Past Audiences Include

Leaders can create an environment of human connection, sustained high-performance and more joy, by fully leveraging their talents. 

In a time when people feel increasingly isolated and burnt out, Rajiv Mehta brings a refreshing approach to strengthening human bonds. This keynote inspires leaders to use their existing skills to create spaces where people feel seen, valued, and part of something bigger—no quick fixes, just real, lasting impact. Using his Mapping Ourselves approach (practices of personal science, experiences of collective self-reflection, and analog methods), Rajiv empowers leaders to cultivate environments that foster connection, commitment, and engagement, where they and their people tap into their collective strengths to excel together. Attendees will walk away with a transformational new perspective on, and actionable strategies for, building a thriving culture that supports long-term success.

Optional: complementary workshops teaching one or more Mapping Ourselves tools, and consulting on building your own Mapping Ourselves practices.

Discover the powerful new ways to pursue the ancient advice to “know yourself”.

Philosophers have been urging people to “know yourself” for millennia. Clearly both the value of and the lack of self-knowledge is not breaking news. But most are unaware that the past two decades have led to a flowering of innovation in tools and methods to explore your own life. In this talk Rajiv Mehta shares powerful, thought-provoking, and often funny stories of how people have explored their own lives, what they’ve learned, and the impact of their discoveries — athletes pursuing Olympic medals, people managing diseases, ex-soldiers settling into civilian life, school-age children exploring care in their lives, friends learning how they can better support each other, and more. In hearing these stories, you’ll discover that you already have the capacity to explore anything of interest in your own life in a disciplined way.

Inventing “a faster horse” … How do they do it?!

Automotive pioneer Henry Ford famously said that if he’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for “a faster horse”, and not a noisy, smelly, bone-rattling contraption. Ground-breaking innovations do not come from market surveys. In this down-to-earth and joyful keynote Rajiv Mehta shares his own experiences developing such innovations in multiple fields (digital photography, computer-speech technologies, personal health, family caregiving, and community building) as well as those of famous historical innovators to illuminate the years/decades before “overnight success”.

Vital to success is a mindset that sees “failures” as “valuable learnings of how not to do things”, an unreasonable optimism that provides the tenacity to keep trying, and a whole lot of luck. Attendees will leave with a deep appreciation of the innovations they use in daily life, and perhaps inspired to pursue their own novel ideas.