This is what leadership looks like.
Leadership looks like intentional choices, made every day.
However the forces shaping those choices aren't always obvious.
TEDx Speaker | Author of Lead Yourself First
Liz Holtzinger is an award-winning professor, entrepreneur, leadership speaker, and author of Lead Yourself First. For more than 25 years, she has studied how language, identity, and communication shape the decisions leaders make—and applied that knowledge in classrooms, companies, and organizations.
Alongside her career in higher education, Liz co-founded and led a healthcare company through growth and its eventual acquisition by a national organization. That experience gave her a firsthand understanding of leadership under real conditions: competing priorities, consequential decisions, organizational change, and responsibility for other people.
Her work begins with a clear premise: leadership starts before the title. Her approach is thoughtful and candid rather than prescriptive, using story, language, and questions to help leaders notice what conventional leadership frameworks often overlook.
Through corporate keynotes and custom-designed leadership retreats, Liz helps leaders examine the assumptions, pressures, and patterns influencing their choices. Drawing from Lead Yourself First and her proprietary Leadership Compass, she gives leaders a practical framework for thinking clearly, choosing intentionally, and leading with greater consistency.
Every organization is shaped by choices. Every choice is shaped by the person making it.
Lead Yourself First examines what happens before a leader acts: the beliefs, pressures, values, and stories influencing how that person interprets a situation and decides what to do next.
In a culture that rewards speed, performance, and constant reinvention, Liz Holtzinger offers a different premise: better leadership does not begin by becoming someone new. It begins by understanding what is already directing your choices—and deciding whether it should.
Through personal stories, practical reflection, and the Leadership Compass framework, Lead Yourself First gives leaders a structure for clearer judgment, more deliberate decisions, and greater consistency between what they value and how they lead.
The book is the intellectual foundation for Liz’s corporate keynotes and leadership retreats, giving leaders and teams a shared language for examining how individual choices shape organizational culture.
Copies may be purchased individually through Amazon, IngramSpark or ordered in bulk for leadership teams, company events, conferences, and retreats.
Clear Thinking. Intentional Action.
Leadership decisions are rarely shaped by facts alone. They are also influenced by context, expectations, familiar patterns, competing responsibilities, and the stories leaders carry into the room.
The Leadership Compass introduced in Lead Yourself First is Liz Holtzinger’s proprietary framework for examining what is influencing a decision before acting on it. It helps leaders look beyond the immediate pressure of what should I do? toward a more deliberate set of questions: What could I do? What is influencing this choice? And who am I choosing to be as I make it?
Used throughout Liz’s keynotes and leadership retreats, the Compass creates a practical structure for clearer judgment, more intentional choices, and more productive conversations within leadership teams.
Download the Leadership Compass worksheet to begin applying the framework to a decision of your own.
Bring intentional leadership into the room.
Liz works with organizations that want their leaders to think more clearly about the choices they make, the influence they carry, and the culture they create.
Drawing from her book, Lead Yourself First, and the Leadership Compass framework, each engagement combines compelling ideas, practical reflection, and language leaders can continue using long after the event concludes.
Corporate Keynote
Liz delivers thought-provoking, story-driven keynotes that challenge audiences to reconsider where leadership begins. Rather than offering another formula for managing other people, she invites leaders to examine what is shaping their own choices: the stories they believe, the pressures they respond to, and the person they intend to be when the decision is theirs to make. Each keynote is adapted to the organization, event, and audience while remaining grounded in Liz’s broader body of leadership work.
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Leadership Retreats
Liz designs and facilitates custom retreats for executive and leadership teams ready to step outside the pace of daily operations and think more deliberately together. Built around the organization’s priorities, each retreat uses the Leadership Compass, guided reflection, and structured conversation to surface the assumptions and patterns influencing individual and collective decisions.
These are not off-the-shelf workshops. Each experience is developed in partnership with the organization to create the conditions for honest conversation, clearer thinking, and more intentional leadership.