Speaking & Facilitation
Stories can carry what explanations sometimes can’t.
Speaking, professional learning, and facilitated experiences that help people understand feelings differently — and meet emotionally weighted moments with greater curiosity, confidence, and care.
Elizabeth Rideout, PhD, is an educator, researcher, author, and experienced facilitator whose work explores emotional experience through story, metaphor, experiential learning, and practical application.
Her signature Ember Compass Approach invites a foundational shift:
Feelings don’t simply happen to us. Feelings happen for us.
Whether working with educators, caregivers, helping professionals, organizational teams, or children themselves, Elizabeth creates engaging learning experiences that make complex emotional ideas accessible, memorable, and immediately useful.
A Different Way of Understanding Feelings
What if the goal wasn't always to calm the feeling down?
What if, instead, we became curious about what it was trying to tell us?
The Ember Compass Approach understands feelings as meaningful communication rather than problems to eliminate. Every feeling — however uncomfortable, inconvenient, or overwhelming — arrives with information. It is responding to something that matters, mobilizing us in some way, and pointing toward something important.
Built from nearly twenty years of research and facilitation practice in experiential and embodied learning and emotional development, Elizabeth's work gives participants a practical framework for developing a different relationship with emotional experience — their own and that of the people they support.
The result isn't another collection of strategies for managing difficult moments.
It's a different way of meeting them.
Signature Professional Learning
Where the Calm Comes From
Understanding our own emotional experience so we can remain grounded in someone else's.
Rather than offering calm as something we perform, the workshop explores how grounded presence is developed from the inside out.
The Language We Leave Behind
Emotional literacy is not primarily taught in lessons. It is transmitted in the everyday language of the adults whom children live and learn alongside — the question we ask after a conflict, the way we respond when a child cries, the words we reach for when something goes wrong.
This workshop invites participants to become curious about the language they have inherited — from their own childhoods, their professional training, and their institutional cultures — and to begin building the vocabulary they want to leave in its place.
When Feelings Become Messengers
A practical framework for understanding what emotions are trying to communicate.
Big feelings are often approached as something to regulate, manage, redirect, or resolve. This workshop begins somewhere different: with curiosity.
The Ember Compass Approach
Every profession that involves people, involves feelings — the professional's own, and those of the people they serve.
Imagine if every difficult emotional moment became easier to navigate. The Ember Compass Approach helps participants understand what feelings are and changes how professionals understand themselves, their clients, & the moments that matter most.
For Conferences & Organizations
Sometimes you have a full day. Sometimes you have fifteen minutes.
Elizabeth's presentations can be adapted to the time, audience, and purpose of the gathering without requiring participants to have prior familiarity with The Ember Compass or the broader framework.
Offerings include:
2.5-hour / Half-Day Deep Dive
A highly participatory professional-learning experience designed for meaningful exploration and application.
Full-Day Professional Learning
A deeper facilitated experience incorporating multiple concepts, experiential activities, reflection, practice, and application to participants' professional contexts.
Multi-Session Learning Series
Signature workshops can be combined into a progressive learning series, allowing participants to deepen and apply the framework over time.
15–20 minute Spotlight
A memorable introduction to feelings as messengers and the central ideas of the Ember Compass Approach.
30–60 minute Conference Session
An engaging, condensed professional-learning experience combining story, research, reflection, and practical application.
60–90 minute Seminar
Ideal for professional associations, caregiver communities, youth-serving organizations, and distributed teams.
Who Elizabeth Works With
The Ember Compass Approach can be adapted for people who support children, families, communities, and one another, including:
Early childhood educators · K–12 educators · school and district teams · youth-serving organizations · family-support professionals · adoption and foster-family communities · community organizations · leadership teams · caregivers and parents
Elizabeth's work is educational and professional-development based and is intended to complement, not replace, clinical or therapeutic services.
From Story to Shared Language
The Ember Compass
Elizabeth is the author and illustrator of The Ember Compass, the first novel in the Flippin' Feels series for young readers.
The story translates the larger emotional framework into a world children can enter for themselves — where feelings become characters, emotional experiences become adventures, and children discover:
Feelings don't happen to us. Feelings happen for us.
For professional-learning groups working with children and families, copies of The Ember Compass and accompanying learning resources can be incorporated into workshop packages, providing participants with practical tools for carrying the learning beyond the session.
Bulk and organizational pricing is available.
For Young Audiences
Author Visits & School Experiences
Elizabeth also offers interactive author visits for schools, libraries, and community organizations.
Part story. Part conversation. Part emotional adventure.
Young audiences meet the characters of The Ember Compass, explore what their own feelings might be trying to tell them, and discover a new way of thinking about the big feelings that sometimes seem to take over.
Visits can include readings, discussion, interactive activities, the Compass Code, Q&A, and opportunities to meet the tangible Flippin' Feels characters that bring the story to life.
Programs can be adapted for different ages and group sizes.
About Elizabeth
Elizabeth Rideout, PhD
Author · Educator · Researcher · Facilitator
Elizabeth Rideout has spent nearly twenty years exploring how people learn through emotional, relational, and embodied experience.
Her work began in experiential learning with horses, where she spent more than a decade facilitating individuals and groups and developing curriculum around emotional awareness, communication, leadership, and personal development. Her academic work ultimately led to a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of New Brunswick, where her research examined the development and professionalization of equine-assisted learning and therapeutic practice.
She has taugh at the university level, developed and facilitated experiential curricula, worked with individuals and organizations, and translated years of research and practice into the Ember Compass Approach.
Today, that work exists in two interconnected worlds:
Professional learning for the adults who hold emotionally important spaces — and stories that give children language for the feelings they are learning to hold.
What Participants Leave With
Elizabeth's sessions are designed to create more than an engaging few hours.
Participants leave with:
A framework they can remember.
Complex emotional concepts become understandable through metaphor, story, and shared language.
Questions they can actually use.
Practical ways of becoming curious about what an emotional experience may be communicating.
Greater confidence around emotional intensity.
Not because every difficult moment becomes easy, but because participants have somewhere meaningful to begin.
Language that travels.
Ideas participants can bring into classrooms, teams, homes, and conversations with children and families.
A different relationship with feelings.
Their own — and those entrusted to their care.
Bring Elizabeth to Your Organization
Professional learning is available in person and virtually and can be tailored to the needs of individual organizations, districts, associations, conferences, and professional communities.
Programs may be booked as standalone sessions or combined into a larger professional-learning series.
Workshop materials and copies of The Ember Compass can also be incorporated into participant packages.
Let's create something meaningful for your group.
Elizabeth Rideout, PhD
You found the compass. Welcome.
The Ember Compass is now available to order everywhere.
For updates on new releases, join the email circle.
Early glimpses of new stories and characters
Reflections on parenting, big feelings, and connection
Opportunities to offer feedback as materials develop
First access to new books, guides, and educator resources
No noise. Just thoughtful updates as things take shape.