2026 Women Lead Change Speak Tank Winner
Your people aren't lazy. They're not even tired, exactly.
They've stopped believing it matters.
Burnout is a resource problem. Demoralization is a meaning problem. Most organizations are treating the first one and wondering why the numbers haven't moved.
What's actually happening
You solved half of it.
You did the right things. The mental health benefit. The flexible schedule. The wellness stipend, the meditation app, the reminder to take PTO.
And your best people are still leaving. The ones who stay have gone quiet.
- Exhaustion responds to rest. What you're seeing doesn't.
- They're not asking for less work. They're asking whether the work matters.
- Engagement scores are flat because engagement isn't the problem underneath.
- Nobody on your team has a word for what they're feeling, which is why nobody has raised it.
Most people right now are both burned out and demoralized. Rest treats one of them. There is no wellness program on the market that treats the other, because most organizations don't know it's a separate thing.
Two physicians named it in 2018 — they argued doctors weren't burning out, they were being prevented from doing what they swore to do. That distinction rewrote how a profession understood its own exhaustion.
Keynotes & workshops
Three talks. One argument.
Why They're Still Leaving
The half of burnout your wellness program isn't touching
The distinction between depletion and demoralization, why the standard fixes only reach one of them, and what actually restores meaning at work. Rooted in the moral injury research that came out of medicine — which makes it land especially hard with clinicians and attorneys.
The RISE Ritual Method
Four steps to change how your people show up
Habits make work automatic. Rituals make it meaningful — and the difference isn't the candle, it's whether the practice points at something larger than efficiency. Reflect, Intentionally Plan, Sensory Activation, Embody: a research-backed method teams can use the same afternoon.
Do Big Things Without Disappearing
Ambition, identity, and the women who stay
High-achieving women don't burn out in a dramatic collapse. They disappear gradually, through successful performances, until they've built an impressive career that doesn't feel like theirs. What that costs an organization — and how ambition gets held without self-erasure.
From the people who booked me
"Your presentation was rated as the highlight of the two-day meeting."
"Participants were highly engaged and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. If anything, we wish we'd scheduled more time."
Why bring me in
A researcher who studies this, not a speaker who read about it.
I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Northern Iowa, where I've taught for over twenty years and run a Strategic Growth Lab on purpose and wellbeing for faculty and staff.
My PhD is in performance studies with a graduate minor in anthropology. I've spent two decades researching ritual — how people mark change, make meaning, and become someone new — and published that work in Text and Performance Quarterly and elsewhere. I co-author a gender and communication textbook now in its fifth edition, and I've served as Director of Women's and Gender Studies.
Which means the frameworks in these talks aren't repackaged from someone else's book. They come out of a body of research, tested on people who did not sign up for coaching.
CNBC · Stacking Benjamins · DisruptHR
Let's talk
Tell me about your event.
Share your date, audience, and budget range, and I'll come back within two business days with availability and a recommendation.
Based in Iowa. Speaking nationally.