![6 Commencement Speeches to Inspire College Graduates and Senior Executives Alike]()
Leadership
This is the time of the year that many of us attend the Pomp and Circumstance processional at graduation ceremonies across the country. I’ve curated six of the best commencement speeches for advice that could be applied by both freshly minted graduates and senior executives:
1. David Foster Wallace, Author
Kenyon College, Class of 2005
Read the transcript
“It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”
2. J. K. Rowling, Author
Harvard University, Class of 2008
Watch it here
“I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom: As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”
3. Ellen DeGeneres, Comedian
Tulane University, Class of 2009
Watch it here
“Follow your passion, stay true to yourself, never follow someone else’s path unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path then by all means you should follow that.”
4. Jim Carrey, Comedian
Maharashi University of Management, Class of 2014
Watch it here
“The decisions we make in this moment are based in either love or fear. So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect so we never ask the universe for it.”
“You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance at doing what you love.”
5. John McCain, Former United States Senator
Liberty University, Class of 2006
Watch it here
“Our country doesn’t depend on the heroism of every citizen. But all of us should be worthy of the sacrifices made on our behalf.”
6. Barack Obama, Former United States President
University of Notre Dame, Class of 2009
Watch it here
“The major threats we face in the 21st century—whether it’s a global recession or violent extremism; the spread of nuclear weapons or pandemic disease—these things do not discriminate. They do not recognize borders. They do not see color. They do not target specific ethnic groups. Moreover, no one person, or religion, or nation can meet these challenges alone. Our very survival has never required greater cooperation and greater understanding among all people from all places than at this moment in history.”
To the graduates of the Class of 2019, I wish for you a career that positively impacts others, and a lifelong journey of lessons that enable you to gain insight before you press the elevator button back down for those who follow.
Question: What would you tell yourself on graduation day?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
![6 Commencement Speeches to Inspire College Graduates and Senior Executives Alike]()
Leadership
When I stood to address the audience at the 4th Annual Re:Imagine Leadership Summit last week, I felt like the hostess of a cocktail party. I couldn’t wait for the guests to mingle and experience an event that my team and I had been curating for months.
Several participants told us that the Summit was exactly what they needed in their lives right now. Here are a few key takeaways from the day’s conversations, and information about two additional programs we’re launching to keep the dialogue going.
1. Danielle Aguas, our VP of Client Engagement, kicked off the day with a story about how her excitement to lead a climb up Yosemite’s Half Dome turned to terror. Without the encouragement and trust in her team that day, she never would have made it to the summit.
What heights have you not yet achieved because you’ve been going at it alone?
2. Dr. Tony Baron, our Co-Founder and Scholar-in-Residence, spoke about how feeding and protecting our ego is one of the most addictive habits we have as human beings. Transformative leadership requires us to guard against the five factors of a malignant ego: 1) Being someone you are not; 2) Assuming you deserve the number one place in the discussion; 3) Having the last word; 4) Always having your agenda in the process; and 5) Thinking you are the reason for your success.
To get back to being truly human, humility is key.
3. I shared how stress impacts our ability to think logically when our amygdala, an almond shaped structure in our brains, sends us into fight or flight mode and shuts off blood supply to the thinking part of our brain. Transformative leaders practice checking in with ourselves so that we can model how to respond, rather than react, to the stressors at work.
Stress is inevitable. Growth is optional.
4. Michael Coffey, our Senior Executive Consultant, discussed how fear is rooted in internal and external conflict. When we’re in conflict at work, we can no longer tap into our naturally creative selves. Instead of working to finding a solution that works for everyone, we become defensive and protective of ourselves and our values.
How can you reimagine the greatest fear that you have in your life right now?
5. Keynote speaker and former NFL player Terrell Fletcher shared four lessons from the champion’s dilemma: 1) Believe you belong in the game; 2) Love the process as much as the outcome; 3) Take risks; 4) Remember to share the stories.
The corporate landscape needs more people to operate with their head AND their heart.
Thanks to our generous sponsor, Connexus Association, passionate attendees, and powerhouse team, the 4th Annual Re:Imagine Leadership Summit was the best ever. What’s next? Two things: we’re kicking off a 6-month Leadership Excellence program in May and a 12-month Executive Chair program in September. We are honored to present quality programs like these to continue taking you from what is to what is possible.
Question: What do you do each year to invest in your growth as a leader?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
![6 Commencement Speeches to Inspire College Graduates and Senior Executives Alike]()
Leadership
Sitting in the queue for takeoff from Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport, a father spoke softly to his son who was gripping the armrests in white-knuckled terror. Though I could not hear their exchange, I recognized the look on the boy’s face. It’s the same one I often see on my clients’ faces when they are getting ready to make a significant change.
My clients get excited when talking about the goals they want to achieve. But, in order to reach those goals, they must strap themselves in and, like the boy, face the fear of G-force acceleration and climb 2,000 feet per minute through bumpy air pockets in order to reach cruising altitude.
Resistance. It’s the invisible force that you feel any time you try to make an improvement in your personal or professional life. Want to write a book? Start a business? Innovate? Be prepared for resistance. As soon as you declare your goal, you can be sure that fear, uncertainty and doubt will not be far behind. They will come from you, from your friends, from your colleagues, from the world.
The next time you face resistance, recognize that it is a natural part of the process required to reach new heights. In keeping with the flight theme, consider these three lessons from The Wright Brothers as recounted by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough.
1. Don’t focus on what you lack.
The Wrights grew up in a house with no electricity, no running water, and no indoor plumbing. Yet, they did not feel disadvantaged because their house was filled with books. They were encouraged and stimulated to read and to write by their father. They took advantage of what they had to feed their curiosity.
2. You can’t take off unless you face the wind.
The brothers tested their aircrafts at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. They chose Kitty Hawk for two critical elements. First, sand dunes made for softer landings. Second, the constant wind added the lift needed for their craft to take flight. To quote Wilbur Wright, “No bird soars in the calm.” If you want to take off, you must harness the power of the wind.
3. A setback is a setup for a comeback.
They never gave up. They crashed, they got sick, and they were ridiculed. They had everything you can imagine go wrong on their way to achieve their goal, but they would not quit. Orville was nearly killed and was crippled — they thought for life — but he came back and was still flying well into his forties. How we handle failure and setbacks is directly correlated to our success.
Our goals are too important to let resistance stop us. The resistance is real. But when we recognize that it is a natural part of the process, we can overcome it, instead of letting it overcome us.
Question: If you could recognize resistance as part of the natural process of climbing to new heights, what could you make happen?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
A son and his father are in a horrible car accident. The father dies on impact. The son, who is severely injured, is rushed to the hospital. The surgeon looks at the son, and immediately says, “I can’t operate. The boy is my son.” How can that be? The surgeon is the boy’s mother.
Did you initially assume that the surgeon was a man? I did. The first time I read this scenario in an issue of Reader’s Digest I was a young girl. I would like to think that if I read the story for the first time today, I would not find it confusing because of gender bias. I’ll never know the answer. But what I do know is that, with exposure and repetition, we can burn new neural pathways in our brains and break out of our bias bubbles.
Evidence for the ability to burn new neural pathways – or neuroplasticity – was documented in Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, a new book by Stanford University Professor Dr. Elizabeth Eberhardt. She writes:
In 2000, not long after I arrived at Stanford, a team led by Professor Eleanor Maguire published a paper that caused quite a stir in the neuroscience community. They’d scanned the brains of London cabdrivers in an effort to examine how the hippocampus – a horseshoe-shaped structure in the medial temporal lobe – might grow in response to demands placed upon it by the taxing experience of driving through the London city streets day in and day out.
Maguire’s team found that the brains of taxicab drivers – who had by necessity learned the structural layout of more than twenty-five thousand London streets –showed significant differences in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that plays a critical role in spatial memory and navigation. The taxi drivers’ navigational expertise was associated with increased gray matters. They had enlarged posterior hippocampal regions, in comparison with a control group of people who didn’t drive cabs for a living. In fact, the longer the drivers had been on the job and the more experience they had, the lager their posterior hippocampus.
What fascinated Dr. Eberhardt about this study was how the brains of the cab drivers changed – not over a period of thousands of years – but within a few years of their lives. The implication this has for overcoming racial bias, for example, is that repeated exposure to people of other races eventually changes our neural response. In a study conducted by Eberhardt and her colleagues, the brains of white people fired more when shown pictures of faces of other white people, and less when shown pictures of faces of black people. This is because, as Eberhardt writes, “we reserve our precious cognitive resources for people who are ‘like us’, otherwise we see categories.
The bad news is that our brains are wired for bias. The good news is that the brain has the incredible ability to rewire. We can restructure our brains through repetitive exposure and bust our bias bubbles.
Question: When was the last time you caught yourself being biased?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
![6 Commencement Speeches to Inspire College Graduates and Senior Executives Alike]()
Leadership
Last week, I attended the 10th Annual Women’s Week Leadership Conference in San Diego. The conference caps off a week of events sponsored by the North San Diego Business Chamber designed to inspire, empower and connect women of all ages and professions in honor of Women’s History Month.
Over the weekend, I reviewed my notes and selected a few quotes that resonated with me.
1. Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt, Professor of Psychology at Stanford and author of Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do. Dr. Eberhardt earned a Ph.D. from Harvard, and is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including a 2014 MacArthur genius award. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers. She is widely considered one of the world’s leading experts on racial bias.
You don’t have to be a bigot to have bias. Our brains are wired to reserve our precious cognitive resources for people who are “like us”. Otherwise, we see people as belonging to a category, not as individuals.
2. Gretchen Rubin, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, is one of today’s most influential and thought-provoking observers of human nature. She’s known for her ability to distill and convey complex ideas with humor and clarity in a way that’s accessible to a wide audience. Gretchen shared insights from her latest book Outer Order Inner Calm: Declutter & Organize To Make More Room For Happiness.
When you get more control over the stuff in your life, you reduce the visual noise in your environment and get more control in general.
3. Rosemary Watson is an accomplished voiceover actress/producer, comedy writer and impersonator, host/MC, and singer. Her YouTube videos caught the eye of Carol Burnett who hand selected Rosemary to perform at the Mark Twain Prize for Humor honoring the legend.
What price do you have to pay to stay where you are? Give yourself permission to go bold.
4. ISHE is a Creative Visionary, Artist, Speaker, Facilitator and Author/Illustrator of an award-winning children’s book entitled Sol The Super Hairo, a story celebrating the glory of natural beauty for children. She is also is the co-author of I AM, a multigenerational book of self-validating affirmations. ISHE has dedicated over 20 years to empowering diverse audiences through the arts.
Her purpose is to inspire women to fearlessly and fiercely embrace their creativity, authenticity and inner beauty.
Be seen as I see you. You are my reflection, not my competition.
5. Guen Garrido’s good news was that she was the first person in her family to graduate from college. Her bad news was that her 2007 graduation from UCLA coincided with the Great Recession, and she was carrying $48,000 in student debt. Her $13 an hour job as a preschool teacher was barely enough to make ends meet. By 2014, Garrido’s debt had grown to $68,600. Her father’s sudden illness awoke her to the fact that she needed to take responsibility for her financial state, so that she could take care of her family. Three years and three months later, the San Diego-based millennial had paid off every cent.
Deal with your debt now so that you’re not always paying for the past.
6. Faith Jennings is the Senior Director of Communications for Northrop Grumman who has dedicated her career to delivering business results for multiple organizations – from Fortune 500 corporations to technology start-ups – by transforming their communications strategies and operations across an increasingly digital landscape.
You didn’t magically appear in this room. Show up as the valued team member that we already know you can be.
These are just a few of the women who showed up at the Women’s Week Leadership Conference to share their stories of with humor, compassion, power, and grit.
Question: If you attended an event honoring Women’s History Month this year, what messages resonated with you?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
