Lauren Paton

Lauren Paton is a women’s leadership keynote speaker transforming how organisations develop and retain senior women in male‑dominated industries. Named the UK’s 6th Best Speaker 2025 and a LinkedIn Top Voice for Gender Equity, she is known for her high‑energy presence, sharp insight, and unapologetically system‑changing approach.

SIGNATURE TALKS:

Building a Personal Brand That Feels Like You (Not Everyone Else)

Somewhere along the way, most women learned that visibility was icky. Loud. A bit much. The kind of thing that men do, that self-promoters do, that people who are more interested in being seen than in doing good work do.

That story has served someone. It wasn’t you.

This talk unpacks where visibility resistance really comes from, why it’s a completely rational response to what most women were taught about taking up space, and why understanding that changes everything about how you approach it. Because the barrier isn’t tactics, it’s the belief running in the background, that being seen is somehow not for you.

From there: the practical reframe. What visibility becomes when you strip away the performance of it, why it’s a strategic necessity rather than a personality trait, and how to start showing up in a way that feels like you rather than a louder version of someone else.

For women who are delivering the work and not getting the recognition, and for the organisations wondering why their best people aren’t putting themselves forward.

You First – The Real Work of Leadership Under Pressure

Most leaders have a list. And somewhere near the bottom of it, if it makes the list at all, is themselves. It often feels like the right call. There’s a team to support, results to deliver, and a version of leadership that says the good ones put everyone else first. The problem is that version of leadership is costing you your clarity, your decision-making, and your ability to be present for the people you’re leading.

This talk is about the stories we tell ourselves about why we can’t go on the list. Where they come from, what they’re actually doing to our brains and our bodies under sustained pressure, and what it costs the people around us when we run on empty for long enough.

You’ll leave with a different understanding of what self-leadership actually is, why it belongs at the centre of how you lead rather than the edge of it, and the permission to treat taking care of yourself as part of the job.

Authenticity – Your Leadership Super Power

Most of us walked into a room having already edited ourselves at least once. We’ve been doing it for so long we don’t notice, but it costs us something every time while it build a gap between the person you actually are and the version you’ve learned is acceptable.

This is about closing the gap and about understanding why it opened in the first place.

Authenticity gets used as a buzzword so often it’s almost lost its meaning. This isn’t a talk about being nice or oversharing or bringing your whole personality to every meeting you’ll ever attend. It’s about something more specific: whether the person on the inside and the person showing up on the outside are broadly the same person. And if they’re not, what it’s costing you, your team, and the people around you.

Authentic leadership isn’t a soft option. It’s the strongest predictor of whether people trust you, follow you, and stay.

For organisations who want their people to show up fully: this is the talk that explains why they aren’t, and what it takes to change it.

Busting the Imposter Syndrome Myth

We’ve all heard the phrase “imposter syndrome” but what if the stories we’ve been told about it are actually making it worse? Every organisation with a gender diversity agenda has imposter syndrome on the list. And yet the women who go through all of it often come out the other side still feeling like they don’t quite belong.

That’s not a coincidence. It’s what happens when you apply an individual solution to a structural problem.

This talk takes everything we think they know about imposter syndrome and examines what it actually tells us about the environments women are working in, the messages they’ve absorbed about who gets to belong, and why making it a women’s issue to fix is, at best, incomplete, and at worst, actively making it worse.

Lauren brings her own experience of how it showed up across her career, what it actually took to dismantle it, and what the research reveals about where the real levers are.

For organisations that are serious about inclusion, the responsibility asks how the room can change, instead of the woman walking into it.

From Amazon to Agitator: What 20 Years in the Wrong Rooms Taught Me About the Right Ones

A company Christmas party held at a strip club. A toxic startup culture. A corporate role at Amazon that looked like success and felt like disappearing. She shares what she learned on her journey through struggles with visibility, to becoming a top rated speaker who is shaking up the way we talk about confidence. Lauren’s origin story is raw, unfiltered, and funny, and filled with the “oh damn” moments.

A decade into her career, Lauren attended her company’s Christmas party at a strip club. Nobody asked if that was okay. It wasn’t really a room where that question got asked.

It was one moment in twenty years of navigating spaces that were built by someone else, for someone else, with someone else in mind. A toxic startup. A senior role at Amazon that looked like success from the outside and felt, from the inside, like a slow process of becoming someone she didn’t know.

This talk is the story of how she got out, what she figured out along the way, and why the thing she thought was the problem — confidence — turned out to be the wrong diagnosis entirely.

It’s funny, uncomfortably familiar, and builds to an argument that Lauren has spent years developing and refining: that what we’ve been calling a confidence problem is actually a conditioning problem, and that the solution isn’t fixing the women. It’s changing what we’ve all agreed to accept as normal.

For mixed audiences, keynotes, and any room where you want people to leave thinking differently about what they’ve been calling progress.

The AI Resistance Problem (And Why It’s Not What You Think)

Women in technical fields are sitting on the most valuable skill set in the room right now. And a significant number of them are also resisting the one tool that could accelerate their careers fastest.

It’s not a coincidence, and it’s not a confidence problem.

There’s a bind that comes up constantly: using AI feels like cheating, like the work only counts if you battled for it. On the surface that sounds like it’s about technology but it’s not. Women have been taught to equate worth with effort for their entire careers, and AI is just the latest place that programming shows up. All the while, the leadership skills women excel at and have learned to undersell are the most valuable in the age of AI.

This talk is for women who are done being told to just try harder, and for the organisations that need to move through the resistance, fast.

You’ll leave knowing where your AI resistance actually comes from (and why it says nothing about your character), with permission to start using the tools badly and immediately, and with a real reframe of the skills you’ve been quietly underselling as exactly the skills this era is asking for.

 The Human Advantage

The more powerful AI becomes, the more valuable it is to be fully, deliberately human as a leader.

The skills rising fastest in the AI era aren’t technical. They’re leadership, communication, emotional intelligence, creativity, and the ability to bring people through uncertainty. The people best positioned for the next decade of work aren’t the ones who completed a prompt engineering course. They’re the ones who know how to lead with humanity, in organisations who stop treating those skills as the soft option.

This talk builds the evidence, offers a practical frame for what strong human leadership looks like right now, and makes the case for why the competitive edge of the next decade is something organisations are often missing.