From her bestselling book of the same name, Dr Kate Mason lays out a new way for women to "communicate while female." Weaving real-life stories, she demonstrates how women can retain what makes them unique-whether that be warmth, humor, or competitiveness, and gain and wield their power, too. From personal presentation style to handling adversarial conversations and becoming your own best advocate, Mason invites a new generation of women to redefine the narrative around women's empowerment and to embark on a journey of self-discovery and success on their own terms. From a billboard in Times Square right to the heart of your organization, Powerfully Likeable is the clarion call across cubicles you’ve been waiting for to educate and energize your teams.

In a world where a nod, silence, and a "looks fine" can mean three entirely different things depending on who's in the room, it’s never been harder to get high-performing, fast-moving teams on the same page without losing trust, speed, cohesion or all three. Drawing on deep experience working with high-performance teams, Dr Kate Mason unpacks the most effective and powerful communication moves that the world's most effective teams have in common. Mason draws an engaging and unique parallel from corporate teams to decentralized filmmaking crews which coalesce and disband regularly to deliver high-stakes, high-scrutiny projects on tight timelines. Compelling, actionable and fast-paced, this conversation leaves an audience motivated to experiment, change, and double down on their communications with their managers, peers and teams.

Confidence is one of the most talked-about and least understood concepts in professional life. We chase it, perform it, and lie awake worrying it will abandon us at the worst possible moment. In short, we overinvest in the very thing that’s causing us significant stress in meetings and presentations every day. Dr Kate Mason proposes something more radical: that the pursuit of confidence itself might be the very thing getting in the way of our success. Confidence – rather than connecting us with our teams and peers – only makes us more distant, self-conscious and tentative than we were before. Mason offers new frameworks to encourage real, genuinely close communication which also have the benefit of being enabling us to be more true to our selves, and therefore less performative and forced. Killing your confidence is, in fact, the most confident move you can make at work and beyond.

Most of us have heard of imposter syndrome — but fewer of us have reckoned with its quieter, more insidious cousin: the habit of deliberately making ourselves smaller, softer, and easier to overlook when making an ask. What Dr Kate Mason calls Imposing Syndrome is when we fear making an imposition (on time, resources or more), and instead use disclaimers, caveats and more, which reinforce that our asks and by extension, ourselves, aren’t worthy of attention. This talk is an intervention. Through a frank, energising communications deep-dive, the audience will map exactly where they are thriving and where they are unconsciously dimming their own light — identifying the specific behaviors, habits, scripts and patterns that are dragging them down and how to avoid the traps forever.

Trust is built into the way we talk and nowhere is this more visible than after a crisis or working with cross-cultural teams with different preferences, habits, and customs. Trust is created not from handshakes or slogans, but from our everyday micro-movements: the sentences we choose, the questions we ask, the recaps we send. Communication is itself built on trust and it is the engine and visibility layer that can help teams run fast and thrive or hinder the very same. This keynote delves into seven ways to conceptualize trust in your teams and how to communicate it effectively so everyone can be on the same page, quickly and seamlessly.