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The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau

A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.

Ethan Kross

Leading others starts with leading yourself. You can turn your inner voice from your worst critic into your best coach.

Award-Winning Expert on Self-Leadership, Mental Health, and The Conscious Mind | Bestselling Author of Chatter | Faculty lead at the Eisenberg Family Depression Center

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The Key to Reducing Our Stress Response

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What to Do if Your Inner Voice is Cruel (6:36)

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Author’s Corner with Ethan Kross

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How to Make Your Inner Voice Work for You

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Why Do We Give Great Advice to Others, but Can’t Take It Ourselves?

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A Powerful Tool for Self Control? Your Self Talk

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Why You Should Start Referring to Yourself in the Third Person

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How Our Inner Voice Influences Our Lives

Lavin Exclusive Speaker

If you want to achieve high performance and tap into powerful leadership, you have to start by leading yourself. Award-winning psychologist ETHAN KROSS can show you how to turn your inner voice into a powerful coach and teammate—plus boost motivation, overcome impostor syndrome, and hone your mental fitness. Ethan is a leading expert on the science behind your self-talk and the author of the instant national bestseller Chatter, called “the groundbreaking and transformative book the world needs now” (Susan Cain, bestselling author of Quiet). He draws on his research to give you a scientifically backed set of tools that can help anyone lead themselves and build resilience—from students to executives, and everyone in between. “Changing the conversations we have with ourselves has the power to change our lives,” Ethan says.

“Ethan Kross is one part sage, one part mensch, and one part world class psychological scientist.”—Angela Duckworth, author of #1 New York Times bestseller Grit

We have everything we need to stop overthinking, embrace introspection, and use our inner voice to motivate and propel us forward. Ethan Kross, award-winning psychology professor at the University of Michigan and director of the Emotion and Self Control Lab, says that we can change our lives by changing the conversations we have with ourselves. Drawing on his acclaimed book Chatter, he shows us how we can strengthen our emotional and mental fitness to find more meaning, satisfaction, and success in all areas of life. Ethan’s concrete strategies have proven to be an invaluable resource for everyone—from students to small business owners to CEOs—in any challenge or stressful situation. His science-based toolkit for avoiding overthinking help all kinds of leaders and employees to build wisdom and coach ourselves through every circumstance.

In his talks, Ethan provides us with simple, immediately actionable tools for distancing ourselves from negativity and harnessing our self-talk. He gives you tools that you can use on your own, like using your own name to give yourself a pep talk, that you can use to lead yourself and calm your anxieties in stressful moments. He also provides tools that you can use with other people (such as your employees or team members) to help them work through their chatter and reach their full potential. Finally, he gives you tools that involve the environment, like increasing your exposure to green space, that will help you improve the overall mental fitness of your entire organization.

Brilliantly argued and deeply compelling, Chatter has received praise from many remarkable leaders in the field, including Angela Duckworth, the world’s preeminent expert on grit, and New York Times bestselling author Dan Pink, who declares, “Ethan Kross has written the definitive work on how to redirect our inner voices away from rumination and self-criticism and toward reflection and self-improvement.” It was one of Amazon’s best non-fiction books of 2021.

An award-winning professor at the University of Michigan and the Ross School of Business, Ethan is the director of the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory, where he studies how people can control their emotions. Using an integrative approach to study these issues, Ethan draws on multiple disciplines within psychology, including social, personality, clinical, developmental, and neuroscience. He is also the faculty lead for the Research Innovation Core at the Eisenberg Family Depression Center, where he uses his vibrant ideas and strategic mind to focus on facilitating research innovations in the field of mental health.

Ethan has participated in policy discussions at the White House and has been interviewed on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, and NPR’s Morning Edition. His pioneering research has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Science. He completed his BA at the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD at Columbia University.

Testimonials

This is one of the BEST speaker sessions I have seen in a long time (in multiple conferences, TED Talks). Thank you so very much for bringing Dr. Kross to guide us with useful life tools that eventually flow into our work life & performance. Ethan was amazing and he was an absolute dream to work with. He’s so down to earth and collaborative, you’d never guess he’s a superstar in real life.

Workday

Testimonials

Ethan's participation in our webinar was wonderful. I felt we could have gone on for much longer and the response has been extremely positive. Ethan's work and message are so important, and the way he delivers it is compelling and accessible. I enjoyed the real-world application, tips, and examples, and specifically, how Ethan related the topic of "chatter" to professionals as well as individuals/self-help. Excellent!

Happify

Testimonials

Thank you so much for such a lively and fun author talk! It was truly a pleasure to spend the hour speaking with you. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive: we received comments like "Outstanding talk from a knowledgeable professional on a topic relevant to almost everyone," "One of the best I've participated in," and "I felt like it was over too fast." I look forward to seeing all the amazing things you do in the future.

Library Speakers Consortium

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George M. Johnson

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Speech Topics

Leadership

Unleashing Your Inner Ted Lasso

We can all unlock passionate high performance, creativity, and execution, all while avoiding burnout. The key? Becoming your own most powerful coach. Award-winning psychologist Ethan Kross offers concrete strategies for managing your self-talk—so you can manage others better. His research-based tactics (what he calls the “Swiss Army knife of the mind”) help boost motivation, overcome impostor syndrome, and hone your mental fitness. For example, Ethan suggests engaging in “mental time travel” or using “distanced self-talk”. Doing so helps you step back and adopt a more objective perspective, leading to innovative and profound breakthroughs. By transforming your inner voice into your biggest supporter, you can be a leader that heightens the performance, execution, and innovation of anything your team does./sets their mind on./works on.

Strategy

26 Strategies for Leading Yourself—and OthersPractical Ways to Harness Our Self-Talk

When we learn how to use our anxieties to our advantage, they become a powerful resource—one that helps us increase productivity and become intentional leaders.

In this insightful and accessible talk, award-winning psychologist Ethan Kross gives us practical strategies to stop overthinking and start living. Drawing from his scientific research and his acclaimed bestseller Chatter, he provides the tools needed to distance ourselves from negativity and turn our inner critic into our inner coach.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, but with 26 strategies to choose from, we’re sure to gain actionable takeaways that we can immediately use at work and in our personal lives. This insightful talk provides concrete strategies for individuals and organizations who want to be healthier, more resilient, and more successful.

Psychology

ChatterThe Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It

The most important conversation we have each day isn’t with our boss, our spouse, or our friends: it’s the one we have with ourselves. When we’re facing a challenging task, our inner voice can motivate us and help us keep our focus. But more often than not, we come up against the nagging voice that tells us we can’t do it, or that people will laugh at us if we try. The million-dollar question, then, is how can we transform our self-saboteur, determined to undermine our success, into an internal life coach that will buoy us up and help us expand our potential?

Enter Ethan Kross. A world-class psychological scientist, Kross has written one of the most definitive guides to mastering self-talk in modern history. In Chatter, he uses a blend of cutting-edge science (from his own lab) and real-world case studies to help us harness the power of our inner voice. The tools are all around us—from the objects we surround ourselves with, to our relationships with other people, the physical spaces we inhabit, and the digital worlds we interact in. This talk is a lively exploration of how we can use those tools to make our inner voice work in our favour, and it answers some valuable questions along the way. For instance, why do we seem immune to toxic chatter when we attempt to provide other people with advice? What factors determine whether we receive—and provide—helpful or harmful social support? And how can we approach our decision-making differently, learning to control our emotions and reason wisely instead of acting on impulse? An expert story-teller, Kross brings his research to life in a way that is fascinating, accessible, and immediately applicable to our daily lives.