Allison Massari

Inspirational Healthcare and Resilience Keynote Speaker

Hailed by audiences worldwide as “life-changing”, “riveting”, “extraordinary”, “bold”, and “deeply moving”, Allison Massari’s message of courage, kindness, and resilience resonates with participants long after an event has finished. Listed as one of the Top 10 Best Speakers for “motivation” and “personal development” in the United States by Meetings & Conventions Magazine, Allison has been featured on ABC, NBC and FOX networks. Her diverse client list includes: GE Healthcare IT, Cleveland Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, LPL Financial, PEI (Petroleum Equipment Institute), MDRT – Million Dollar Round Table, Eli Lilly and Co., Allscripts, Fresenius, HIMSS/CHIME, Teva Pharmaceutical, Siemens Medical, CVS Health, Beryl Institute, The Mosaic Company, American Family Insurance Group.

Severely Burned

Allison has dedicated her career to catapulting individuals and organizations toward total success, mastery, and fulfillment. As an international keynote speaker, executive coach, and interdisciplinary artist, Allison provides an exceptional blend of business acuity, clarity, creative perspective, and real understanding. Her highly effective methods have enabled her to form bonds as a trusted confidante to CEOs, executives and entrepreneurs. Having triumphed over two traumatic accidents, one where she was severely burned on over 50% of her body, Allison captures the hearts of audiences, demonstrating how to move forward with speed and grace. Prepare to be taken on a journey.

Inspirational Stories

Allison Massari’s programs are packed with content. Blending powerful life lessons with compelling, insightful, and awe-inspiring stories, she offers actionable tools for people to immediately use to transform and manage their lives.

Entrepreneurial Spirit

With the heart of an artist, the keen vision of an entrepreneur, and a knack for success, Allison has built four thriving businesses in the past 25 years. She began with a robust fine arts business and jewelry line, Massari Fine Arts, LLC. Among her accolades were commissions for Fortune 500 companies including Lockheed Martin, General Mills and US Airways.

With characteristic vigor, she launched her coaching and speaking career. She was quickly honored as the #1 Rising Star in Speaking by the National Speakers Association, and has been recognized with esteemed engagements including a TEDx event in Spain on “The Future of Happiness” and as a main platform speaker at the 2013 Million Dollar Round Table Conference, addressing an audience of 8,600 from 75 countries. Allison Massari is also featured in the award-winning international documentary “Resolve” which offers solutions to overcome adversity and PTSD, hosted by the Head of US Forces for the Military in Afghanistan. Currently, Allison coaches and speaks full-time around the world, drawing packed audiences who praise her sincerity and her remarkable life-altering message of finding the will, determination, and compassion to overcome adversity against all odds.

Redefining the Impossible

In 1998, Allison survived a devastating near head-on car crash where she was trapped and burned alive, conscious the entire time. A selfless onlooker, who was a Vietnam veteran, ran into the fiery scene, kicked the glass out, and saved her life. Just three years later she was hit again at 60 mph and sustained a closed-head brain injury. Allison has always believed in the miraculous. Her profound journey of overcoming these two life-altering injuries gives her a genuine and direct approach to transcending life’s difficulties. By sharing her story she motivates change – in people and in the organizations that nurture and inspire them.

Incredibly, Allison views her life’s experiences as a tremendous gift, one that helped her find strength, resolve, and ultimately, her life’s work. She says, “I didn’t want to just heal. I wanted to feel peaceful. I became relentless in my pursuit to find the answers to life.”

Transforming Lives

Allison’s accomplished and diverse client list highlights the resounding impact of her story and message to so many types of audiences worldwide. She adapts her message to address the individual issues affecting each market and has worked with a broad range of industries including Finance, Insurance, Sales, IT, Energy, Real Estate, Agriculture, Healthcare, and Non-profits. She inspires courage, tenacity, and willingness, which everyone needs, in every industry. With honesty, encouragement, and clarity, Allison shows how it takes courage, again and again, in a series of many moments to be successful.

In Healthcare, for instance, Allison has quickly become a leading educator – helping to ameliorate stress, moral injury, and burnout, offering support for compassion fatigue, and providing a preeminent program on patient-centered care as it relates to health care reform. Her keynote often provides Continuing Medical Education (CME) and Continuing Education Units (CEU).

Allison’s unique history reinforces her ability to address important and sensitive subjects without alienating individuals. Raised by her mother, a nurse, and her father, a cancer surgeon, Allison grew up with an intimate understanding of the demands and challenges of the medical profession. Her upbringing, coupled with collectively spending hundreds of days in hospitals, doctor’s offices, and physical therapy centers, gives her a compelling view inside the patient experience. As Allison states, “Compassion heals the places that medicine cannot touch.”

As a powerful and passionate advocate for both patient and provider, she teaches the art of self-leadership – how to be the light in the room no matter the circumstances. Allison states, “I knew if I could bring healing to the healers, I could have the greatest impact.” Her dynamic and poignant program offers real solutions to the struggle of how to keep the patient first, which increases patient satisfaction and supports the financial success of medical facilities, while improving the welfare of the patients – and patient safety.

Giving Back

Allison believes deeply in the power of community and compassion. On the advent of her own recovery she began helping children and teens with severe burn injuries. In 1998, Allison founded a revolutionary outdoor sports program, named after the man who risked his own life to save her when he pulled her from her burning car. The Roger Pepper Adventure Camps powerfully build confidence, hope, and healing in young participants. These innovative programs continue to transform lives to this day at the Adaptive Sports Center in Crested Butte, Colorado.

Artistic Expression

Schooled in creativity as a sculptor, painter, and interdisciplinary artist, Allison always felt that her artwork was a vehicle for her passion to connect with people.

After receiving her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Massari went on to receive an integrated masters degree by combining MFA programs from Parsons School of Design in painting, and the School of Visual Arts in illustration in New York City. Her artwork has been embraced by private art collectors and museums throughout the country and overseas.

Allison Massari’s sublime artwork serves as an intimate and bold visual backdrop to her keynote speeches.

THE ART OF RESILIENCE – MAKE YOUR LIFE A MASTERPIECE

Prepare to be taken on a journey. In her moving and thought-provoking resilience keynote, Allison Massari teaches listeners to find peace, purpose, and happiness, giving them the tools they need to rise above any obstacle. As the survivor of two life-threatening car accidents, and having suffered severe second and third degree burns on over 50% of her body, she reveals her personal journey from absolute loss, to forgiveness and understanding, and finally to a success and life beyond anything she could have imagined. With a unique and genuine perspective and through the power of storytelling, Allison weaves humor, empathy, and potent life lessons, allowing the audience to study what she learned on each step of her path. You will hear and understand keys to resilience and the answers to some of life’s biggest questions. Her dynamic and deeply moving keynote speech fortifies audience members with an inspired outlook on life and applicable tools for managing change and adversity.

TRANSFORMING PATIENT LIVES: THE HEART AND SOUL OF HEALTH CARE

Allison Massari knows that you have the power to transform lives. As the survivor of two life-threatening car accidents, one where she was severely burned and suffered second and third degree burns on over 50% of her body, Allison has a deep understanding of what it takes to heal. With sensitivity and compassion born from her experience, Allison shines light on the provider’s immense value to a patient who is suffering, reinvigorating employees and helping heal burnout in the workplace. She explains, “The power of what you do goes far beyond the technical part of your job. You are healing the places medicine cannot touch. In fact, YOU are the medicine.” As an advocate for both patient and healthcare provider, Allison’s program illustrates how kindness is a critical healing tool. Her unforgettable keynote stories reveal the potent impact that each provider had upon her journey, and how some of the most dramatic healing occurred in a matter of seconds. Those moments are vital to recovery. Despite time constraints and everyday stresses, participants will see that it is possible to quickly bring their humanity to a patient. This visceral knowledge uplifts and motivates participants, reminding each person of why they went into healthcare in the first place. In this breathtaking and thought-provoking keynote, Allison takes her audience on a journey and offers a sincere and direct approach to transcending life’s difficulties. Her experiences and her extensive time in recovery give her compelling authority to energize health care teams, and to galvanize their commitment to this noble profession. Packed with tools to manage change and adversity, Allison’s life-changing message mobilizes audiences to always find a way to be the healer in the room. In this session, Allison will equip participants to: • Transform stress, hopelessness, and burnout into passion and a self-generating fire to continue to give. • Master the art of expressing kindness in just three seconds – regardless of professional challenges and pressures. Learn how those simple acts can be profoundly memorable to a patient. • Empathize more deeply with the patient experience. • Identify that compassionate care is not dependent upon direct patient contact, and that being an expert at your job, no matter the role, is a part of compassionate care. • Shift from feeling defeated by limited time and resources to feeling empowered to make a real difference in patients’ lives. • Witness the pronounced significance that patient empathy and engagement can have upon the healing process. • Realize that vigilance and attentiveness is noticed and deeply appreciated, even if the patient is incapable of communicating. • Experience being valued, respected, and honored for your mission in healthcare. • Deepen self-awareness and activate simple concepts that strengthen resilience. • (Optional) Understand the correlation between delivering compassionate care and the financial success of a facility due to the impact of improved patient satisfaction on reimbursements. • Utilize specific tools for managing a stressful environment or a difficult person. • Recognize the vital influence of family and emotional support in the healing process in order to foster and encourage those relationships. • Gain awareness of the necessity for patient modesty, even when someone is in a coma or other severe physical state. • Prioritize being up to date on the most humane and effective treatments to minimize pain and discomfort.

THE SURVIVAL GUIDE TO BEING HUMAN - AND THE ART OF HAPPINESS

. In this moving and thought-provoking keynote, Allison Massari teaches her listeners to find peace, purpose, and happiness, and gives them the tools they need to rise above any obstacle. As the survivor of two life-threatening car accidents, and having suffered severe second and third degree burns on over 50% of her body, Allison reveals her personal journey from absolute loss, to forgiveness and understanding, and finally to a success and life beyond anything she could have imagined. Through the power of storytelling, Allison weaves humor, empathy, and potent life lessons, allowing the audience to study what she learned on each step of her path. You will hear and understand the answers to some of life’s biggest questions. This dynamic and deeply moving speech fortifies audience members with a new vision and applicable tools for managing change and adversity. “The truth is, the same internal fire and ‘command of self’ that I needed to heal my life is exactly what has given me success professionally. They are all the same qualities. Science shows us today that the ability to have a sense of well-being and your resilience in the face of challenges, is directly linked to the bottom line of your business. This is the type of personal and professional development that I embrace fully and love to teach.” — Allison Massari In this session, Allison will equip participants to: • Grow motivation and confidence through an extraordinary story of overcoming extreme adversity and finding the internal strength for hope to flourish. • Discover the wellspring for creating a phenomenal life. • Promote exceptional customer service and teamwork by learning to navigate and bring ease to the most challenging situations. • Increase generative capacity, inventiveness, resourcefulness and excitement. • Learn a simple tool to transform debilitating feelings of defeat, doubt, and sorrow. • Work with humor – learn to access humor’s joy and grace, even in moments of heightened stress. • Deepen self-awareness and activate simple concepts that strengthen resilience. • Inspire team-building through palpable stories of the heroic impact of community. • Develop and maintain personal command and integrity in the face of feeling attacked, betrayed, hurt or enraged. • Witness the powerful results of fierce determination and tenacity in an ‘impossible situation’. • Demystify false concepts that impede well-being. • Choose the most powerful action to take when addressing the everyday challenges of being human. • Build a positive outlook despite seemingly insurmountable odds.

NURTURING AND ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSFORMATION: LEADERSHIP LESSONS WITH A PERSONALIZED PERSPECTIVE

This keynote blends the programs above, specifically customized for leaders. Patient-centered care is critical not only to a patient’s recovery but also to the financial success of medical facilities, now more than ever. Regulatory pressures, board and stakeholder demands, and doing more with less serve as game changers for healthcare executives. In addition to these practical strains, healthcare leaders often assume the role of coach, mentor, friend, motivator, and career counselor while simultaneously establishing and maintaining an executive presence. With keen insight and appreciation for the challenges faced by leaders in healthcare, Allison addresses the personal side to/of their work, which can be quickly forgotten with the pressures of the day. This dynamic and poignant program provides innovative leadership lessons that invigorate and fortify participants to be able to tackle their work with newfound vigor and expansive thinking.