Molly Hughes Wilmer is an energetic, charismatic, and inspiring presenter who can read her audience. An experienced speaker throughout her career, she has given talks on topics as wide-ranging as women and aging in Tokyo and on art and sailing in Hamburg. Not shy in front of a camera or a crowd, she even delivered a toast at her own rehearsal dinner.
The topics can be delivered as talks or workshops. Molly can also deliver team-building exercises on any of these topics on sailboats.
Speaking Topics
Embracing Empathy & DEI
Embracing DEI in business can positively impact employee retention, sales, and profit. From a personal standpoint, Molly explores empathy and self empathy in the pathy to truly embrace DEI. She describes several options for how leaders can become more empathetic. She encourages empathy by focusing on the personal benefits of self empathy and empathy, both essential components of joy.
Busting Out of the Comfort Zone
Sitting in the comfort zone can lead to stagnation in life and business. Using her own experiences as an example, Molly explores thriving in the growth zone. Molly motivates participants by focusing on the personal benefits of living in the growth zone, including enhanced skills and renewed energy, as well as the business benefits of continued relevance and innovation.
Winning Teams
A member of a highly successful sailing team for over 22 years, Molly talks about the importance of teamwork for success. She profiles how successful teams handle setbacks. She explores the process of team dynamics, as well as the organizational ingredients necessary for team success.
Crisis Leadership
Crisis happens, unfortunately, and Molly has lived through several, both personal and professional. Effective leaders help it happen better, with organizations coming through stronger and more viable than before. Using several case studies, Molly examines the process of a crisis, the types of responses that can be expected, and how to leverage the known to navigate the unknown.
“I am still thinking about her words … they made an impression! I just wanted to thank you. She was truly great!”
Speaker Bio
At this point in her life, Molly’s journey has taken her to a state of peace and joy, happiness and empathy that is unlike any she has ever known. She offers all that she has become and is still becoming to enable other people to reach their bliss, their “rapture” of being alive.
Molly Hughes Wilmer has been called the “Queen of the Cool Jobs” – she “followed her bliss” and got paid to have amazing experiences with fascinating people. She climbed Mt. Fuji with a birthday cake for a surprise sunrise breakfast celebration at the peak. She was the only woman in a Russian sauna during a break from learning about lumber mills. She has sailed tall ships in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and Mediterranean and Caribbean Seas. She has enjoyed salmon fresh off a boat in Bergen. She has given talks on topics as wide-ranging as women and aging in Tokyo and on art and sailing in Hamburg.
She has been tested – sometimes by her own invitation, and more often by surprise. She survived storms at sea and summited a snowy mountain on a moonlit night. She red-flagged a woman’s potential spinal injury and managed her wilderness evacuation. She was a caretaker for a dying loved one, managed a second loved one through a mental health crisis, and kept a third loved one alive during an allergic reaction. She helped first responders get communications equipment on 9/11. She chaired an international sailing regatta that took place one week after a hurricane put the entire facility under water. She held a scheduled investor quarterly conference call in a hastily reserved hotel when our headquarters were flooded by a burst water main the night before. That was after she had reassured 500 employees they still had jobs even though they didn’t have a place to work.
Through it all, she has grown. How she experiences and views life has been transformed. And, now Molly wants to share the joy of living life, the “rapture of being alive,” as Joseph Campbell calls it.