Neelu Kaur

Why organisations work with Neelu Kaur

• She treats workplace silence as a structural problem. Most speakers in this space coach individuals to be more confident; her intervention sits in meeting design and the conversational rules that decide who gets to challenge a senior idea.
• The Self-Trust Recession is her named diagnosis of the moment: capable leaders, surrounded by AI and competing opinion, are second-guessing themselves and outsourcing decision authority. Her Self-Trust Reset framework is the way back.
• Her cross-cultural lens, the collective “we” she was raised in meeting the individualistic “I” of American corporate life, makes her credible to global and AAPI audiences who have lived that gap themselves.
• Her tools combine cognitive and body-based techniques. The pairing of organisational psychology training (Columbia, NYU Stern) and sixteen years of yoga and Ayurveda teaching produces practical methods her audiences can apply in the next meeting they walk into.
• Be Your Own Cheerleader, published by Post Hill Press in January 2023, gives her work a published thesis a senior buyer can read before commissioning.

Biography highlights

• Author of Be Your Own Cheerleader (Post Hill Press, 2023), a guide to self-advocacy that addresses the cultural gap between collective and individualistic workplace norms.
• MA in Social and Organizational Psychology, Columbia University, and BS from NYU Stern School of Business.
• Certified NLP Master Practitioner and Coach, NLP Center of New York.
• Client list includes Google, Bloomberg, Sony Music, RBC, Ernst & Young, and Jefferies.
• Featured on Morning Brew’s Good Work and TV Asia / SEEMA Network’s Sundays with Seema.
• Chief Guide at Chief (NYC), with over sixteen years as a yoga teacher and Ayurveda practitioner.

Biography

Most organisations have more talent than they have contribution. Capable people stay quiet at exactly the moments their judgement is most needed, and what looks like alignment is often silence. This is the tension Neelu Kaur takes on.

Trained as an organisational psychologist at Columbia and with an undergraduate degree from NYU Stern, she has spent over fifteen years inside Fortune 500 organisations. The question her work returns to is why capable people stay quiet in the moments that matter. Her client list, which includes Google, Bloomberg, Sony Music, RBC, Ernst & Young, and Jefferies, gives her a view across financial services, consulting, and tech.

Her current diagnosis is what she calls the Self-Trust Recession. Leaders are surrounded by AI tools and competing opinion, and the quiet effect is that capable people are outsourcing their own judgement. The Self-Trust Reset framework she has built around this idea is a way to recognise when fear is shaping a decision and rebuild internal authority before acting on it.

The earlier strand of her work runs through Be Your Own Cheerleader (Post Hill Press, January 2023). She wrote the book out of her own experience growing up between two cultures: Indian at home, American at work. It examines why people raised in collective ‘we’ cultures struggle to advocate for themselves in workplaces built around the individualistic ‘I’. That cultural lens still shapes her work and is part of what makes her credible to global teams and AAPI audiences who have lived the same code-switch.

Key speaking topics

• Self-trust and decision-making in high-pressure environments
• Self-advocacy in the workplace
• Cross-cultural communication in global teams
• The cost of consensus and over-collaboration
• AAPI and underrepresented voices in corporate life
• Burnout and sustainable leadership

Ideal for

• Leadership teams in Fortune 500 environments where decision speed and contribution quality are the bottleneck
• CHROs, Chief Learning Officers, and L&D leaders building cultures of voice and accountability
• DEI, AAPI, and Employee Resource Group programmes looking for content that goes beyond representation language
• High-potential talent and mid-career professionals working across cultures in global organisations

Audience outcomes

• A clear way to recognise when fear, perfectionism, or comparison is shaping a decision instead of judgement
• Behavioural tools to speak up in high-stakes moments without overshooting or shutting down
• A vocabulary for the cultural gap between collective and individualistic workplace norms, useful for global team conversations
• A diagnostic for where consensus and over-discussion are slowing the team’s decisions