Curt Steinhorst

The Distraction Expert

Curt Steinhorst is a top productivity virtual keynote speaker, founder of Focuswise, and the bestselling author of Can I Have Your Attention? A regular Forbes contributor, Steinhorst speaks over 75 times a year to organizations around the world. Audiences leave with takeaways on how to effectively communicate, lead employees, engage customers, and create focus in a distracted world.

  • Curt Steinhorst Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    $20,001 - $30,000

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    Texas, USA

  • Curt Steinhorst Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    $20,001 - $30,000

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    Texas, USA

Suggested Keynote Speaker Programs

Shaping the Future of Work: Transforming Who, Where, How, What, and Why We Work

The pandemic revealed issues with the pre-pandemic workplace and taught employees valuable lessons about how they best work, and what they expect from their employer, and convinced them not to settle for less. In Shaping the Future of Work, Curt ...

The pandemic revealed issues with the pre-pandemic workplace and taught employees valuable lessons about how they best work, and what they expect from their employer, and convinced them not to settle for less.

In Shaping the Future of Work, Curt Steinhorst covers the five essential lenses to understand the rapidly changing landscape of work:

  • Who Works: Employee demographics are changing with multiple generations working together and a more diverse workforce.
  • Where We Work: Remote work, redesigned offices, and hybrid locations have shifted where we work.

  • How We Work: A more varied workforce that includes employees, contingent workers, and gig workers has created new opportunities.

  • What is Work: New technologies and digital transformation have led to the emergence of new job roles, necessitating reskilling.

  • Why We Work: Workers expect companies to provide clear value to them while they, in turn, create value for the company. The importance of belonging and culture in the workplace remains unchanged. However, the way in which they are developed and sustained needs to be updated.

This session will teach leaders how to prioritize the present and guide their company toward the future.

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Growing Your Company Without Shrinking Its Culture: As you grow, how do you preserve what makes your organization special?

How can you maintain the unique aspects of your culture as your company grows and brings in new colleagues and customers? In this session, Curt Steinhorst helps you identify ways to protect and sustain your company’s culture during ...

How can you maintain the unique aspects of your culture as your company grows and brings in new colleagues and customers?

In this session, Curt Steinhorst helps you identify ways to protect and sustain your company’s culture during growth. He challenges you to rethink assumptions about scalability and addresses how what created cohesion, efficiency, and “magic” in the past can actually create silos and inefficiency in the future.

You will learn how to expand, adapt, and thrive through clarity, communication, and intentional attention. Curt will address common and often misunderstood culture drivers, including:

  • Culture is driven by clarity.

  • Communication driven by convenience creates chaos.

  • A leader’s ability to avoid certain decisions is as important as those they make.

  • Meetings are more likely to drain us than connect us.

  • Attention is your most limited and valuable resource.

By learning how to adapt your organization and its actions, you will leave with practical and sustainable solutions you can implement to preserve what makes your company’s culture unique while giving it room to evolve.

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Signal in the Noise: Communicating to drive trust, alignment, accountability, and results

Leaders need to communicate their strategic vision effectively in today’s noisy and uncertain environment — or face missed milestones, chaos, conflict, and lack of accountability. Unfortunately, employees often don’t understand or connect their work to the strategy...

Leaders need to communicate their strategic vision effectively in today’s noisy and uncertain environment — or face missed milestones, chaos, conflict, and lack of accountability. Unfortunately, employees often don’t understand or connect their work to the strategy.

  • 72% report a lack of understanding

  • Only one-third feel like their leaders communicate effectively

  • More than 70% of employees don’t read company emails or content

This is compounded by the staggering amount of change and information employees face daily, leading to an insurmountable volume of messages, tasks, and meetings. It is more important than ever for leaders to communicate clearly and compellingly what matters most.

Key Outcomes

 

  • Communicate clearly and authentically with employees from all generations, locations, and backgrounds
  • Discover what it takes to build true clarity in your organization
  • Structure and deliver impactful messages
  • Bridge the gap between executive strategy and employee activity to ensure adoption and execution

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Intentional Leadership in a Rapidly Changing Workplace: How to drive trust, collaboration, and results through uncertainty

Today’s leaders face many challenges, including the great resignation, hybrid and remote work, shifting employee expectations, and tense social and political landscapes — plus the noise and uncertainty of daily life. Leaders need to build ...

Today’s leaders face many challenges, including the great resignation, hybrid and remote work, shifting employee expectations, and tense social and political landscapes — plus the noise and uncertainty of daily life.

Leaders need to build trust, communicate effectively, and demonstrate empathy to improve recruitment, retention, productivity, engagement, and well-being.

The core challenge is not a leader’s lack of awareness or concern. Many leaders do what they can — but the primary resource necessary is under assault and in critically limited supply: A leader’s intentional attention.

In this presentation, Curt helps leaders identify old assumptions, hidden traps, and new ways to connect effectively.

Key Outcomes

  • Navigate varying and conflicting work preferences based on employee generation, experience, tenure, background, and personality
  • Reconfigure team protocols to remove costly distractions that sabotage productivity
  • Increase capacity and space to innovate
  • Maintain trust in times of chaos, volatility, and uncertainty
  • Achieve clarity of purpose that drives teams further

Leaders will come away with tools to help them relate to and guide employees — and drive their own intentional attention — with higher achievement and greater engagement for all as the reward.

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Healthy Hustle: Doing your best without burning out

Despite wellness programs, unlimited vacation days, and flexible arrangements, high-performing individuals are burning out at epidemic levels. In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would allow us to work only 15 ...

Despite wellness programs, unlimited vacation days, and flexible arrangements, high-performing individuals are burning out at epidemic levels.

In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would allow us to work only 15 hours per week by the end of the century, leading to an increase in leisure time and standard of living.

Technology has enabled us to do more, faster, yet we find ourselves bored, miserable, overwhelmed, exhausted, and burnt out.

What Keynes didn’t predict was that technology would open the floodgates to infinite connections, opportunities, ideas, tips, and ultimately, an overwhelming amount of information. And we consume 118 zettabytes of it daily. How we make decisions about what information deserves our attention will determine how we respond to this environment.

In this presentation, Curt Steinhorst emphasizes the power of human attention and focus to overcome stress and burnout. By combining brain science with the realities of working in today’s connected world, Curt’s “focus wisdom” helps individuals achieve a meaningful career and life.

Key Outcomes:

  • Use the power of attention & focus to overcome stress & burnout
  • Know techniques for prioritizing tasks, setting boundaries, & managing time
  • Understand the impact of organizational culture & policies in preventing turnover & advocating for change
  • Strategically make decisions about what information deserves attention for a fulfilling career & life

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The New Team Rules How to Collaborate With Teams in a Way that Achieves Clarity of Purpose and Higher (Not Broken) Productivity

How do you build a productive team when co-workers are no longer in the same room or even available during the same hours? And how do you create better rhythms of work and communication that ...

How do you build a productive team when co-workers are no longer in the same room or even available during the same hours?

And how do you create better rhythms of work and communication that ultimately drive greater engagement and success for your team?

Effective teams foster creativity, accountability, and diverse ideas, but achieving this is complex. Different work styles and priorities can lead to conflicts and slow progress. Communication overload and excessive meetings can reduce focus and productivity. Team dynamics can result in power struggles, lack of accountability, and stress.

In this session, Curt Steinhorst outlines hidden drivers that can harm teams. He provides a playbook for working together in a way that makes room for diverse work styles and communication preferences.

Key Outcomes

  • Transform diverse, dispersed, and disconnected individual contributors into a high-performing team
  • Improve communication while avoiding overload and interruption
  • Ensure organizational goals link to team priorities
  • Negotiate successful ground rules for remote/hybrid work/in-office arrangements
  • Improve collective decision-making within teams.

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Selling in Today’s Noisy World

How to Capture and Keep Attention in the Age of Distraction (for sales professionals) Today’s buyer is harder to reach than ever, and even harder to keep. The rules have changed. To effectively reach them, sales professionals must ...

How to Capture and Keep Attention in the Age of Distraction (for sales professionals)

Today’s buyer is harder to reach than ever, and even harder to keep. The rules have changed. To effectively reach them, sales professionals must radically alter their strategies to cut through increasing noise, distractions, and uncertainty. The volume of messages coming at all of us requires intentionality in the communication format, channel, length, and timing. It has never been more important to communicate clearly, concisely, and persuasively.

In “Selling in Today’s Noisy World,” attention expert Curt Steinhorst will prepare you to excel in today’s complex and challenging communication environment — helping you authentically connect with today’s increasingly diverse, multi-generational, constantly connected, easily distracted audience. He introduces you to the critical lens of focus and attention, which Microsoft CEO Satya Natella calls today’s scarcest resources.

A must-hear program for these times, Curt shares insights garnered from years of coaching sales teams, founders, CEOs of multibillion-dollar brands, NFL hall of famers, NBA Owners, Olympic gold medalists, TV personalities, TED Talk presenters, and Shark Tank contestants on how to capture and keep the attention of their internal and external audiences.

Key outcomes:

 

  • Adapt to the varying and conflicting preferences based on generation, background, and personality.
  • Communicate effectively in ways that capture attention, sustain engagement, and increase clarity.
  • Discover counterintuitive communication methods that surprise, delight, and stick
  • Avoid well-intentioned communication mistakes that decrease engagement
  • Leverage your customer’s distracted state to communicate more effectively with them

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About Keynote Speaker Curt Steinhorst

Focus expert Curt Steinhorst helps leaders and teams take control of their attention and focus it on what matters most for their success. By applying the science of how the brain works to the reality of how we function in today’s hyper-connected world, Curt provides actionable insights that help leaders break through the noise, achieve greater innovation and performance, and get the important work done.

Curt Steinhorst is the author of the bestselling book, Can I Have Your Attention?, a global speaker, and a regular Forbes contributor on leadership strategy. Diagnosed with ADD as a child, Curt knows intimately the challenges companies face to keep the attention of today’s distracted workforce and customer. He began his public speaking career as a leading voice at the #1 global research organization on generational trends in the workplace and spent years studying the impact of tech on human behavior. He founded Focuswise to help leaders and organizations create cultures of focus and teams that thrive.

Today, Curt speaks around the globe on mastering focus and attention, combining unforgettable stories, cutting-edge research from attention science, and practical case studies from global client engagements. Sought-after by global sales teams, CEOs of multi-billion-dollar brands, NFL Hall of Famers, and anyone looking to become a better, more focused leader, Curt brings his unique viewpoint and entertaining speaking style to audiences worldwide. His many clients include AT&T, Southwest Airlines, Deloitte, JPMorgan Chase, Nike, BMI, the U.S. Naval Academy, and SAP, to name just a few.

Testimonials

“Curt’s ability to command the undivided attention of the room is second to none. For someone who claims that attention is the heart of communication, he really lives up to his message on stage.”

CEO, NTT DATA

 

“If you’re looking for someone who can equip your people to better focus in today’s work environment and do so while keeping them entertained and engaged, look no further than Curt. He made us think, he kept us laughing, and we left knowing how to improve our lives by reclaiming our attention.”

President/CEO of the Aspen Ski Company

 

“No workforce issue is more important to address than the challenge of digital distractions. Curt speaks to this issue with impressive knowledge and expertise, through a uniquely engaging and thought-provoking style. What most impressed me was the attention he gave to customizing his message for the specific needs of our industry.”

President, Training Industry Inc.

 

“I applied his specific focus strategies to block all the ‘noise’ out and focus. I found myself sharing with everyone in my office.”

Chapter President, HSMAI, DFW

 

“It’s no small feat to keep a room full of top performing wealth managers engaged and off their phones for an entire keynote. Not only did Curt maintain enthusiastic attention, but he gave us plenty of practical advice for finding focus in the ocean of distractions. His session was the highest rated of the conference.”

Vice President

Ameriprise

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