Laura Gassner Otting

Bestselling Author, ‘Wonderhell’ and ‘Limitless’

About

Bestselling Author, ‘Wonderhell’ and ‘Limitless’

Author, Catalyst, and Executive Coach Laura Gassner Otting inspires people to push past the doubt and indecision that keep great ideas in limbo by helping audiences think bigger and accept greater challenges that reach beyond their current, limited scope of belief.

She delivers strategic thinking, well-honed wisdom, and perspective generated by decades of navigating change across the start-up, corporate, nonprofit, political, as well as philanthropic landscapes. Laura dares audiences to find their voice and generate the confidence needed to tackle larger-than-life challenges by helping them to seek new ways of leading, managing, and mentoring others.

Laura’s rebellious and entrepreneurial edge has been well-honed over a 25-year career that started when she dropped out of law school to join an unknown southern governor’s presidential campaign and ended up as a Presidential Appointee in Bill Clinton’s White House, where she helped shape AmeriCorps.

She left a leadership role as the youngest Vice President at a nationally respected search firm when she realized that her boss’s definition of success didn’t align with hers and, instead, founded and ran one of the fastest-growing search firms in the country, partnering with the full gamut of mission-driven executives, from start-up dreamers to scaling social entrepreneurs to global philanthropists. In 2015, Laura sold that firm to the team who helped her build it, both because she was hungry for the next chapter and because she held an audacious dream of electing our nation’s first female president. (Whomp whomp.)

Since that time, Laura has appeared regularly on Good Morning America and the TODAY Show, and her writing has been seen in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, HR Magazine. She is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of three books, including Wonderhell: Why Success Doesn’t Feel Like It Should… and What to Do About It, Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life, and Mission-Drive: Moving from Profit to Purpose. Her books have been translated into five languages.

Through her own commitment to give back, Laura has helped build a local Montessori school, co-founded a women’s philanthropic initiative, advised a start-up national women’s PAC, grew a citizen-leadership development program, and completed five charity-inspired marathons, projects emblematic of her passions and values. She’s turned on by the audacity of The Big Idea and that larger-than-life goal you just can’t seem to shake. She’s an instigator, a motivator, and a provocateur, and she’s never met a revolution she didn’t like, just ask her enduringly patient husband, two almost-grown sons, and troublesome puppy with whom she lives outside of Boston, MA.

Video Library

Speech Topics

Limitless Growth: Turning Limitations into Invitations

Inspired by her Wall Street Journal bestseller, Wonderhell, and viral talk seen more than 2M times on TED.com, this keynote is perfect for audiences who feel stuck at their current level of success or who need to embrace new goals, changes, or opportunities.

Each time we experience success, we see what else might be possible. It’s wonderful to see a bigger, better version of ourselves, but it also fills us with anxiety, doubt, fear, impostor syndrome, uncertainty, and burnout. It is wonderful, and it’s hell. It’s Wonderhell.

We think success will make things easier, but it doesn’t. In fact, every new level brings a new devil.

After personally interviewing more than 100 Olympic medalists, corporate titans, start-up unicorns, world-changing philanthropists, and glass-ceiling shatterers, Laura made a startling discovery about growth. When we’re faced with the “burden of our potential,” the trajectory-shifting choice is whether we interpret the tsunami of emotions that flood in next as limitations, warning us to stay still, hunker down, and stagnate… or as invitations, cheering for us because we are on the right track.

In Limitless Growth, Laura unpacks the proven strategies that high achievers use to not just survive these most important inflection moments, but learn to look forward to them, learn from them, and thrive in them instead.

Limitless: Bringing Everything we are to Everything we do

This keynote is Based on Laura’s Washington Post bestseller, Limitless, named by Robin Roberts as one of Good Morning America’s Favorite Books of the Year, this keynote is perfect for audiences who are ready to push past limiting beliefs and achieve more than they ever thought possible.

Each one of us was handed a scorecard of success at some point – by a parent, a teacher, a celebrity – maybe even before we can remember getting it… and it shaped who we are and what we think we can become. But what if their scorecard isn’t your scorecard, and what if you’ve been busy trying to fill in that myopic, singular, externally defined scorecard of success, only to find that even when the scorecard is full, you still feel empty? (Spoiler Alert: this is why only 23% of people say they feel engaged in their work.)

You can’t be INSATIABLY HUNGRY for someone else’s goals.

Laura spent 20 years leading executive searches, helping thousands of people navigate their most vulnerable moment of career shift and life disruption. Along the way, she discovered that the people who were the most successful, the most fulfilled, and the most profitable and productive for their companies weren’t those who simply hustled harder, but those who knew how to connect their work to what really mattered to them.

A kick in the ass wrapped in a warm hug, Laura teaches your audiences how to ignore the limiting beliefs that created their ceilings, remove the lies we tell ourselves that trap us in our past, and find meaning in bigger, more profitable, and sustainable goals.

Limitless Sales: Igniting Meaning to Connect and Win

Harnessing everything Laura has learned as a serial entrepreneur, endurance athlete, and the #1 Mindset Coach in the World, this keynote is perfect for igniting excitement and confidence in your sales team and empowering them to crush bigger sales goals.

Winning at sales requires more than product knowledge and the right sales techniques. Successful sales teams deeply understand why their product, service, and brand matter to them and can connect that meaning to their clients’ needs.

Your clients don’t buy a product or service; they buy a solution to their problems… one they won’t believe will work until they know that you see their problem and truly understand it.

Drawing on decades of experience as an entrepreneur and chief rainmaker, Laura breaks down the process of connection—to self, to product, and to sale—and empowers your sales team to exceed their numbers, improve customer relationships, and drive more profitable growth.

Limitless Leadership: Unlocking Greatness to Drive Profitable Growth

Bringing together three decades of advising leaders from the corner office to the Oval Office, this keynote is perfect for leaders who want experience- and research-based strategies for spotting talent in others and cultivating their greatness toward innovation and growth.

In an ever-changing, increasingly complex world, one thing never changes: we all want to bring out the greatness in ourselves and in those who matter most to us. We applaud ourselves for getting it right because employee engagement is the highest it’s been in ten years… but it’s only 23%. Considering that engaged employees are dramatically more productive and profitable for their companies, 23% simply isn’t enough. What’s happening to the other 77%.

It would be easy to blame them for not leaning into the work, but the truth is harder for leaders to hear Employees aren’t failing leaders: leaders are failing employees.

We know good leaders will engage their employees more than bad leaders. But what’s less obvious is that even great leaders risk losing their best performers when those performers don’t feel truly seen. In the absence of a strong relationship, they become dissatisfied, disengaged, disappointed… and leave. With turnover costing up to twice the annual salary of departing employees, leaders must embrace a management approach that starts with unlocking greatness.

Leveraging more than a million data points gathered from her multi-year, global research project on employee engagement, Laura reveals how leaders can spot and stoke their employees’ secret talents and hidden passions and leverage deeper, catalyzing relationships to inspire limitless engagement (and profits).

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