Eileen McDargh

Eileen McDargh is founder and CEO of the consulting firm, The Resilient Spirit. Leadership Excellence magazine, which ranks top thought leaders in management and leadership, named Eileen to its “Excellence 100” list several times. As a platform speaker, she has given thousands of keynotes for organizations and associations in dozens of fields. She is a member of the National Speakers Association and was elected into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame, and was given by her peers the Legend of the Platform Award. As an author, Eileen has written five books.

Eileen is also a member of the University of Pennsylvania’s Sloan Work and Family Researcher Network, an organization of interdisciplinary researchers and scholars studying work-life issues.

Experience a leadership and communications expert who fully understands your group’s challenges–someone who stimulates new ideas and truly catalyzes personal accountability and a readiness for action. She delights listeners all over the world while teaching them to be resilient and engaged at both work and at home, bringing them the wisdom she’s gathered during thirty years of working in the business world for. She motivates and inspires while sharing tools and techniques to help audience members meet their professional and personal goals, engaging the minds and hearts of the audience through extensive preparation and involvement in the entire event. Eileen McDargh connects with your
audience, inspires action, and delivers lasting results.

 

PROGRAM TOPICS

     Resiliency: The Grow-Through Secret for Sales Success

KEYNOTE 60-90 minutes or half-day session

Forget bouncing back in the face of rejection. That’s old school. Resiliency today is so much more.

Challenging, changing times require a mindset that constantly looks for how to improve the pipeline that traditionally is bogged down with unproductive actions.

It’s about turning right when the competition turns left. It’s about reframing the impossible into the possible.

It’s about the courage to deeply listen.

It’s about becoming a trusted adviser instead of a vendor.

Bottom line: Break-through results require grow-through strategies

Let Resiliency Expert, Eileen McDargh, offer provocative, pithy, profound yet personal insights into four resiliency skills. She’ll challenge your thinking while you interact and laugh—yes laugh. Laughter is a critical resiliency skill that binds us together.

Watch the results with increased sales, better retention of staff and customers, and an energized, resilient team.

     Radical Resilience: Staying Rightside Up In A World That’s Upside Down

KEYNOTE 60-90 minutes or half-day session

“Nobody ever downsized their way to greatness.”
– Eileen McDargh

Radically turbulent times demand professional and personal responses that transcend our regular work and life patterns. It’s not about happy faces on mirrors and mantras on coffee mugs. It’s not about hanging on while holding back. It’s about times when you feel someone ate your cheese, drained the swamp, and went from great to less-than-good. Eileen’s book The Resilient Spirit is an ideal gift that can be personalized as a take-home reminder of powerful lessons.

Radical resilience requires the courage to challenge, commit, and contribute in ways that positively impact both today as well as many tomorrows. Based upon the length of the presentation, participants will:

• Discover how to grow the skills of adaptability, agility, laugh-ability, and alignment for producing results that put YOU in control of your ship.
• Learn a four-part model for methodically tackling the tough issues you currently face.
• Explore what great leaders do to inspire teams to stay in the game and thrive. (And it has NOTHING to do with money!) Get them energized, actualized, authorized, and gratified.
• Develop a personal legacy leadership goal that defies downturns and disappointments.

     Leveraging Your Career To Fit YOUR Authentic Self

A good career fit is not like squeezing into Spanx. Nope! It means thinking, listening, and sensing where, when and how to craft actions that bring you from good work to great work! The result: you feel GREAT and you stop the busywork and start the work that matters. It begins from the inside out.

In this session, you will:

• Discover the difference between UGH work, Good Work and GREAT work.
• Explore through exercises how to identify what is uniquely YOUR authentic work.
• Learn how to ask for what you want and three possible steps to leverage you into your GREAT/Authentic work.
• Understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor.
• Explore the six qualities of charisma and how to develop these qualities so that you attract people to you and your authentic work.

      The Power of Engagement: Inside Out Leadership for Resilient Teams

KEYNOTE 60-90 minutes

The “soft stuff” of business is always the hardest part of business.

It’s time to START talking and get back to work! Create a competitive edge in engaging and retaining talented employees and customers on the most human of playing fields: conversation. Without that connection, there is no energy of engagement. Discover the secret of viewing points, orange batons and Little Davids in creating teams and fostering loyalty. The latest report from DDI reports that more than 40% of leaders crave soft skills that can help them work better with others.

The results will be:

• Clear understanding of what energizes employees and what depletes.
• Connected and cohesive stakeholders.
• Candid conversations that can generate a renewed commitment.

     Work for a Living and Still Be Free to Live: The Secret for a Resilient Life

KEYNOTE 60-90 minutes

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
– Howard Thurman

Balance is baloney! Discover a better metaphor for the realities of living in a 24/7 world. Learn the power of choice and how to conduct a C.A.T. scan of your life. Develop strategies to create a life by YOUR design and not by default.

A critical topic for all walks of life and one Eileen has followed since authoring the first book ever written on this topic.

Make no mistake—everyone works—whether for free or fee!

How can you work smart and live happier? Is it even possible to have work/life balance in this fast-paced, frantic world? From senior executives to front line employees, this issue is key to the changing nature of America’s workforce and today’s world.

We hear about the need to balance personal and work priorities, but how do you go from burned out to fired up? How can we juggle the many responsibilities and demands on our busy lives?

In this insightful and interactive program you will:

1. Understand why traditional models of balance no longer work in these times of change.
2. Discover how to conduct your own “CAT” scan of life.
3. Acquire the skills to “sail” within the five critical areas of living.
4. Create your own action plan for juggling the demands of your fast-paced life.
5. Develop personal strategies for creating “a life by design, not be default”.
6. Learn at least three methods for effective self-management and self-improvement that you can put to work immediately.

Eileen is affiliated with Work Family Research Network University of PA. and listed as a resource on their site. Do good by bringing in Eileen to your local community non-profit. Sponsor her for an event and receive acknowledgment by both Eileen and your local non-profit.

Watch Eileen challenge our preconceived notions of what it means to be balanced. She explains that being balanced in life is not about equality, but about being personally connected with the important things in life.

     The Energy Connection: The Secret To Resilient Living

Keynote 60-90 Minutes

At the end of the day, you too yearn for a way to let your spirit soar and your gifts shine. The competitive global 24/7 world of heart-stopping competition puts personal energy at risk. We too yearn to connect with new possibilities for people, productivity, profitability and purpose.

This keynote is based on the premise that transforming our work requires nothing less than transforming ourselves and together we take a look at four inner skills essential for coaching ourselves along this journey. Our own “work in progress” becomes the touchstone for connecting at a deeper level with our work mates and our soul mates. As we ease on down this road, we find our wisdom, ah-ha moments and greatest learnings through the context of our lives. This wisdom becomes deeper if it is forged in a furnace fueled with mind, heart and spirit.

You’ll never think of energy in the same way again. Forget OPEC and prices at the pump. Discover your own reservoir of power and purpose with five tools to drill down into your own internal well of possibilities. Human energy is a priceless commodity. Learn a new formula for E=MC 2 . When it comes to energy and the capacity to do work, discover how to get it, renew it and stop giving it away.

     Lead-Her-Ship – Claiming The Power, Passion, Play And Purpose Of Our Lives

Keynote 60-90 Minutes

Gather women together and you have an energy source to light even the darkest corners of the world. Eileen puts a match to that energy. A presentation for reliving and laughing about our foibles, for celebrating our uniqueness, for renewing our passion and commitment to life, and for establishing the common traits which allow all of us to bloom where we are planted. We can learn to be heroines of our own story and leaders shaping tomorrow for all our children. This is your time to refresh, realign, reawaken, reflect, refuel, regenerate, rejoice, release, remember and renew.

Participants will learn to:

• Celebrate all you are (outlaw negative thinking and projection paralysis; banish living to someone else’s expectations.)
• Be fully alive (laughter and tears flow from the same well.)
• Act on the dream (small gifts-great rewards.)
• Love without ceasing (the grace of gratitude.)
• In-joy the ride (power of laughter.)

     Plain Talk for Complex Times

At the end of the day, our very success hinges on relationships.
These relationships grow or die based on a skill too often we forget: CONVERSATION. How meaningful are yours?

The proliferation of cell phones and the glut of chat rooms show us what society yearns for: meaningful human connection, community, and the value of relationships.

The pace of change, the lure of dazzling technology, and the speed of life have created the opposite. The most human of all connections is conversation – an internal and external event that has become blurred. We’ve forgotten how to talk to each other – if in fact some of us ever knew. In many instances, we have never been taught how to listen. At the deepest level, we’ve probably never stopped long enough to even listen to ourselves.

And at times of crisis, these conversations become even more important. This presentation explores a model for understanding and growing the conversations we have with ourselves and with each other so that everyone becomes fully engaged in the work we are tasked to do. And you’ll also celebrate the power of humor to connect. Be prepared to think, laugh, and learn.

     Resilient Relationships: Surviving and Thriving With Difficult People

Workshop: 90 minutes to 3 hours

Life would be easy if it weren’t for other people! Would you like to turn from mad to glad with your colleagues and customers?

Eileen can show you how.

This session focuses on improving relationships at work through successfully dealing with people. Using humor and examples, Eileen will guide participants through the process of learning how to defuse anger in themselves and others. They will discover how to identify and understand problem behavior and how to use systematic methods for handling such behaviors.

Participants will also:

• Understand techniques for “scripting” and creating rapport
• Identify the behavior of difficult people and personal responses to such behaviors
• Focus on effective responses to the hostile-aggressive trio
• Discover the 4-step model for handling anger on and off the phone
• Learn the difference between difficult people and people within a difficult situation
• Identify self-management tools for developing rapport and maintaining inner calm and integrity under pressure

Please note: This session can also be interactive; including role-play, phone practice, etc.

     Resilient Relationships: Understanding Your Communication E-Quotient

Workshop: 90 minutes to 3 hours

Talk is never cheap. It’s priceless!

How would you rate your communication efforts? Better still—what would others say?

Using a personal communication profile (the DISC), you’ll discover your unique behavioral preferences. You’ll gain insights on where and why relationships grow or suffer. This workshop is designed to open channels for sharing communication preferences and valuing differences.

With interaction, humor and high content, Eileen will help you walk away with ideas for improving your own communication while understanding others.

This program provides plenty of ‘meat’—high content, useful information you can put to work at the office and at home. You will:

• Learn an easy-to-grasp framework to improve communication skills long after the workshop is over
• Discover why some people “bug you” and why you do well with others
• Find out how to work with peers and bosses using key information on “what makes them tick”
• Learn how to “sell” different people, differently
• Understand how to select a dynamic and productive team, valuing individual differences
• Improve communication skills with clients, colleagues, friends and family
• Look at every human interaction differently, using new-found knowledge and insights

Full Biography

Since founding her consulting firm in 1980, Eileen McDargh has helped organizations and individuals transform the life of their business and the business of their life through conversations that matter and connections that count. She believes that resiliency is a critical life skill and one that requires the energy of connections.

She draws upon practical business know-how, life’s experiences and years of consulting to major national and international organizations that have ranged from global pharmaceuticals to the US Armed Forces, from health care associations to religious institutions. Her programs are content rich, interactive, provocative and playful—even downright hilarious.

Executive Excellence magazine continually ranked her as one of the top 50 thought leaders in self-leadership development. Global Gurus International, a British-based provider of resources for leadership, communication and sales training, also named her as one of the World’s Top 30 Leadership Professionals following a global survey of 22,000 business professionals.

Eileen has authored:

• Work for a Living & Still Be Free to Live, the first book to address work/life balance—a topic that placed her as a futurist in this issue.
• Her second book, The Resilient Spirit is found from South Africa to California and was written as a response to 9/11.
• Talk Ain’t Cheap—It’s Priceless serves as a leadership guide for numerous organizations.
• Gifts from the Mountain-Simple Truths for Life’s Complexities won the Benjamin Franklin Gold Award. A training film based on this book earned a Silver Telly, the highest award for commercial productions.
• My Get Up and Go Got Up & Went offers succinct insights in an easy-to-read fashion for recharging and renewing human energy.
• Your Resiliency GPS: A Guide for Growing through Work Life offers a path for finding your GPS (growth positioning strategies) through recalculating questions.

As a business author and commentator, Eileen has appeared on network news, on radio programs and in business journals and in major metropolitan newspapers.

Eileen is a certified speaking professional (CSP) and her election into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame places her among the top 3% of speakers in the United States.

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