate for low-carbohydrate diets (for people with and without diabetes alike!) — Catherine enjoys consulting and contributing to panels and fireside chats around subjects relating to diabetes, nutrition, blood sugar control, medical technology, product design/user experience, and clinical research. She also enjoys sharing her own personal story: despite her malfunctioning pancreas (or perhaps because of it!) Price is committed to living as full of a life as possible, which has led to adventures including riding a bicycle across the United States three months after being diagnosed with type 1 and spending seven months with her husband traveling the world, including time spent in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Mongolia, Tibet, China, Vietnam and Cambodia, and two weeks spent volunteering on a French dairy farm (cheese has no carbs!).

In addition to participating in clinical trials herself, Price has written about diabetes for publications including The New York Times and Popular Science, and is a member of the Leadership Council for the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism at the University of Pennsylvania.

To complement any of Catherine’s talks, HWA can facilitate a bulk purchase of How to Break Up With Your Phone and/or The Power of Fun to be distributed to your employees not only as a memento of the event, but also as tools to hone these shared skills across your organization. Catherine, who specializes in what she refers to as "science-based self-help," also has numerous additional resources that can be offered to talk attendees, including a discount for her online courses, a guide for a 3-day "phone breakup challenge" (a fun team-building activity!), a phone breakup conversation-starting kit, and a "Fun Toolkit" that's designed to help people build more fun into their lives.