Speaker Spotlight
Most Keynotes Hand a Room Another Framework. Hers Asks Them to Say the Thing They Have Been Avoiding.
Anne Gillaspie — Creator of SHARE YOUR FEAR™ · 12-Year Entrepreneur and CEO of Fix & Form · Host of the OnlyFounders Podcast
Anne Gillaspie has spent more than a decade as a brand therapist to founders and executives, which is a job that mostly consists of sitting with people while they work out what is actually true about themselves and their companies.
What she kept finding was that the honest answer was already in the room. It was just not being said out loud. That observation turned into SHARE YOUR FEAR™, a keynote and a movement built on the premise that the thing you are most afraid to say is usually the thing that would change everything.
She is based in Denver and speaks at conferences, annual meetings, leadership summits, women's events and founder gatherings across the United States and internationally.
Fear Almost Never Looks Like Fear
The reason fear is a hard topic to program is that most people in a conference room would tell you they are not afraid of anything. And by their own definition they are right. Nobody at a leadership summit is white-knuckling the armrest.
Anne's argument is that fear stopped announcing itself a long time ago. It shows up as busyness. As politeness. As a role someone has clearly outgrown and has not left. As the conversation that keeps getting moved to next week, and then the week after that.
She does not treat any of that as weakness to be conquered. She treats it as information, which is a meaningfully different starting point than most content in this category. The question is not how to be braver. It is what the fear is pointing at, and what it is costing to keep working around it.
That is the question the keynote is built around, and it is the one she hands back to the audience.
It Is an Activation, Not a Talk
This is the part planners should understand before they book her, because it is the whole difference. Anne does not deliver a presentation to a room. She runs the room through something.
Storytelling, humor, live audience participation and, yes, unexpected dance. The dancing is the part people mention first and it is not a gimmick; it is the fastest way she has found to get a group of professionals out of the posture they walked in with. What follows is the actual work, which is people saying true things out loud in front of colleagues.
The measurable outcome is not what the audience remembers. It is what they said. A host who booked Anne for a four-part women's event series wrote that what started as a room of strangers ended as a safe space for vulnerable truth telling, and that there were laughs, tears and real connection among women carrying the same guilt most of them assumed was theirs alone.
That is a different deliverable than a framework, and it is worth being deliberate about. It fits an opening session that needs to break a room open, a women's event, a founder gathering, a culture or wellbeing block, or an offsite where the real agenda item is that nobody is being straight with anybody. It is a poor fit for a room that wants slides and a takeaway sheet.
The Operator Behind It
Anne is not a speaker who found a topic. She is a twelve-year entrepreneur who found a stage.
She is the CEO and founder of Fix & Form, a brand strategy firm that has been running for over a decade, and the co-founder and CEO of 10toLaunch. She hosts the OnlyFounders podcast, which is where a lot of the raw material for the keynote comes from, since founders tend to tell a microphone things they will not tell a boardroom.
Her stages so far include the SheSpeaks CEO Summit, BizLifeCon, Industry Icon, the BuzzBuilders Bootcamp series, Wine Women & Wealth, Women RISE and Wildrock Trailblazers, plus emcee and facilitation work including the CertaPro Painters annual gala.
Away from the stage she is raising three kids in Denver with her husband and a sheepadoodle named Noodles, which is the kind of detail she would put in a bio on purpose, because the whole point of the work is that the unedited version is the useful one.
Three Ways to Program Her
SHARE YOUR FEAR™: The Radical Truth That Sets You Free is the signature. Forty-five to sixty minutes, opening or closing, for any room that has been performing too long.
The Integrated Leader takes the same premise into leadership programming, on the argument that trust, engagement and retention are all downstream of whether people feel safe being real at work.
Brand Before Business is the founder and marketing version, drawn from her decade of brand work: the brand already exists, it is made of everything the founder has lived, and the quirks most people edit out are the ones that make the business memorable.
She is also available as an emcee, a workshop facilitator and for moderated conversation. Full topic descriptions and takeaways are on her speaker profile.
Book Anne Gillaspie
Available for keynotes on fear, truth-telling, human connection, personal growth and culture, plus emcee work, facilitated workshops and moderated conversation.