Most speaker websites show you finished work. This page shows you the work in progress — the engagements on my calendar right now, what each client asked for, and what I'm building to deliver it.
I don't name clients here. Their events are theirs to announce. But if you're weighing whether I'll customize for your audience or hand you a talk I gave last week, this is the honest answer.
Updated October 2026
These entries describe recent engagements. For what's on the calendar today, contact Helen.
A statewide association that connects community college educators with the employers who hire their graduates asked me for a short keynote, delivered in four cities across the state. The employers in the room depend on that pipeline of trained workers, and they want to know what they’re getting.
I’ll show them what’s different about today’s new employees compared with when they themselves started out. Then I’ll cover best practices for recruiting, retaining and upskilling young employees.
An Alabama association of financial planners and insurance agents has asked me to present PHASE Into Retirement™ at a luncheon in Birmingham. PHASE continues to generate a lot of interest among advisors. It gives them a framework for the side of retirement that isn’t about money: Purpose, Health, Activities, Social Life and Everyday Life.
That’s the client’s question, word for word, and it’s the right one. A financial services company holding a meeting in Dallas asked for a selling workshop for a sales force whose next customers are a generation or two younger than they are.
From Dallas I go to Boston, to work with a company with consumer products, pharmaceutical and technology businesses. I’m doing a half-day management and leadership workshop with them to help them better understand their teams.
To prepare, I’m interviewing about six of their district and regional managers to get a good sense of the challenges they face and which changes would help them fastest.
I’m preparing content for a trip to Vietnam, about Gen Alpha and the trends that drive their buying behavior in apparel. The client sits between apparel brands and the factories that make their clothes. It’s a new market for me, so I’m doing a lot of research to get ready.
I’m spending a good bit of time right now running onboarding webinars on Zoom for financial advisors I met in September. They’re interested in using PHASE Into Retirement™ with their own clients.
A hospital system asked for four hours with their middle managers and other healthcare workplace leaders. The subject was intergenerational communication and the workplace conflict that comes out of it. They wanted clear instruction, and they wanted role plays. This group learns by doing.
We built it as two halves with a lunch break between them. Teaching first: what each generation in their buildings expects from a colleague, from a manager, and from a patient's family, and why those expectations collide. Role plays after — written from situations they were already handling, and titled the way they'd recognize them: “Peer to Peer,” “Leader to Team,” “Maternity Discharge,” and “Medicare Patient w/ Daughter.”
Two of those four are patient-facing, which is the part most generational training leaves out. In a hospital the generational collision isn't only between staff. It's between a young nurse and an older patient's adult daughter, at the worst possible moment for both of them.
The reviews were strong. The leader who brought us in sent a note afterward, and she's allowed me to publish it — without her name or her employer's.
Case studies cover engagements clients have agreed to name, with their own account of what changed afterward.