Laura absolutely ROCKED it with energy, enthusiasm, and inspiration. I loved hearing our panelists and participants refer back to Laura's concepts, ideas, and catchphrases as the day went on. It's firm evidence that people really resonated with Laura's talk.
Laura Gassner Otting
Founder and Chief Catalyzing Officer at Limitless Possibility
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Laura Gassner Otting
Biography
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, Access Hollywood, and the TODAY Show and has given speeches around the world. Her TEDx talk Why doesn't success bring happiness? has been viewed over 2 million times. She has written for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and HR Magazine and is the author of Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life (2019), which debuted at #2 on the Washington Post bestseller list (right behind Michelle Obama). Limitless has been translated into Arabic, Korean, Turkish, Portuguese, and German and was chosen by Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts as one of her Favorite Books of 2019. She also wrote Mission-Driven: Moving from Profit to Purpose (2015), and her latest book, Wonderhell: Why Success Doesn’t Feel Like It Should… and What to Do About It, debuted in April 2023 at #2 on the Wall Street Journal Bestseller List.
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 seven 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 and two troublesome pups with whom she empty-nests in Boston.
Laura Gassner Otting
Featured Videos
Current: 2025 Speaking Reel
Time 03:37
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Laura Gassner Otting
Featured Keynote Programs
Live Limitlessly.
Many of us spend our lives pursuing a singular idea of success, one that was created for us by someone else. We give votes to those who shouldn’t even have voices and strive to go faster and faster even as we find ourselves falling further and further behind. We chase gold stars, we check all the boxes, we Lean In – and we still feel incomplete.
In this keynote, Laura Gassner Otting teaches you how to ignore the rules that created your limits, align your energies and your actions, and do work that really matters so that you can live your best life. Often described as “a kick in the ass surrounded by a warm hug,” Laura brings both tough love and wisdom and offers a no-holds-barred look at what it really takes to get out of your own way and earn your success today.
Aimed at entrepreneurs and misfits, idealists and dreamers, as well as anyone seeking to align who they are with what they do, this talk lights a fire within that catalyzes energy and excitement towards becoming the change agent needed to maximize impact.
The Limitless Leader
Engaging Your Full Workforce
Demographic shifts in the workforce have led to conversations about purpose and meaning that have heretofore never been had. Millennials, Gen-Xers, and Boomers alike are all demanding that their work matters more. And, yet, only one-third of the US workforce reports that they are actively engaged in their work.
Why? Because we are using an outdated scorecard which measures the value of a job – title, money, prestige, among others – without adding in the most important part of the equation: the employee.
We know that engaged workers are 22% more productive and profitable for their employers, but what recruits the employee doesn’t retain them.
In this talk, 20-year executive search veteran Laura Gassner Otting teaches leaders how to unlock their employees’ engagement to not only make them limitless but make their companies and their profits limitless too.
Contagious Confidence
Mastering Your Leadership Voice
Self-doubt and uncertainty consign great ideas to limbo, hindering your team from exploring the big opportunities that will differentiate your company and disrupt the marketplace. That changes now.
Through this interactive experience, Laura catalyzes the confidence of audience members, so that your up-and-coming talent can fully embody that aspirational state of leadership, and leave understanding what they need to do to activate that leader inside of themselves.
Together, they explore this mindset, the actions it inspires and how, together, they create a momentum of contagious confidence which can’t be reversed. Audience members leave with a physical manifestation of their own personalized roadmap directing them to find and own the very core of their leadership voice, and with the confidence to make that dream a reality.
Limitless Sales
Ignite Meaning to Connect and Win
Regardless of the title on your business card, you are in sales.
How can everything that you do be focused on delighting your customers, closing deals, and extending and deepening relationships? It starts with the individual customer, at each interaction, through every touchpoint, at every step. And that starts with you and your customer-centric mindset.
In this talk, bestselling author Laura Gassner Otting unlocks the motivation that initially brought you to your work, and creates a framework through which you can understand and become a partner to your customers, empathizing with their nagging anxieties and empowering their big dreams, paving the way for you and your company to become their first-choice solution.
Laura Gassner Otting
Featured Books
Wonderhell: Why Success Doesn't Feel Like It Should . . . and What to Do About It
by Laura Gassner Otting
WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER!
AS SEEN ON GOOD MORNING AMERICA!
Have you ever accomplished something you weren’t so sure you could do? Success has always been the end goal, but when you achieve it ... something infuriatingly predictable happens. You start wondering what more you can do.
Instead of success bringing you happiness, it hands you an increased hunger to achieve something even bigger. And with that desire also comes uncertainty, self-doubt, anxiety and stress.
Success, in other words, is kinda wonderful ... but it’s also kinda hell. Welcome to Wonderhell.
Wonderhell is that space in your psyche where the burden of your newly discovered potential plops down, unpacks its backpack, and asks: Hey, you! Whatcha got for me?
Living in an ambitious, results-oriented society, we often mischaracterize the turbulent emotions that surround success, deeming them a “necessary evil”―a byproduct of one’s rise to the top. We tend to think that we just need to survive these difficult moments, to hang on by our fingernails and somehow get through these stressful, unwanted side effects of our success. We torture ourselves with a never-ending internal dialogue: I can handle this. Can I handle this?
But we are wrong.
Learning to live in this newfound potential can be exciting rather than exhausting. Emotions like fear, anxiety, and heartbreak are not collateral damage, slings and arrows to be absorbed and swallowed down, silenced and pushed aside. Rather, each emotion is a portal that shows us what more we can do, if instead we recognize that on the other side of this wonderful hell that we so badly wanted is another and another and another . . . but only if we choose to accept it.
Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life
by Laura Gassner Otting
Limitless will help you get "unstuck" -- and achieve extraordinary results. This book is like a high energy masterclass and brainstorming session all in one - with actionable tips to transform your vision for your career and do work with purpose.
What if success doesn't equal happiness?Many of us spend our lives pursuing a singular idea of success, one that was created for us by someone else. We give votes to those who shouldn't even have voices and strive to go faster and faster even as we find ourselves falling further and further behind. We chase gold stars, we check all the boxes, we Lean In - and we still feel incomplete.
This is not a story about failure, but it might as well be. When we don't define success in our own terms, finding our purpose and carving our own path becomes impossible. How do you break the cycle so that you can be better at work and life?
In this book, Laura Gassner Otting teaches you how to ignore the rules that created your limits, align your energies and your actions, and do work that really matters so that you can live your best life. Often described as "a kick in the ass surrounded by a warm hug," Laura brings both tough love and wisdom and offers a no-holds-barred look at what it really takes to get out of your own way and earn your success today.
If you ever dreamed about discovering and crushing that personal goal that is so big and so scary that you've only dared whisper it to yourself, this book is the permission you didn't even know you needed to live into it as only you can.
Laura Gassner Otting
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