Marisa Santoro, a former Wall Street IT executive with a 21-year career in Financial Services is the founder of the corporate training practice, In Our Shoes (InRShoes.com). She is a corporate leadership trainer, TED and keynote speaker, career coach, and author of Own Your Authority (McGraw Hill). Her dynamic and relatable style engages audiences and leaves them with real, practical tools they can hit-the-ground-running with immediately.
Her signature style invites participants to make ‘gutsy moves’ – take small incremental action that have the potential to increase their impact over time. Her expertise in leadership and professional development, as well as effective business communication, has been brought in to support business leaders across industries at organizations such as Pfizer, Merck, American Express, UBS, Anheuser-Busch, Allianz Global Investors, Sony Music, S&P Global, State Farm, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), New York Council of Nonprofits, Women in Tech International (WITI), Aetna Healthcare, New York University (NYU), NYU Langone Medical Center, New York and New Jersey municipalities and many more.
She is also an honoree of the Woman of Influence award from New York Business Journal and BizWomen.com for her years of mentoring and coaching midcareer leaders, executives, healthcare professionals, and sales leaders to achieve higher levels of influence. She also writes a career column for American City Business Journals, covering their how-to career and business strategy sections, with articles published across 44 cities in the United States.
Her TED talk, “Speaking Without Apology,” guides on how to detach from language that feeds into the “Sorry Syndrome” and make subtle tweaks in your speech to springboard you from diluting your value to spotlighting your assets immediately. She guides professionals how to reclaim their confidence, tap into their instincts and embrace their inner dialogue using proven tactical tools, and strategies in proven step-by-step career leadership programs coaching on ways to authentically build trust as leaders and advance in their careers.
She delivers seminars, workshops, webinars, coaching, microlearning “just in time” modules, and self-paced multimedia courses to fit your organization’s training needs. Her work has been integrated to launch Women’s Leadership Initiatives, Leadership Academies, Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives, New Hire Programs and used in learning and development programs across government agencies, nonprofits, and organizations in the financial services, health care, real estate, education, and wine sectors.
In the world of leadership development, there’s no shortage of advice on what to do to drive career success—but very little is said about who to be and listening to your intuition. While leadership skills are important, self trust is the foundation that great leadership is built upon—and developing it is a deeply personal process. In Own Your Authority, career leadership expert Marisa Santoro provides the knowledge, tools, and insights you need to understand and embrace your authentic personality and trust your intuition.
“This is the heart of increasing confidence in any area,” she writes, “taking on risk in small increments, stepping into new territory, facing fears, learning, failing, growing, and circling back to take on more risk that will stretch but not freeze you.”
Great leaders communicate clearly, speak up when it matters most, and thrive on taking on measured risks. Through self-awareness, they embrace acts of discomfort every day—all in the name of learning, growing, and achieving higher levels of influence and leadership. And it all comes with self-trust and confidence.
"I attended two gutsy leadership programs with Marisa - both events packed a punch and were motivating to take action. Her presentations brought awareness and motivated me to start with reviewing how I present myself in written messages and when putting together speaking presentations. She has helped me completely transform how I show up at work."
"I attended two gutsy leadership programs with Marisa - both events packed a punch and were motivating to take action. Her presentations brought awareness and motivated me to start with reviewing how I present myself in written messages and when putting together speaking presentations. She has helped me completely transform how I show up at work."