KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Founder, F*ck Being Humble | Author & Career Strategist | TEDx Speaker
Fee information first. Availability is normally checked once there is a concrete intention to proceed.
WHY STEFANIE
Stefanie Sword-Williams addresses a persistent leadership problem: capable people whose work remains unseen or undervalued. Her practical approach helps organisations build cultures where contribution can be communicated clearly, recognition is distributed more fairly and talent is better able to advocate for its value.
KEYNOTE TOPICS
A practical examination of why valuable work is often overlooked and how people can communicate their contribution with clarity. The session addresses visibility, credibility and the discomfort surrounding self-promotion, giving participants ways to share achievements, build useful relationships and advocate for opportunity without adopting a persona that feels inauthentic.
Personal reputation is shaped long before a formal promotion or job move. This keynote explores how expertise becomes legible through consistent stories, decisions and relationships, and how professionals can define what they want to be known for while keeping their communication specific, credible and connected to the value they create.
Many career decisions are weakened by vague expectations and an inability to articulate value. Sword-Williams reframes negotiation as an ongoing leadership skill, covering preparation, evidence, boundaries and the language needed to ask for pay, responsibility, recognition or support with greater confidence and a clearer sense of agency.
Achievement can create its own crisis when a long-pursued milestone fails to deliver meaning or security. Drawing on the themes of Career Comedown, this session examines burnout, status and professional identity, helping people reassess inherited definitions of success and make more deliberate choices about the work they pursue next.
Stefanie Sword-Williams is the founder of F*ck Being Humble, a career development platform focused on self-advocacy, visibility and professional confidence. Since establishing the business in 2018, she has developed its work across speaking, training and community programmes for organisations and individuals navigating competitive, fast-changing workplaces. Her current focus also examines what happens when conventional ideas of achievement no longer produce a sustainable or satisfying career.
Before building the company, Sword-Williams worked in creative and marketing roles. That background shapes an approach grounded in how ideas, reputations and value are communicated: self-promotion is treated as a learnable professional skill rather than a personality trait. Her first book, F*ck Being Humble: Why Self-Promotion Isn't a Dirty Word, set out that argument in practical terms. Career Comedown extends the work into ambition, burnout, identity and the choices people face after reaching goals that fail to meet their expectations.
Her distinctive contribution is to connect personal visibility with questions of access and organisational culture. She examines why strong work does not automatically receive recognition, how underrepresented talent can be disadvantaged by unwritten rules, and how leaders can create clearer routes for people to demonstrate their contribution. The aim is more precise than confidence-building: it is to help people express their value without performing a version of themselves that feels false.
For leaders, this work is relevant to retention, progression and the credibility of inclusion efforts. Organisations lose capability when recognition depends on informal networks or on who is most comfortable speaking about themselves. Sword-Williams gives teams a practical vocabulary for making value visible, negotiating with greater clarity and pursuing ambition on terms they can sustain.
ON STAGE
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