Jessica Pettitt

WARNING! Not Your Typical Diversity Speaker!

Nancy's Note:

“When I first encountered Jessica at a speaker’s conference, I was instantly struck by how articulate she is, with a high level of intellect and passion. The more I get to know her, the more I’m impressed with her understanding of humanity and her desire to make a difference. She’s a very special human being.”

Jessica Pettitt

WARNING! Not Your Typical Diversity Speaker!

Nancy’s Note
“When I first encountered Jessica at a speaker’s conference, I was instantly struck by how articulate she is, with a high level of intellect and passion. The more I get to know her, the more I’m impressed with her understanding of humanity and her desire to make a difference. She’s a very special human being.”

Jessica Pettitt

WARNING! Not Your Typical Diversity Speaker!

Nancy’s Note
“When I first encountered Jessica at a speaker’s conference, I was instantly struck by how articulate she is, with a high level of intellect and passion. The more I get to know her, the more I’m impressed with her understanding of humanity and her desire to make a difference. She’s a very special human being.”

Expertise

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Corporate Social Responsibility, Humor, Motivation, Inspiration, Current Events/Politics, Difficult Conversations, Resistance to Change, LGBTQIA+

Travels From

Eureka, California

Speaking Style

Humorous, Action-oriented, Challenging

About Jess...

As a stand-up comedian, this Diversity, Equity and Inclusion specialist delivers actionable content while also making you laugh and THINK. 

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Watch Jess in Action

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Presentation Topics

Let’s face it, there are people and topics that at some point are just off limits.  You just can’t do it or them right now.  Even worse, often it is a difficult topic that you have to bring up with a difficult person.

What if you could engage in these conversations with more confidence, humor, and ease?  No matter the person or topic, you are your best tool for conversations that matter.  Understanding yourself and others as differently right gives you the tools to intentionally design teams, groups, and partnerships that can bring value to a single project or topic.  We are all frustrating to someone, and at times even to ourselves.

Once you know who and how you are, you can reclaim responsibility for these behavior response patterns and leave room for others to do the same.  Before you know it, you are having better conversations and fuller relationships with those around you.  Jessica’s promise – it is that easy.

Sitting around pointing fingers and waiting for change to appear on the horizon—has it ever worked for you? Do you feel imbalance between who you are and who you think you should be?  Do you see fulfillment, better relationships, and stronger teamwork as something to work for, but not possible now?

In her breakthrough message, author and keynote speaker Jess Pettitt reveals the truth about how we can be the best versions of ourselves now! By being our authentic selves, we can immediately improve our companies, relationships, and communities.

Good Enough Now is an innovative and practical guide to ridding yourself of self-doubt, self-limiting beliefs, and habitual excuses.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Being true to yourself
  • Building on your strengths
  • Supporting others in their strengths
  • Building better teams
  • Serving others
  • How to lead others better

After 15 years of direct Diversity Trainings, Jess Pettitt, CSP, has uncovered why change doesn’t stick. Human Resources Professionals are being asked to wear a million hats and ensure that the organization won’t get sued. This doesn’t lead to inclusive work culture. Let’s spend a day in the life of a change crusher. Let’s look at a dozen or so contradictory characters that make up your office staff under the magnifying glass and solve the mystery of what you can do with what you already have to make your diversity initiatives stick.

Learning Outcomes:

  • To understand the difference between Diversity and Social Justice
  • To remove excuses that stand in one’s way from doing social justice work
  • To utilize three basic tools of self reflection: tracking, triggers, and listening
  • To motivate and inspire audiences to become participants in their own change

Unlike other online diversity trainings, this course introduces the concepts that the user or learner can utilize in their own lives immediately. Regardless of each participant’s identities and lived experiences, the concept of how we coexist, interact, and impact one another is imperative to build better teams, better connections, and deeper relationships.

Spend an hour, reflecting on how you fit into the conversation of diversity. Coming to terms with our own unique positive and negative bias as well as how that intersects with our responsibility of perception and sense of entitlement to validation is the foundation of social justice work. Our experiences, choices, and impact, both intentional and unintentional, matter. This is the starting place.

Learning Outcomes

  • Recognizing difference and engagement habits
  • Personal reflection and seeking out new experiences
  • Feeling safe and prepared
  • Conscious and Unconscious Bias, both positive and negative
  • Recruitment, Retention, and Fit
  • The role of Curiosity, Generosity, Authenticity, Vulnerability

Have you experienced an optical illusion where you don’t initially see all of the options? Was the dress blue with gold stripes? Were you team Laurel or Yanny? Can you see the rabbit and the duck?

Our lived experiences are the tools we use to interpret the world around us. This is why we may assume there is a monster in the garage when we haven’t experienced an earthquake before – we literally don’t have the experience to pull from to understand what is happening. We believe what we know – whether we know it or not.

Take some time to notice how you perceive yourself and others. The role of perception is directly linked to all that we are conscious of as well as all of the stuff we aren’t! We must learn our habits to be able to be open to understand something we don’t understand.

Learning Outcomes

  • Self-reflection activities to identify difference
  • Recognize the role of positive bias in our conscious and unconscious bias
  • Recognize the role of negative bias in our conscious and unconscious bias
  • Paying attention to one’s own habits and beliefs and reinforcing or editing them to align with our own personal values

Books