Summit schedule.

Networking asks, “What can we do for one another?” Community asks, “What can we create together?”

In this interactive session, Ariel Landrum, LMFT, and Stefanie Bautista, MA, explore kapwa, often translated as shared identity, a core Filipino value grounded in the idea that the self is relational. This value will be explored through play, collaboration, and hands-on activities.

Participants will examine how professional relationships can move beyond transactional networking toward connection, reciprocity, shared creativity, and collective growth. Ariel and Stefanie will also explore how these principles can inform the development of mental health programs and community-centered offerings.

Through playful exercises, attendees will experience how individual contributions can become part of something larger and consider how those same principles can shape mental health practice, program development, and community-centered entrepreneurship.

Dr. Adrianna Taylor did not become a business owner in isolation. She built a practice while becoming a therapist and professor and raising her daughter as a single mother, all within professional and economic systems that have historically excluded Black women while continuing to expect us to excel inside them. Along the way, comparison made other people's pace, visibility, and success look like evidence that she was behind, without accounting for what she was carrying or what she had never been shown.

Mental health professionals are often taught to treat comparison, self-doubt, and perfectionism as individual mindset problems. But comparison is not context-neutral. We compare outcomes without comparing access, representation, mentorship, caregiving responsibilities, financial flexibility, disability, institutional support, or room to fail. Through her own journey across entrepreneurship, clinical practice, academia, and single motherhood, Dr. Taylor will examine how systems and lived context shape the way we evaluate our progress and define success. Centering Black women's experiences while inviting participants to examine their own, this presentation offers a culturally responsive framework for restoring context to comparison and building a version of success that reflects our actual lives, values, capacity, and communities.

“You should be further along.” “You should be able to handle this.” “A good therapist would already know what to do.”

These thoughts can sound like our own voice, even when the rules beneath them came from family, clinical training, cultural expectations, or professional systems. In this interactive presentation, Dr. Mel invites clinicians to examine the “shoulds” shaping how they work, make decisions, and show up for clients. Using reflection and clinical examples, participants will trace a “should” to the belief beneath it, consider what that belief has helped protect, and assess what it costs now. They will practice distinguishing ethical responsibilities from rigid rules and identifying more flexible responses for themselves and the people they serve.

Many high-functioning women with undiagnosed or late-diagnosed ADHD spend decades holding life together through structure, overpreparation, and sheer effort. Then perimenopause arrives. As estrogen declines, the dopamine-supported systems behind attention, motivation, and emotional regulation become less stable, and coping strategies that worked for years stop working. These women often come to therapy describing anxiety, burnout, brain fog, and a growing belief that they are failing. That self-doubt is frequently a symptom of an unrecognized neurobiological shift, and it is easy to miss.

This presentation reviews current research on sex hormones and ADHD, including a 2025 population-based cohort study in which women with ADHD were significantly more likely to report severe perimenopausal symptoms (54.2% vs. 30.1%). Participants will learn to recognize where ADHD and perimenopause overlap, understand how masking delays diagnosis, and apply practical screening questions and referral pathways. The session closes with strategies for helping clients move from self-blame toward informed action, even while doubt is still present.

Success is often measured by growth, revenue, visibility, and impact; but rarely by what achieving it requires the entrepreneur to absorb. This presentation examines the intersection of entrepreneurship, occupational stress, burnout, and professional functioning among mental health professionals and service-based business owners. Drawing from research and lived entrepreneurial experience, Sharise Nance explores how overfunctioning, blurred boundaries, chronic stress, and success-driven beliefs can affect personal well-being, ethical decision-making, and the quality of services provided to clients. Participants will examine the hidden costs of building a business and identify practical strategies for creating professional success that does not depend on their continued exhaustion.

You had a plan. Life had other ideas.

Maybe a relationship ended, your health changed, a business idea didn’t work out, or the role you worked so hard for no longer fits. Sometimes even a change you chose comes with something to grieve. And when you’re used to being the helper, leader, or person with the answers, making room for that can be complicated.

This interactive session invites therapists, coaches, creatives, and entrepreneurs to explore the losses that don’t always get called grief. Dr. Arielle Jordan introduces Grief Intelligence™, her educational framework for recognizing loss, exploring what it means, and making intentional choices about what comes next. Contemporary grief research, relatable examples, and thoughtful humor will ground conversations about identity, changing expectations, and the pressure to keep going.

Participation will include clear instructions, time to process, and options to write, reflect quietly, or share. Personal disclosure and partner participation are optional. Expect practical questions, room for different ways of thinking, and space to be a person who is still figuring things out.

Mental health professionals will also practice applying these concepts to client scenarios through culturally responsive validation and exploration of client-defined next steps. Together, we’ll make room for disappointment, curiosity, connection, and possibility without requiring a silver lining.

You don’t need your whole next chapter figured out to take one meaningful step.