Customized Speaking

What differentiates Cameron as a speaker, thinker, synthesizer, and creator are the strengths (i) that make up his range.

Cameron Powell

Cameron has crafted moving, fact-based stories as a trial lawyer out of Harvard Law School, as a public speaker for the Corporate Executive Board, as a coach to people seeking career identity, and as an entrepreneur pitching startup companies to investors, partners, customers, and media.

Cameron brings audiences and readers the diversity of thought and experience of a writer, an entrepreneur, a lawyer, an executive coach and talent builder, and a passionate student of:

  • great writing and literature

  • history and psychology

  • the world’s wisdom traditions, myths, and religions

  • nature and technology

In the last decade Cameron has spoken to audiences and written about disrupting talent, hiring for story, and building teams, storytelling for fundraising and employer brands, the risks, rewards, and ethics of GenAI, legacy and meaning in life, and the courage-making, gratitude-boosting power of the Legacy Mindset.

In his Legacy Mindset talks, Cameron helps your people . . .

Build Gratitude and Focus, Courage and Creativity

. . . by answering 3 vital questions.

Why

Why do people need bravening - to become more brave - and reminding?

Bravening because fear stunts the human genius inside every one of us.

The greatest barriers we have to engaging and leading, creating and innovating, are our core human fears of failure and rejection. Imagine what we could do with our wild and precious lives if we were more fearless.

Reminding because we keep forgetting there's not plenty of time, and only reminders make us stop saying "some day".

What

What can a legacy mindset do to make people braver, more creative, and more connected?

Reflecting on our legacy and the preciousness of life famously focuses our priorities.

Steve Jobs said it: “Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.” Ron Shaich, founder of Panera, builder of Au Bon Pain, backer of Cava and Tatte, knows the same secret. Every year, on some tropical island, Mr. Shaich conducts a premortem on himself.

Why? Because there are proven tools for making human beings more fearless. Tools that make us braver. Freed of our fears of criticism and failure, we finally reach out or commit, we create, we let go, we lead and innovate, we are grateful. We stop putting off what our future self would like us to do today. Nobody wants a someday kind of love. Welcome to The Bravening™.

How

How do we get a legacy mindset?

First, Cameron shares his own authentic personal stories of the Hero's Journey from fearfulness to courage, paralysis to productivity, isolation to connection.

He then introduces audiences to the specific tools for building atomic habits of bravery and focus -- tools used throughout the world's wisdom traditions and approved by science. 

The Bravening™ tools are proven to help people cultivate more perspective and gratitude, more presence and power of now, and more courage in the face of the fears and doubts that hold us back and keep us smaller than we know we can be.

So we can create and connect, in ways that make us uniquely human.

Insane Curiosity

Event organizers say Cameron can talk about almost anything, and what he doesn’t know well enough to talk about yet he can learn. He was the sort of kid who’d read over 300 young-adult books in three weeks for a contest. In startups and legal circles he’s known for his “insane productivity”. 


Cameron is able to draw from experience ranging across industries and professions, from law, government, and management to entrepreneurship, art, and media, through history and psychology and literature and religious and mythical traditions. So he can quickly generate new speeches tailored to almost any audience. Sort of like GenAI, but with heart, humor, and a distinctive voice. Reach out to see what he can deliver for you. 

Recent speeches include these thematic variations

Here are just a few of the other bricks of ideas Cameron regularly uses in his speaking and writing:

  • Meaning, purpose, passion

  • Storytelling, argument and persuasion, presentation

  • Sales psychology, making a case, copywriting

  • Creativity, innovation, talent

  • Productivity, Flow, teams

  • Positive psychology, performance psychology, psychological safety

  • Strengths, talents, drive: what matters at work.

  • Interviewing for story

  • Democracy, voting rights, free speech, lawfare

  • Technology, tech companies

  • Fundraising

  • World literature, writing, mythology’s Hero’s Journey (now in most movies)

  • Diversity of thought and experience

  • Cancer, hospice, death and dying

  • Books, movies, popular culture

Speaking Topics

The Legacy Mindset

The Power of Reflecting on Mortality to Turn Fear of Failure Into the Courage to Create and Connect

Outcomes

  • Your audience will walk away inspired to develop the courage to create, to innovate, to experiment, to reach out and connect, to risk failure and rejection - and to boost their self-expression, creative output, engagement, retention, and well-being.

  • Proven effective for: any gathering seeking meaning and inspiration - conference keynotes, senior executive meetings, strategy kick-offs, client meetings, workshops

GenAI Law, Ethics, Policy

Stay Human. Protect Creativity and Cognition. Preserve Rights. 

Outcomes

  • What GenAI can and can’t be expected to do. 

  • How workers must adjust to protect their brains, their jobs, and your organization’s reputation. 

  • How workers’ use of GenAI affects your intellectual property rights. Did you know your org only has copyrights in the edits your workers make, but owns nothing of GenAI’s first drafts? 

  • Risks of GenAI: law, ethics, costs. 

  • Opportunities: What GenAI works best on.

  • Proven effective for: leadership teams, boards of directors, content creation teams, HR leaders

A Contrarian Take on Talent

Outcomes

  • How to use Story to fix what’s wrong in hiring (like our keyword-based, “skills and prior experience” thinking) (see the DisruptHR talk)

  • Why only their Story can reveal team members’ and job applicants’ unique genius

  • Understanding how to optimize workers’ strengths, sense of meaning, and feelings of mastery to get them into the super-productive Flow state

  • Learn to build teams diverse in thought and experience for the proven best outcomes

  • Proven effective for: team leaders, HR leaders, hiring managers, all interviewers

Speaking Engagements

Cameron Powell is a dynamic speaker who inspires audiences with his insights on leadership and talent, storytelling, meaning-making and legacy, technology and startups, and Generative AI law, policy, uses, and abuses. His engaging storytelling and deep expertise leave a lasting impact.

Talent, Flow, Teams

Drawing on experience across industries and leading and mentoring technology startups, Cameron shares key strategies for effective leadership, innovation, and protection of legal rights.

From one-on-one to Industry Conferences

Cameron speaks on podcasts and at major business conferences, tech summits and startup demo days, and networking events, adding humor, credibility, and insight to any event.

Cameron's speaking and coaching teams have appeared in...

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