Kiersten Hathcock Speaking Topics

• Build Anyway

  The story of what happens when you have no blueprint, no funding, and no backup plan — and you build anyway.

  This is Kiersten Hathcock's flagship business keynote — and the one audiences talk about longest after they leave the room.

  Drawing on her journey from television executive to self-taught carpenter to "Shark Tank" winner to Post Hill Press author, Kiersten dismantles the myth that you need the perfect conditions, the right credentials, or someone else's permission to build something extraordinary.

  What she gives your audience instead: a framework for moving forward with clarity and confidence when the path ahead is anything but clear.

  Your audience will leave with:

  • A reframed understanding of what qualifies someone to lead, build, or begin

  • A concrete decision-making framework rooted in both data and instinct

  • The permission — and the tools — to start before they feel ready

  Ideal for: Corporate all-hands events, entrepreneurship conferences, business association keynotes, commencement addresses, leadership summits

• The Gut Knows First

  Why the most successful leaders trust their instincts — and how to develop yours into a genuine competitive advantage.

  In a business culture obsessed with data, analytics, and consensus, Kiersten Hathcock makes a contrarian and rigorously argued case: your intuition is not the opposite of good business judgment. It is the most sophisticated business tool you own — and most leaders are leaving it entirely on the table.

  This keynote weaves together Kiersten's own experience — the decisions she made by instinct that defied conventional wisdom and proved right, and the ones she ignored her gut on that cost her dearly — with research-backed insight on how high-performing leaders actually make their best decisions.

  Your audience will leave with:

  • A new and practical understanding of intuition as a leadership skill

  • Specific techniques for accessing and trusting their own instinctive intelligence

  • A framework for balancing data-driven and instinct-driven decision making

  Ideal for: Leadership conferences, executive retreats, innovation summits, women in business events

• No Blueprint Required

  A masterclass in brand building for entrepreneurs, founders, and anyone who has ever had to make something from nothing.

  Before there were influencers, before Etsy, before the era of the garage startup — Kiersten Hathcock was building a brand by hand, one piece of furniture at a time, in her Los Angeles garage. She figured out how to get press without a publicist, build an audience without an ad budget, attract celebrity clients without an agent, and land international retail distribution without a single industry connection.

  This keynote is a practical, honest, and often funny masterclass in brand building from the ground up, with hard-won lessons that apply whether you are launching a startup, repositioning an established company, or trying to cut through the noise in a market that is louder than ever.

  Your audience will leave with:

  • A repeatable framework for building a brand with authenticity and intentionality

  • Specific strategies for earning attention, trust, and loyalty without a massive budget

  • The mindset shifts that separate brands people remember from brands people forget

  Ideal for: Entrepreneurship conferences, marketing and brand summits, chambers of commerce, small business associations, startup ecosystems

• Little Voices

  The keynote based on the Post Hill Press memoir — a true story of survival, awakening, and the voice inside you that has been trying to protect you all along.

  This is Kiersten Hathcock's most personal keynote — and for many audiences, her most powerful.

  Drawing directly from her memoir, Kiersten takes your audience inside the experience of surviving childhood sexual abuse and narcissistic abuse — not from a clinical distance, but from the inside, with the honesty and specificity that makes audiences feel genuinely less alone. She traces the long arc of her own healing including the false starts, the setbacks, the moments of clarity, and the unexpected spiritual awakening that ultimately became one of her most important tools for recovery.

  She talks about the voices she began to hear. What they told her. What they led her to. And what she learned about the relationship between trauma, intuition, and the extraordinary wisdom of the body and spirit that conventional healing frameworks so often overlook.

  This is not a talk about having survived. It is a talk about what survival opens up — about the version of yourself that becomes possible when you stop running from your own story and start listening to what it has always been trying to tell you.

  Your audience will leave with:

  • A profound sense of being seen, understood, and less alone in their own experience

  • A new framework for understanding intuition as an active partner in healing

  • Specific, practical tools for beginning to trust the inner voice that trauma taught them to silence

  • Hope — not the performative kind, but the real kind, grounded in an actual human story with an actual human outcome

  Ideal for: Trauma conferences, survivor organizations, abuse recovery events, mental health awareness summits, women's healing retreats, spiritual and consciousness events

• Surviving and Thriving

  For audiences of survivors — the keynote that tells the truth about what recovery actually looks like, and what becomes possible on the other side of it.

  Recovery is not a straight line. It does not follow a schedule. It does not look the way the books say it will look, or feel the way the well-meaning people in your life tell you it should feel. It is messy and nonlinear and sometimes it feels like you are going backward when you are actually going deeper.

  Kiersten Hathcock knows this because she lived it.

  This keynote is her most direct address to survivor audiences — the talk she gives when she knows that many of the people in the room are still in the middle of their own healing, and that what they need is not someone standing at a polished distance telling them it gets better. What they need is someone who has actually been where they are, who will sit with them in the difficulty of it without rushing to the resolution, and who can show them — through the actual texture of her own experience — that the life on the other side of this is not just possible but extraordinary.

  She talks about what helped. What didn't. What surprised her. What she wishes someone had told her earlier. And what she has learned, through her own healing and through the thousands of conversations she has had with survivors since Little Voices was published, about the specific, practical things that make recovery not just possible but sustainable.

  Your audience will leave with:

  • Validation — deep, specific, honest validation of the nonlinear reality of their experience

  • Practical tools drawn from Kiersten's own recovery and the wisdom of the specialists she has worked alongside

  • A genuine, grounded sense of hope rooted not in optimism but in evidence

  • The felt experience of being in a room with someone who truly understands — and who made it through

  Ideal for: Survivor conferences, domestic violence awareness events, sexual abuse recovery organizations, mental health retreats, women's healing summits, trauma-informed care training events

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