Samantha Clarke
Wellbeing sits at the edge of most organisations – a budget line, a benefits menu, an app. The underlying conditions of work stay the same. Engagement falls, burnout rises, and leaders cannot understand why the latest intervention has not moved the dial.
Samantha Clarke is a workplace happiness consultant, lecturer and author who helps organisations design cultures where people sustain performance without burning out.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Samantha Clarke
- Treats workplace wellbeing as a design problem. Her Masters-level training in Neuroaesthetics and Global Innovation Design gives her a scientific framework for how physical space and sensory conditions shape performance. It is territory most workplace wellbeing consultants never enter.
- Teaches regularly at three distinct platforms: The School of Life, Simon Sinek’s Inspire U, and The Guardian Masterclasses. The material has been refined across years of teaching, not just delivered on a speaker circuit.
- Author of Love It Or Leave It: How to Be Happy at Work (Octopus Publishing Group, 2020). The book sets out a framework for career fit decisions that HR leaders have used to structure retention and talent development conversations with senior talent.
- Qualified as a Bhutanese Gross National Happiness Facilitator, one of few workplace speakers with formal training in a non-Western model of measuring wellbeing. The credential brings practical weight to what otherwise risks becoming a philosophical conversation about happiness at work.
- Client roster includes JP Morgan, LVMH, Accenture, Samsung and Pinterest. The work holds up in performance-first cultures where wellbeing programmes are often treated with suspicion.
Biography highlights
- Author of Love It Or Leave It: How to Be Happy at Work (Octopus Publishing Group, 2020)
- TEDx speaker, “Are You Ready to Break Up With Work?” (TEDxRoyalTunbridgeWells)
- Faculty lecturer at The School of Life; lecturer and facilitator at Simon Sinek’s Inspire U platform; facilitator for The Guardian Masterclasses
- Masters-level training in Neuroaesthetics and Global Innovation Design for Social Change; qualified Bhutanese Gross National Happiness Facilitator; MIT training in Neuroscience for Business; ICF-accredited Co-Active and ORSC coach
- Appeared in conversation with Hillary Rodham Clinton and Angela Duckworth at the Hillary Rodham Clinton Global Challenges Summit
- Featured in Forbes, Fast Company, Monocle, Stylist, Harper’s Bazaar, Psychologies, Evening Standard, BBC Woman’s Hour and BBC Radio 4
- Client work across JP Morgan, LVMH, Accenture, Samsung, Pinterest, Unilever, Nespresso, ITV and the NHS
Biography
Organisations spend more on wellbeing than at any point in their history, and employee engagement keeps falling. The gap between intention and outcome is where Samantha Clarke works. She treats wellbeing as a design problem: something shaped by how work is structured, led and experienced, before any programme begins.
Her methodology draws on neuroaesthetics, coaching practice and positive psychology. The Masters-level training in Neuroaesthetics and Global Innovation Design equipped her to think about how physical space and sensory design shape cognitive and emotional capacity. A Bhutanese Gross National Happiness Facilitator qualification adds a non-Western model for measuring wellbeing; MIT Neuroscience for Business adds the biological layer.
She teaches at The School of Life as a faculty lecturer, and runs programmes for Simon Sinek’s Inspire U platform and The Guardian Masterclasses. Her TEDx talk “Are You Ready to Break Up With Work?” takes the central question to a wider audience. Her book Love It Or Leave It: How to Be Happy at Work (Octopus, 2020) takes the same argument to individuals: a framework for deciding whether a role still fits.
The material on resilience and sustainable performance also draws on her lived experience of sickle cell anaemia and chronic pain. That experience is the reason her work on stress and burnout sits on a different foundation from motivational treatment of the same topics. Clients including JP Morgan, LVMH, Accenture, Samsung, Pinterest, Unilever, Nespresso and the NHS have brought her into senior teams where those topics matter.
Key speaking topics
- Workplace wellbeing and culture design
- Happiness and fulfilment at work
- Burnout prevention and sustainable performance
- Employee engagement and retention
- Leadership in change and transition
- Resilience and stress management
- Neuroaesthetics and workplace environment design
Ideal for
- CHROs and People leaders reviewing wellbeing and engagement strategy
- Senior leadership teams addressing burnout and retention in high-performance environments
- Culture and transformation leads designing new operating rhythms
- HR directors shifting from programme-led to design-led wellbeing
Audience outcomes
- Specific reasons their wellbeing initiatives have failed to improve engagement, and what is missing
- Language to distinguish wellbeing-as-benefit from wellbeing-as-design inside their own organisation
- Methods to identify signature drop-off points in the employee experience before those become attrition problems
- Rhythms leaders can install in their own teams without adding another programme layer
- A sharper view of when individual performance issues are in fact organisational design issues
Talks
A TEDx-origin keynote that reframes the relationship between identity and role, and gives leaders language for spotting disengagement before it becomes resignation.
Key takeaways:
- A framework for separating identity from job title across career stages
- The signals that someone is working against a role instead of within it
- How organisations can surface that friction early, before it becomes attrition
The keynote version of Samantha’s book, a structured approach to helping individuals decide whether a role still fits, and helping leaders see retention through the same lens.
Key takeaways:
- The specific drivers that make high performers stay or leave
- How to run a career conversation that goes beyond development plans
- What organisations lose when they treat retention as a compensation problem
A talk for leaders on the daily rhythms and design decisions that shape whether wellbeing is built into work or treated as a separate programme.
Key takeaways:
- How physical space and sensory design shape team performance
- Signature rituals senior leaders can install without adding a new programme layer
- What shifts when wellbeing is treated as a leadership capability