Speaking & Workshops
What happens when the life that looks right stops feeling right?
Some of the best conversations happen when someone from outside your usual orbit walks into the room.
Liz Coffey speaks to successful women who have spent years doing what was expected of them (building careers, taking care of people, checking the boxes) and are beginning to wonder what they actually want from the next chapter.
Before founding On Leave Experiences, Liz spent 15 years working alongside C-suite leaders at major consumer brands. Today, as a trained coach and founder of On Leave, she works with women navigating the space between “I should be grateful for what I have” and “I think I want something more.”
Her talks draw from the On Leave Method, the five-part framework that grounds her work with women: Locate, Interrupt, Imagine, Choose, Go.
Liz has spoken for employee resource groups, professional networks and women’s communities across the country. Her sessions are warm, candid and highly conversational, designed to leave women not with someone else’s answer, but with better language and questions for finding their own.
Ways to Work Together
Workshop
What’s true right now — and what else could be true?
An interactive workshop built around the first three parts of the On Leave Method: Locate, Interrupt and Imagine.
Women start by noticing what’s actually happening in their lives right now: the roles they play, the orbits they’re in, the rules they follow, the shields they put up and what’s giving or taking their energy.
Then we explore what becomes possible when we interrupt those patterns and give ourselves permission to imagine what we might want before immediately filtering it through what feels practical or realistic.
Women leave with new language for what they’re experiencing, questions they can continue asking themselves and a clearer sense of what they may want more (or less) of next.
Workshops can be adapted for employee groups, professional networks, women’s organizations and smaller private gatherings.
Keynote
You're not stuck. You’re using a map that isn't yours.
Early in my own work with a coach, she asked me a question I’d never thought to ask myself: Whose rule is that?
I’d mentioned that I felt guilty putting up an away message at work if I was just taking a Friday afternoon off. She stopped me. Whose rule is that? What happens if you break it? What happens if you don’t?
I’d never questioned that. It turns out I’d spent 15 years following rules I’d never actually agreed to and no one else actually made. A definition of success that arrived fully formed before I was old enough to examine it. A ladder I kept climbing because, well, that’s what you do. A life that looked genuinely great on paper and earned all the right reactions from everyone around me. The problem was that I couldn’t see past the edges of the world I was already living in.
Liz speaks to women who have built good lives and are starting to wonder if good is the whole story. She asks the questions that help them hear themselves think, maybe for the first time in a long time.
This isn’t a talk about quitting your job or blowing up a perfectly good life. It’s about learning to tell the difference between gratitude and settling. Recognizing a map that was never yours to begin with. And finding a gentler on-ramp to whatever change is yours to make.
Women leave feeling seen in a way they didn’t expect and more optimistic than they walked in.
Fireside Chat or Panel
Prefer a purely conversational format?
Liz can join a leader or moderator from your organization for a candid conversation about the questions successful women often wrestle with privately, even when everything looks good on paper.
Topics can include the tension between gratitude and wanting more; how our roles, rules and relationships shape our choices; the value of a thought partner outside our usual orbit; why getting outside our normal patterns can create clarity; and how to explore change without assuming we need to make a dramatic one.