Joel Zeff creates energy. He is a dynamic speaker, improvisational humorist and author. His interactive in person performances invite members of the audience to participate in hilarious improvisational exercises that illustrate Joel’s central message: That organizations and individuals should CELEBRATE every day successes to increase collaboration, productivity, passion and innovation. His virtual presentations will also engage your audience with interactive surprises and present his powerful messages with humor, fun and energy.
Since 1997, Joel has inspired audiences from Wells Fargo to Samsung to KPMG and even the IRS. Yes, the IRS. Joel is a masterful public speaker and a nationally renowned motivator, lifelong humorist and improvisational actor.
His career is a search for fun and passion. He quickly realized the importance of both at his first jobs delivering the hometown newspaper and cleaning up trash at a suburban movie theater.
He started his professional career as a newspaper journalist and public relations executive. In 1994, Joel went out on his own as corporate communications specialist. He helped clients with their employee communications, media relations, strategy and customer marketing. Throughout the consulting process, Joel realized his clients – many of them high-level technology and telecommunications firms – needed more than marketing and public relations strategy. Many of his clients’ employees were starving for fun, passion and new perspective on finding success.
At the time, Joel was having fun on the weekends as a comedian. Through friends, he discovered improvisational comedy. One of his clients (a large technology company) knew Joel performed comedy on the weekend. The client asked him to play some improvisational games before dinner for a group of high level executives. He brought a fellow comedian and a corporate speaking career was born.
He connects to his audience with humor that has them laughing so uncontrollably that their mascara runs, their cheeks hurt, and their bellies ache. And he doesn’t do it alone. Volunteers from the audience join him on stage and play an integral role in an improvisation game in front of hundreds or thousands of people—something the audience members have never done. He expects nothing less than their success. He expects the volunteers to focus and work together as a team; communicate effectively; positively support each other; and take responsibility.
Joel makes his audience laugh so hard that they forget about the corporate nonsense of conference calls, “strategic deliverables,” PowerPoint presentations with upside-down triangles, or “paradigm shifts in a cross-functional organization.” Make the Right Choice is conversational, funny, and very informative. Yes, Joel will make you laugh, but he’ll also make you think. This presentation delivers a combination of inspiration, essential business knowledge, and significant ideas to help audience members reconnect with their own passion and success.
As discussed in his book, Make the Right Choice, Joel believes that we all encounter choices in our careers. We always have the opportunity to make the right choice to live a more creative, passionate, and productive life. How do you “make the right choice”? You can choose to provide opportunity. You can choose to provide positive support. And along the way, you can choose to have fun. It’s really that simple. Joel teaches us just how easy it is to make these choices.
When he is not speaking, Joel expresses his creativity as an actor, writer and comedian. He started performing professionally in 1992. In Dallas, he was co-host of The Movie Zone on UPN 21. He has appeared in dozens of commercials for numerous clients, including the Dallas Cowboys, Harrah’s Casino, Mydiscountbroker.com, Time Warner Cable, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, Eagle Country Markets, and Extraco Bank. He has appeared in hundreds of corporate videos and has appeared on shows from CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch to the Fox Network’s Fox and Friends Weekend. His articles have been featured in The Dallas Morning News, The Houston Chronicle, The Kansas City Star, among many other mainstream media outlets.
We are all improvising. We face challenges, disruption, change, and obstacles without a script or rehearsal. To find success, we need to work together, build trust, and create opportunity. During this session, Joel will discuss how the tenets of improvisation create successful teams during change and disruption. Joel has spent the past 30 years performing and teaching the lessons of improvisation. This interactive, engaging and hilarious session will focus on staying in the game; facing fear; building trust, and asking the important question, “How do I help the people around me be successful?” Joel will also bring his famous TA DA energy as he discusses the importance of opportunity, positive support, and active listening in collaboration. Yes, you will have fun and laugh during this session. You will also learn how to collaborate more successfully as a sales and marketing team, and navigate change. Are you ready for the TA DA?
This session will focus on:
1. Creating opportunity and positive support for your team.
2. Making the choice to “be in the moment.”
3. How to Stay in the Game when faced with challenges, change and disruption.
4. Thrive during change by making the choice to be prepared and open and flexible.
5. Fueling your passion and reducing stress.
“Joel was great to work with and the attendees really enjoyed his presentation. Thank you for all of your help!”
“Your keynote session was exceptionally relevant to the central themes of our meeting, and you managed to energize our participants around these topics through your dynamic delivery. Thank you for a fantastic session that sent our attendees back into their workplaces with fresh perspective and renewed passion.”
“We are beginning some debriefs with stakeholders on the gala and the comments about your work have been very, very positive. Words like “high-energy”, “humorous”, “entertaining” have all been used with the underlying theme from everyone that this year’s program was one of the best because of what you brought to the stage and the classy way you worked with the presenters.”
“I just had to again thank YOU for making our humble, I mean Humble Convocations truly the BEST we ever had in my 15 years here! You absolutely hit a grand slam not only from and energizing standpoint, but from a message standpoint. You simply nailed the kind of culture I have envisioned from the day I joined our district in 2001! Know that you have an admittedly not very humble #1 fan in Humble USA! You significantly made a huge difference for our family!”
“We hired Joel for a women’s conference – 400 women at a leadership conference. Joel was our closing keynote speaker and we could not have asked for anything better. He was absolutely hysterical and extremely engaging, all the while, driving home the leadership messages. As someone who hired Joel, he was very easy to work with. Additionally, I told him that he was sponsored by one of our companies – he mentioned them many times throughout his presentation and the sponsor loved every minute of it! We already hired Joel again for another conference and can’t wait to see him again! Standing ovation!!”
“Joel, Thank you for an amazing session with our group. I have heard nothing but AMAZING feedback and we will be sending out a feedback survey that I will share the results with you. My most favorite and consistent feedback was we cannot remember laughing like that in years. It felt good and we needed that. They also feel like all the barriers were broken and everyone is now seen as an equal member in the sales family. Thank you for helping us along on our journey of healing and kicking off the year! I look forward to seeing you again. Thank you again!”
“I apologize for the delay, but I have been on the road the past 2 weeks. I wanted to personally reach out and thank you for the amazing presentation. I have had many people tell me how much they enjoyed your presentation. My manager said “I think he is the best speaker we have ever had”. So, thank you! The energy your presentation evoked with our teams permeated the remainder of the event. I am so thrilled we found you and you could join us.”
“We all agreed that you are the best motivational/leadership speaker we have had at our events.”
“I can’t tell you how many people I spoke with throughout the conference that said we “just hit a home run” with both our keynote speakers this year. People went on about how fun, hysterically funny, entertaining and thought-provoking your keynote was. What a delight to have you there. We’ll certainly be keeping your materials, and if we (or any of our other respective organizations) have any opportunities to use your services (or recommend you to others) again, we will. Thank you again so much for your wonderful contribution to CETPA this year.”
“Joel Zeff was the perfect master of ceremonies for our YPO graduation event. He was hilarious and his improvisational style kept the group laughing the entire time. Joel’s ability to draw the audience into his presentation was the best I’ve seen in my 10 years in YPO.”
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I have never seen such a positive response from any meeting. Actually, I’m now advertising for you with my recap of the event. There has been some fallout, however. Now everyone leaving our bathrooms are yelling “TA DA” in celebration. We’ve posted a hand washing expert outside to make sure that the celebration is actually warranted. And today in a presentation to a group which was composed of many outsiders, I used both the TA DA and “bunny, bunny, bunny”. Our team members were amused; the other team members, bemused. Thanks for the energy and the lift. I look forward to the LDI. “
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I wanted to let you know that the feedback from everyone was overwhelmingly positive. I would say that in my 20 year sales career it was perhaps the most enjoyable (and appropriate) presentation I’ve been a part of in a sales meeting. Your competition for that top spot is John Cleese, so you’re in very good company.
I wanted to say thank you on behalf of Convergys and we very much look forward to working together again in the future.”
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First, let me say that I was replaying your performance all weekend long for friends and family — so my personal enjoyment extended way beyond the 90 minutes we had in the “back room of the Hyatt in Richardson!” Second, you provided a superb ending to our conference, by giving people excellent food for thought while making them laugh. We have had tremendous feedback on your contribution to our event.
I do hope we’ll be able to work together again. In the meantime, I’ve shared your e-mail with other key HR leaders who attended last week’s meeting. Many of them support their groups in planning meetings and events”
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We had Joel Zeff speak at our branding session last week and the feedback was outstanding from Bill McDermott down to the field plumbers and fitters. He kicked off our event as our morning key speaker and he was interactive, entertaining, tied the message of teamwork, passion, commitment and ESOP together and energized our meeting from the moment he started. While not inexpensive, the investment, relative to his energy and contribution to our meeting was well justified. We had people push back initially on his fee but they came up to me afterwards and said he was worth every penny and more. Bill McDermott said he was the perfect kickoff to our meeting and that Joel was “incredible”.
It is the second time I have used him (the first was our Kansas City Mechanical Contractors Annual Dinner) and both times he wowed the audience and hit a grand slam as far as everyone was concerned. If he is one of your finalists, we would highly recommend him. I am not sure you will do any better with someone else.”
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Thank you for captivating our Corporate Relations team during your engaging performance and discussion at our department kickoff meeting. You created a memorable event. I will never forget seeing my colleague, Sari, imitate a ballerina and a kangaroo!
Your messages of passion, energy and teamwork struck a chord with our department. These lessons will be helpful to our company as we focus on reinventing protection and retirement for the consumer. Your improvisation games highlighted that we as a department need to take risks, deal with change, and positively support each other as we face our corporate challenges.
Again, thank you so much for your wonderful presentation.”
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Thanks for a wonderful wrap-up to our meeting!
Some of the comments I heard were, “I had to leave to use the restroom during his performance”, “I was crying from laughing”, “my sides hurt”, “what an awesome way to get a message across”! By the way, I did thank the person for leaving to use the restroom.
You delivered exactly what we asked for, and we would like to have you back next year!
Thanks again for a wonderful presentation.”
“What an outstanding event!! I continue to hear ‘What’s your one line?’ and ‘opportunity and positive support’ as I speak with people in the field. Your delivery and message has created a great buzz!! Thank you and I look forward to working with you in the future.”
