Speaking + workshops
Speaking that gets people thinking, talking + doing something differently.
High-energy keynotes and workshops about work, wellbeing, leadership, careers and navigating change.
Sarah Rose
Speaker • Coach • Workplace Wellbeing Strategist
More than a presentation
Good conversations.
Real possibilities.
Sarah Rose brings nearly 20 years of experience in higher education, leadership, coaching, career development and workplace wellbeing to keynotes and workshops designed for one thing:
Helping humans work, lead and navigate life a little better.
These aren’t sit-back-and-listen presentations.
Sarah combines stories, research, humor, reflection, audience interaction and practical tools to help people recognize what’s happening in their own work and lives — and leave with ideas they can actually use.
Whether she’s talking with a room of working professionals about mental load, helping leaders understand what their employees need during uncertain times, or getting college students on their feet thinking differently about careers and leadership, Sarah creates experiences that are human, engaging and refreshingly practical.
For Organizations
Workplace wellbeing
+ leadership.
Today’s employees are navigating a lot.
Changing technology. Higher workloads. Caregiving. Career uncertainty. Financial pressure. Changing brains and bodies. Constant communication. And the expectation that somehow everyone will keep performing as though none of it affects their ability to work.
Sarah’s workplace sessions challenge the idea that wellbeing is something employees should manage entirely outside of work.
Instead, she helps organizations and employees explore a more useful question:
How do we create ways of working that allow people to perform well without continually draining the humans doing the work?
Popular workplace speaking topics
The strategies that worked earlier in our careers don't always work forever.
Responsibilities change. Bodies change. Brains change. Careers change. What matters to us changes.
This energizing keynote helps professionals recognize when their old operating system is no longer serving them and identify practical ways to recalibrate workload, expectations, energy and wellbeing for the season they're actually in.
Great for: Women's conferences, employee resource groups, professional associations, leadership events and workplace wellbeing programs.
It's not always the amount of work that's exhausting.
It's everything we're mentally carrying around the work.
Remembering. Anticipating. Coordinating. Following up. Emotionally supporting. Planning. Checking. Worrying. And becoming the default person because we're good at figuring things out.
This session makes invisible mental load visible and gives women practical ways to evaluate responsibility, protect capacity and stop automatically carrying work that doesn't need to belong to them.
Great for: Women's leadership events, employee resource groups, professional development days and wellbeing programming.
Most conversations about productivity focus on time.
But having an open hour on your calendar doesn't necessarily mean you have an hour of usable capacity.
This session explores the hidden factors affecting energy, attention and performance — and gives employees practical ways to make work feel more sustainable without simply asking them to become more productive.
Great for: Staff development, leadership programs, employee wellbeing events and professional conferences.
When organizations are changing quickly, leaders often focus on explaining what is changing.
Employees may be trying to answer a different question:
What does this mean for me?
This practical leadership session explores clarity, emotional intelligence, psychological safety and the importance of understanding your audience during periods of uncertainty.
Participants learn how to slow down long enough to consider what their team knows, what they may be feeling and what they need in order to move from uncertainty toward meaningful action.
Great for: Managers, department leaders, leadership retreats and organizations navigating significant change.
What if some of the strategies we label as "professionalism" actually make it harder for neurodivergent employees to perform?
This practical session explores executive functioning, attention, motivation, time perception, transitions and cognitive load — and the external structures that can help ADHD brains do great work.
Rather than focusing on fixing people, Sarah helps participants explore how work itself can be designed differently.
Great for: Employee development, neurodiversity programming, managers, HR teams and professional conferences.
For Colleges & Universities
Higher education
speaking + training.
Sarah spent nearly two decades working inside higher education as an advisor, counselor, disability services leader, professor, career professional, trainer and student advocate.
She understands the work because she’s done the work.
Her higher education sessions combine that experience with coaching, career development, leadership, neurodiversity and human-centered approaches to help institutions respond to the changing realities facing both students and staff.
Programming can be designed for faculty and staff, student affairs professionals, advisors and counselors, TRIO programs, student employees, student organizations and student leaders.
Faculty + Staff Professional Development
Students rarely arrive with one clean, easily solved problem.
Academic concerns collide with financial stress, career uncertainty, mental health, family responsibilities, transportation, disability, belonging and dozens of other factors.
The result can be confusing for students — and exhausting for the professionals trying to help them.
This interactive workshop helps teams examine realistic student scenarios from both the student experience and staff experience, identify where roles and handoffs become unclear and find practical opportunities to keep students from falling through the cracks without making every employee responsible for everything.
Great for: Advising, counseling, student success teams, enrollment services, TRIO, student affairs and cross-functional teams.
Students don't necessarily understand our organizational charts.
They simply know they asked someone for help.
This session explores how colleges can create a "no wrong door" experience while still maintaining healthy role clarity and sustainable workloads for employees.
Participants examine communication, handoffs, shared information, role ownership and collaboration through the lens of the student's actual journey.
Higher education professionals have become the catch-all for increasingly complex student needs.
But caring deeply about students doesn't mean one person should carry every problem.
This session explores boundaries, role clarity, emotional load and collaborative student support — helping professionals continue to care deeply without accidentally owning everything.
Career Development + The Future of Work
AI, skills-based hiring, rapidly changing technology and evolving entry-level roles are changing what it means to prepare students for careers.
Sarah helps students and professionals move beyond "pick a major and get a degree" toward a more active approach to career development built around skills, experiences, relationships, experimentation and adaptability.
Sessions can include topics such as:
AI + the future of work • Skills-based hiring • Career exploration • Translating experiences into skills • Networking • Resume strategy • Microcredentials • Building career experiences before graduation • Navigating career uncertainty
Student Keynotes + Leadership Programs
College students don’t need another hour-long lecture telling them leadership is important.
They need a reason to care.
Sarah’s student programming is high-energy, reflective and interactive — designed to help students understand themselves, understand other people and recognize how the experiences they’re having right now connect to their future careers.
Great leadership isn't about having the loudest voice in the room.
It's about understanding the humans in it.
Students explore how knowing themselves, reading a room, understanding what motivates other people and adapting their communication can make them better student leaders now — and stronger employees, managers and community leaders later.
Running a meeting.
Handling conflict.
Planning an event.
Recruiting members.
Managing a budget.
Getting five people who aren't answering their texts to actually show up.
That's not "just a club."
That's experience.
This interactive session helps students translate everyday leadership experiences into the communication, organization, problem-solving, emotional intelligence and leadership skills employers are looking for.
Your career doesn't begin at graduation.
Students explore practical ways to start building skills, relationships, experiences and career evidence while they're still in college — even if they have absolutely no idea what they want to do yet.
What Sarah brings to the room
People participate.
Ideas connect.
Something shifts.
Sarah’s sessions are designed to make people participate, reflect, laugh, talk to each other and leave with something useful.
Depending on the audience and event, sessions may include storytelling, audience polls, small-group challenges, case studies, reflection exercises, movement, coaching questions, real-world scenarios and practical tools participants can use immediately.
Meet your speaker
Meet Sarah Rose.
Sarah Rose is the founder of Fresh Rise Group, a work-life and leadership coach, speaker and workplace wellbeing strategist.
Before launching Fresh Rise, Sarah spent nearly 20 years working across higher education in roles including special education teacher, academic and career advisor, counselor, Director of Disability Services, professor, trainer and consultant.
Today, she brings together that experience with training in coaching, career development, ADHD, emotional intelligence, trauma-informed practice and workplace wellbeing to help people navigate the very human realities underneath performance, leadership and change.
Sarah is especially interested in what happens when we stop asking humans to simply try harder — and start creating smarter ways to work, lead, learn and live.
Let’s talk about your event
Let’s create something your audience will actually remember.
Planning a conference, staff development day, leadership retreat, student event or workplace wellbeing program?
Sarah can customize an existing program or develop a session around the challenges your audience is navigating right now.
Tell me about your audience, what they’re experiencing and what you want them walking away thinking, feeling or doing differently.