Henna Pryor - Keynote Speaker, Author, Workplace Performance Expert

Henna Pryor - Keynote Speaker, Author, Workplace Performance Expert We help high achievers level up and make impossible change thru award-winning keynotes + programs.

06/10/2026

A Berkeley study just exposed that the thing you’ve been rewarded for your entire career is starting to work against you. 😳

Researchers pulled more than 500K college grades from 2018 to 2025 and tracked what happened the moment Chatty G showed up. As you’d expect, everyone didn’t suddenly get more brilliant (don’t we wish!)... but an entire tier of “pretty good” work (the B+, A-, and the honest 87% results) slowly DISAPPEARED into a sea of identical, gleaming A’s.

When AI makes everyone an A student, does the “A” even mean anything anymore?

While that’s happening in education, on the research side, scientific peer reviewers have started rejecting technically flawless research papers for being “mathematically soulless.” 2 totally different rooms, but the same shared gut reaction.

This affects you too.

The thing that used to prove you were good at your job DOESN’T always prove that anymore. It proves something else entirely - and the people evaluating you have already started running a second test on YOU, the human, standing behind the work.

I break down exactly what that test is (and the two-part audit every manager, client, and audience is now running on you whether they admit it or not) in the video.

Let’s talk about it! If you’ve ever opened a perfectly worded message and thought “...a person did not write this,” you already know where this is going.

Are you already running this audit without realizing it?

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👩🏻 Who is she? Henna Pryor, CSP is a keynote speaker, author of Good Awkward and the upcoming The Signal Gap, and Inc. Magazine columnist. She speaks to executives and professionals on communication, influence, and social fitness at work. Frequently recommended for sales and leadership conferences, association meetings, and corporate offsites. Fueled by curiosity, coffee, and just the right amount of awkward.

20 years of marriage and still this studly. 😍 How lucky am I?
06/09/2026

20 years of marriage and still this studly. 😍 How lucky am I?

It can be SUPER nerve-wracking to throw brand new content on its feet for the first time.Not tweaked the deck a little b...
06/08/2026

It can be SUPER nerve-wracking to throw brand new content on its feet for the first time.

Not tweaked the deck a little bit. More like “no one outside of my beta readers has heard any of this and I hope they like it” new. 😳

So we went public last week in Nashville - where I had the honor of keynoting for a pharmaceutical company whose entire job is walking into rooms full of professional skeptics and making them believe something. (Perfect audience for it!)

- In Market Access, as people who carry the value story into rooms full of people with their guards up, I started with this truth: Everyone is an everyday influencer. (and not the TikTok kind. 😉)

- Whether it’s getting a payer to cover a therapy, getting a provider’s office to push through the access process, or getting a brand-new colleague to raise their hand in a meeting where the decision is moving without them: Influence is what creates impact. And the old playbook has expired.

- We debuted some of the concepts from The Signal Gap in this keynote for the first time, and... well, we’re trusting the evidence. 😊 🙏🏽

Life was temporarily turned upside-down in service of this new content, so what a thrill (and relief!) to have it be so well-received by innovative, brilliant groups like this one. Huge thank you to my partners at for the partnership on this event.

When’s the last time you walked into a room with a brand-new idea and had to trust it? (And yourself?)

____

👩🏻 Who is she? Henna Pryor, CSP is a global keynote speaker, award-winning author of Good Awkward and the The Signal Gap (out this fall!), and leadership strategist. She speaks to high-performing teams on communication, influence, and building trust under pressure. Frequently recommended for leadership summits, corporate conferences, and annual meetings. Known to drop a 90’s rap lyric mid-workshop without warning.

Between this photo (13 years ago today) and watching the replay of the Tonys’ opening number, I’m already on tissue #3 ...
06/08/2026

Between this photo (13 years ago today) and watching the replay of the Tonys’ opening number, I’m already on tissue #3 and the day has barely started. How are YOU doing? 🤣😭❤️

Waking up at 5:45 AM for nine months straight. Flipping on the coffee machine, bleary-eyed. Packing lunches and making b...
06/05/2026

Waking up at 5:45 AM for nine months straight. Flipping on the coffee machine, bleary-eyed. Packing lunches and making breakfast to make it in time for a 6:30AM bus. Playing professional chauffeur for after school activities and bustling social lives. Holding space for emotional ups and downs. Nurturing new passions and interests, even when time feels scarce. Watching after aging parents. Doing all of those things, and more, while building the business of your dreams, eating healthy, prioritizing your friendships, remembering to take your collagen, trying to wear something that isn’t sweatpants a few days a week, and somehow realizing that all of it is just the rhythm of life and you wouldn’t change a thing.

In a few hours, we will officially have two kids in high school. And the idea of the rhythm being anything BUT this has me sobbing into my supplement stack. 😭

Working moms. I see you, I see you, I see you. And… ALL HAIL SUMMER! ☀️ 😎

You can’t outrun your character - and this guy never had to.A huge congrats to on a well-earned retirement from the NFL...
06/04/2026

You can’t outrun your character - and this guy never had to.

A huge congrats to on a well-earned retirement from the NFL. I was lucky enough to meet Russ through our work with and as expected, he was a class act and the nicest guy. Never once did he treat me like a fan - always me like a peer, teammate, and friend.

👊🏽 When I asked if he’d endorse Good Awkward, he didn’t hesitate, because that’s just what kind of teammate and leader he is.

👊🏽 He truly walks the talk about the concepts we espouse so deeply at Limitless Minds - mental strength, neutral thinking, adversity tolerance. These ideas were truly the backbone of his illustrious career.

👊🏽 Beyond all the football titles and accolades - of which there are SO MANY - he’s remained servant-hearted, charitable, generous, and consistently took the high road when life’s twists and turns gave him a million reasons not to. He’s poured into so many people, and now it’s time for us to pour back into him.

👊🏽 Russ - you deserve every. single. flower. and round of applause coming your way this week. Most people would never try to do what you’ve done in the last decade and change, and we are grateful not just for what you did - but who’ve continued to be each step of the way. Your squad is honored to carry forward the legacy of your work. ♥️

#3 fans, are you in the building? Let’s hear it for a job BEAUTIFULLY DONE!

“There are a million cheap seats in the world today filled with people who will never be brave with their own lives, but who will spend every ounce of energy they have hurling advice and judgment at those of us who are trying to dare greatly.”

I submit the manuscript for my second book tonight. Writing and editing this one been exhausting, emotional, and life-ch...
05/31/2026

I submit the manuscript for my second book tonight.

Writing and editing this one been exhausting, emotional, and life-changing all at once. Doing final edits on a chapter, and while it’s a book about influence and trust in the workplace, there are personal examples woven in - and sweeping this bit for the last time has me crying on a Sunday. I genuinely hope you love this book as much as I do.

[Excerpt from The Signal Gap - publishing on November 10, 2026 | | ]

“Costly signals stack up over time.

My wedding twenty years ago was a sight to see: me, a Pakistani-American woman with immigrant parents, in a crimson bridal lehenga so loaded with gold work I could barely sit down, and Ian, a blue-eyed white dude from a small town in lower Delaware, in a cream sherwani. (He wore a turban, too—and spent the whole ceremony terrified it would fall off his head. Bless.) Every member of our bridal party was in traditional Pakistani clothes: my sister next to me in a royal blue lehenga, Ian’s groomsmen in sherwanis.

Out of fourteen people standing up there with us, twelve were not South Asian, and no one thought twice about it. Not because they were being “good allies” (that phrase wasn’t even mainstream yet), but because I’d watched these people show up—actually show up—for years. They’d sat at my parents’ kitchen table eating biryani with a side of yogurt to manage the heat on their tongues. They’d asked questions that were clumsy and heartfelt in equal measure. They’d done the small, unglamorous work of learning a world that wasn’t theirs—not because it performed well, but because they loved someone who lived in it.

By the time they stood next to Ian and me in clothes that weren’t “theirs,” it didn’t read as a statement. It read as obvious. Of course they wore them. Their character had already been audited—not by a single grand gesture, but by a thousand small signals, exposed over years, that all held up. That’s what behavioral proof looks like when it stacks: by the time anything’s actually on the line—an ask, a slip, a reason to doubt you—the audit’s already come back clean.

[continued in comments]

My husband is the car-obsessed one, not me, but given that we gave our son the middle name of Aston and I’ve never seen ...
05/30/2026

My husband is the car-obsessed one, not me, but given that we gave our son the middle name of Aston and I’ve never seen this color combo EVER in my life - I know a sign from the universe when I see one. 🥰

Turns out the most believable people at work right now are the ones admitting they used AI. (New data on this one surpri...
05/25/2026

Turns out the most believable people at work right now are the ones admitting they used AI. (New data on this one surprised even me. 😉)

Singapore is kicking around an idea I love: nutrition labels for AI models. An actual little panel - “amazing at summarizing meetings, meh at metaphors, do NOT trust it with therapeutic advice, trained partly on blogs and Reddit.” Basically the back of a cereal box, but for your LLM. ( )

The important bit isn’t the models (nor did I ever care about the word “Riboflavin”). This is about humans trying to trust each other.

At work, most of us are doing the exact opposite. We’re scrubbing every fingerprint off, buffing out any trace of how the sausage got made, and quietly praying no one asks if we used AI to help.

We’ve been optimizing for the wrong thing.

New workplace data: 56% of people say their trust in a coworker would drop if they found out that person used AI and didn’t say so.

Translation: Few people care if you used an AI TOOL. (At this point, that’s practically an expectation. We’re all using them.) People don’t love the HIDING.

For 2+ years, we’ve assumed the believable move was to make our work look effortlessly, seamlessly human. The research points somewhere almost backwards: the believable move is naming - flat out - where the machine helped and where YOU actually did the thinking.

Today we’re in the Verification Era: people verify first, trust second. In this world, flawless output doesn’t automatically make us think “Wow, you’re so smart and competent!” And instead can even trigger “Ok.. what are you not telling me?”

Once DISCLOSURE becomes the trust signal, “polish” flips. The spotless thing becomes the suspicious one. The teams over-buffing their work to look impressive end up tripping the very alarm they’re trying to dodge.

Today, influence and trust go to the person who says: “Here’s where the bot helped, here’s where I did the work, here’s where I still have questions.”

If a coworker told you they used AI to help with something they sent you, does your trust go up or down?

In a nutshell? 😉( 🙏🏽)
05/24/2026

In a nutshell? 😉

( 🙏🏽)

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