Innovation Women spotlights women and other underrepresented voices from its speaker database. This month’s six speakers coach confidence, build brands, teach influence, guide leaders through tough conversations, support caregivers and make the case for sustainable business. Meet this month’s featured speakers:
Lourdes Laifer | Confidence Coach, Mindfulness Teacher, Author and Speaker, Cultivating Confidence & Calm
Lourdes Laifer is a coach, mindfulness teacher, author and speaker who helps women stop shrinking, strengthen self-trust and rise into the fullest expression of who they are meant to be. Her work centers on women’s empowerment, self-worth, resilience, confidence and the mindset shifts that make sustainable success and meaningful change possible.
Lourdes knows the subject firsthand. She struggled with severe low self-esteem and self-doubt, and the sudden loss of her mother became the catalyst for a personal transformation and a calling to help others through similar moments with clarity and courage. Her training in coaching, psychology and mindfulness grounds that experience. She is passionate about helping women move from self-doubt to empowerment and from playing small to fierce self-determination.
Lourdes created the signature keynote “Unshrink Yourself: From Surviving to Sustaining Without Burning Out.” Its message is that women do not have to wait until they are depleted to live with confidence, purpose and self-trust. Her talks help audiences recognize the quiet cost of burnout, release patterns that undermine well-being and build the inner resilience to live and lead more fully. She speaks to women’s conferences, wellness events and professional organizations.
View Lourdes’s speaker profile.
Orly Zeewy | Facilitator of Lightbulb Moments, Zeewy Brands 
Orly Zeewy is an author, speaker and Facilitator of Lightbulb Moments. She helps solopreneurs and emerging businesses turn their LinkedIn profiles into lead funnels and their web visitors into prospects. She has lectured at Wharton and taught in the Close School of Entrepreneurship at Drexel University and at the University of Pennsylvania. Her articles have appeared in national publications including The Marketing Journal, Smart Hustle and Lioness Magazine, and she has been interviewed on more than 50 podcasts.
Her book “Ready. Launch. Brand: The Lean Marketing Guide for Startups” was published in May 2021 and endorsed by Seth Godin. It was the No. 1 new business book release on Amazon in April 2021. Her second book, “Why NOT Me? The Female Guide for Entrepreneurship,” is due out in 2026. The brand process at the heart of the first book grew from her childhood, when she watched her father struggle to build a successful business. She wanted to help founders like him thrive, and reducing the startup failure rate is now her passion. When she helps a founder, she says, she is also helping their family.
Orly has helped hundreds of founders and dozens of nonprofits build or rebuild their brands. The story that stands out is a summer day camp struggling with low enrollment. The camp had been around since the 1950s and built its marketing around its lake. When Orly’s team surveyed parents, only one of 100 respondents mentioned the lake. Parents were sending their kids because they learned to take risks and grow as individuals. The new tagline, “Where small kids do big things,” reflects that, and it’s the first thing families hear on a tour. Before the rebrand, the camp still had openings in July. After it, the camp had a waitlist in March.
Erin Copelan | Caregiver Support Specialist
Erin Copelan is a caregiving support specialist, speaker and best-selling author of “Welcome to Caregiving: The Things Caregivers Never Talk About.” She has spent more than 15 years as the sole caregiver for her husband, Jerry, through cancer, a liver transplant complicated by rare medical conditions and the repeated return of disease. This year marks the 10th anniversary of his transplant. That long journey shapes the grounded, compassionate voice she brings to her speaking and writing.
Erin is known for honest, often humorous storytelling about caregiving, burnout and emotional resilience. Her work helps audiences feel seen, especially those quietly carrying the weight of caregiving without acknowledgment or support. She has spoken to national healthcare and continuing education audiences, including the Society for Transplant Social Workers. She also works with caregiver organizations, healthcare systems, nonprofits and professional groups that want a non-clinical, lived-experience speaker. She takes on in-person and virtual engagements, podcast conversations and guest writing.
Erin is passionate about helping caregivers move through burnout and overwhelm with presence, emotional awareness and gentle movement. She lacked those tools at the start and learned them along the way. In her talks and her Caregiver Archetype Quiz, she stresses that caregivers differ in strengths, limits, communication styles and emotional needs. She also gives caregivers permission to feel more than one emotion at once: love and resentment, devotion and exhaustion, gratitude and grief. Helping caregivers trust themselves again and remember that their presence matters is the heart of her work.
Elaina Zuker | Influence Expert, Keynote Speaker, Bestselling Author of “7 Secrets of Influence”
Elaina Zuker is a consultant, keynote speaker and bestselling author of “7 Secrets of Influence,” now a global seminar and eLearning program. She has spoken for leading associations and Fortune 100 companies including Chase, American Express and Merrill Lynch. With a master’s in organizational psychology, she combines business savvy with academic rigor. NYU honored her with its Alumni Achievement Award for her contributions to business and leadership.
Her signature concept is Portable Power, which captures why influence is the most essential skill for career success. Elaina wants leaders to see influence as their true Portable Power. Her mission is to give people simple but powerful tools to become more confident, effective and influential in every area of work and life.
Her best story starts with an unfair parking ticket. When Elaina contested it, the director of public security reimbursed the fine. The director later read Zuker’s book, reached out and hired her to train a 40-person team. Zuker’s takeaway: “Forget fighting City Hall—sometimes City Hall hires you.”
View Elaina’s speaker profile.
Michelle Gilbert | Chief Engine Officer, Purple Engine Coaching & Consulting LLC
Michelle Gilbert is an ICF-certified executive coach and Chief Engine Officer of Purple Engine Coaching & Consulting. She helps leaders handle the conversations that shape careers and often get avoided. Michelle has more than 30 years of leadership experience, including 24 years in Fortune 50 companies, and she brings a practical, real-world approach to high-stakes communication. She gives audiences clear strategies they can apply right away to handle pressure, speak with impact and lead with more confidence.
Her signature topic is how strong leaders handle uncomfortable conversations, whether that means delivering tough feedback, addressing tension or balancing competing priorities. She also speaks on building strategic relationships by managing up and on making networking feel authentic instead of forced. Across her talks, she helps participants move from avoidance and second-guessing to clear, confident action.
Michelle says she is most energized by helping leaders with the conversations they are tempted to avoid, the ones that quietly hold teams and organizations back. She has been in those moments herself: avoiding the conversation, second-guessing her approach and learning the hard way what works. When leaders build this skill, she says, decisions move faster, trust deepens and teams spend less time stuck.
View Michelle’s speaker profile.
Tamara Stenn | Professor of Entrepreneurship and Founder, Sustainability Lens Game
Tamara Stenn is a professor of entrepreneurship at Suffolk University, an economist, a Fulbright Scholar and founder and CEO of the Sustainability Lens Game. She is a globally recognized expert in sustainable entrepreneurship, innovation and experiential learning. Her work helps organizations shift from treating sustainability as a compliance requirement to using it as a strategic advantage that drives growth, innovation and resilience. She created the Sustainability Lens framework and game, an interactive tool that builds sustainability into core business strategy through hands-on learning and systems thinking.
A defining moment in Tamara’s career came in rural Bolivia, where she worked with Indigenous women artisans and quinoa farmers. Despite producing high-value goods for global markets, many remained economically vulnerable. That sparked a lifelong commitment to redesigning how business works. Tamara founded and led an eco-fashion company that applied Fair Trade principles to support Indigenous artisans, conducted Fulbright research on the well-being of women quinoa farmers and co-founded a farmer-run cooperative. Her career spans more than four decades across business, academia and international development.
Tamara believes business can, and must, be a force for meaningful change. Her passion comes from working with Indigenous women entrepreneurs, students and communities often excluded from traditional economic systems, and she helps them build ventures that are both profitable and just. Her newest work focuses on aligning profitability with impact, which she calls “The Profitable Good.” As a speaker, she combines storytelling, real-world experience and practical tools, and her sessions often include gameplay to make complex ideas easier to grasp.
View Tamara’s speaker profile.
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