Jess Ekstrom Author; Motivational Speaker; Founder of Headbands of Hope and Mic Drop Workshop

The quality of your future is entirely dependent on the quality of your mindset. The first step to achieving influence and massive success is editing your thought patterns and the negative feedback loops that are holding you back, then find the growth mindset that will take you to the next level.

Jess Ekstrom knows this better than anyone. She’s started two multi-million dollar social enterprises that have helped women and girls all over the world, but not without a few trips and falls (okay, maybe more than a few!) on her climb to the top.

This keynote will help audiences identify the five core mindsets we have and how to use them: The Reactor (happens in times of pressure), The Student (happens in new territory), The Lawyer (happens in conflict), The Dreamer (happens on the edge of opportunity), The Evaluator (happens when we reflect on our life and progress).

If you’re looking to motivate your people to get out of their own way, outplay their imposter syndrome and feel fulfilled at the end of a work day, this is your keynote.

Audience Takeaways:

• Feel confident in their career so they can increase productivity and overcome challenges and change.
• Understand how we talk to ourselves in moments of pressure, new territory, conflict, opportunity, and self-evaluation.
• Learn how to reflect and evaluate their progress without judgment or comparison so they can avoid burnout and workplace anxiety.
• Develop a toolkit for their thoughts so they can articulate their ideas and communicate with influence

Nowadays, it’s so easy to get warped into negative thoughts and constantly feeling like you’re moving from problem to problem.

A recent study at the American Academy of Neurology found that prolonged negative thinking diminishes your brain’s ability to think or reason clearly and it quickly drains your energy.

You’d think the solution to negativity would be to tell yourself to “just be positive!” but we all know that doesn’t trick your brain, it only frustrates it.

In Jess’ bestselling book, Chasing the Bright Side, she talks about how optimism isn’t about eliminating the negativity, it’s about using it to create something better. Even the spark of her business, Headbands of Hope, was started because of a problem she saw: kids with cancer wanted to wear headbands after hair-loss. Now, her company has donated over one million headbands to kids with illnesses and has reached every children’s hospital in the United States and 22 countries.

But it all began because there was a problem. Problems are where a lot of great ideas begin if we let them.

If you’re looking to find a keynote speaker who can deliver inspiration infused with humor and entertainment, then Jess is your choice. In this keynote, she aims to inspire audiences to not just envision a better future for their life, work, and community, but go create it.

Audience Takeaways:

• Finding the overlap between passion and profit
• Why optimism is the key to positive growth
• How to turn setbacks into comebacks
• A better future starts with a brighter mindset

This keynote is perfect for: workplace engagement, overcoming burnout, adapting a more positive mindset at work, employee retention, increasing fulfillment, navigating change and hardships, startup struggles and culture building.

Let’s get one thing straight: meaningful work is not assigned to you, it’s created by you.

Most of the time we believe that in order to do something meaningful, we have to do something else: live somewhere else, work somewhere else, do something else, be someone else.

But what if we didn’t have to change our circumstance to do something meaningful, but changed our mindset around it?

So according to the Chapman University Survey, why do most people fear public speaking more than they fear sharks?

Nowadays, people don’t want to just clock in and clock out. People want to feel like what they’re doing matters- it’s human nature. We want to know that all of the tasks are building blocks to something greater than themselves. We want to zoom out and say, “Yes! I’m a part of something that matters.”

When employees, leaders, entrepreneurs can create meaning in their work:

They show up with more passion
Their hustle muscle is activated
They’re more engaged in the big picture
And the ordinary tasks now have an extraordinary purpose

When we build meaning in our work: A single sale becomes a fist pump of forward progress. A customer service call becomes a deeper connection to a future customer. An end of quarter review becomes an impact report….

In other words, our jobs are no longer jobs…they’re a service to humanity.

Jess’ keynote is certainly not a namaste, save the world, love-what-you-do-and-you-never-have-to-work-a-day-in-your-life manifesto. She uses her experiences, market research, and improv comedy classes to make an inspiring yet entertaining experience.

Audience Takeaways:

• Fulfillment is not a destination we hit one day, but a choice to how we live today
• Develop an entrepreneurial mindset to increase your agility and handle what's thrown your way
• It’s not about the task, but what you make the task mean
• Learn what is success (purpose) and what is achievement (reward)

There was a study that asked men and women in their last moments of life what they regretted. 

Women said, “I cared too much about what others thought of me.”

Men said, “I worked too hard.”

In other words, women had regrets over their thoughts and perception…men didn’t.

Whether or not we recognize it or hear it, we have this voice in our head: the voice in our head that tells us we’re not ready. The voice in our head that makes our failures louder than our wins. The voice in our head that compares us to the woman beside us. The voice in our head that tells us someday, but not today.

So what happens when we change the story?

Opportunity. That’s what happens when we change the voice in our head to tell us that there’s good and we can bring it. It opens up a whole other world that maybe we thought was beyond reach before. Everything we want is within reach if we’re willing to throw perfection out the door and embrace the messiness of the journey.

But first, we have to learn to recognize the voice in our head and train it to be our biggest cheerleader, instead of the coach that keeps putting you on the bench. In this keynote, Jess will use her entrepreneurial story to show how she actively trained the voice in her head through times of inspiration, chaos, failure and purpose.

Audience Takeaways:

• Recognizing the voice in our head and what it tells us
• The path to leadership begins with giving more airtime to our inner cheerleader than our inner critic
• Learning that confidence is a voice, not a skill
• Understanding that we are always in control of our story