Clif Smith, a US Army veteran, former diplomat, and intelligence officer, serves as Ernst and Young (EY) LLP’s Americas Mindfulness Leader and is an internationally recognized leader for bringing mindfulness into the corporate world. Clif brings his story and more than 25 years of experience leading through high-pressure situations into his teachings and demonstrates the value of adopting mindfulness as a fundamental part of our personal and professional lives. Following his passion for developing others, he built EY’s Mindful Leadership program, delivering practical training to more than 150,000 people, including EY professionals and clients, with measurable impact on performance, leadership, and well-being. Before devoting much of his time to creating and managing mindfulness programs, Clif led EY into a new market, winning multimillion-dollar deals for the firm as an account leader in the government and public sector practice. Immediately prior to joining EY, he managed diligence projects across several sectors including financial services, telecommunications, and government at private investment firm Granahan McCourt Capital (GMC). Prior to GMC, he was a vice president at JP Morgan Chase, where he helped create the firm’s first cyber threat and protective intelligence collection, reporting, and analysis policy and program. Clif’s experience in the private sector is preceded by 17 years in the US Department of Defense, Defense Intelligence Agency, and broader Intelligence Community, where he served as an intelligence officer managing and carrying out signals intelligence and clandestine and overt human intelligence collection operations around the globe including deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. Clif’s personal journey from poverty to prosperity is a key motivating factor for his work as an executive coach, mindfulness teacher, and keynote speaker helping others achieve success despite their self-limiting beliefs and challenging circumstances. His one-on-one coaching clients have included CEOs and other senior executives, university administrators, veterans, troubled youth, and others. His keynotes, as well as his insights gleaned from successfully bringing mindfulness into the corporate setting, are sought after by many organizations, including major universities, corporations, leadership conferences, and nonprofits nationally and internationally. Clif is a mindfulness-based stress reduction teacher, a certified Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute Mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence teacher, an ICF-certified executive coach, and an accomplished public speaker. He has a bachelor of science in business information systems from Bellevue University and master of public administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Clif and his wife, Jen, live with their son in Virginia.