Cate Hall

Most of what holds you back isn’t real—it’s unexamined assumptions about what you’re allowed to do. Cate breaks down how to identify the invisible constraints running your life and start dropping them, drawing on her journey from lawyer to poker champion to startup founder to CEO. Audiences leave with a framework for identifying and breaking down fake limitations—and the permission to stop performing who they think they should be.

Everyone is asking which technical skills will survive AI. That’s the wrong question. In a world that’s changing faster than anyone can plan for, the people who thrive won’t be the ones with the best predictions—they’ll be the ones who know how to act. Agency is the antidote to feeling stuck, a way of taking your fate into your own hands, and it’s about to matter more than ever. Cate offers a brass-tacks guide to developing it when you don’t have a playbook.

Every important decision happens with incomplete information, but most of us were trained to wait until we feel certain. As a former top-ranked professional poker player, Cate shares a decision-making framework built for uncertainty: how to know when you have “enough” information, how to tell productive risk from recklessness, and why your biggest mistakes are probably the bets you never made.

Burnout isn’t stress—it’s what happens when you break a sacred pact with yourself. Using the “elephant and rider” framework, Cate explains why burnout doesn’t heal on its own, why your rational mind can’t willpower its way out, and what actually works: figuring out what your elephant needs, and dropping everything to provide it. A talk for anyone who’s pushing through when they should be paying attention.

We worship grit and discipline, but the people who actually transform their lives aren’t the ones who tried hardest—they’re the ones who changed the game. Speaking from five-plus years of addiction recovery, Cate offers a framework for lasting change that replaces white-knuckling with something that actually works: redesigning your environment, rewriting your identity, and making the right thing the easy thing.

The most valuable trait in your best employees is agency—the willingness to figure things out without being told. But most companies say they want this and then build systems that punish it. Cate offers a diagnostic for where your organization is accidentally suppressing initiative, along with specific hiring and management practices that keep your highest-agency people engaged instead of frustrated.