An Evening with Verena Rizg: The Cost of Capable™ Live
YOUR TICKET INCLUDES
A signed print edition, personalised to you, given to you on the night.
An evening with Verena Rizg — spoken word, live conversation, audience discussion, and book signing.
For years you have been praised for how much you can carry, and never once asked what it costs.
You are the one everyone relies on. The one who keeps performing, producing, leading, giving, whether or not anyone notices.
You learned early that being needed was the price of belonging. So you kept paying it.
There is a name for that. Verena calls it contingent belonging — the learned belief that safety, worth and acceptance have to be earned through performance, productivity, silence or self-abandonment.
And if you lead people, you have someone like this on your team.
They never miss a deadline. They absorb what nobody else will. They ask for the least and carry the most. You don't have to worry about them, which is precisely the problem.
Organizations know how to spot poor performance. They seldom know how to spot the person performing exceptionally at an unsustainable cost. Until that person is gone.
Verena Rizg has spent sixteen years caring for people whose charts say they are fine while their bodies say otherwise.
The migraines. The exhaustion that sleep does not touch. The blood pressure climbing in someone with no risk factors. The anxiety that never quite leaves.
These are not isolated symptoms. They are the physiological cost of over-functioning, and they are showing up in the people organizations depend on most.
In medicine, care is offered when someone stops functioning. But people in survival mode do not have the luxury of not functioning. They are the ones who would have to schedule a breakdown. So the threshold is never met, the chart records functioning well, and no support is offered.
If anything, they are praised for the very thing that is costing them. And the excellent work only brings more work.
The Cost of Capable™ is the framework she built to name what she was watching: a clinical and organizational framework on contingent belonging and the hidden cost of high performance.
We assume high performance is a result of ambition, when for many it is a result of survival. Ambition gets to rest. Survival doesn't know how. From the outside the two look identical. The cost is not.
WHAT YOU LEAVE WITH
Language you did not have before. A way to see the person in your life who is paying this cost — and whether that person is you.
"This book will find the part of you that has been quietly holding everything together and finally give it permission to exhale."
— Karen Rezk, Founder and Registered Psychotherapist, Ubuntu Psychotherapy, Markham
Moving people from insight to action.
WHY THE WORK TRAVELS
Federal institutions. Health authorities. Universities. Financial services. National HR and payroll associations.
Every one of them runs on people who carry the most and ask for the least, and every one of them is blind to what it costs. The pattern does not belong to a sector. It belongs to a way of belonging.
HOSTED BY RHIANNON ROSALIND
CEO of Conscious Economics and former CEO of the Economic Club of Canada.
She discovered the work, flew to Halifax to host that launch, and is convening this evening because she believes it belongs in every sector.
"Verena has accomplished something incredibly rare. She has created a framework that is intellectually robust while remaining remarkably accessible. Having spent more than two decades convening policymakers, corporate leaders, healthcare professionals, researchers, community organizations and social innovators across Canada, I rarely encounter work that has genuine cross-sector relevance."
ABOUT VERENA
Verena Rizg, MN, NP-PHC is a clinician, author and keynote speaker, and the creator of The Cost of Capable™.
The daughter of Coptic Sudanese-Egyptian migrants, she was the first in her lineage in nearly everything she has done, and learned early that failure was not an option. She writes about contingent belonging because she has lived it.
She founded the first BIPOC-focused clinic in the history of the Canadian Armed Forces as a civilian, a woman of colour, and often the youngest person in the room, with no playbook and no precedent. She took it from idea to reality, and the work was recognised with the DM/CDS Excellence in Defence Award in 2024.
She pioneered the Nurse Practitioner role across every federal prison in Nova Scotia. Sixteen years in practice across acute care, migrant health, primary care and occupational health — and still practising.
She has performed spoken word on Canadian stages for two decades.
Her Halifax launch sold out.
This is an evening for anyone who has been the capable one for longer than they can remember — and for the people who lead them.
Leaders, founders, clinicians, executives, artists, caregivers. Anyone who would like to understand what capability has cost, and what else might be possible.
Toronto, October 8.
Speaking enquiries: verena@verenarizg.com
AFTER YOU REGISTER
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