Keynotes, Workshops, Speaking Topics

• Connection
• Communication
• Leadership
• Mentorship
• Digital

This Talk Won’t Change You, But How You Remember It Will

Memories are unreliable and fickle, yet drive our emotions and our narrative. We are anchored not by our past but how we remember and process our past. Learn to improve the narrative by recognizing the fallibility of memory, how that fallibility serves us, and to release the attachment holding us back.

Brand YOU: Tips for Managing Your Reputation

Interested in creating a good reputation for yourself? Whether you like it or not, you’ve already got a personal brand. Do you like what people are saying? Do you want your message to reach even more people? Which people? Learn how to manage your message by strengthening the pillars that build the foundation of your brand. Examine strategies of powerhouse brands of industry leaders who are doing it right.

“I’m not taking any negative input at this time” – Your Process for Examining Bias

Researchers have shown that, regardless of gender, implicit bias in employees influences product development and delivery. People often cannot resist their IMPLICIT biases, limiting their ability to make decisions in neutral ways (even when they do well in resisting their EXPLICIT biases). This results in biased design. While implicit biases are often linked to negative consequences, they are also malleable, which means it is helpful learn to mitigate your own biases and work with them to your advantage. Understanding your (positive and negative) unconscious thoughts and the consequences of allowing bias to enter your design will help you build better teams, products, and designs.

Better UX w/EQ Training Workshop

For designers and developers to create user-centric products, we must focus on creating the best possible experience for our clients. We do this by incorporating emotional intelligence into the creative process, triggering positive emotions when clients engage with our products and services. Emotional Intelligence is a skill you can develop with practice. Learn how to incorporate it into your creative process to design products and services that impress your clients. In this user experience workshop, you will:

• Understand ways user experience is included at every level of business
• Identify the touch points of your brand
• Learn the difference between UX vs. UI
• Learn to quickly identify what poor UX looks like
• Examine where UX fits into your own creative process
• Learn strategies you can implement immediately to design products and services with the best possible user experience
• Discuss companies that are effectively using EQ for their UX
• Understand the areas where you can incorporate EQ into your creative process when designing products and services

Social and Emotional Intelligence at Work

You don’t have to be a manager or a boss to be a leader. Effective leadership means celebrating the strengths of individuals and empowering them with the tools to implement innovative new ideas. Time spent resolving conflicts in the workplace decreases productivity and stifles creativity. This workshop offers suggestions for improving your results at work by increasing interpersonal skills, building a personal brand, understanding your optimal work environment, and how to present professional projects.
Leaders can lead from within an organization. A collaborative work environment builds team trust and fosters innovation. This is an experiential learning workshop with hands-on activities to get better results from your team, even if you are not a manager or owner.

Learning to Say, “No!” Without Being a Jerk

Are you tired of feeling overwhelmed because you overcommit? A recovering “People Pleaser,” I know the harm and unrest that can come with saying “yes” too often. Learn to recognize your resistance to saying “no.” Get examples of strategies you can begin to implement immediately to get better results in your life. This talk will present tips and tricks for re-training your mind to only accept invitations that will propel you forward in life.

Social Media Strategy

Social media marketing needs to have an all-encompassing strategy which includes focused creative content. Unique digital ads can be created to attract the attention of your target audience and direct them to a website landing page. A way to capture email addresses for future marketing purposes is also needed. Create additional value for your potential clients by creating infographic sheets, videos, a podcast, blog posts, and eBooks. Learn how to implement a consistent social media strategy for delivering quality products and services to your ideal client.

Mr. Potato Head Branding

For most people, personal branding is like playing with an incomplete Mr. Potatohead. A successful branding strategy includes all of the parts! You’ve got to have all of the pieces in the correct places if you want your marketing and advertising dollars to be successful. Learn important elements of building a successful brand online such as social media strategy, a website, press releases, search engine optimization, and your overall brand message.

Transformative Chaos: How To Win When You Set Yourself Up To Lose

Life can be a struggle, and it can be chaotic. We have wins and we have losses. Sometimes when we’re winning, we sabotage ourselves; we make things worse by making things extra hard so we feel like we’ve earned it. We set ourselves up to lose, and this adds even more chaos to our lives. But chaos isn’t meant to be managed, it’s meant to be dealt with. When going on a diet, instead of just renouncing all sweets, just limit yourself to one piece of hard candy per day. In this session, you’ll learn strategies for dealing with the chaos by breaking it into micro-manageable bits—bite-sized bits you can deal with. You don’t need to eliminate the chaos, just convert it into something you can handle.

Unleashing Your Creativity Training Workshop

For innovation to flourish, organizations must create an environment that fosters creativity; bringing together multi-talented groups of people who work in close collaboration together— exchanging knowledge, ideas and shaping the direction of the future. Creativity is a skill you can develop with practice and a process you can manage.
In this creativity workshop, you will:

• Understand the dynamics of creative work, the most common pitfalls, and how they affect teams
• Learn to identify and eliminate the things that stop creativity
• Discover specific, everyday practices that lead to long-term effectiveness
• Understand the pillars of effective collaboration and creative leadership
• Develop the mindset, skillsets, and toolsets of highly creative people in business, arts, and science.
• Discover your natural capacity for creativity through a range of hands-on activities that will appeal to both sides of your brain
• Explore some of the thinking strategies of innovators in business, art and science, and how you can apply these strategies to your everyday work
• Experiment with ideation tools that supersede traditional brainstorming in a fun, inspiring action-filled environment
• Find the business case to bring creativity into your organization

Fearing the Robot Overlords Keynote

We fear robot overlords as we do vampires, werewolves, and other baddies that go bump in the night. We worry that their intelligence will take our jobs, our livelihood, our freedom, and enslave us to their bidding; or at least that’s how it happens in the movies. Popular culture capitalizes on this emotion to sell Terminator tickets and Asimov novels, but this is not our future. We can celebrate Artificial Intelligence as our greatest accomplishment, and harness it for the tool that it really is. This talk addresses our relationship with computers as tools and how we should allow computers to do the work, so people can do the innovating. Our horizon awaits.

5 Tips for Cultivating EQ in the Workplace Training Workshop or Keynote

Learning to manage our state of mind in the workplace is an acquired skill. While stress in the workplace in unavoidable, it is possible to cultivate Emotional Intelligence (EQ) to manage our state of mind. Practicing EQ helps us identify and eliminate stressors in our lives. Awareness of self and awareness of others strengthens personal and professional relationships. When we understand the motivations of ourselves and the perspectives of others we form deeper connections. In this presentation, learn five tips for cultivating Emotional Intelligence in the workplace.

User Experience at Every Level of Business

User Experience is included at every level of business. This can be seen in the culture of a company. Through the content, products, and services that the employees create, the company engages with its consumers. User experience is integrated into every touchpoint of a company’s infrastructure when people engage with a brand. Learn why it’s important to have a Generalist on the team to oversee the User Experience for a company at every level of its processes, including hiring, design, development, advertising, and marketing.

The 4 Deadly Sins of Mentorship

Mentorship is important to build into your organization. In order to maintain a cohesive culture of your organization, you must pass on a legacy. Mentorship allows you to impart values, creates a cohesive culture and shares experiential wisdom. Creating a caring, diverse, supportive environment allows your team to build the skills and attitudes they need for success. In this presentation, you will learn the Four Deadly Sins of Mentorship that will make or break your organization.

Mentorship can come from people in the same industry, people of varying ages and through various communication methods (in-person, email, video conferencing, etc.). Mentorship experiences can happen once or multiple times throughout the year. Mentorship is more about guiding others through challenging experiences that you’ve already experienced than it is about telling someone what to do.

Transform Your Life, Transform Your Team! 8 Actions To Lead By Example

Leadership is a transformational journey for both the leader and for those being led. Most great leaders are go-getters, but to be an exceptional leader, you must understand that the ecology of leadership includes: diversity, mentorship, personal development, open communication, team building, skills sharing and professional development. Leaders can learn to incorporate these suggestions into their professional and personal lives to get better results from the people around them. In this presentation, we will cover 8 leadership actions you can start practicing now to create a diverse, supportive environment to get better results from your team.

Empathy Is Your Secret Weapon Keynote

It can be argued that trauma is defined by perception. As different as we all look, sound and act, so too are we different in how we process our life experiences, even the most dramatic. The things that have happened to you are likely to have the strongest influence on your current and future behavior but the way you process those experiences can be altered. Empathy is your greatest ally in life and in business. It is also a muscle that needs to be exercised in order to evolve.

5 Steps to Having a Difficult Conversation

The words “Diversity and Inclusion” often provoke animosity and disparity in the workplace. Phrases and labels that are meant to be positive and describe people and workplace issues often have the opposite effect and instead produce division and isolation. But how do we resolve disparity in the workplace and have productive conversations? How do we correct our approach and stop alienating each other? We seek open and productive dialog involving often competing viewpoints, yet sensitive topics are met with kid gloves when they require compassion and balance. We must replace the apathy of tolerance with the empathy of understanding. We need to learn how to navigate difficult conversations, avoid their divisive triggers, and restore collaboration and unity. Attend this session to better understand the multi-facets of highly effective communication. Learn the 5 steps to having a difficult conversation and how these conversations can help you manage and work within diverse teams. We will also discuss how to incorporate unity, collaboration, and mentorship into your work.