Liz Bohannon

Investing in the future takes a good deal of conviction and purposefulness which many people are seeking as we emerge from the past few challenging years, but where to begin? 

Besides being the Founder and CEO of socially conscious fashion brand Sseko Designs, Liz Bohanan is a difference maker in this world who Forbes named a “Top 20 public speaker in the U.S.” By sharing her unique story of applying a Beginner’s Mind to everything she does, Liz shows how this mindset will help to escape the normal constraints that hold people back and give them new pathways to pivot, innovate and ultimately transform toward any goal.  The power of her personal story of building a multi-million dollar, socially conscious brand with purpose and impact will inspire you and motivate you to take action.

By exploring some key principles from her Bestselling Book, Beginner’s Pluck: Build Your Life of Purpose & Impact Now, Liz challenges participants to dream small so they can start doing instead of dreaming, and show how curiosity over criticism fuels innovation. She sets the stage for the audience to take a personal journey down the ultimate path of success by weaving passion & purpose into their every goal. The three words she lives by are purpose, passion, and impact and everyone can learn to make these a part of their everyday thinking!

Key Takeaways:

• Become a Problem Finder: Turn your world inside out. By challenging your Inner Beginner, you'll become less overwhelmed with finding the solution and you find new power by first starting with identifying the most interesting problems facing your customers and your community.
• Dream Small / Achieve BIG: Counterintuitively, when we give ourselves and our people permission to dream small and ACT on those dreams, we create the momentum we need to do BIG things in the world.
• Collaboration Over Competition: The new approach to working smarter and better together.
• Build (or reconnect) With Your Purpose: Purpose is the “why” that should always be considered first and foremost. When unexpected curveballs are thrown your way, the strongest unifier and innovation-inducer is going back to the basics and embracing a renewed sense of purpose. You don't find your purpose, you build it. 

Leadership can be an isolating experience. The daily pressure to perform, wrestle with gut-wrenching decisions, and drive hard conversations all weigh on a leader’s soul. Overcoming what can often become a self-fulfilling prophecy of the lonely leader is not only crucial to your survival but also for those you lead. Drawing on her experiences as a successful entrepreneur and founder of Sseko Designs, Liz Bohannon understands the pressures that leaders face to have all the answers and make hard choices in a complex and quickly changing landscape. She’s seen what a leader support system can provide: more educated decision-making, improved team dynamics, and increased mental health for leaders and society at large. Walk away from this talk ready to embrace vulnerability in a new way and build authentic connections and a community that can support you in the challenges ahead.

Key Takeaways:

• Actively identify your personal “Board of Directors”: how to surround yourself with people who will support and inspire you.
• Learn the difference between community and culture and why both are important.
• Gain a new perspective on why positive mental health matters.
• Learn how to better manage the sacrifices you may be making in pursuit of success.

Since its founding, Sseko Designs, led by transformation speaker and entrepreneur Liz Bohannon, has generated tens of millions of dollars in impact revenue, created dignified, fair-wage jobs for thousands of artisans globally, and enabled hundreds of female scholars in developing economies to continue to university and become leaders in their communities and our world. None of this would have been possible if Liz had not had the vision to see that sometimes working together to solve a problem results in much more immediate success than going it alone. Liz can offer clarity of conviction and inspire the audience to find a new purposefulness in the way in which they do their work.

Liz shares with the audience how she is living out her values of choosing collaboration over competition as Sseko Designs merged with their biggest competitor, Noonday Collection to form the world’s largest impact-driven, fair-trade social selling brand. Liz details that after leading thousands of key stakeholders through an intensive M&A change management process, she is even more committed to leading with the principles of stakeholder buy-in, emotional intelligence, vulnerability, and co-creation.

Key Takeaways:

• Become a Collaborator: Turn your world inside out. By challenging your view and thinking about potential ways to work with others, you'll become less overwhelmed with tackling your problems and find new power by first starting to identify the most interesting ways to potentially collaborate with your community, your competitors, and maybe even your customers!
• Find a New Way to Dream: When we give ourselves permission to creatively dream and then ACT on that out-of-the-box thinking, we create the momentum we need to do BIG things in the world.
• Connect With Your Purpose: Purpose is the “why” that should always be considered first and foremost. When unexpected curveballs are thrown your way, the strongest unifier and innovation-inducer is going back to the basics, embracing a renewed sense of purpose and possibly even teaming with a competitor. You don't find your purpose, you build it. And Liz will teach you how.