Speaker Spotlight
She Spent 21 Years Learning Not to Panic in a Muay Thai Ring. Now She Teaches Leaders to Be the Calmest Person in the Room.
Elaine Lou Cartas · Creator of Conscious Conversations® · LA Weekly's #1 Thought Leader of 2023 · ICF PCC · LinkedIn Learning Instructor · Los Angeles, California
Elaine Lou Cartas has trained in Muay Thai for 21 years, and the ring taught her the lesson she now brings to boardrooms and conference stages: the moment you panic is the moment you fall. Most leaders, she noticed, walk into hard conversations with no training at all for that moment, and the conversation escalates when it should be coming down.
Her work is built on one line: people problems are profit problems, and Conscious Conversations® solves both. The daughter of Filipino immigrant farmers, a former community organizer who raised $11 million, and now a business and executive coach to more than 20,000 clients across 58 countries, she created a cognitive sciences framework that trains leaders to communicate under pressure the way fighters and athletes train: by pausing, planning and practicing.
She has taken that framework to Amazon, LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Kroger, and to travel and hospitality leaders from Hilton, Marriott, American Airlines and Ritz-Carlton. She likes to joke that she is more than a personality hire. Audiences laugh, and then they leave with an action plan.
Watch Elaine In Action
People Problems Are Profit Problems
Every organization Elaine works with can tell you where its shipments are, what its delivery windows look like and how much it lost to shrink last quarter. Very few can tell you where a message broke down on its way from the C-suite to the front line, or what that breakdown cost in rework, missed targets and people quietly heading for the door.
Her keynote Your Communication Is a Supply Chain (And It's Leaking) treats communication like the operational system it actually is. Elaine shows leaders how to understand their own communication operating system and everyone else's, so they can plan for every person in the room rather than the one they assume is listening. She covers what to do in the moment a conversation goes sideways, before it costs time, trust or talent, and how to close a meeting so everyone leaves on the same page instead of discovering three weeks later that they heard different things.
It is the talk for operations-heavy organizations, retail and logistics leaders, and any company where a message has to survive several layers before it reaches the people doing the work.
AI Can Write the Email. It Can't Calm the Room.
AI can now draft tough feedback in ten seconds. What it cannot do, Elaine points out, is stay steady when the room gets tense, voices rise and everyone's stress response kicks in at the same time. As machines take on more of the work, the human skill that matters most is the one that was always hardest to teach: staying calm.
In AI Can Write the Email. It Can't Calm the Room: Emotional Intelligence Under Pressure, she teaches leaders to be the calmest person in the room, even when nobody else is. She draws directly on the ring, using the same breath and body cues fighters rely on, and explains why stress shuts emotional intelligence down and how to get it back within seconds. The goal is not to avoid hard conversations. It is to de-escalate a tense one without backing down from what needs to be said.
Elaine has delivered her emotional intelligence talk to more than 10,000 AI founders in Dubai. For organizations building out a broader AI and human skills program, our feature on Erica Dhawan and critical thinking in the age of AI pairs well with Elaine's focus on staying human under pressure.
Executive Presence That's Actually Yours
A lot of executive presence training, Elaine argues, quietly teaches people to become a copy of their boss. Every fighter learns early that borrowed style falls apart under pressure, and the same is true in a leadership meeting.
Her keynote Executive Presence That's Yours, Not a Copy of Your Boss helps leaders build a presence that holds up when the stakes are high. She gives audiences the one word they can use to stop an overbearing colleague from taking over a conversation, a communication dashboard for tracking how their conversations actually land, and a way to keep improving the way athletes do, with practice and review rather than hoping the next meeting goes better.
Built on the Brain, Tested in the Ring
Elaine's approach is grounded in how the brain actually behaves under stress. She holds a Bachelor's in Cognitive Sciences and Sociology from the University of California, Irvine and a Master's in Leadership and Management from the University of La Verne. She is an ICF Professional Certified Coach, a certified Executive Coach, an IFS Foundations for Coaches™ graduate and a LinkedIn Learning instructor, and she hosts the podcast WOC & Allies: Business & Career Realtalk™.
LA Weekly named her the #1 Thought Leader of 2023 for the Conscious Conversations® framework, and her commentary on careers and the workplace has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, HuffPost, Money and LinkedIn News. She has more than 300 reviews from clients and audiences.
Beyond keynotes, two formats make her unusually flexible for planners. In her live coaching sessions, attendees complete a short survey about their biggest communication challenges beforehand, and Elaine coaches live on the top themes, so the room gets answers to the questions it actually has. Her self-defense and de-escalation wellness session is a morning add-on that teaches safe self-defense movement and de-escalation techniques, with a workbook attendees take home.
What Audiences Say
The feedback on Elaine tends to come back to the same two things: how quickly she gets a room engaged, and how much of what she teaches people use the very next day.
Brenda Valley, a finance officer at Albertsons, described using Elaine's heart-shaped 6-P framework in a real conversation the day after the session, and then owning the room at a large networking event her team ran the following week. Vicki Goizueta, an HR business partner at Acosta Group, said her favorite part was the way Elaine let others shine, drawing out the knowledge already in the room by getting attendees to help one another.
Video testimonials from an Amazon operations director, an assistant HR leader at Food4Less and Kroger, and a program manager at the California Water Association are part of her speaker kit and available on request.
What Planners Can Expect
Elaine works from three signature keynotes: Your Communication Is a Supply Chain for operations, retail and multi-layer organizations, AI Can Write the Email. It Can't Calm the Room for teams adopting AI and leaders managing tension and change, and Executive Presence That's Yours for leadership programs, emerging leaders and women's leadership events. Each talk comes with a personalized workbook, and she uses improv, so expect laughter alongside the tools.
She also offers live coaching built around a pre-event survey and a self-defense and de-escalation wellness session that pairs naturally with a keynote. Based in Los Angeles, she is an easy booking for events across California and the West, travels nationally and internationally, and delivers virtually.
Full keynote descriptions, takeaways and testimonials are on her speaker profile.
More on communication under pressure: Karen Laos on closing The Credibility Gap, Sean Fisher on conflict resolution from a court-certified mediator and Chris Rollins on Invisible Friction.
Book Elaine Lou Cartas
Available for keynotes, live coaching and self-defense and de-escalation wellness sessions on communication, emotional intelligence and executive presence, in person or virtually.