Ethan Kross
- Two-Time International Bestselling Author, Chatter and Shift;
- Advisor to Fortune 100 Companies and Professional Sports Teams;
- Co-Founder and Executive Director, University of Michigan Institute for Mental Fitness
Ethan Kross Speaker Biography
Ethan Kross is one of the world’s leading experts on emotion regulation. An award-winning professor and bestselling author in the University of Michigan’s top ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, he studies how the conversations people have with themselves impact their health, performance, decisions and relationships.
Ethan was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude. After earning his PhD in Psychology from Columbia University, Ethan completed a post-doctoral fellowship in social-affective neuroscience to learn about the neural systems that support self-control. He moved to the University of Michigan in 2008, where he founded the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory.
Ethan’s research has been published in Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among other peer-reviewed journals. He has participated in policy discussion at the White House and has been interviewed on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper Full Circle, and NPR’s Morning Edition. His pioneering research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Harvard Business Review, USA Today, The Economist, The Atlantic, Forbes, and Time.
Ethan is the two-time National Bestselling author of SHIFT: Managing Your Emotions—So They Don’t Manage You and CHATTER: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters and How to Harness It. His books are routinely featured in the worlds’ top media (e.g., New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, The New Yorker), have garnered multiple accolades and been translated into over 40 languages.
Ethan lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and two daughters.
Book this SpeakerFeatured Videos
Speech Topics
Mental Fitness: The Skill Your Organization Is Already Paying For — But Not Building
Organizations spend billions each year on burnout, stress, and productivity loss — treating the symptoms of unmanaged emotions without ever teaching the skills that prevent those outcomes or minimize them when they occur. In 1825, America introduced its first physical fitness program; within 75 years it was a national norm.
Mental fitness is at the same inflection point. As co-founder and Executive Director of the University of Michigan Institute for Mental Fitness, Dr. Kross makes the business case that emotion regulation and inner-voice management are trainable, measurable skills, and equips leaders with the evidence-based tools to build them into the fabric of their organizations.
The Human Edge: Mental Fitness in the Age of AI
As artificial intelligence takes on more cognitive labor, a critical question emerges: what do humans bring that algorithms can’t? The answer isn’t a technical skill — it’s a psychological one. The people and organizations that win the AI era will be those who can manage the inner voice under uncertainty, regulate emotions when disruption is constant, and lead with clarity when everything feels unstable. Dr. Kross makes the scientific case for mental fitness as the defining human competitive advantage in an AI world, and shows audiences exactly how to build it.
Perform: The Science of Excelling When It Matters Most
What separates people who perform brilliantly under pressure from those who freeze or fall apart? It isn’t talent or experience — it’s the relationship they have with their own mind in the critical moment. Choking, freezing, overthinking aren’t signs of weakness; they’re the predictable result of a brain doing exactly what it’s designed to do at exactly the wrong time. From the lab to the locker room to the C-suite, Dr. Kross unpacks the science of why the brain undermines itself under pressure — and delivers specific, immediately applicable techniques for performing closer to your ceiling when it counts.
Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It
The conversations we have with ourselves are the most important we’ll ever have. Our inner voice — “the Swiss Army knife of the mind” — helps us plan, perform, create, and lead. But when it turns on us, it becomes chatter: the relentless loop of worry, self-doubt, and rumination that undermines performance and health, often precisely when the stakes are highest.
Drawing on compelling human stories and cutting-edge science, Dr. Kross gives audiences practical, immediately applicable tools to turn their inner voice from their worst critic into their best coach — and the clarity to know the difference.
Shift: Managing Your Emotions — So They Don’t Manage You
Emotions are information, not noise. The better we regulate them, the better we think, perform, and lead. The problem isn’t that people have difficult emotions — it’s that almost no one was ever taught what emotions are, why they arise, or how to change them.
Dr. Kross dismantles stubborn myths — that avoidance is always toxic, that negative emotions are the enemy, that willpower is the answer — and reveals a surprisingly wide science-based toolkit for changing how we feel: strategies that work even under stress, even without time, and even when the usual approaches fail. The science challenges what you think you know. The tools change how you operate.
Raising Mentally Fit Humans: What Every Parent, Coach, and Teacher Needs to Know
Children spend more than 15,000 hours in school learning to read, calculate, and compete. They spend almost none learning to manage the experience of being human: the worry before a test, the spiral after a loss, the voice that says they’re not good enough. The result is a generation struggling with unprecedented anxiety and emotional overwhelm.
With research that will surprise and stories that will resonate, Dr. Kross gives parents, educators, coaches, and healthcare providers a practical framework for building mental fitness in young people — and modeling those skills themselves.
