Henna Pryor is a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) and 2x TEDx and SXSW speaker who helps teams close the gap between being competent and being believed – the hidden tax of a skeptical, AI-saturated workplace. A workplace performance expert, Inc. columnist, and LinkedIn Learning instructor, she works with conferences and corporate teams in financial services, pharma, technology, and professional associations to turn doubt into trust that travels. Henna is the author of Good Awkward and The Signal Gap: How to Boost Believability and Influence in the Age of Doubt (Ideapress).

Henna’s Speech Topics:

Henna’s signature keynotes explore a bold new edge of workplace performance: where AI meets human connection.

Her talks focus on the intersection of AI + our uniquely human skills, revealing how emerging tech isn’t replacing our soft skills – it’s exposing how essential they are AND teaching us how we can use AI to enhance them. With her trademark blend of science-backed insights and razor-sharp humor, Henna helps high achievers upgrade the mindsets, communication habits, and leadership moves they’ll need to stay future-ready. From decoding tone with AI to building trust in high-stakes conversations, she equips teams with unexpected, practical tools to level up what matters most: their ability to connect, persuade, and perform – human to human.

MIND THE (SIGNAL) GAP!
Earning trust and influence in a world where polish is cheap and skepticism is free

The formula for winning a room used to be simple: prepare thoroughly, polish relentlessly, deliver with confidence. Then AI made flawless communication free. A warm, personalized note now takes four seconds to generate, and a gorgeous deck comes from a template. When perfect words cost nothing, audiences stopped trusting perfect words.

Meanwhile, your audience (whether it’s one person or 1000) has logged thousands of hours with unscripted, candid humans – and recalibrated their radar for what real actually sounds like. Against that baseline, the over-rehearsed executive and the machine-smooth message trigger the same reaction: something feels off.

So if polish stopped working, what earns belief now? Closing what Henna Pryor calls a signal gap – the space between what you mean and what your audience actually experiences. The work that closes it is congruence: aligning what you say, what you mean, what you believe, and how you behave when no one’s managing the optics. It’s the costliest signal there is, and the only one skeptical audiences still trust.

In this keynote based on her book The Signal Gap, Workplace Performance Expert, 2x TEDx speaker, and Inc. Magazine columnist Henna Pryor, CSP delivers the new playbook for influence and trust: disarm the skepticism in the room first, then align the four layers of congruence – Communication, Belief, Context, and Character – so your message survives any scrutiny it meets, and your influence skyrockets.

Charisma opens doors, but believability keeps them open.

After this keynote, you’ll be able to:

• Recognize why “more polished” now reads as “less believable,” and what to send instead
• Replace cheap signals with costly ones: visible reasoning, named trade-offs, and the honest specifics audiences still trust
• Close the signal gaps hiding across the four congruence layers before they fracture your credibility
• Stand out as the real thing in an AI-saturated market – the most future-proof edge there is

HIGH-TECH, DEEPLY HUMAN  – STRENGTHENING WORKPLACE RELATIONSHIPS USING AI

BEST FOR: NAVIGATING CHANGE, ADAPTABILITY IN DISRUPTION, INNOVATION/RISK-TAKING,

 TEAMWORK/COLLABORATION, COMMUNICATION, MINDSET, WOMEN’S EVENTS

Use AI to prepare for high-stakes conversations with greater empathy and clarity AI isn’t replacing your soft skills – it’s revealing how badly we need them.

USING AI In a workplace racing toward automation, many worry AI will strip our interactions of humanity, flattening communication into transactional exchanges. But here’s the surprising flip: AI, when used intentionally, can become an unexpected ally in strengthening relationships. In this energizing keynote, Workplace Performance Expert Henna Pryor reveals how AI acts like a “prescription lens” that sharpens empathy, clarity, and emotional presence at work. Instead of letting automation dilute human connection, Henna shows leaders and teams how to wield AI as a tool to design connection – not just hope for it. Audiences will discover how to role-play tough conversations, catch blind spots in tone, personalize outreach at scale, and, most importantly, stay deliberately, courageously human in a high-tech world.

After this Keynote, you’ll be able to:

-Use AI to prepare for high-stakes conversations with greater empathy and clarity

-Spot and correct tone misfires before they derail trust

-Personalize your communication at scale without losing authenticity

-Strengthen your “human edge” to stand out in an AI-driven workplace

Because in today’s workplace, the edge won’t go to the ones who automate the fastest – it’ll go to the ones who stay deeply human and use AI to prove it.

THE PERSUASION PLAYBOOK – USING AI TO AMPLIFY YOUR INFLUENCE

Use AI to sharpen and tailor your messaging for maximum impact. AI can’t make you persuasive – but it can make you unstoppable.

BEST FOR: INFLUENCE/PERSUASION, LEADERSHIP, SALES/REVENUE GROWTH, COMMUNICATION, ADAPTABILITY IN DISRUPTION, MINDSET, FUTURE OF WORK, WOMEN’S EVENTS.

We’re living in an age of AI-generated noise: more emails, more pitches, more content… but we’ve known for years that more noise doesn’t equal more influence. Can we actually use technology to help? In this provocative keynote, Workplace Performance Expert Henna Pryor shows why real influence still comes down to trust, relevance, and emotional connection – and how AI (when used wisely) can amplify all three. Audiences will learn to harness AI as their ultimate persuasion partner: a backstage coach that sharpens messaging, flags emotional cues, role-plays pushback, and tailors outreach without losing our uniquely human edge.

After this Keynote, you’ll be able to:

-Use AI to sharpen and tailor your messaging for maximum impact

-Identify and address emotional cues and hidden objections

-Prepare for resistance and pushback with confidence

-Balance authenticity with technology to build trust and spark buy-in

With her trademark blend of humor, sharp insight, and actionable tools, Henna empowers professionals with the cutting-edge techniques to rise above the noise, earn trust, spark buy-in, and influence even when they’re not in the room.

Because in a world where anyone can automate a message, the real power lies with those who can make it matter.

More Programs:

Awkward and Upward!: Your surprising secret weapon for taking more professional risks

Advances in technology have made it easy to avoid real human interaction. While texting, online ordering, and “swiping right” is convenient, we’re losing the skills of relating to others, building trust and connection, and enduring the critical friction and messiness we get from being in proximity to each other. This weakening of our social muscles is slowly destroying our ability to take smart risks at work – like collaborating with colleagues, initiating tough conversations, speaking up, and sharing new ideas.

Risk-taking sounds good in theory, but most of us have a hard time moving from wishful thinking to execution. Why? Because when we have a chance to take a risk in the moment, we feel awkward – and that awkwardness bumps up against our deep desire for others to approve of us and what we do. As it turns out, it’s what we improve in the face of taking risks – often despite others’ judgment – that leads to the greatest growth. After all, the fastest path to major improvement comes from strengthening what’s weak, rather than what’s strong.

Join 2x TEDx Speaker, Executive Coach, and Workplace Performance Expert, Henna Pryor, to learn how embracing the Good Awkward is your secret weapon for skyrocketing teamwork, speaking up boldly, and strengthening your risk-taking muscle.

After this keynote, you’ll be able to:

-Pinpoint the exact reason it’s been difficult to take risks – and how to move past it

-Use deliberate discomfort and strategic micro-stressors to rebuild our social and risk-taking muscles

-Create a custom plan for speaking up, sharing ideas, and being courageous and risk-ready whenever the chance arises

The Changing Psychology of Influence in the Modern Era: How to overcome resistance to move your ideas forward

In the modern era, the new psychology for creating new actions, influence, inspiration, and navigating through uncertainty has changed.  We need to take a new approach to create new actions in our teammates and in ourselves, to persuade prospects, to have difficult conversations, and to maximize opportunities for partnership.

If you’ve ever found yourself facing resistance to your ideas – you’re not alone. Even when we have a great idea that will affect enormous change, we don’t always get the reaction – or action – we’re hoping for.

That’s because we spend the majority of our energy making our ideas and changes more compelling, more interesting, more attractive — pouring on the fuel — that we rarely discover the frictions that are working against us, and all humans have them.

In this interactive session, join 2x TEDx and Global Keynote Speaker, Author, and Workplace Performance Expert, Henna Pryor, to uncover and explore the 3 specific reasons why people resist change, and more importantly, concrete strategies to overcome them so we can move our ideas, initiatives, team members, prospects, and mission forward.

After this keynote, you’ll be able to:

-Shift away from problem-solving to a more valuable strategy

-Understand how being the “expert” is hurting your influence instead of helping

-Position your idea from several new angles that increase trust and get the green light you need for people to say yes

The Inner Game of Influence (with Collin Henderson)

Buyers today are not the same buyers of 5 years ago. Between changes in consumer behavior and information overload in the digital era, our buyers are different, and we need to be different. Sellers today need an updated approach to connect on a deeper level and bring a new kind of value.

While markets will always have problems to solve, the real problem in the current market is that we focus on ‘metrics’ more than the ‘mindsets’ that lead to the behavioral changes we need to create real results.

The truth is a single mental shift can activate measurable change: When we optimize mindset, we automatically optimize metrics as a result. Which means in this season of sales, we need to learn the Inner Game of Influence– a multi-step method that helps sellers develop unshakeable clarity, tools to break free from the internal and external limits we don’t realize we have, while learning what motivates modern buyers and drives them to action today.

This speaking duo model is ideal for Sales Kickoffs, Revenue Kickoffs, and National Sales Meetings.

Videos:

Henna Pryor’s Bio:

Henna Pryor is a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) and 2x TEDx and SXSW speaker who helps teams close the gap between being competent and being believed – the hidden tax of a skeptical, AI-saturated workplace. A workplace performance expert, Inc. columnist, and LinkedIn Learning instructor, she works with conferences and corporate teams in financial services, pharma, technology, and professional associations to turn doubt into trust that travels.

The idea behind her second book, The Signal Gap, came out of nearly two decades of corporate experience – working closely with leaders, sales teams, and high-performing professionals, reading people, earning buy-in, and watching careers rise or stall on believability rather than raw competence. That field research became her work: helping high performers be as trusted and influential as they are talented.

Her keynotes tackle performance mindset, high-impact communication, navigating change, and what she calls Social Muscle Atrophy: the quiet erosion of the human skills that make teams believable. Audiences leave with specific, research-backed, immediately usable tools, delivered with the warmth and candor of a sharp friend who happens to have the receipts.

She’s been invited to speak twice for TEDx, in NYC and Wilmington, DE, and brings her expertise to Google, Workday, Johnson & Johnson, and JPMorganChase. She’s a SUCCESS Magazine Woman of Influence, a LinkedIn Learning and CNBC instructor, and a two-time SXSW Workplace track speaker, and she’s frequently sought out by TIME, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, INSIDER, NBC, The Washington Post, Fast Company, Business.com, and HuffPost.

Henna is the author of Good Awkward and The Signal Gap: How to Boost Believability and Influence in the Age of Doubt (Ideapress). She is the founder of Pryority Group. Whether on a mainstage or a leadership offsite, her message is the same: in an age of doubt, being believed is the real competitive edge.

Collin Henderson’s Bio:

Collin Henderson is the founder and CEO of Master Your Mindset, a leader in the field of mental conditioning. Collin left his corporate role as a #1 ranked medical sales professional and national sales trainer to now be considered by many – including acclaimed broadcaster Jim Rome – “One of the best mindset coaches in the industry.” Collin has written 7 books and 2 journals and his podcast has hundreds of thousands of downloads worldwide.

Collin’s trainings on mindset and sales psychology have been utilized by some of the world’s best organizations including: Nike, Zillow, Los Angeles Dodgers, Lululemon, Anaheim Ducks, Microsoft, Salesforce, Alaska Airlines, FedEx, and Amazon. He’s also the Director of Mental Conditioning with the UCLA Women’s Basketball program, and along with Henna Pryor, is a sales and mindset keynote speaker to Russell Wilson’s groundbreaking corporate mindset training company, Limitless Minds.