Emma Reed Turrell

Why organisations work with Emma Reed Turrell

• She brings the consulting room into the boardroom. The frameworks she uses with audiences are the same ones she works with in private clinical practice, not a borrowed model dressed up for corporate slides.
• Two trade-published books with named theses, Please Yourself (HarperCollins) on people-pleasing and What Am I Missing? (Penguin) on four blind-spot profiles, give her content a recognisable structure that audiences can act on after the session.
• Her four-blind-spot typology (The Gladiator, The Bridge, The Hustler, The Rock) gives teams a shared, non-judgemental language for the friction that usually goes unnamed in 1:1s and team reviews.
• Co-hosting Best Friend Therapy with Elizabeth Day, now in its seventh season, has trained her to translate clinical material into conversation that lands with non-specialist audiences without losing precision.
• MBACP-accredited practitioner status means employers can route sensitive content (boundaries, self-worth, conflict avoidance) through a clinician on the register, not a motivational speaker working in adjacent territory.

Biography highlights

• Author of Please Yourself: How to Stop People-Pleasing and Transform the Way You Live, HarperCollins.
• Author of What Am I Missing? Discover the Four Blind Spots That Are Holding You Back, Penguin.
• Co-host of Best Friend Therapy podcast with Elizabeth Day, in its seventh season.
• MBACP-accredited psychotherapist running a private practice (The Therapy Loft).
• English graduate of Queens’ College, Cambridge; ten years in commercial roles before retraining.
• Corporate engagements named on her bureau profiles include Diageo, Sky, AstraZeneca, ClearScore, Evelyn Partners, and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

Biography

The most common complaints inside large organisations, people who cannot say no, leaders who cannot ask for help, talented staff who under-claim their work, sit downstream of the same psychological patterns that fill a therapist’s caseload. Emma Reed Turrell has spent fifteen years working with those patterns clinically, and her speaking is built directly on what she sees in the consulting room.

She read English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, spent a decade in commercial roles, then retrained as a psychotherapist and became MBACP-accredited. She now runs a private practice, The Therapy Loft, alongside her writing and speaking. The two books, Please Yourself with HarperCollins on the structure of people-pleasing, and What Am I Missing? with Penguin on four named blind-spot profiles, are the source material for her keynote content.

Her co-hosted podcast with Elizabeth Day, Best Friend Therapy, now in its seventh season, has built her a reach beyond the clinical audience and trained her to make therapeutic ideas usable in everyday work conversations. The result is a speaker who can hold a non-specialist audience for an hour on people-pleasing, imposter syndrome, or unconscious blind spots, and leave them with a vocabulary they can take back into their team.

Organisations that have booked her include Diageo, Sky, AstraZeneca, ClearScore, Evelyn Partners, and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, employers for whom employee wellbeing and communication are not soft topics but live retention and productivity issues.

Key speaking topics

• People-pleasing and workplace boundaries
• Imposter syndrome in high-performing teams
• Psychological blind spots and self-awareness
• Self-worth and confidence at work
• Mental health and wellbeing in the workplace
• Non-conflict communication
• Resilience and stress management

Ideal for

• CHROs, heads of talent, and L&D leads designing wellbeing and communication programmes for the wider workforce.
• Women’s networks and emerging-leader cohorts wrestling with imposter syndrome and self-worth.
• Senior teams that want a shared language for the friction patterns showing up in 1:1s and reviews.
• Employee conferences and all-hands events where wellbeing content needs clinical weight rather than motivational gloss.

Audience outcomes

• A named vocabulary for the people-pleasing, imposter, and blind-spot patterns that shape day-to-day work.
• Specific tools for setting boundaries and managing self-worth that audiences can use the following week.
• Recognition of which of the four blind-spot profiles (Gladiator, Bridge, Hustler, Rock) is most active in their own behaviour.
• Practical anxiety-management techniques drawn from her clinical practice, including the worry-box approach.
• Permission to treat wellbeing as a serious operational topic, not a soft benefit.