Elise Madrick
SHE / HER / HERS
Elise Madrick speaks to leaders and individuals at pivotal moments, inspiring personal reinvention. As founder of Cerené, her keynotes and workshops ignite transformation and open new and exciting possibilities.
Every keynote and workshop Elise delivers catalyzes reinvention. Leaders and teams confront limiting narratives, unlock hidden potential and leave with tools and habits to sustain meaningful change beyond the event.
Popular Talks
Who Are You as a Leader?
An interactive experience that challenges participants to examine how they show up as leaders, beyond credentials or role, and uncover the narratives shaping who they are as leaders. They leave with new language, perspectives and possibilities to lead authentically, align with purpose and create meaningful impact.
Enrollment
The Leadership Skill That Turns Strategy Into Action – This talk equips leaders to move beyond ideas into action by mastering the art of enrollment – inviting others into a vision so compelling they choose it as their own. Attendees gain the language and conversational tools to transform strategy into a movement that people believe in and build together.
Becoming Unrecognizable
Reinventing Who You Are to Redefine What’s Possible – This transformational session invites participants into the space between what has been and what could be, where an entirely new version of themselves can emerge. They leave with a powerful understanding of how to break past the familiar and access the hidden potential waiting to redefine what’s possible.
Speaking, Workshops, Consulting & Coaching
Workshops
Who Are You as a Leader? – An interactive experience that challenges participants to examine how they show up as leaders, beyond credentials or role, and uncover the narratives shaping who they are as leaders. They leave with new language, perspectives and possibilities to lead authentically, align with purpose and create meaningful impact.
From Success to Meaning Through Legacy – This session helps accomplished professionals leverage their achievements and relationships to unlock the hidden potential still within them and define a future that even they find surprising. Participants leave with clarity on “what’s next” and practical insights for shaping a legacy that is both personal and powerful.
Enrollment: The Leadership Skill That Turns Strategy Into Action – This talk equips leaders to move beyond ideas into action by mastering the art of enrollment – inviting others into a vision so compelling they choose it as their own. Attendees gain the language and conversational tools to transform strategy into a movement that people believe in and build together.
Becoming Unrecognizable: Reinventing Who You Are to Redefine What’s Possible – This transformational session invites participants into the space between what has been and what could be, where an entirely new version of themselves can emerge. They leave with a powerful understanding of how to break past the familiar and access the hidden potential waiting to redefine what’s possible.
Wellbeing: The First & Most Important Job for Leaders – This session reframes wellbeing from a personal perk to a core leadership responsibility, showing how leaders set the tone for team performance, resilience and culture. Participants leave with concrete strategies to embed wellbeing into how they lead and sustain high impact without burnout.
Coaching
Elise works with individuals and leadership teams to accelerate growth, expand leadership range and increase organizational impact. Using a deliberate practice approach, she helps clients see and remove the constraints that limit performance, experiment with new behaviors in real time and sustain change through ongoing accountability structures.
Consulting
Coachees learn how to navigate pressure with presence, lead through ambiguity and align their actions with the future they choose to create. Whether the goal is preparing a leader for their next role, unifying an executive team or strengthening the talent pipeline; Elise’s coaching is designed to produce reinvention that endures.
Elise partners with organizations to design and deliver highly customized experiences and engagements that accelerate leadership transitions, embed new skills and reshape culture. Her consulting work blends research-based practice with ontological coaching to help teams move beyond incremental change into sustained reinvention, resulting in measurable performance gains and deeper alignment with purpose.
“Her presentation was nothing short of captivating—insightful, relatable, and filled with practical takeaways that we could immediately apply. Her ability to engage the audience with both insightful and practical content is remarkable. Seamlessly combines inspiration with real-world utility, offering takeaways that I could immediately apply to my work and life. What set Elise apart was her vulnerability, which added depth to the content and centered her powerful call to action. Her message resonated deeply, particularly two points: ‘Great leaders are less defined by what they do and more by how they make others feel,’ and ‘Wellbeing is not just the absence of disease, but having what you need to be happy in life.’ These principles will stay with me as personal and professional guideposts moving forward. If you’re looking for a speaker who will not only captivate but also provide actionable insights; Elise is the one!”
– Francisco Martinez, President & CEO, Project Quest
“Not only have several of my blind spots been blown wide open, I have a framework of how to move through my stuck-ness. It’s already helping me reframe the conversations I have with myself and rewriting what I believe is possible.”
– June Svetlovsky, Co-Founder & CFO, Varion Biotech
“It’s already helping me reframe the conversations I have with myself and rewriting what I believe is possible.”
– Senior Executive, Insurance Industry
“It gave me an incredible context for re-thinking how my actions/words directly impact the life I create for myself and those I enroll in my success. It was more empowering than what I learned in 15 years of therapy to see how much the mindset you decide to take on every day can impact your happiness, sense of self, and success.”
– Senior Executive, Retail Industry
“This is for anyone who is looking for concrete mindsets and tools to do so. The work is diverse and purposeful. It includes recognizing stories that no longer serve us, identifying our strengths and our choices, learning how to ask for and give feedback, and planning in detail how to acquire new skills and habits.”
– Debbie GC, Matador Network
Elise Madrick is an architect of transformation for the world’s most curious and courageous humans. As Founder and CEO of Cerené, she creates immersive experiences that invite people to become unrecognizable to themselves in the most extraordinary way.
With more than two decades of research and experience spanning clinical social work, public policy, behavioral science and leadership transformation, Elise is renowned for designing programs that catalyze deep, enduring change. In a previous chapter leading executive education at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, she crafted top-ranked leadership programs honored for their innovation and impact.
Her most profound transformation, however, began outside institutional walls, when she built Cerené from the ground up.
Cerené is a company devoted to personal reinvention, helping people become unrecognizable to themselves in all the best ways. Elise and her team design powerful Executive Experiences across the globe, guiding leaders through the uncomfortable yet liberating journey of radical reinvention.
The purpose is not to repair what is broken, but to unlock futures once unimaginable, and to create the space to ask: What now? What’s next? Who am I becoming?
Elise embodies the very transformation she teaches. Each year, she travels to over ten new countries, undertakes 108-day skill development journeys as part of Cerené’s methodology and cultivates a thriving global community of humans on the same path.
At the core of her work lies a singular mission: to help people “master the art of speaking their future into existence” and, together, create an extraordinary world.
Let’s collaborate to ensure a transformative experience.