Keynote topics

Here is a sample of some of our most popular Keynote speaking topics. If you would like something different or more specific to your team she is open to exploring that with you. Please make sure to include your topic idea (one from the list below or one you would like to explore).

Leadership & Company-Wide Keynotes

Executive Presence: It Has Nothing to Do With How You Look

Executive presence is about how others experience your leadership. Participants learn five things they can begin doing today to strengthen their credibility, communication, influence, and leadership presence—without changing how they look.

Positive Intelligence (PQ): The Intelligence That Drives Performance

We know about IQ. We know about emotional intelligence, or EQ. But what about Positive Intelligence—PQ? This powerful keynote takes a deep dive into why PQ can be a critical factor in how effectively individuals and teams respond to challenges, pressure, conflict, and change. Participants learn what Positive Intelligence is, how PQ is measured, and how strengthening it can influence leadership, collaboration, resilience, decision-making, relationships, and performance. Most importantly, Shelly connects the individual benefits of PQ to the bigger organizational question: What happens to your corporate bottom line when more of your team’s mental energy is working for you instead of against you?

Creating a Workplace Where Talent Comes to You

Culture can become one of your organization’s greatest competitive advantages. Learn how creating the right environment can strengthen recruiting and retention, attract higher-quality candidates, and build a workplace people actively want to be part of.

Closing the Gender Gap—and Why It Impacts Your Bottom Line

Gender equity isn’t simply a women’s issue; it’s a business issue. This keynote connects talent, leadership, opportunity, culture, and organizational performance to demonstrate why closing the gender gap belongs in conversations about business results

Executive & Senior Leadership

Male Executives: The Solution, Not the Problem

Designed for male people leaders, this keynote shifts the conversation from blame to action. Leaders learn how their influence can help remove barriers, improve talent decisions, advocate for high-potential employees, and create stronger organizations.

Understanding Privilege: Awareness Without the Browbeating

We can’t change what we don’t recognize. This keynote creates a constructive conversation around privilege that builds awareness rather than blame, helping leaders become stronger advocates and champions in the workplace and beyond.

Closing the Gender Gap—and Why It Impacts Your Bottom Line

Gender equity isn’t simply a women’s issue; it’s a business issue. This keynote connects talent, leadership, opportunity, culture, and organizational performance to demonstrate why closing the gender gap belongs in conversations about business results. 

HR & People Leadership

Are Women’s Groups Really Working?

Women’s ERGs are designed to create inclusion—but are they producing meaningful change? This provocative keynote challenges traditional approaches and explores what organizations can do differently to create real opportunity, advocacy, advancement, and inclusion.

Creating a Workplace Where Talent Comes to You

What if you didn’t have to constantly hunt for great talent? This keynote explores how culture, leadership, policies, benefits, and employee experience can turn an organization into a place talented people actively want to join—and stay.

The Generational Sweet Spot

Four generations are working side-by-side, often with very different expectations. Rather than creating different policies for every generation, this keynote identifies the “sweet spot” where generations come together and shows organizations how to build a talent strategy around it. This topic is also available as a comprehensive organizational training program.

Countering Performance & Unconscious Bias

Promoting or hiring the wrong person costs far more than money. This keynote explores how performance, applicant, gender, and unconscious bias influence talent decisions—and provides leaders with practical tools to make more objective hiring and promotion decisions.

Cultivating Partnerships at Home—and What It Means for Corporate America

The traditional male breadwinner model is changing. This keynote examines how evolving expectations around fatherhood, partnership, flexibility, and work-life balance are changing what men and women expect from employers—and what organizations need to understand to compete for modern talent.

Women at Work

Women Holding Other Women Back

The glass ceiling is real—but sometimes women unintentionally reinforce it. This keynote offers truth without condemnation, helping women recognize limiting behaviors, course-correct, and become leaders who actively elevate other women and the next generation.

You Don’t Need a Mentor. You Need an Advocate.

Mentors give advice; advocates help create opportunities. This keynote is a mini-masterclass in finding influential advocates, building the right relationships, and becoming a powerful self-advocate for your own career.

Confidence vs. Capability

What happens when your capability has outgrown your confidence? Designed for highly capable women, this keynote explores how to stop questioning whether you’re ready and start showing up with the confidence, authority, and presence your experience has already earned.

Beyond Work for Women

Cultivating Partnerships at Home

Women don’t need another productivity hack to help them become more efficient at doing everything. This keynote challenges the “do-it-all” model and explores how women can create true partnership at home through shared responsibility, delegation, and a broader support system—making room for careers, families, relationships, and themselves.

Customized for Your Audience

Every organization is different. Keynotes can be customized around your audience, industry, leadership challenges, event objectives, and desired outcomes—creating more than an inspiring conversation, but one that gives people new ways to think, lead, and take action.

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