Rebellious Curiosity disrupts status quo, evoking radical change.

Profile

Yemi Penn is a global thought leader on how to ignite your Rebellious Curiosity at an individual, team and organisational level.

An Engineer by profession, Entrepreneur by passion Yemi fuses analytical thinking with creativity to produce superior outcomes. She is an advocate for challenging status quo, being a disruptor in all industries to bring about innovative and sometimes radical change.

She is a champion and steadfast advocate for equality and equity in STEM fields, inviting individuals to tap into their self-empowerment using her bespoke pain to power' mapping technique which unlocks their unique resilience blueprint.

Yemi is a force to be reckoned with and has inspired audiences across Australia, the United Kingdom, Africa and the United States, where she has delivered a TED talk on the TEDx Ocala stage in Florida.

Yemi's superpower is meeting people wherever they are.

Current Work:

Yemi is a sought-after global speaker and facilitator on Belonging, Liminal Thinking and Transformation. She was the opening keynote speaker for PwC's recent signature experience, The Outside', which saw over 3,000 of their staff experience a transformational residential over 3 days in NSW's Hunter Valley region across five weeks.

Yemi's keynotes go beyond a typical presentation of inspiration; she moves her audience to action by inviting them to start with self'. She has a unique ability to cut through surface-level conversation by asking high-quality questions. She has recently designed and facilitated round table discussions with BT, SalesForce, PayPal, Macquarie Bank and Commonwealth Bank on Gender Equity in cyber security, as well as discussed the emerging challenge businesses face in bringing teams back into the physical working space.

Yemi is a chameleon across industries. She recognises the common thread is people and connection; once this is established in its most authentic form, wellness, transformation, and productivity can be achieved in any organisation.

Deep dive sessions following her keynote presentations are one of her specialities where people get the deepest learning and change. Through these deep dives, Yemi holds space for the conversations to go where it needs to, inviting the attendees to ignite their rebellious curiosity by asking and answering high-quality questions.

Previous Clients:

Speaker: Yemi has spoken at ANSTO, Hammond Care, University Technology of Sydney, NAWIC, WSP, Hitachi ABB, Business Chicks, Reckitt and many more.

She also represented Australia at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, forming part of the Female Founders Mission group and spoke at the Women's Economic Forum in London.

Media: Yemi has featured in a number of worldwide media outlets sharing her story and tips for people to change theirs. This includes The Age, Sky News, Entrepreneur.com, Australia News, Women's Agenda, Refinery29, MI Woman, Engineers Australia, ABC radio and more

Expertise

Talking Points

IWD 2025: March Forward: Leaving No One Behind

In alignment with the 2025 United Nations IWD theme, “March Forward,” Yemi Penn delivers a powerful, evocative keynote designed to challenge conventional thinking and build bridges across perceived divides. This keynote focuses on the urgency of collective progress, dismantling fears, and ensuring no group regardless of gender, race, or class is left behind in the march toward equality.

Yemi explores how we can balance ambition with equity, addressing the complex emotions that arise as power dynamics shift, and offering strategies to ensure the progress of one group doesn’t unintentionally lead to the marginalisation of another.

Through her signature blend of humour, research, lived experience, and a bit of cheeky agitation, Yemi invites EVERYONE to lean into uncomfortable yet necessary dialogues. She bridges gaps between empowerment and resistance, helping audiences discover how to transcend identities and co-create a future where equity benefits everyone.

Key Takeaways:

1. Progress Through Inclusion: Shared Power, Shared Progress
Yemi challenges the notion that empowerment is a zero-sum game, showing how shared power creates collective progress. She emphasises that everyone has a role to play in dismantling fears and biases that hinder equity.

Key Insight: Learn how reshaping narratives about power can unite, rather than divide, communities and organizations.

2. The Pyramid of Belief: Reframing Perspectives to Build Bridges
Drawing from liminal thinking and the concept of the Pyramid of Belief, Yemi empowers audiences to challenge assumptions and step into new paradigms. This approach is especially useful for decision-makers navigating resistance to change.

Key Insight: Understand how shifting perspectives fosters understanding and collaboration, even in the face of fear or opposition.

3. Addressing Disenfranchisement: Why "Left Behind" Is Everyone’s Problem
Yemi confronts the tensions between rising movements and groups who feel excluded, offering tools to turn perceived competition into collaboration. This section highlights real-world strategies for inclusive leadership and allyship.

Key Insight: Explore how fear of being left behind is a barrier to progress and learn how to bring disenfranchised voices into the fold.

4. The Role of Vulnerability and Power in Leadership
Yemi draws from her lived experiences and research to emphasise how vulnerability fosters courageous leadership. By naming power and privilege, she invites allies to rethink their roles and responsibilities in creating change.

Key Insight: Discover how embracing vulnerability can deepen connections and influence systemic change.

5. Marching Forward as a Collective: From Policy to Paradigms
Yemi closes with a call to action for corporations, communities, and individuals to align internal shifts with external advocacy. She offers actionable strategies for fostering cultural change and advancing equitable policies.

Key Insight: Learn how organisations and individuals can create sustainable cultural and policy shifts to ensure no one is left behind.

Why This Keynote Matters:
In 2025, the march forward isn’t just about celebrating progress, it’s about addressing the messy, complex realities that come with change. Yemi’s keynote equips audiences with the tools, mindset, and inspiration to navigate these challenges with grace, courage, and hope.

If your organisation or community is ready to move beyond surface-level conversations and dig deep into what it truly means to March Forward, this is the keynote you need for IWD 2025.

Building a Thriving Culture

We are living in fragmented times, where the very mention of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion often feels divisive. Yet beneath the tension lies a universal truth: every individual desires and has the right to belong. Through her research and lived experience, Yemi Penn reveals how our bodies carry the scars of exclusion and oppression, shaping unconscious biases in both the marginalised and the privileged.
In her keynotes and workshops, Yemi creates space for the uncomfortable yet necessary conversations we often avoid because they feel “too hard.” As Yemi says, “Nobody is coming to save us, so we must be bold enough to save ourselves and build thriving cultures.”

These conversations are the catalyst for transformation, allowing organisations to shift from a culture of disconnection and survival to one of collaboration and thriving. At the heart of this transformation is something new, bold, and deeply needed: what Yemi calls “Cultural Peace Brokering.”

Why This Keynote Matters:
1. Organisations Can’t Afford Toxicity: Toxic cultures impact employee retention, creativity, and bottom-line performance. Ignoring these issues is no longer an option. This keynote addresses the root causes of cultural dysfunction and provides a roadmap for transformation.

2. Beyond Surface Solutions: Many organisations focus on diversity metrics or one-off inclusion efforts, but real change requires deeper work, transforming systems, behaviours, and mindsets that perpetuate exclusion and inequity.

3. Belonging Is Good for Business: Research shows that psychologically safe and inclusive workplaces lead to higher engagement, innovation, and resilience. Thriving cultures aren’t just about “feeling good” they drive measurable results.

Audience Impact:
- Transformative Perspective: Attendees will leave with a new lens on what’s possible when we prioritise shared power, equity, and emotional safety.
- Practical Tools: Yemi equips audiences with actionable steps to assess their current culture and implement meaningful changes.
- Confidence to Lead Difficult Conversations: Leaders will feel empowered to tackle uncomfortable topics with courage and clarity, fostering growth for their teams.
- Personal Growth: Yemi’s unique approach integrates personal resilience with organisational change, helping participants navigate their own biases and contribute to a thriving culture.

Key Takeaways
- The Pillars of a Thriving Culture: Learn how to build cultures that prioritize emotional safety, equity, learning, and inclusion.
- Cultural Peace Brokering: Discover the art of bridging cultural divides and healing disconnection through empathy and shared accountability.
- From Surviving to Thriving: Move from survival mode to spaces where people feel empowered to grow and contribute fully.
- Power With, Not Power Over: Transform hierarchies into systems of shared power and co-creation.
- Challenge the Status Quo: Embrace “rebellious curiosity” to spark meaningful, systemic change.
- Practical Transformation Strategies: Gain actionable tools to conduct culture audits and implement changes that last.

Human Disruptor

We are born into an inherited narrative of what works and what doesn't.

We learn to go through life without question until something goes wrong, but even then, at times, we still stay quiet for fear of retribution, eradicating creativity, and collaboration. We learn to accept things because they are simply the way they are and have always been. This leads to people feeling unfulfilled, frustrated, and uninspired. Impacting their well-being and how they show up in life and at work.

Yemi Penn will inspire attendees and move them to action by sharing tools and challenging attendees to start with themselves by being curious about their belief systems and challenging the status quo in the process.

Key takeaways:
- Remembering the curiosity of the inner child
- Understanding that rebelling without kindness is counterproductive
- Increased creativity and collaboration
- An understanding of how to challenge the status quo to move things forward
- A handful of tools and anchors to bring about desired results from being curious

Sustainable Peak Performance + Mindset Transformation

Liminal means threshold. To solve problems, we will need to shift our perspectives and change the mindset in which these problems were created. This will require deconstruction of existing systems, requiring a bit of unreasonableness and the alchemy of bending reality.

Yemi Penn will share her formula for bending reality, sharing how the boundaries that usually cage us can be used as props to bring about superior outcomes.

Key takeaways:
- Understand the key principles of Liminal thinking
- That thinking outside the box is redundant because there is no box
- That acknowledging the elephant in the room and Emotional Intelligence resolves conflict
- How you can as a leader create better relationships within organisations and teams
- A higher sense of compassion and understanding of those around you

Courage and Resilience

Our resilience blueprint is individual to us, meaning our specific distressing events is what creates resiliency in us, and the approach we take to get through it is what builds our blueprint.

Yemi Penn is a leading thought leader on Trauma in Australia, currently undertaking a PhD researching the transformative nature of trauma. She leads individuals and organisations through their pain points using her bespoke pain to power' mapping tool to empower people through their transformation. Paving the way for greater connection within teams and kinder organisations.

Key Takeaways:
- Shame is linked to trauma and is one of the most useless emotions
- Resilient Blueprint - Pain to Power' mapping so that individuals can understand how to move to their position of power
- An understanding that Event + Response = Outcome
- More resilient individuals and organisations

Who this is for: - All levels within an organisation, managers, and leaders, particularly people working under intense pressure.

Deep Dives

This offering works well they have no structure but are designed for Yemi to guide the conversation with deep listening following my keynote. We go deeper into the tools and concepts Yemi shares and create a safe space for the smaller group to participate. These deep dives are more intense than a keynote as it is emotional housekeeping and deeper integrated neurolinguistic programming.

Round Table Discussions

In these discussions with the Senior Leadership teams, Yemi designs and facilitates difficult conversations in the workplace on topics such as race, gender, consent and allyship. These sessions are designed for small groups to begin with with the potential to extend the discussion into a Keynote for wider audiences.

Topics

Business

Lifestyle & Wellbeing

Motivational

Media

Video

Yemi Penn | Speaker Reel | Saxton Speakers

Yemi Penn is a global thought leader on empowerment and resilience. An Engineer by profession, Yemi is a champion and tireless advocate for equality and equity in STEM fields. As an Entrepreneur and Mindset Coach, she is an advocate for self-empowerment and resilience as tools to get organisations back on track with wellness and productivity. Yemi is a force to be reckoned with and has inspired audiences across Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, where she recently delivered her first TED talk at TEDxOcala in Florida.

Yemi Penn - Mindset Transformation Coach | Saxton Speakers

Yemi Penn is a global thought leader on empowerment and resilience. An Engineer by proYemi Penn is a global thought leader on empowerment and resilience. An Engineer by profession, Yemi is a champion and tireless advocate for equality and equity in STEM fields. As an Entrepreneur and Mindset Coach, she is an advocate for self-empowerment and resilience as tools to get organisations back on track with wellness and productivity. Yemi is a force to be reckoned with and has inspired audiences across Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, where she recently delivered her first TED talk at TEDxOcala in Florida.

F45 Global Leadership Conference | Yemi Penn | Saxton Speakers

Do we choose the experience our trauma teaches us? | Yemi Penn | TEDxOcala

This talk dares humanity to acknowledge its individual trauma at the same time, detaching itself from a victim story. Guiding the collective to transmute its pain to power and be the change the world so desperately needs. Born in the UK, childhood in Nigeria, stint in Okinawa Japan and now living in Sydney, Australia, Yemi can be described as a citizen of the world! She is an Engineer by profession, an Entrepreneur by Passion and a Transformation Mindset Coach by mission; Yemi is dedicated to guiding others in unlocking their untapped potential. An introvert at heart having only recently found her 'voice', she is making up for lost time! Having authored her first book and podcast titled, 'Did You Get the Memo?' Yemi has featured in numerous publications in the U.K, Africa and Australia. Yemi run's 3 businesses whilst parenting her two children in Sydney, Australia. One being her Engineering Management consultancy, an F45 Fitness studio in Brixton, London and her Transformation company under her brand of Yemi Penn. With qualifications ranging from project management to neurolinguistic programming, and methods taught to her personally by Jack Canfield and Tony Robbins, Yemi helps transmute pain to power.

Yemi Penn interview with Jack Canfield | Saxton Speakers

As part of Jack Canfield's 'Talking About Success' series, he interviews Yemi Penn. Discussing her journey and dedication to raise the vibration around trauma and the healing of it.

Audio

Feedback

Yemi is an engaging and authentic presenter. Her energy and connectedness invites her audience to journey with her through her presentation. Highly recommended! ... keep reading Lifeline

Yemi is an impeccable speaker with an impressive ability to connect and draw in the audience through her authentic, unapologetic yet graceful manner. Yemi’s knowledge and inspiring perspectives had all of us highly engaged and reflecting on our own stories, challenges and experience to make positive impacts. Yemi’s personable nature built trust and opportunity for open conversations among the group. We would highly recommend Yemi for any speaking engagement.

Thales

Yemi was a fabulous opening keynote. She is inspiring.

Department of Education Northern Territory Government

Yemi facilitated an extremely complex and challenging symposium over 2 days of multiple sessions with several stakeholders to help us achieve concrete outcomes and action plans that we wanted. It was an immense task and Yemi was beyond excellent in keeping people engaged, active and in good humour to work collaboratively and effectively.

University of Technology Sydney