What Happens When Companies Invest In People Before Profit by Dr. Harte

Airports full of bowed heads and glowing screens told us something we couldn’t ignore: we’re hyper-connected and emotionally disconnected. So we took that tension to a room of HR leaders in London and asked a hard question—what if the most reliable path to profit starts with the human nervous system?

We reframe ROI as Return on Intention and break it into three practical levers: Regulation, Ownership, and Integrity. Through real client stories, we show how a pause-before-send protocol saves relationships and decisions when stress spikes. We explore how blame cycles kill learning, and how shifting from hostile why to compassionate curiosity keeps teams engaged through failure. And we examine the cost of integrity gaps—those moments when hiring promises collide with impossible workloads—and why people don’t just leave jobs, they leave misalignment.

This conversation blends lived experience, recovery wisdom, and neuroscience into a modern, trauma-informed framework leaders can use to build emotionally sober cultures. You’ll hear how to turn inventories into post-mortems that teach, how to make integrity measurable by tracking promise-keeping, and why tending to the person behind the performance drives retention, innovation, and productivity. The takeaway is simple and bold: invest in emotional ROI first, and the financial ROI follows.

If this resonates, tap follow, share with a colleague who shapes culture, and leave a review to help more leaders find it. Want a deeper dive or a keynote for your team? Check the show notes to book a free discovery call.

https://calendly.com/drharte/free-discovery-call-w-dr-harte

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And London Keynote Setup
• 2:48 Early Career Burnout And Boundaries
• 6:40 From Quitting To Founding Strongheart
• 7:40 The Global Connection Crisis
• 8:54 Redefining ROI For HR Leaders
• 10:40 R Is Regulation: Chrissy’s Email
• 14:10 The Neuroscience Of The Pause
• 15:24 O Is Ownership: Jason’s Project
• 19:20 From Blame To Compassionate Curiosity
• 21:20 I Is Integrity: Jessica’s Story
• 25:20 People Behind The Performance
• 27:00 A Trauma‑Informed 12‑Step Framework
• 29:00 Money Follows Emotional ROI
• 30:20 Audience Q&A: Defining The Work

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:00

Welcome back everybody to the truth about addiction. Today is a special episode because you are getting first tips on my first ever international keynote that I just got back from London and presented to a group of HR leaders. When I got this opportunity from my management company, I jumped at the chance to go overseas and share my message. And quite frankly, all the talks I've been giving up until this one have been motivational speeches or talks specifically for entrepreneurs. Everything's baked in my lived experience and where science meets the soul. But this talk and how quickly it came up forced me to get my corporate speech in order. And I am so proud of this 30-minute talk. I use slides for the first time, I used the clicker for the first time, and I gave this talk for the first time. So I am excited to share it with you guys. I take the idea of RLI inside of corporations and I turn it on its head. I do what I do, I tell stories. Some are about me and some are about case studies and client examples to drive the point home and to make it relatable to the people in the audience. And I try to set people's souls on fire. That is the type of speaker that I am. And I'm excited for you guys to hear it. I'd love for you to leave a comment, a review, or share it with a friend. If you know anybody who is an event organizer who's looking for a soul-driven corporate talk that ultimately raises the bottom line and increases revenue for the corporation, please reach out to me. You can book a free discovery call with me, and that link is in the show notes. And until next time, enjoy the talk. And the first job interview I had was with a company I had done a clinical affiliation with during my graduate program. They were opening up a new practice in downtown Manhattan, and I thought this is an amazing opportunity for me. Because I could be mentored. It wasn't a bustling, busy, outpatient, orthopedic clinic. It was going to be new and slow. So I thought. And I remember sitting in the interview and being very specific. That was a time in my life. I wasn't clear on a lot of things, but I was clear on the type of practitioner I wanted to be. And I said, please mentor me. Please help me move through this slowly so I could become a great practitioner. And they said, sure, sure, sure. We got you. The first day of my first job as a doctor of physical therapy, I had four patients in the clinic at the same time that I was responsible for. And I had a fifth patient in a private treatment room that I was supposed to be doing an evaluation on. I was so overwhelmed and I was pissed because it wasn't what I signed up for. So I did the best that I could that day, and I politely called them the next day and said, I quit. I eventually moved to California. The guy I was dating really wanted to move to LA, and I said, Well, if New York City is not where it's at, let's go. Let's have an adventure. And I went in search of a job that was truly one-on-one. One patient to one therapist. And I found it. I got a job at a private practice that was nine blocks from the Pacific Ocean. And it felt like my whole world opened up. Anything was possible. And in this job, I was mentored. I was eased in. When I didn't know something, I could go to my supervisor and ask. And she would teach me. There was a much better culture. But still, three years into the job, I was$100,000 in debt, making$33 an hour. The other thing I want you guys to know about me is that I'm 16 and a half years sober from drugs and alcohol. And addiction and recovery is a huge part of my story. So when I work with people, I am attuning to the entire individual, their entire presentation. But in those early years of my career, the guy that I moved to LA with, well, he was with me on the front end of my addiction. And now we were married, and our marriage was falling apart. And I was financially destitute. And I could not survive in a clinic where I only made$33 an hour. And I remember going to my boss and saying, You think I could get a raise? I started a dance medicine program. I took all this initiative to build up your practice. It was so scary for me to ask for what I needed. And she looked at me and said, I can't give you a raise. Every client you have is from a relationship I built. I was so startled by that. Here I was building somebody else's dream, working to the bone, and I was broke. So I left. And that's when Strongheart Fitness was born, which is an integrative center for the mind, body, and spirit. And I've been in business since 2013. My work hasn't just taken me to the individual, it's taken me inside of institutions and corporations. And this year, I have done more traveling than I've ever done in my life. The word of the year for me was adventure. Part of adventure is travel. Sometimes adventure has meant emotional adventure, something that stretches me outside of my comfort zone. Coming to London to give this talk was one of those things, actually. And every city I go to, every airport that I'm in, I'm noticing something. But now that I see it, I can't unsee it. Everybody's heads are down. Everybody's eyes are glued to their phone. On the one hand, we are more digitally connected than we've ever been in our lives, and on the other, we are emotionally disconnected from ourselves and from each other. That is what I'm here to talk about. Because we can do something about the global connection crisis that we're in. What's the business of connection? What does this have to do with an HR conference? Well, everything. Brene Brown is one of my favorite authors and speakers, if you guys know her. And fortunately for us, she has paved the way through her research on proving things that we already intuitively knew to be true, which is that cultures rooted in trust and safety are the ones that outperform their peers in droves. They have better retention, better innovation, and better productivity. But I get it, money matters. And we have to deal with the reality of the pressure of the financial ROI of the companies that we work for. So when I think of ROI, I think of financial return on our investment, right? Today I'm going to challenge you to think about ROI completely differently. As a return on our intention. Because in this very fast digital age, intention in the workplace is going to become more and more difficult. But I'm here to tell you that when we focus on it, we raise the bottom line. And rather than think about financial ROI, we're going to think about an emotional ROI instead. What's the R? I have a client named Chrissy. She is in a high-powered position at a corporation. Chrissy was having one of those days where everything that could go wrong went wrong. She woke up late, she was rushing out the door, she didn't eat her breakfast, she's sweating under her clothes, she gets to her desk, she opens up her emails, and she's flooded. And there are certain emails that are high priority. She's got to get back to them. And one of the emails is from a colleague she doesn't really get along with. And it's hostile. The tone of the email is passive aggressive. And Chrissy is pissed. Can anybody relate to that? Yeah. So she excuses herself and she's sending me a flurry of text messages about what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? And so I say, I got you, girl. You're gonna hit compose email and you're gonna put your email address in the top. And then you're gonna write her back and you're gonna let it rip. You are gonna give this woman a piece of your mind. That's right. Do not censor yourself. And I can see on the text those ellipses. She's like, are you sure, Dr. Sam? I thought, doesn't seem like a great idea. I said, well, Chrissy, there's a caveat, of course. You're not gonna hit send, you're gonna hit delete. You're gonna wait five minutes, and you're gonna try it again. You're gonna hit reply, and you're gonna write the email again, having gotten out everything that you actually felt. And then, before you hit send, you're gonna visualize getting to the end of your day, getting in bed, putting your head on the pillow, and thinking about whether or not you feel proud of what you wrote. If you can do that, regardless of what she wrote to you, then you're gonna hit sent. So, what did Chrissy do? She practiced emotional regulation in the workplace. She expressed her feelings, she got them out, she didn't shut them down and act like she was fine when she wasn't. But she exercised the power of the paws. This isn't woo-woo stuff, you guys, this is science. We are so chronically stressed right now that our bodies think we are running from a saber-toothed tiger. And we're not. We are in a state of perpetual fight or flight, flooded with cortisol and adrenaline. And these micro moments of stress happen all day long at work. And if we react rather than respond, we're reacting from the amygdala, which is the fear center of the brain. And I don't know if anyone's ever sent a text or an email from an emotionally charged place. I have. If we pause just long enough, our prefrontal cortex, which is the center for logic and reason, comes back online. And we can respond with dignity and grace. So the R and ROI is not return, it's regulation. I want to challenge you guys to think about creating a culture of emotional regulation in the workplace. The O is near and dear to my heart. It stands for ownership. So in the 12-step programs, in step 10, it's all about inventory. When you think of inventory in a business, you think about numbers and sales and what's in stock and what needs to be ordered. When I think about inventory, I think about going inward. What is it that happened today? What did I say and what did I do? Do I feel good about it? Is there anything I could do differently? So I have another client, his name is Jason. He's the head of engineering at a big company. And he got tasked with a project that was a big deal. It was a difference between a couple million dollars for the organization or not. There was a lot of pressure to get the project ready in a really short amount of time. The project failed. And what happened was a cycle of blame and shame. So Jason said to me, Look, product management gave us more time to do this, so you need to take it out with them. I go to product management and they say, We were just doing what executive leadership told us to do. We haven't made a deadline. They're the ones paying us then. Go talk to them. So I go to executive leadership and they say, We had investors looking at this project, and they gave us a deadline. We needed investor funding for this thing to go through. So they circled all the way back to the people on the front lines, and they said, they didn't execute. We're gonna have to let one of them go. Okay. Imagine, God forbid, every leader of the teams took a second to go, what happened? Why did it end up like this? What could we have done better? Ownership is tricky. I don't know if anybody's ever apologized or had an apology to. It just didn't feel genuine. I'm so sorry about that. Sorry if it lowered. Yeah. So we're not talking about ownership with hostility, with judgment. Because there is a difference, right? Jason could have said, why did they put this kind of pressure on me? Okay, yeah, I could have maybe I could have communicated differently, but what why? Why this? Why not? Hostile, critical, judgmental. Ownership means we have to shift the tone from critical to compassionately curious. So instead of why, why? Why did this end up the way that it did? Now, why does the tone matter? Well, when we go from rigid to flexible, or critical to compassionately curious, all of a sudden we have a lot more options about what happened and why. We stay engaged, we reach a level of understanding that allows us to then take radical ownership of whatever our part might have been. So we can create cultures that are baked in trust and safety, where people stay engaged, where there's empathy amongst the people. Ownership is something I could talk about in an entirely different keynote. Since we don't have time for that, what I did was create a QR code that is a free PDF. If you guys want to take your phones out, I don't know if you're close enough. It is a free blueprint for radical ownership in the workplace. So you guys can literally download this and use this toolkit with your employees. And if there's any trouble getting it, I can give it to you after. Yes, we got some yeses. And the eye of ROI. We talked about regulation, we talked about ownership. Let's talk about integrity. Everyone here probably has a pretty good sense of what integrity means. When your words and your actions are aligned. This final story is about a woman named Jessica. She's 42, beautiful blonde woman. She lives in a fancy suburb in New Jersey. She has two kids. She's a family law attorney. She's been practicing law for a few years. And she got a job opportunity to work at a major law firm. This is a career-changing opportunity. And she jumps at the chance. And just like me, she was very clear. She wanted to be mentored. She wanted to become a trial attorney, but she needed a lot of practice. And they yesed her to death like they did at that first job that I took. And within the first couple weeks, she was drowning in paperwork. Deadlines haunting her, working 12, 14, 16-hour days sometimes. And worse than that, she was constantly criticized. Nothing was ever enough. This company that had such a great reputation was so out of alignment with their integrity. They said one thing in the interview and they did another in reality. And just like me, Jessica quit. This is not an uncommon experience. We could talk about tech and innovation and AI until our faces turn blue, but there is a human behind every click of the button. And what are we doing to tend to that? How are we staying aligned with our integrity as a corporation? But I have a confession to make. Jessica's bad work experience is not the reason she overdosed. Of course it is not. Every person in your company is carrying an invisible emotional load that you know nothing about. And you have to tend to the person, not just the performance. Because when people feel seen and heard and valued, they feel safe. And when they feel safe, they stay. What does it mean to be mindful? It means to be conscious, to be awake and aware of the people inside of the institutions. When she died, I turned to my husband and I said, I'm writing a book. Well, I was just a clinician before that. I knew nothing about authorship. But I wasn't kidding. Because in the time I spent sober, I got to know my intuition. And what was once a whisper became a roar. This presentation of soul sickness inside of my clinic was something I had to do, something about. And so as I was writing the stories of my life, this one being the most traumatic, I thought, what's the book for? Am I just trying to tell a story? Or am I trying to prescribe people a framework that they can take with them into their personal life, into their professional life, into their institutions and organizations. Oh, that's what I'm trying to do. I had to think about what helped me the most. Remember, I told you guys I was in that marital crisis when I started Strong Heart Fitness. I had been five years sober at that point. So yes, I was physically abstinent, but I was spiritually bankrupt, still trying to control the world around me, the people, places, and things in it. And this woman came into my life and she said, What if we did the 12 steps on your marriage? What if we stopped focusing on substances? And we focus on these other things that you're pretty sure you can control, but you can't, that are robbing you of your peace of mind. So we did. That was when my healing began. So when I wrote my book, I thought that's what this book is. This book is a modern, trauma-informed reinterpretation of the 12 steps of recovery. So people have a way to navigate life's hardest things. And it's not just something I do as a clinician when I treat the whole person and their whole body. It's a framework I'm taking into institutions and organizations so that we can change the way we live, love, and lead. So I know there's pressure for these companies you guys work for to hit benchmarks, make a certain amount of money. I get it. It's important money matters. It should matter. It's the reality of the world we live in. If your company wants great financial success, it should want it. That means it's meant for it. But if your company wants a financial ROI, then invest in the employee's emotional ROI first. Thank you.

unknown: 28:10

We've got time for I think one question if anyone wants to pop up a question.

SPEAKER_03: 28:19

Oh come on, somebody has a question.

SPEAKER_00: 28:30

So um I think you've got uh really great uh content and emotional impact. Thank you. Uh unfortunately I was a little bit late uh to the session, so uh can you share what your home business is? Like what's your impact through the business?

SPEAKER_03: 28:45

Sure, yeah. So my work in the world is how to create an emotionally sober culture inside of corporations. Alright, so that can sound a little scary. What does that mean, right? Because we think about sobriety as a substance abuse issue, we think about abstaining from substance as the stopping of, but actually it's an awakening to. So my work in the world is this 12-step framework made modern and current in 2025 as a framework to implant into cultures and organizations so that we don't forget about the humanity and the person behind the performance, so that we create cultures that are baked in high amounts of trust and safety so that ultimately people stay and the productivity goes up. Thank you guys.

unknown: 29:52

Okay, perfect.