Great Leadership Starts From the Inside Out.
Helping Leaders Understand What Shapes How They Lead—and Use That Understanding to Lead Differently
Listen to Margo
Experience Margo's keynote style, storytelling, and audience engagement.
Leadership isn't just about what you know. It's about what happens when you have to use what you know.
Leaders make decisions, navigate complexity, build trust, manage emotion, and influence others every day. What shapes those moments isn't simply knowledge or skill. It's also what's happening beneath the surface—in the brain, the body, and the breath—and how those influence the way we think, feel, respond, and lead.
That's the science of leadership Margo Boster brings to the stage.
With 25+ years of leadership experience and 15+ years coaching CEOs, senior executives, and military generals, Margo brings together insights from neuroscience, emotional intelligence, and mindfulness to help leaders understand leadership from the inside out. She explores the science behind judgment, decision-making, emotional awareness, attention, presence, trust, and the patterns that shape how we lead, particularly when complexity and uncertainty make leadership harder.
Her keynotes don't simply give leaders another set of tools to add to their toolkit. They help leaders understand why they respond the way they do, what's influencing their choices in the moment, and how greater awareness can create more options for how they lead.
The result isn't a quick fix. It's a deeper understanding of themselves as leaders, plus practical, evidence-based ways to turn that understanding into greater clarity, connection, and impact.
ICF Master Certified Coach — top 4% worldwide
Award-winning Author
Georgetown University adjunct faculty
25+ years senior leadership, IT & health IT
Harvard Medical School, Science of Leadership
NeuroLeadership Institute, Executive Certificate
What audiences say
Three talks. One core idea.
Each keynote approaches the science of leadership from a different angle, but they share the same foundation: understanding how we think, feel, and respond is only the beginning. The real work is learning to respond differently. Available as standalone keynotes, half-day workshops, or multi-session leadership programs.
Lead through anything: the leadership competency most programs miss
When pressure rises, technical expertise is no longer enough. Leaders need to be able to think clearly, stay connected to what matters, and choose how they respond when uncertainty, complexity, and emotion are all competing for their attention.
Drawing on the science of the brain, body, and breath, decades of leadership experience and coaching, and the remarkable story of the 2018 Thai cave rescue, Margo explores what happens to leadership capacity when the stakes are high—and what leaders can do to create more choice in how they respond.
This keynote goes beyond tips for handling pressure. Leaders discover how stress and emotion influence attention, judgment, decision-making, and behavior—and how awareness and intentional practice can help them lead with greater clarity, presence, and influence when it matters most.
Participants leave with:
-
- A deeper understanding of what happens to thinking, attention, and decision-making when pressure rises—and why awareness is the first step toward responding differently.
- Practical strategies for creating a pause between stimulus and response, allowing leaders to make more intentional choices in challenging moments.
- Greater capacity to navigate uncertainty, difficult conversations, and high-stakes situations with clarity, presence, and influence.
The Science of You: Why Smart, Successful People Still Get Hijacked by Automatic Patterns
You know what to do. So why do you sometimes react in ways you wish you hadn't? Our brains create patterns from repeated experiences, our bodies continuously communicate with our nervous systems, and our breath can influence the state we're in. Understanding these systems gives us something more powerful than another leadership strategy: more choice in how we respond.
Drawing on neuroscience, decades of executive coaching, and the science of brain, body, and breath, Margo makes the invisible mechanisms behind automatic reactions practical and accessible.
Participants leave with:
- A practical understanding of how the brain creates—and can change—automatic patterns.
- Simple, science-based techniques for interrupting thoughts, emotions, and reactions before they take over.
- Practical ways to use posture, movement, and breath to shift state in high-pressure moments.
- Greater awareness of the choices available between what happens and how they respond.
Successfully exhausted: the hidden price of high performance
High achievers often become trapped by the very patterns that helped make them successful. They deliver extraordinary results while quietly sacrificing clarity, patience, creativity, connection—and eventually, their capacity to sustain the performance others have come to expect.
The problem isn't simply too much work. It's that many of the patterns driving high performance operate outside our conscious awareness. Pushing harder, taking on more, staying constantly available, and overriding the body's signals can look like commitment—even as they begin to diminish the very leadership capacities success requires.
In this keynote, Margo explores the science behind these patterns and why exhaustion has become so easy to normalize in leadership. Bringing together insights from neuroscience, mindfulness, and decades of leadership experience and coaching, she helps leaders recognize what's driving their own patterns, interrupt automatic responses, and develop practices that support both sustained performance and well-being.
Participants leave with:
- A deeper understanding of the unconscious patterns that can turn high achievement into successful exhaustion—and how to begin recognizing them.
- Practical ways to interrupt automatic, stress-driven responses and create greater choice in how they work and lead.
- A new understanding of sustainable success—one that protects the clarity, connection, and capacity leaders need to perform effectively over time.
Custom Keynotes
Your audience isn't generic.
Your keynote shouldn't be either.
Margo's signature talks are built on a proven framework, and every one of them is tailored to the specific audience, context, and goals of the event. Before any engagement, Margo connects with event planners or HR leaders in a pre-event conversation to understand what the audience is carrying, what the organization needs, and what success looks like when people leave the room.
If your leadership challenge doesn't fit neatly into one of her three signature topics, that's worth a conversation. Margo has delivered talks for technology companies, federal agencies, healthcare organizations, and university leadership programs — each grounded in her framework and shaped around your specific situation.
This isn't "I'll say whatever you need." It's "I know this material deeply enough to meet your audience where they are."
Who Margo speaks to
Margo works with organizations where the pressure is real, the stakes are high, and leaders are expected to perform regardless of what's happening around them. She has particular depth with technology, health IT, healthcare, and pharmaceutical and biotech audiences — industries she knows from the inside after 25+ years in senior leadership.
Technology & health IT leadership summits
Healthcare & life sciences conferences
Corporate leadership development programs
HR & L&D association conferences
Pharma & biotech leadership events
Financial services leadership events
University leadership programs
Federal & military organizations
What event planners need
Everything you need to present Margo to your team and confirm the booking.
Speaker Kit
Explore keynote descriptions, audience outcomes, credentials, and speaking information.
Speaker Sizzle
A quick introduction to Margo's message and stage presence.
Speaker Reel
Experience Margo's keynote style, storytelling, and audience engagement.
About Margo
Margo Boster knows what it costs to perform at the highest level without ever stopping to ask why. She spent 25 years in senior leadership in enterprise and health information technology, delivering results, absorbing pressure, and running the kind of schedule that looked like success from the outside and felt like something else entirely from the inside.
What she found when she finally looked up changed the direction of her work. She trained at Georgetown University's Leadership Coaching Program, earned her Master Certified Coach credential from the International Coaching Federation, held by fewer than 5% of coaches worldwide, and completed advanced training at Harvard Medical School and the NeuroLeadership Institute. She built a practice grounded in the neuroscience of how leaders actually function under pressure.
Today, Margo coaches senior executives in the private sector alongside US military generals, university executives, and federal senior leaders. She is the author of Mindfully Successful and serves as adjunct faculty at Georgetown University's Leadership Coaching Program.
Her keynotes aren't built from research alone. They're built from what she learned the hard way, and what she's watched transform leaders who thought they were already doing everything right. Audiences leave her keynotes with more than a good feeling. They leave with a framework they can use, a practice they can apply, and a different relationship to the pressure they walk back into.
Speaking Inquiries
Tell me about your event
Complete the form below, and Margo will follow up within two business days to schedule a conversation. Fields marked optional won't disqualify your inquiry — share what you know.
Prefer to reach out directly?
If you'd rather start with a conversation before filling out a form, that works too.