What if the discomfort of success isn’t a breakdown, but a breakthrough? Laura Gassner Otting challenges us to embrace this idea in what she calls “Wonderhell”—the space where new success unlocks untapped potential while also bringing doubt, anxiety, and bigger goals. Laura’s journey is a testament to bold reinvention. From dropping out of law school to working in the White House, founding a global executive search firm, and becoming a bestselling author, she’s built a career anchored in core values and fearless decision-making.

Her story is more than a career blueprint; it’s an invitation to rethink how we view success. Laura believes that passion lies in what you’re willing to fail at until you master it and that aligning with your values can transform uncertainty into growth. She reframes midlife as a liberating time to hone skills, grow quietly, and then make your biggest impact. Laura’s insights are a rallying cry to anyone ready to push through discomfort and claim their full potential.

Key Highlights:

1. Rethinking Passion: Passion is what you’re willing to fail at repeatedly until you succeed.
2. Wonderhell Explained: Success reveals untapped potential but also brings doubt and ambition, creating space for growth.
3. Core Values Matter: Staying rooted in your values helps guide decisions and build authentic success.
4. Midlife Opportunity: Laura sees midlife invisibility as a time to refine and prepare for major impact.
5. Leveraging Skills: Past experiences and transferable skills are key to creating new opportunities.

About Our Guest:

Author, Catalyst, and Executive Coach Laura Gassner Otting inspires people to push past the doubt and indecision that keep great ideas in limbo by helping audiences think bigger and accept greater challenges that reach beyond their current, limited scope of belief.

She delivers strategic thinking, well-honed wisdom, and perspective generated by decades of navigating change across the start-up, corporate, nonprofit, political, as well as philanthropic landscapes. Laura dares audiences to find their voice, and generate the confidence needed to tackle larger-than-life challenges by helping them to seek new ways of leading, managing, and mentoring others.

Laura’s rebellious and entrepreneurial edge has been well-honed over a 25-year career that started when she dropped out of law school to join an unknown southern governor’s presidential campaign, and ended up as a Presidential Appointee in Bill Clinton’s White House, where she helped shape AmeriCorps.

She left a leadership role as the youngest Vice President at a nationally respected search firm when she realized that her boss’s definition of success didn’t align with hers and, instead, founded and ran one of the fastest growing search firms in the country, partnering with the full gamut of mission-driven executives, from start-up dreamers to scaling social entrepreneurs to global philanthropists. In 2015, Laura sold that firm to the team who helped her build it, both because she was hungry for the next chapter and because she held an audacious dream of electing our nation’s first female president. (Whomp whomp.)

Since that time, Laura has appeared regularly on Good Morning America and the TODAY Show, and her writing has been seen in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, HR Magazine. Laura is the author of Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life (2019), which debuted at #2 on the Washington Post bestseller list (right behind Michelle Obama), has been translated into Arabic, Korean, Turkish, Portuguese, and German, and which Good Morning America’s

Robin Roberts chose as one of her Favorite Books of 2019, as well as Mission-Driven: Moving from Profit to Purpose (2015). Her latest book, Wonderhell: Why Success Doesn’t Feel Like It Should... and What to Do About It, debuted in April 2023 at #2 on the Wall Street Journal Bestseller List.

Through her own commitment to give back, Laura has helped build a local Montessori school, co-founded a women’s philanthropic initiative, advised a start-up national women’s PAC, grew a citizen-leadership development program, and completed six charity-inspired marathons, projects emblematic of her passions and values. She’s turned on by the audacity of The Big Idea and that larger-than-life goal you just can’t seem to shake. She’s an instigator, a motivator, and a provocateur, and she’s never met a revolution she didn’t like, just ask her enduringly patient husband, two almost-grown sons, and troublesome puppy with whom she lives outside of Boston, MA

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