Expert on Resiliency

Motivational speaker Eileen McDargh presents virtual and live programs on Resiliency Skills for Pandemic Panic or Disruptive Times, and Creating a Resilient Workforce.

Eileen McDargh is founder and CEO of the consulting firm, The Resiliency Group (a division of McDargh Communications). Organizations like Cisco, Novartis, Oracle, and Procter & Gamble hire her firm to teach them ways of building resilient leadership teams and workplaces.

Since 1980, she has helped organizations and individuals transform the life of their business and the business of their life through conversations that matter and connections that count.

Her programs are content rich, interactive, provocative and playful-even downright hilarious.  She draws upon practical business know-how, life’s experiences and years of consulting to major national and international organizations that have ranged from global pharmaceuticals to the US Armed Forces, from health care associations to religious institutions.

Global Gurus International, a British-based provider of resources for leadership, communication and sales training, also ranked Eileen in the World’s Top 30 Communication Professionals for several years following a global survey of 22,000 business professionals.

Eileen is energy without hype. A Connector who joins head and heart to create action. Instead of giving lectures Eileen teaches and tells stories. She speaks with humility and humor in place of pride and pretense.

Along with her work as an organizational resiliency consultant, Eileen speaks and writes about resiliency. As a platform speaker, she has given thousands of keynotes for organizations and associations in dozens of fields, including aerospace, education, finance, healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, public agencies, real estate, retail, technology, utilities, and women’s leadership.

She is a member of the National Speakers Association (and has served on its Board of Directors), was awarded by Speakers Platform a Top 5 Speaker designation in Leadership, was elected into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame, and was given by her peers the Legend of the Platform Award. She is a certified agent for THE WHY INSTITUTE.

As an author, Eileen has written seven books, including:
“Your Resiliency GPS: A Guide for Growing through Life and Work”

“The Resilient Spirit: Heart Talk for Surviving in An Upside Down World”

“Work for a Living and Still be Free to Live!”

“Gifts from the Mountain: Simple Truth’s for Life’s Complexities” won the Benjamin Franklin Gold Award. A training film based on this book earned a Silver Telly, the highest award for commercial productions.

“40 Tips For Speaking Up, Speaking Out, And Being Heard”

“Resilient Living: Moving From Burnout To Bounty”

“My Get Up and Go… Got Up and Went”

“Talk Ain’t Cheap… It’s Priceless”

“Burnout to Breakthrough: Building Resilience to Refuel, Recharge, and Reclaim What Matters”

Before starting her own consultancy, Eileen was the Director of Communications for a national healthcare company, served as senior manager on a U.S. Navy installation project, and taught school in Nassau County, Florida, where she was elected “Educator of the Year.”

She and her family live in Dana Point, California.
 

Virtual Events

Business-as-usual has gone the way of the dodo bird, the passenger pigeon and a balanced Federal budget. The skills of resilience have never been more important to cultivate.

• Your organization needs the creative brainpower of all stakeholders.
• Leaders need to figure out how to release the talent and collaboration of remote workers.
• Individuals need to harness the energy of optimism and action.

We can do this through the wonder of technology.

VIRTUAL FORMATS

Virtual Mini Keynotes: A 30 to 45-minute face-paced, program with high content backed by engaging stories and humor. Expect plenty of ROI for your time.

Virtual Seminars: All leadership begins with self-leadership. This hands-on, thought-provoking series looks at moving from burnout to breakthrough: building resilience to refuel, recharge and reclaim what matters.

Virtual Executive Exploration: Customized facilitated “advances” designed to bring seasoned executives together to serve as masterminds in moving through new realities.
 

Most Popular Topics

All of us are being whip-lashed by a barrage of frightening news, warnings, and dire predictions about the fate of our communities, countries, and world. Many of us are just plain anxious and frankly scared. Never before has there been such a universal need to understand and cultivate resilience.
 

NEW!

Mental Wellness Matters: Moving From Brawn to Brains to Big Hearts

Cultivating Resilience in the Age of Burnout: Leadership Skills for Complex Times

This program is designed to open a conversation about what we can do as individuals and professionals, as employees and managers, to move from pandemic panic to realistic responses. Fear paralyzes us. Clear thinking moves us.

Audience takeaways:

• Guidance through the accurate definition of resilience and begin to explore actions to take in cultivating four critical resilience skills: adaptability, agility, laughability, and alignment.
• How it all begins with YOU—what conversations you are having with yourself and what emotions arise as a result?
• We’ll talk about the power of the present and how to develop intelligent optimism. Action is the antidote for anxiety and you’ll be guided on how to control the controllable.
• Walk away with at least three concrete actions you can take today!

Burnout to Breakthrough: Building Resiliency to Refuel, Recharge and Reclaim What Matters

In May 2019, the World Health Organization declared burnout as a global occupational hazard with specific symptoms and warnings. Enter COVID 19 and an upside down world.  Burnout has become even stronger and insidious. Remote workforces, physical distancing, and dependency on virtual communication provide their own potential for burnout. You’ll experience why Eileen has also been called a HOPE merchant, filling minds with positivity, laugh-ability and DO-ability. Discover ways individuals and organizations impact burnout and what to do about it. Come away with at least 3 action items to implement today to control the flames.

Lead-Her-Ship – Owning Our Power, Passsion, Play and Purpose

Gather women together and you have an energy source to light even the darkest corners of the world. Eileen puts a match to that energy.  We can learn to be heroines of our own story and leaders shaping tomorrow for all our children. This is your time to refresh, realign, reawaken, reflect, refuel, regenerate, rejoice, release, remember and renew. Participants will learn:

• About the POWER of choice.
• To understand The POWER of who you are, what you know and what you have done.
• About the POWER of PRESENCE – PERSONAL vs. SOCIAL.
• How to use PASSION to leverage your career to match your authentic self.
• HOW TO PLAY… and how to help others enjoy their work and world.
• About your PURPOSE: the bigger picture. Why am I here, and what do I leave behind?

Leveraging Your Career To Fit YOUR Authentic Self

A good career fit is not like squeezing into Spanx. Nope! It means thinking, listening, and sensing where, when and how to craft actions that bring you from good work to great work! The result: you feel GREAT and you stop the busywork and start the work that matters. It begins from the inside out. In this session, you will:

• Discover the difference between UGH work, Good Work and GREAT work.
• Explore through exercises how to identify what is uniquely YOUR authentic work.
• Learn how to ask for what you want and three possible steps to leverage you into your GREAT/Authentic work.
• Understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor.
• Explore the six qualities of charisma and how to develop these qualities so that you attract people to you and your authentic work.

The Art of Balancing an Unequal Life: The Secret to Resiliency!

Make no mistake—everyone works—whether for free or fee!

How can you work smart and live happier? Is it even possible to have work/life balance in this fast-paced, frantic world? From senior executives to front line employees, this issue is key to the changing nature of America’s workforce and today’s world.

We hear about the need to balance personal and work priorities, but how do you go from burned out to fired up? How can we juggle the many responsibilities and demands on our busy lives? In this insightful and interactive program you will:

• Understand why traditional models of balance no longer work in these times of change.
• Discover how to conduct your own “CAT” scan of life.
• Acquire the skills to “sail” within the five critical areas of living.
• Create your own action plan for juggling the demands of your fast-paced life.
• Develop personal strategies for creating “a life by design, not be default”
• Learn at least three methods for effective self-management and self-improvement that you can put to work immediately.

Your Resiliency GPS Workshop

Surprises are the new normal. Change is the new constant. Stress and burnout have reached epidemic proportions. Yet, not all is lost. Using the book Your Resiliency GPS: A Guide for Growing through Life and Work author and professional speaker Eileen McDargh will guide your audience on a different path.

This workshop is for everyone from the leaders of Fortune 100 companies to small business owners to the unemployed.  Workshop pricing includes a copy of Your Resiliency GPS for each participant. Based upon the length of the presentation, participants will:

• Cultivate PREresilience skills in order to be pro-active about change.
• Learn to see opportunities where others see only barriers.
• Learn a four-part model for methodically tackling the tough issues you currently face.
• Learn how to use Growth Potential Strategies (GPS) to get you to where you want to go.
• …. Recalculating Questions.

Leading in Disruptive Times—Radical Resilience

Radically turbulent times demand professional and personal responses that transcend our regular work and life patterns. It’s not about happy faces on mirrors and mantras on coffee mugs. It’s not about hanging on while holding back. It’s about times when you feel someone ate your cheese, drained the swamp, and went from great to less-than-good. How can professionals cope with change while staying focused on their jobs and organization goals?

The answer is resiliency – the ability to find the inner strength to grow through a set-back, challenge or opportunity.

Radical resilience requires the courage to challenge, commit, and contribute in ways that positively impact both today as well as many tomorrows. Based upon the length of the presentation, participants will:

• Discover how to grow the skills of adaptability, agility, laugh-ability, and alignment for producing results that put YOU in control of your ship.
• Learn a four-part model for methodically tackling the tough issues you currently face.
• Explore what great leaders do to inspire teams to stay in the game and thrive. (And it has NOTHING to do with money!)
• Get them energized, actualized, authorized, and gratified.
• Develop a personal legacy leadership goal that defies downturns and disappointments.

Resilient Relationships: Plain Talk for Complex Times

At the end of the day, our very success hinges on relationships. These relationships grow or die based on a skill too often we forget: CONVERSATION. How meaningful are yours?

The proliferation of cell phones and the glut of chat rooms show us what society yearns for: meaningful human connection, community, and the value of relationships.

The pace of change, the lure of dazzling technology, and the speed of life have created the opposite. The most human of all connections is conversation – an internal and external event that has become blurred. We’ve forgotten how to talk to each other – if in fact some of us ever knew. In many instances, we have never been taught how to listen. At the deepest level, we’ve probably never stopped long enough to even listen to ourselves.

And at times of crisis, these conversations become even more important. This presentation explores a model for understanding and growing the conversations we have with ourselves and with each other so that everyone becomes fully engaged in the work we are tasked to do. And you’ll also celebrate the power of humor to connect. Be prepared to think, laugh, and learn.