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The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau

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

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler

Every setback offers insights you wouldn't have gained from a success. By learning how to "fail well," you can cultivate a mindset of mastery and reach your highest goals.

Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management | Poets & Quants 40-Under-40 MBA Professor

Lavin Exclusive Speaker

To reach your highest career goals, you need to cultivate a mindset of mastery: one that lets you learn from your failures as well as your successes. Lauren Eskreis-Winkler is one of the world’s foremost voices on resilience, actually learning from your mistakes, and achieving your individual and organizational goals. Named a Poets & Quants 40-Under-40 Business Professor, Lauren has worked with leading organizations like the World Bank to transform their corporate culture into one of mastery, where every failure is an opportunity to gain insight you wouldn’t have received from a success. She’s also spent years working closely with grit pioneer Angela Duckworth to carry out “grit interventions” that bolster organizations’ success. In smart, engaging business talks, she shows you the scientifically proven ways that you can overcome barriers, adapt faster, and outpace the competition.

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler is an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where she researches motivation and achievement. Her work on mastery and learning from failure is crucial in helping people reach their goals, no matter their situation in life.

Formerly a post-doctoral fellow at the Wharton School (as well as a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Character Lab), Lauren has designed and implemented numerous interventions alongside #1 New York Times bestselling author Angela Duckworth (Grit). Together, they have successfully reached everyone from struggling athletes, to students in grade school and college, to individuals at every level of the workforce. Her work reveals a critical fact: “Grit is not only important, but also malleable and can be encouraged via intervention.”

Named to the prestigious Poets & Quants list of 40-Under-40 MBA professors, Lauren is a dynamic and engaging speaker with deep experience in the corporate world. Her sessions prime audiences on the cutting-edge science of grit, using fun intervention techniques that work empirically to increase motivation, resilience, and other qualities that cultivate a mindset of mastery. Her interactive talks can be used for individual character-building, or to nurture a corporate-wide culture of mastery. Lauren earned her PhD in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Testimonials

Just wanted to express our thanks to everyone at Lavin, and especially to Lauren for such a wonderful presentation. Our nurses really enjoyed the webinar last night – it certainly gave them a lot to think about! Lauren was a wonderful speaker and was such a pleasure to work with.

Oncology Nursing Society

Testimonials

I thought Lauren's keynote was a great session for our team, and a great new take about how to think about personal growth, collaboration, and the importance of language in all we do with one another. Great work!

GSTV

Lavin Exclusive Speakers

Angela Duckworth

Author of Grit, the #1 New York Times Bestseller | Pioneering Researcher on Grit, Perseverance, and the Science of Success

Daron Acemoglu

2024 Nobel Prize Winner | 3rd Most Cited Economist in the World | MIT Institute Professor | Bestselling Co-Author of Why Nations Fail and Power and Progress

Alison Wood Brooks

Harvard Business School Behavioral Science Professor | "40 Under 40 MBA Professor" | Author of TALK: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves

Derek Thompson

#1 New York Times Bestselling Co-Author of Abundance | Host of thePlain English Podcast | Staff Writer at The Atlantic

Clint Smith

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author of How the Word Is Passed and Above Ground | The Atlantic Staff Writer

Speech Topics

Psychology

Developing a Mindset of MasteryWhy It’s Important and How It Can Be Cultivated

We face setbacks every day. How do we ensure we’re learning from them?

Lauren Eskreis-Winkler is one of the world’s top voices on mastery. She says that learning from the setbacks you face is one of the most important elements to reaching your highest personal and career goals. It’s not easy—but she can show you how to do it.

In vital, engaging business talks, Lauren explains how our losses can often hold vital information that we wouldn’t get from our wins. She shows us why we struggle to learn from our setbacks as well as our successes—and how we can overcome these tendencies in order to adapt faster and bounce back from failure. Drawing on her work with major organizations like the World Bank, she shows how leaders can revolutionize your entire company culture so that your teams and employees seek deep mastery instead of easy wins. Audiences will walk away inspired to learn from their setbacks and equipped to develop a mindset of mastery both at home and at work.

Grit at Work

Failing Your Way to SuccessWhy the Best Salespeople Love to Lose

Salespeople face rejection daily. But there’s good news: There’s a science-backed way to learn from rejection, achieve your sales goals faster, and achieve mastery.

Kellogg business professor Lauren Eskreis-Winkler draws from her original research on resilience and mastery to offer sales teams a vital new approach to turning rejection into success. She reveals the key reasons it’s difficult to learn from failure and rejection—and the proven strategies that salespeople can use to overcome them. For instance, rejection is difficult to stomach when your work feels purposeless. Lauren shows you the simple techniques that can help increase your passion or your team’s passion, like using your unique strengths to find purpose in your daily work and persevere through difficulty.

This dynamic, customizable sales talk leaves teams excited and inspired to do their best work. Audiences leave with a new perspective on how to leverage failure and rejection for mastery, as well as practical tips and strategies that they can implement in their own sales cycle today.

Grit at Work

Grit InterventionDeveloping Grit in Yourself and Your Organization

Grit is a personality trait defined as passion and perseverance for long-term goals, predicting success across multiple domains. Sales reps who are high in grit are less likely to quit or move to another company, and gritty Special Forces officers in the US army are less likely to drop out. In this interactive talk, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler explores cutting-edge research on the science of grit, and reviews intervention techniques that have been shown to make people grittier. These interventions can be used to promote grit in individuals, or to nurture a corporate-wide culture of grit. You will walk away from this session able to:

1) Articulate what grit is and why it matters.

2) Understand the difference between grit and talent, and their relative importance to success.

3) Recognize key qualities that differentiate gritty individuals on a micro-level.

How do gritty people think in the face of challenge? How do they interpret setbacks? What is their response to frustration? With this knowledge set, you can recruit, staff, and build stronger teams. You will come away understanding how to build grit—in yourself, your team and within your organization’s culture.