Advance your organization

Leader Keynote Speaker on Sustainable Success

NHelping high‑achieving leaders perform brilliantly — without burning out.

You’re not just looking for another keynote.
You’re looking for a lever.


I work with organizations whose leaders look successful on the outside… but are exhausted, questioning what’s next, or losing their spark.

Through my Six Levers of Sustainable Success™ framework, I help them regain energy, clarity, and purpose — and turn that into better leadership and better results.

Meet Ruth Pearce, JD, PCC, PMP

Ruth Pearce is a leadership keynote speaker, coach, and behavioral‑science practitioner who helps high‑performing leaders over 40 create sustainable success — success that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

Blending legal training, project leadership, positive psychology, and coaching, Ruth delivers high‑energy, science‑backed talks that give leaders practical tools to reduce burnout, reconnect with purpose, and lead with renewed confidence.

The Six Levers of Sustainable Success

How High-Performing Leaders Reclaim Energy, Purpose, and Performance — Without Burning Out

Many organizations are led by people who are performing at a high level — and paying for it with their wellbeing. They’re delivering results, but feeling drained, disconnected, or unsure what comes next.


In this bold, research‑backed keynote, Ruth Pearce introduces The Six Levers of Sustainable Success™, a practical framework that helps leaders:


  • Realign how they use their strengths
  • Rebuild hope and clarity about the future
  • Raise their courage for meaningful action
  • Use curiosity to reduce pressure and unlock innovation
  • Reconnect with purpose
  • Create alignment between their goals, energy, and capacity


This is not “feel‑good” motivation. It’s a reset for leaders who want to keep succeeding — without burning themselves out.



Leaders Will Learn To:
  • Recognize the hidden patterns that drive burnout and fatigue
  • Use six behavioral “levers” to shift how they lead, decide, and work
  • Reclaim energy by using what’s strong instead of overusing what’s draining
  • Build hope and momentum even in uncertainty
  • Take small, brave steps that move big things
  • Lead with curiosity instead of constant pressure
  • Make decisions that align with their values and long‑term goals


Ideal for:

  • Leadership off-sites and retreats
  • Corporate conferences and all‑hands events
  • HR, L&D, and talent development programs
  • Organizations focused on retention, engagement, and sustainable performance


Optional extensions:

  • Follow‑up workshop or breakout
  • Leadership coaching for selected leaders
  • Integration into existing leadership programs

Breakouts & Workshops That Deepen the Message

These sessions build on the Six Levers framework and give your leaders more time to apply what they’ve learned.

1. Be Hopeful, Be Strong, Be Brave, Be Curious® The Four Mindsets of Sustainable Leadership
Breakout or Workshop — based on Ruth’s trademark book
Be Hopeful, Be Strong, Be Brave, Be Curious®

This highly interactive session explores the four mindsets that fuel sustainable leadership:

  • Hopeful – seeing a meaningful future and believing you can influence it
  • Strong – using your strengths in ways that energize rather than deplete
  • Brave – taking the small courageous actions that move big things
  • Curious – replacing pressure and perfectionism with inquiry and learning

Leaders discover how these mindsets connect directly to the Six Levers of Sustainable Success™, and leave with simple, practical shifts they can make immediately.

2. Using What’s Strong: Strengths‑Based Leadership in the Real World
A practical session on how leaders can align their work with their strengths to improve energy, engagement, and performance — without adding hours to the day.

3. Hope Is a Strategy: Leading With Clarity in Uncertain Times
A deep dive into the science of hope as a leadership tool, helping leaders create clear goals, multiple pathways, and renewed agency for themselves and their teams.

4. Micro‑Courage: Everyday Bravery for Modern Leaders
This session shows leaders how small, intentional acts of courage — conversations, decisions, boundaries — can transform their impact more than one big leap ever could.

5. The Curiosity Advantage
How curiosity reduces stress, improves decision‑making, and drives innovation. Leaders learn how to lead with more questions, less pressure, and better outcomes.

6. Purpose at Mid‑Career
Designed for leaders who have “checked all the boxes” and still feel something’s missing. This session gives them language, tools, and direction to reconnect with purpose and meaning in their work.

Science of Hope:

When Hope Is a Strategy

 In this session we focus on the science of hope to provide a sense of agency-that each of us can make a difference, and that some things are within our control.

Some days you and your personnel just don't feel like facing the world. Maybe you push through or hope tomorrow will be better-somehow.

At it's best, hope isn’t wishful thinking; it’s a trainable strategy. But when we use hope as a code for "the outside world (or situation) will just change", we struggle.

Invite me in so we can accept fear, recognize opportunity, and inject hope onto your nervous system.

Then use small, right‑now practices to move the needle. Or to put it another way, you go from surviving→ thriving.
The bottom line is that; Hope is measurable, learnable and predicts what leaders track—grades & retention in schools; productivity, performance, and retention risk at work.

In these sessions we first explore what the people in the room think of when they hear the word hope. Then we dive into the science of hope to understand how it can be applied to our everyday lives - in and out of work. And knowing that Hope can feel far away when we are burned out and struggling, we start small and work up

Measure your level of hope here


Courage Science

You Are Already More Courageous Than You Think

Courage isn't just people running into burning buildings, rescuing someone from the edge of a precipice or taking a seat in the front of the bus.
It is more complicated and shows up in many different forms.

We tend to think others have it and we don't. Yet when the time is right and the incentive big enough, we are all brave.

There is much talk about the need for psychological safety at work. But to have the capacity to be brave we need total person safety to bring out the best in each of us.
We have two ways to increase sense of safety, change the environment and/or increase the capacity of the people within the environment. 
In this session we explore answers to questions such as: 

  • Is bravery the same as courage?
  • Is your organization courageous?
  • And what does courageous behavior look like?


"Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day that says, 'I'll try again tomorrow.'" — Mary Anne Radmacher
 
Bravery and the related courage strengths-Honesty, Perseverance & Zest-are most accessible when we feel settled and safe. 
But even when the environment is stressful, we can adopt small practices that move the needle. 
And recent research has found that Hope correlates strongly with courage.
So combine this program with the Hope program for double the impact. 
Bravery—taught as a skill & practiced in right-sized doses—pays off: teams surface risks sooner, make better decisions, and perform better, especially when voice flows to the right leaders in psychologically safe conditions
Courage begins with hope, speaks with honesty, moves with bravery, runs on zest, and finishes with perseverance.

"Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” ~ Franklin D Roosevelt

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” ~ Winston Churchill

In the VIA Character Strengths framework, courage is the sum of Bravery + Honesty + Perseverance + Zest. When we are burned out and struggling, just existing is brave, being authentic, persevering and experiencing zest may feel out of reach—and we honor that. We scale courage from micro‑moves to principled risks and collective action.

 Assess your level of courage here:

Curiosity:

Why It Killed the Cat—but Doesn’t Have to Kill You

I come across lots of people who claim not to be curious. They don't like novelty, they don't like trying new things, but they ARE interested in people, their stories, their journeys,
Research shows that curiosity is not one thing, or only measured by how much you like to try new things. It is measured by your interest in others, or your tolerance for not knowing the answer to a question-the uncertainty as you find out. 

Curiosity is something that most leaders and organizations want in their teams. It is powerful when timed right. It enhances creativity, opens up new possibilities, challenge stale thinking and adjust your mindset
When your people stressed or burned out, curiosity is a double-edged sword. Then curiosity can spike anxiety; derail individuals and teams from the simplest tasks and cause increased uncertainty.
But as we move toward thriving, curiosity is expansive.
Did you know that: Teams where leaders model curiosity see safer environments and more creative output—because curiosity fuels exploration and idea generation. Curiosity is measurable and targetable.

And Curiosity is not just one thing. According to research by Todd Kashdan et al, curiosity has at least 5 facets. And can measure what our top - and bottom - forms of curiosity are. There is no point in sending someone low in social curiosity to find out what a user wants and needs in a new app! Or someone who is high in social curiosity to be an observer in a meeting.

In these sessions we first measure each individual's type and degree of curiosity, then map curiosity to role. Only after that to we then build safe, small experiments that widen thinking without overwhelm.

Check your areas of curiosity here:

Ethics & Self Regulation:

Whole-Person–Informed Decisions

A common fallacy is that if we are in compliance then we are being ethical. According to studies, organizations without an ethical work climate underperform. (Weber, J., Opoku-Dakwa, A. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04778-4)

We don’t make our best ethical calls from a place of burnout and struggle. We may not even be able to determine what is and is not ethical - especially in challenging situations where the answer is in the gray. 
It is only when we feel calm and clear that we can effectively evaluate ethical dilemmas

And ethical decision-making is a process, not a moment. Individuals move through four capacities: noticing the issue, judging options, prioritizing ethics, and acting—so interventions must support all four. 

This session focuses on three components—stabilize, widen, decide—so teams do the right thing without burning out.


Context beats character more often than we think. Ethical (and unethical) behavior is heavily influenced by organizational climate and bounded by ethicality-systematic blind spots that can make good people cross the line.

And Leaders set the “ethical weather.” Ethical leadership—modeling appropriate conduct and reinforcing it through communication and rewards—predicts employee voice, trust, and lower misconduct. 

We use case studies and examples from your own organization to create safe explorations into what ethical looks like based on the current environment. We align the program to the professional ethical standards most relevant to your organization and we use small experiments to widen perspective without creating overwhelm. 

Are you burned out? Take the assessment and see

Note: We align the program to the professional ethical standards most relevant to your organization.


Cool, Calm & Collected

What I Learned From Bar Prep That You Might Want to Know Too! (Limited Time Only)

When I decided to take the North Carolina Bar this year, I did not spend much time reasoning out my decision. The timeline to apply was tight, the process is rigorous (and time consuming). It is not for the faint of heart. 
I could have postponed until February 2026, but I felt a sense of urgency and decided to go for the exam in July 2025. 

Of course, once you decide to do something like that, you need a plan. It was 13 years since I had sat for a bar exam (in California when it was still a three-day exam!). I am older, my law school training is more remote, and I am not studying law day in day out with colleagues and friends. 

So I did what most bar takers do, I went in search of a good bar prep course. AND I committed to using the practices and techniques that I speak about in talks and with coaching clients. It was a good opportunity to learn from re-applying to myself, the theory that I often share with others.

One size does not fit all - most bar prep courses are aimed at people just out of law school, under 35, with limited experience of high pressure high stakes multi-day exams.

In other words, I am not the target audience.

In this journey, I had to learn what worked for me - and what didn't. I experimented to see where the biggest returns on studying were and which study & practice methods were good and yet, not the best for me. 

Most important of all, success did not depend just on how I studied, but how I took care of my entire system. And those decisions related to my baseline physiological and mental state, AND the context of the day.


Using my experiences of preparing for, taking and passing the bar, without burning out, this talk explores what choices we can make to opimtize, energy, effort, timing and focus. We are all different, so learning what works for you is a game changer!


Created with