Sylvia Marusyk
Wellbeing programmes have multiplied while burnout, absence and disengagement keep climbing. Most interventions sit at the surface: a meditation app, a lunchtime webinar, a stress awareness week. The harder problem is rebuilding the physical, cognitive and emotional capacity of a workforce that is already worn down, in language a frontline operator and a senior leader will both accept.
Sylvia Marusyk is an occupational therapist and founder of MindBody Works who helps organisations reduce burnout, stress-related absence and workplace injury through clinically grounded health programmes.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Sylvia Marusyk
- A practising occupational therapist, not a wellness coach, which gives wellbeing content credibility with EHS, operations and unionised audiences who routinely dismiss soft programming.
- Thirty years of clinical work translated into language that holds a room of utility engineers, nurses, municipal workers and aerospace technicians, not only an HR audience.
- A repeatable session catalogue covering stress, engagement, respectful conduct and self-health, with named talks that buyers can match to a specific workforce problem.
- Author of Testing Positive: 365 Days of Calm Through Chaos, written through her own cancer diagnosis, which gives the wellbeing material lived authority rather than borrowed theory.
- Track record across Manitoba Hydro, Great-West Life, City of Winnipeg, Transport Canada, Health Canada, StandardAero and the Manitoba Nurses Union, so buyers can see the work has held up across regulated, industrial and public sector environments.
Biography highlights
- Founder and owner of MindBody Works Inc., a Canadian workplace health and wellness consultancy.
- Registered occupational therapist with more than 30 years of practice in health, safety and workplace wellbeing.
- Author of Testing Positive: 365 Days of Calm Through Chaos, a daily guide written after her cancer diagnosis during the pandemic.
- Host of the Trigger with Sylvia Marusyk podcast and former host of the Happy Hour with Sylvia radio programme.
- Speaking and training clients include Manitoba Hydro, Great-West Life, Transport Canada, Health Canada, City of Winnipeg, StandardAero, Manitoba Nurses Union and CAPPA.
- Signature programmes include Surviving to Thriving, Stressed to Kill, Happy Hour Begins at 9am, Respectfully, Up Yours! and Rules of Engagement.
Biography
Wellbeing budgets have grown for a decade, yet absence, burnout and turnover keep rising. The problem is not awareness. It is that most workplace health content sits a long way from the physical and cognitive reality of the people actually doing the work, which is precisely the gap Sylvia Marusyk has spent her career closing.
She trained as an occupational therapist and has practised in the field for more than thirty years. That clinical grounding shapes everything she does on stage: the body and the brain treated as a single working system, stress described in biochemical and behavioural terms, prevention framed as an operational discipline rather than a lifestyle choice. As founder of MindBody Works Inc., she has built a Canadian workplace health consultancy around that approach.
Her session catalogue is unusually concrete for the wellbeing category. Stressed to Kill unpacks the physical, cognitive, emotional and environmental components of stress. Surviving to Thriving offers self-health tools that hold up under pressure. Respectfully, Up Yours! turns psychological safety into a behavioural conversation, and Rules of Engagement tackles retention and engagement. The book Testing Positive: 365 Days of Calm Through Chaos, written through her own cancer diagnosis, supplies the personal spine to the clinical content.
The credibility shows up in who books her. Manitoba Hydro, Great-West Life, Transport Canada, Health Canada, the City of Winnipeg, StandardAero and the Manitoba Nurses Union have all put her in front of audiences that are unforgiving of generic wellness talk: engineers, nurses, municipal staff, aerospace technicians. That is the market she has built her work for.
Key speaking topics
- Workplace stress and burnout prevention
- Employee wellbeing and mental health at work
- Occupational health and injury prevention
- Respectful workplace culture and psychological safety
- Employee engagement and retention
- Resilience and self-health practices
- Workplace happiness and work-life conflict
Ideal for
- CHROs, heads of wellbeing and EHS leaders rebuilding stress, absence and injury programmes
- Operations and safety leaders in utilities, healthcare, aerospace, manufacturing and municipal services
- Union and member organisations commissioning content for frontline and clinical workforces
- HR and culture leads addressing respectful conduct, engagement and retention in fatigued teams
Audience outcomes
- A clinical understanding of how stress affects the body, brain and behaviour at work
- Specific self-health practices audiences can apply during and after the working day
- Language for naming and addressing disrespectful conduct without escalating it
- A sharper sense of where wellbeing programmes are working and where they are theatre
- Renewed energy and humour in rooms that often arrive defensive about wellbeing content
Talks
A practical session on rebuilding personal capacity under sustained workplace pressure.
Key takeaways:
- How chronic stress reshapes the body, brain and behaviour over time
- Self-health practices that hold up inside a working day, not only outside it
- A way of talking about resilience that does not feel like another wellness slogan
A clinical breakdown of stress and what it actually does to performance, health and teams.
Key takeaways:
- The physical, cognitive, emotional and environmental components of workplace stress
- The biochemical mechanics behind common stress symptoms
- Tools individuals and managers can use to interrupt the stress cycle early
A session on workplace happiness, technology use and the work-life conflict that keeps eroding both.
Key takeaways:
- How technology and always-on culture shape mood and energy at work
- The relationship between team trust, humour and discretionary effort
- Practical habits that move a working day from drained to engaged
An interactive seminar on respectful conduct and psychological safety in real teams.
Key takeaways:
- What disrespectful behaviour looks like in everyday workplace interactions
- How to name and address it without turning every conversation into a complaint
- The link between respectful culture, retention and operational performance
A talk on what genuinely engages and retains people in demanding workplaces.
Key takeaways:
- Why standard engagement initiatives plateau in frontline and clinical workforces
- The behaviours managers control that actually move engagement
- How to align engagement work with wellbeing and safety outcomes