Peter Bregman

Based on his book Leading with Emotional Courage: How to Have Hard Conversations, Create Accountability, and Inspire Action on Your Most Important Work, Peter unlocks the secrets of highly successful leaders – regardless of their role – and pinpoints the fundamental ingredient: emotional courage.

Emotional courage distinguishes powerful leaders from weak ones. It means speaking up when others are silent and remaining steadfast, grounded, and measured in the face of uncertainty. Truly great leaders don’t just know what to say or do – they are willing to experience the discomfort, risk, and uncertainty of actually saying or doing it.

In this engaging and interactive talk, Peter shows audiences:

• Why emotional courage is important, and examples of its power.
• How to use emotional courage to initiate hard conversations, create accountability, and inspire focused action on your most important work.
• Why the best leaders have confidence in themselves, the ability to connect with others, and commitment to a purpose – and how emotional courage is the key to unlocking all of those factors.
• What it feels like—experientially through fun and effective exercises—to have emotional courage.
• How to become a leader with the power to align teams, inspire action, and achieve stellar results.

We squander a tremendous amount of our potential. Organizations waste a tremendous amount of their people’s potential. How? By focusing on the wrong things or not following through on real priorities.

Drawing from his bestselling book, 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, Peter sets out the new, simple rules for leading in a way that makes the best use of everyone’s talents and brings focus to an organization.

In this engaging, story-based, and very practical talk, Peter offers ideas, practices, tips, mind hacks, and gentle nudges to help leaders bring focus to their organization. Peter will show audiences:

• An 18-minute plan to manage their day—empowering them to get the right things done.
• How to get traction, stick to their focus, ignore non-priorities, avoid the allure of unproductive busyness, and master their boundaries so they can resist distractions.
• How to build a plan that places people at the intersection of their strengths, weaknesses, differences, and passions, maximizing their success and impact on the organization.

70% of all major change efforts fail because of rampant fear, anxiety, and resistance. But it doesn’t have to be that way, resistance is a direct result of how we manage change.

Peter Bregman has successfully designed and executed major change efforts at the world’s most prestigious companies of all sizes. Peter’s experience proves that resistance is optional, an unintended consequence of the way most leaders try to execute change. His key insight: “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”

In this speech, Peter teaches a simple mind shift and a few basic, easily implementable strategies that can completely transform how managers and leaders lead—and how the whole organization perceives change. He shares:

• Three change rules that must underlie any organization’s change effort.
• How to use the “Engagement Continuum” to diagnose and describe their own change initiatives.
• Seven strategies for engaging the workforce during a time of change that shift the responsibility of change from leaders to the people who must take the daily actions to make the change successful.