Closing Keynote
ASTC Virtual 2021 Annual Conference
October 5–7, 2021
Closing Keynote
Thursday, October 7, 2021
3:30–4:45 p.m. EDT
“Personal and professional resilience in the face of constant change”
Our closing session will focus on the concept of resilience. As a community and as individuals, we have experienced a lot of upheaval, uncertainty, and trauma over the past 18 months. This includes significant staff reductions, an assault on science and evidence, and a state of constant change. We will be joined by an expert on resilience who, after recovering from her own Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, established a center to train foreign affairs professionals and others on how to be resilient themselves and how to cultivate resilience within their teams.
Beth Payne (@payneresilience) is a resilience trainer and author of a weekly resilience blog. In 2016, she created the U.S. Department of State’s Center of Excellence in Foreign Affairs Resilience, where she designed resilience tools and resources for foreign affairs professionals across the U.S. government. She served as a U.S. diplomat from 1993 until 2016 with assignments at the U.S. Embassies in Senegal, Rwanda, Israel, and Kuwait and as the U.S. Consul General in Kolkata, India. In 2003, she opened the Office of the U.S. Consul in Baghdad, Iraq, where she received the State Department’s award for heroism.