SPEAKING TOPICS
Jen Shirkani is a published author, business leader, and nationally recognized emotional intelligence expert. She has experience as
a keynote speaker at national and state conferences, universities, government agencies, and business organizations around the world.
The Stories Teams Tell: Cracking the Code on Motivation and Engagement
In every team, there are silent narratives and stories shaping your team’s performance. Exceptional performance doesn’t happen by chance; it is the result of a story well told. A story where skills, culture, feedback, motivation, and leadership all align. In this engaging, research-backed session, Jen reveals what drives employee performance today and how leaders can shift from managing to meaning-making.
Through compelling data and real-life stories, Jen helps you uncover those subtle narratives shaping your team’s performance, and shows how to rewrite them for stronger engagement, better retention, and breakthrough results.
Attendees will leave with practical tools to reframe their team’s “story” around purpose and culture, the missing keys to unlocking lasting performance.
The Science Behind Engaging Leadership
There is an essential ingredient of long-term leadership success, particularly in complex and ever-changing workplace environments. Well-developed emotional intelligence (EQ) allows leaders to gain deeper insight into performance dynamics and build greater mastery to motivate and engage followers. This presentation includes definitions and development tips for the key skills set required to demonstrate EQ, understand its framework including its correlation to employee engagement, and participate in a discussion on the particular risks senior leaders face that hinder their ability to use EQ.
The Chemistry of Connection
Just as great chemistry blends elements in precise ways, high-performing professionals combine technical expertise with core emotional intelligence skills, such as self-awareness, flexibility, and empathy. When those ingredients align, the outcome is stronger trust, collaboration, and performance at every level of an organization.
Talent Identification & Performance: Building a Championship Team
Exceptional performance is the perfect alignment of skills, rewards, feedback, management style, measurement and culture. Keeping employees engaged today requires staying in-tune with what is most important to them, finding ways to creatively match cultural features with their motivation factors. This session is designed to help leaders learn about employee performance drivers and easy to apply techniques for engaging, motivating, and developing their employees. In this presentation, Jen shares research that supports the engagement levers in employees today that leaders must be aware of and actively pursue to attract and retain top talent. This session includes startling statistics on how employees think about topics such as performance management, motivation, and leadership involvement. Attendees will leave with the missing key to unlocking potential and ways to shift from assuming and expecting to creating the performance they desire.
Change Happens, Now What?
That’s a big ask. And most teams aren’t trained for it.
In this high-impact, immediately applicable session, Jen reveals the three unique change styles and helps professionals answer the one question that matters most in the middle of disruption:
Now what?
Whether you are leading a team or navigating change independently, this session equips you with the skillset upgrade needed to show up with clarity, confidence, and meaningful impact regardless of what is shifting around you.
Staying Resilient in Changing Times
Dealing with the personal consequences of change is difficult; however, leading others through that same pathway is even more complex. Challenging times require resiliency competencies that provide the basis for leading through tough transitions. This presentation reveals strategies for managing a wide range of reactions to change, understanding change styles and provides awareness to the resistance factors common in new and uncharted territory. Learn how to increase your self-awareness and employ resiliency to build stamina and adapt your responses to collaborate more effectively.
Ego vs EQ
In this powerful, story-driven keynote, Jen unpacks the critical mistakes that derail even the most promising professionals and shows how emotional intelligence (EQ) is the game-changing skill that separates those who rise from those who stumble. Drawing from her book Ego vs EQ and over two decades of coaching leaders across industries,
Jen shares real-life examples of executive missteps and recoveries including the hidden ego traps that cost organizations time, talent, and valuable resources.
How Top Leaders Use Emotional Intelligence for Success
Successful managers and leaders leverage the power of emotional intelligence (EQ) to engage and motivate their employees and associates. Leaders with high EQ can communicate with others effectively, provide balanced feedback, lead others through ambiguity, use humor to build rapport, read and respond to the leadership needs of others, and remain optimistic, even in the face of difficulty. These leaders can emotionally and mentally plug into others and can read the situation at hand and behave accordingly to get the best results for everyone. Studies show a direct correlation between high EQ and successful leadership. But managers can also fall into particular pitfalls that hurt their credibility and hard won success, impeding their ability to use the EQ they have. This presentation provides strategies for building a strong case for the importance of both IQ and EQ. Audience members will leave with practical examples and new skills as they learn about the unique leadership traps that can trip up even the most successful leaders, and the ways to avoid them. Jen explains why EQ is particularly hard to maintain at management levels of the company, shares the most common ego traps, and how to avoid them to increase leadership effectiveness.
Feedback, Friction, and the Fight to Stay Effective
Drawing on real-world dynamics, this session explores how feedback, conflict, and emotional intelligence intersect to shape performance and trust. Audiences learn how to recognize behavioral triggers, navigate friction with empathy and composure, and transform difficult conversations into moments of clarity, connection, and growth.
Leveraging the Power of Emotional Intelligence for Success
Business today demands the need for professionals who are nimble, flexible and engaged. This presentation provides practical ideas for thriving in a dynamic environment through the development of the emotional intelligence competency. Studies show that top talent leverages the best blend between technical knowledge and expertise, with functional skills like self-awareness, adaptability and problem solving to navigate the complexity of relationships with coworkers and clients. Jen provides strategies to increase your level of effectiveness through times of change with practical tools and resources. Attendees will receive definitions and examples of key functional skills; learn how to diagnose performance issues related to low emotional intelligence; and learn techniques to develop emotional intelligence in themselves and others.
SheQ: The Power of Emotional Intelligence
SheQ helps women harness emotional insight as a superpower, fueling confidence, resilience, and courage in the face of challenge. Through engaging stories and practical strategies, attendees learn how to navigate risk with composure, transform setbacks into growth, and embrace the healthy struggles that build inner strength. Jen equips women to use emotional intelligence as a catalyst for success.
Attendees will discover how to navigate risk, stay grounded under pressure, and turn everyday struggles into opportunities for growth. Discover how to strategically deploy core emotional strengths—recognizing, reading, and responding—as powerful tools for negotiation, assertiveness, and influence.
SheQ
Perfect for a women’s conference or large female audience, Jen’s “SheQ” presentation provides strategies for being more emotionally intelligent (EQ). Using EQ as a key competency builds more resiliency and helps women gain more confidence by learning to get comfortable with risk in a motivating and inspiring message. This session helps audience members see how maintaining a healthy level of challenge and struggle can enable everyone to be more powerful at work and in every aspect of life.
The Emotionally Intelligent Salesperson
In this presentation, Jen shares a consultative sales approach that leverages the power of emotional intelligence and creates client value and redefines “selling” to being seen as a trusted advisor. The most successful salespeople learn how to intuitively recognize their strengths, read people and situations accurately, and respond to others appropriately. This session provides a framework to correctly read both buying and resistance cues, recognize customer reactions and triggers, read their unspoken needs, and use timing to know when too close. Attendees will learn ways to prepare self-aware and motivational conversation prompters to enhance the dialogue, maintain a service mindset, identify the needs of others through listening and empathizing, and map a solution by determining need and fit and apply the techniques of “soft closing.” Using your EQ, clients will see you as a vital business partner, not just a vendor.
The Emotionally Intelligent Salesperson
In this presentation, Jen shares a consultative sales approach that leverages the power of emotional intelligence and creates client value and redefines “selling” to being seen as a trusted advisor. The most successful salespeople learn how to intuitively recognize their strengths, read people and situations accurately, and respond to others appropriately. This session provides a framework to correctly read both buying and resistance cues, recognize customer reactions and triggers, read their unspoken needs, and use timing to know when too close. Attendees will learn ways to prepare self-aware and motivational conversation prompters to enhance the dialogue, maintain a service mindset, identify the needs of others through listening and empathizing, and map a solution by determining need and fit and apply the techniques of “soft closing.” Using your EQ, clients will see you as a vital business partner, not just a vendor.
“Inspire your attendees with stories and practical advice on how to be a more engaging leader by leveraging the power of EQ.”
BOOK JEN FOR YOUR NEXT EVENT
- Nationally recognized keynote speaker and expert on EQ
- Jen has an affordable, flexible fee structure
- She has dates available in the next 90 days
- Diverse experience with a wide range of industries (from Assisted Living to Bank Auditing)
- Engages small to large audiences
- Published author on leadership and emotional intelligence
- Entertaining and funny, uses storytelling to share concepts
