Motivational Speaking
Lisa Fitzhugh
Past Keynotes

A collection of excerpts from past keynote speeches that touch on leadership, introspection, creativity, stepping up, and more.

Past Keynotes
Team Building
Lisa Fitzhugh
Adventure on the High Seas

This essay was based on a vivid and disturbing dream. It describes a large ship of adolescents trying to sail into a fierce storm, unable to harness the power of their collective courage and creativity to save themselves.  It speaks to what’s needed for any team to assemble well and survive such times. 

Adventure on the High Seas
Creativity
Lisa Fitzhugh
A Fool's Errand

In this essay, I highlight the essential role of the fool and his/her capacity to challenge our assumptions about what we accept as the truth, the key to any creative endeavor worth its salt. This may be more relevant now in 2025 than when I wrote it in 2021.

A Fool's Errand
Team Building
Lisa Fitzhugh
An Act of Imagination

During the pandemic we had different experiences of the lockdowns, the virus, and other people’s choices.  I encourage people to consider that we are, each of us, afraid of different things. So if something scary is happening ‘out there,’ it’s important that some people hold less fear, otherwise the collective nervous system would collapse under the strain. 

An Act of Imagination
Leadership Coaching
Lisa Fitzhugh
Leading From the Inside Out

How we lead is directly related to how well we tend to our inner emotional and psychic landscape. Whatever untended ‘business’ inside of us will be projected onto the people around us, especially if we hold more positional authority.   

Leading From the Inside Out

Retreat Facilitation Tools

Creating with Others

After leading group process for years, I came across an essential book I wish I had found earlier in my career.  Creating With Others: The Practice of Imagination in Life, Art & the Workplace by Shaun McNiff.  The book explores “the genesis of human creations in a reciprocal world of inspirations and collaborations…Communities and relationships committed to the mutual creation of new forms will change the world as we know it.”

Sitting in the Fire

Arnold Mindell has written more than 20 books on leadership, healing, shamanism and group process.  His Sitting in the Fire: Large Group Transformation Using Conflict and Diversity is an important one from his selection.  His philosophy aligns closely with my own as we both value the tensions and conflicts within a group to be key to liberation and transformation.  I have found this to be true again and again so am no longer daunted by deep divisions but see them as nothing more than love wanting an outlet.