Leadership Love Asheville

Monday, September 14 - Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Century Room on the Park at Pack’s Tavern
20 South Spruce Street • Asheville, NC 28801

Leadership Love:
Candid Stories from the Front Lines

Leadership Love isn’t your typical conference. It’s a deeply human gathering for agency leaders and changemakers who have weathered tough calls, messy transitions, and defining personal moments. We’re shining a light on the raw, unfiltered stories that rarely get told.

Whether you’re at your own crossroads, steering a team through change, or simply seeking to reconnect with what truly matters, Leadership Love offers space for honest reflection, practical wisdom, and real human connection. Together, we’ll explore how to lead with clarity, creativity, and compassion—without losing yourself along the way.

Member Ticket: $1,450

Nonmember Price: $1,950

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Teams of 4 or more receive a $200 discount per ticket!

Meet Your Leadership Love Speakers

STEPHEN GATES

Stephen is the founder of CRZY design and strategy studio.

Learn more about Stephen

Stephen’s Presentation

I Was Good at the Wrong Job

After three layoffs, Stephen Gates sat down to interview for his next big role and realized he hadn’t created work he was proud of in over five years.

He had become a politician, organizational therapist, interventionist, and executive hysteria coordinator. Not a creative. Not the kind of leader he’d set out to be. The salary was there, but the work and creativity had gone lost along the way.

This is a talk about something senior leaders almost never say out loud: that success can quietly hollow you out. That imposter syndrome doesn’t get smaller when you get the big job. The further you climb, the more alone you can feel, and the less you want to admit it.

It’s also about what happened next. The past four years building his own studio have been a reckoning and a rediscovery about what it takes to find your original voice again, build work you are proud of, and stop measuring yourself by what a corporation decided you were worth.

SCOTT WELLIVER

Founder & Psychotherapist at Within Mental Health

Learn more about Scott

Scott’s Presentation

CTRL+ALT+DEL: On Burnout, Meaning, and Becoming

For a long time, I got really good at being a functional human inside systems that rewarded functioning. Creative leadership. Tech. Strategy. Performance. Achievement. From the outside, much of my life looked successful. Internally, though, there was a growing sense that I had become disconnected from something essential in myself. In the middle of shifting from design leadership into psychotherapy, while also rebuilding my own life in real time, I became increasingly interested in the possibility that burnout is not just depletion, but direction. Less about failure and more about feedback.

CTRL+ALT+DEL is a conversation about transitions, identity, and the strange experience of realizing the person you became to survive or succeed may no longer fully fit who you are becoming now. Blending mental health, philosophy, systems thinking, and lived experience, the talk explores what happens when the old operating system stops working, and how interruption, grief, uncertainty, and reinvention can sometimes become the beginning of something more honest. More alive. More you.