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Laura Gassner Otting

Washington Post Best Selling Author and Motivational Keynote speaker
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About

Gender: Female
Nationality:
Languages: English
Travels from: United States

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Biography Highlights

  • Laura Gassner Otting is highly recognized for her impact within the nonprofit sector, Founder & CEO of Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, a member of multiple nonprofit boards and a thought leader on mission-driven work.

Biography

About Laura Gassner Otting

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. Laura 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), has been translated into Arabic, Korean, Turkish, Portuguese, and German, and which Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts chose as one of her Favorite Books of 2019, as well as Mission-Driven: Moving from Profit to Purpose (2015). Her forthcoming book, Wonderhell, is expected in April 2023.

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.

Videos

Popular Talks

What is this talk about?

After stewarding thousands of leaders through massive moments of career shift and organizational disruption, Laura knows a thing or two about the emotional rollercoaster of going after everything you’ve ever wanted. This talk was born out of the question, “Why doesn’t success feel better?”

In this keynote, Laura explains that success isn’t just an endpoint, but a waypoint, a portal that shows you that you were made for even more… if you choose to embrace your ambition, conquer your fear, and actually learn to enjoy the ride. This talk throws down the gauntlet and dares your audience members to dream even bigger.

You can watch Laura’s viral TEDx (which was immediately elevated to TED.com and hit 150K views in the first month it was live) right here.

Smart, insightful and life-reorienting, Live Limitlessly is the signature keynote based off of Laura’s Washington Post bestselling book, Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life, which Robin Roberts named as one of Good Morning America’s Favorite Books of the Year.

This high-energy and fast paced empowerment keynote is geared toward Entrepreneurs, Business Owners, MLM, Direct Sales Professionals and anyone looking to align their career to their life’s calling and purpose. It is suitable for rising stars as well as established leaders.

Learn more about how Laura can help your audience toss out everyone else’s expectations in life in order to pursue their own definition of success.

What is this talk about?

Demographic shifts in the workforce have led to conversations about purpose and meaning that have heretofore never been had. Millennials, GenXers, and Boomers alike are all demanding that their work matter more. And, yet, only one-third of the US workforce reports that they are actively engaged in their work.

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.

Backed up by a 20-year career in executive search and a three-year research project, comprising nearly 6000 responses from 74 different countries from before, during, as now as we come out of the pandemic, 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.

A smash hit with empowerment audiences, Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life has helped readers find the courage to finally live the life they’ve always wanted.  Through this interactive experience, Laura motivates audience members to channel their confidence and fully embody that aspirational state of leadership.

This action-oriented keynote is for aspiring corporate leaders, business owners, Direct Sales and MLM team leaders, corporate managers, executives, directors, and supervisors at industry conferences or individual organizational events.

Learn more about how Laura can leave your audience understanding exactly what they need to do to activate the inspiring leader within themselves.

What is this talk about?

Your clients don’t buy your products. They don’t buy your services. They don’t buy your brand.

They buy the solution that you provide to the problem that they have.

In order to win at the sales game, your audience must connect to why this product, this service, this brand actually matters to them, and be able to community that meaning as they build mutually beneficial relationships with your clients.

In this talk, based on decades of experience as an entrepreneur and chief rainmaker, Laura breaks down the process of connection… to self, to product, and to sale.

“How Can I Help?” is a well-intended question that typically creates actions resulting in martyrdom, burnout, and malaise that prevents real innovative thinking and creative solutions.

This gut-wrenching, heart-invoking keynote speaks to core of nonprofit agencies and organizations, volunteers, donors, investors, business leaders and entrepreneurs looking to break through barriers holding their teams back from finding real solutions to stagnating problems.

Learn more how Laura can help your audience reframe the question and break through doubt and limited-scope thinking.

Books

Wonderhell: Why Success Doesn't Feel Like It Should . . . and What to Do About It

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.

Read more..

Wonderhell: Why Success Doesn't Feel Like It Should . . . and What to Do About It

Careers, Motivational & Inspirational, Self Help
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.
Buy the book
Buy the book

Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life

Limitless helps innovators, idealists, and iconoclasts 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 doing 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 Limitless, 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.

Read more..

Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life

Motivational & Inspirational, Self Help
Limitless helps innovators, idealists, and iconoclasts 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 doing 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 Limitless, 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.
Buy the book
Buy the book