Jully Black

Speaking topics

Presentations listed below include in-person and virtual keynotes, as well as workshops, fireside chats, and other presentation formats.

• Living and Leading Through Adversity

  Personal challenges influence how we show up long before we speak about them. In this compelling keynote, Jully Black explores how loss, uncertainty, and changing circumstances shape our confidence, relationships, and approach to leadership.

  Through the invitation, “If you really knew me, you would know…,” Jully encourages audiences to look beyond titles and first impressions. She explores the experiences people carry quietly and how greater understanding can change the way we communicate, respond to difficulty, and support one another.

  Jully’s message connects personal resilience with the daily choices of leadership. How do we remain present when life feels uncertain? How do we acknowledge our limitations while honouring our responsibilities? How can we offer support without assuming we know what someone else needs? Jully invites audiences to approach these questions with honesty and compassion.

  Relevant to leaders at every level, professional associations, and teams navigating difficult periods, this keynote encourages people to lead with greater awareness of themselves and others. Audiences will leave with a more human understanding of strength and a clearer sense of the leader they want to become.

  Key takeaways include how to:

  • Recognize the way personal adversity influences communication and decisions.
  • Build trust through authenticity and appropriate boundaries.
  • Respond to others with curiosity rather than assumptions.
  • Accept support while remaining accountable to their responsibilities.
  • Take purposeful steps forward during uncertainty.

• Mental Health at Work: Building Mental Fitness

  The pace of work can make it easy to overlook how we are doing until our energy, patience, or sense of connection begins to change. In this engaging keynote, Jully Black invites audiences to give their well-being a more consistent place in everyday life.

  Drawing on lived experience, Jully will explore mental fitness through the habits, conversations, and choices that help us remain connected to ourselves. She asks audiences to consider what they are feeding their minds, how they speak to themselves, and whether their routines allow room for recovery. Her distinction between self-care and self-maintenance encourages a closer look at whether they are meeting their needs or simply preparing themselves to keep going.

  For leaders, the conversation extends to the environment they help create. Jully explores what it means to “be a bridge” by listening, responding with care, and helping people connect with appropriate support. She invites organizations to consider whether their everyday expectations make it easier for people to acknowledge pressure and ask for help.

  Suited to workplace wellness events, employee gatherings, and leadership development, this keynote opens a personal, accessible conversation about caring for ourselves and supporting the people beside us.

  Audiences will leave understanding how to:

  • Notice when their daily demands are leaving too little room for recovery.
  • Examine the influence of self-talk and habitual expectations.
  • Build space for rest, reflection, movement, and connection.
  • Communicate needs and seek appropriate support.
  • Contribute to a workplace where well-being receives consistent attention.

• Building Resilient Cultures: Becoming Unbreakable Together

  What helps a team keep believing in its work when the demands are high and the answers are uncertain? In this energizing keynote, Jully Black explores the relationships and shared commitments that help people move through challenges together.

  Drawing on themes of renewal, resourcefulness, and mutual support, Jully invites audiences to consider how they respond when they do not have everything they need. She encourages teams to recognize the resources already around them, remain curious about another approach, and see possibility beyond the obstacle immediately in front of them.

  Jully will also explore the influence of belief. Sometimes a colleague, a young person, or an entire team needs someone to see their potential before they can see it themselves. Through storytelling and reflection, she connects that belief with everyday actions that strengthen trust, encourage contribution, and help people feel less alone in their responsibilities.

  This keynote speaks to organizations navigating change and to teams whose work depends on sustained care for others. Particularly relevant to education, youth services, nonprofit organizations, and community agencies, it offers an opportunity to renew shared purpose and strengthen the people carrying it forward.

  Audiences will leave understanding how to:

  • Approach obstacles with resourcefulness and openness to another way.
  • Strengthen colleagues through encouragement and dependable support.
  • Recognize the influence of everyday actions on team confidence.
  • Balance commitment to a mission with care for the people delivering it.
  • Renew a shared sense of responsibility, connection and possibility.

• Step into the Light: Women Empowerment

  Women often learn to make room for everyone else while questioning how much space they are allowed to take themselves. In this empowering keynote, Jully Black invites women to recognize their value, own their ambition, and step forward without waiting for permission to be fully themselves.

  Through personal storytelling, humour and reflection, Jully explores how expectations shape the way women speak, lead, and make decisions. She addresses the pressure to remain agreeable, the habit of minimizing accomplishments and the self-doubt that can follow women into rooms they have already earned the right to enter. Her message encourages audiences to examine whose expectations they are living by and what becomes possible when their own voice carries more weight.

  Jully also explores the importance of recognizing progress. Drawing on her achievement board exercise, she invites women to look beyond what remains unfinished and acknowledge the strength, experience, and accomplishments they already bring. That recognition becomes a foundation for pursuing opportunities, navigating transitions, and supporting other women.

  With applications across women’s leadership events, professional networks, entrepreneurship, and personal development, this keynote connects confidence with action. Audiences will leave ready to name what they want, speak about what they offer, and take a meaningful step toward what comes next.

  Key takeaways include understanding how to:

  • Recognize the expectations and beliefs that influence their confidence and choices.
  • Own their accomplishments without minimizing their contribution.
  • Communicate their ambitions and advocate for opportunities.
  • Move through self-doubt without waiting to feel perfectly prepared.
  • Create space for other women through encouragement, mentorship and shared opportunity.

• Turning Pain into Purpose

  Grief can follow the loss of a loved one, a relationship, an opportunity or the future we expected. In this moving keynote, Jully Black explores how we live with those changes, recognize what we are carrying, and begin to imagine life beyond the circumstances in front of us.

  Through personal reflection, Jully considers the barriers that can make healing difficult, including silence, isolation, and the pressure to appear further along than we feel. She invites audiences to acknowledge their experiences without measuring their progress against someone else’s timeline.

  The conversation extends to connection, creativity, and legacy. How do we honour what matters to us? What do we want to carry forward? How might our experience deepen the care we offer ourselves and others? Jully explores the possibility of finding meaning while continuing to make room for grief.

  Relevant to community gatherings, employee events, and audiences navigating significant transitions, this keynote offers an opportunity for reflection and renewed hope. Its message respects the complexity of loss while encouraging people to remain open to support, purpose, and joy.

  Audiences will leave understanding how to:

  • Recognize grief associated with different kinds of loss and change.
  • Identify expectations or habits that may be making it harder to seek support.
  • Use reflection and creative expression to explore their experience.
  • Honour important relationships and experiences through intentional acts of remembrance.
  • Take manageable steps toward connection and renewed purpose.