Terry Suffredini, a Certified Life and Career Coach as well as, a licensed Chemical Engineer, is a warm, friendly, funny, and inspiring Keynote Speaker. As a coach, she focuses on the things that truly matter in life: values and integrity, meaningful work, and rediscovering the joy that can be lost during the daily grind. As a speaker, Terry focuses on stories; using empathy and humor to illustrate and illuminate the ways that we can all find fulfillment in our work and our lives – and how each affects and reinforces the other.
Keynote Speaking
Terry’s preferred audience includes left-brained, analytical types like herself. Her passion is to support engineers who are unhappy and dissatisfied with their professional lives.
These are motivated, committed individuals who often feel trapped, – frustrated, stressed-out, and stuck in a work environment that does not fuel their vision, support their goals,. or appreciate their dedication. These individuals seek change yet fear it …and often feel that they have failed in meaningful ways, despite their obvious intelligence, years of training, and experience.
They know they are capable of, perhaps even destined for, something better; but feel lost as to how to make the transition happen. This dissatisfaction with their professional lives may also be creating issues in their personal lives, adding to their frustration and sense of failure.
As Terry’s career has progressed, she discovered that she had a passion and gift for coaching and public speaking. Using humor and personal experiences from her professional life as an environmental regulatory bureaucrat for the state of Texas, as a Process Design engineer and Project Engineer in the private sector, as well as her experiences as a mom of four, Terry shows how she can relate to most issues that her audience likely is facing.
Terry’s approach as a Keynote Speaker tends to focus on two areas that have meaning to the audience described above.
In her talk on How Bad Advice and Wrong Choices Can Still Create a Path to Success, Terry shares how she got to where she is today despite getting bad advice at the beginning of her career from those who should have known better. She uses these experiences to illustrate how: 1) she is no different from everyone else and, if she can change, anyone can; and 2) we don’t have to be defined by our mistakes, and 3) we certainly don’t have to stay in a bad place if we don’t want to.
Terry’s mix of self-deprecating humor and empathy for others who’ve listened to bad advice and made bad choices, not necessarily due to the bad advice, makes this instructional talk entertaining as well as enlightening. Not shy about her own missteps and mishaps, she is happy to share her journey to a place in life that has led to gratefulness, understanding, forgiveness, and joy, making her work far more productive and rewarding.
Through her sometimes rocky journey, Terry has learned that values matter and that integrity to those values will lead you to the place in your life, and the career, that is right for you.