David Shaft

Every leader has a conversation they're putting off. The underperformer who needs candid feedback. The colleague whose silence has gotten loud. The client who's owed a hard truth and a clear path forward. Most leadership advice tells you to have it. Almost none of it shows you how. After 58+ longform interviews with executives, creators, and culture builders, David has built a working library of the moves real leaders use to start, hold, and land the conversations most people walk away from. This keynote walks through three of them in detail and ends with the Try This Tomorrow framework: one concrete action every attendee runs the next morning, in the actual conversation they came in dreading. Best fit: executives, managers, and HR leaders whose work depends on communication that lands.

The biggest career moves rarely happen in the meeting everyone remembers. They happen in the conversations nobody bothered to track. The way you actually handle a 1:1. The question you risk asking in a team meeting. The line you hold in a hallway when no one's watching. Across 58+ podcast interviews with executives in finance, creative, and culture, the leaders who climbed fastest had the same small habits, and almost none of them were the obvious ones. This leadership keynote names the conversational habits that turn into trust, sponsorship, and authority — not as theory, but as specific reps you can run starting Monday morning. Audiences leave with the Try This Tomorrow framework and one rep tailored to where they're stuck right now. Built for leaders, managers, and operators who'd rather move their career through the quiet conversations than wait for the loud ones.

Most sales training trains the pitch. The best closers know the pitch barely matters. What moves a deal is the discovery conversation that happens before anyone proposes anything, and the version most reps deliver is built to talk, not to listen. As a President's Club banker at Rocket Mortgage, David has spent years on the wrong side of dozens of those calls before fixing them. Add 58+ recorded interviews with executives, creators, and negotiators on the Conversations That Count podcast, and the pattern across high performers is unmistakable. This sales and negotiation keynote walks through the three discovery moves that consistently shift clients from polite interest to a committed yes, with the Try This Tomorrow framework as one specific move every attendee runs in their next discovery call. Best fit: sales teams, account executives, financial advisors, and anyone whose number depends on what happens before the proposal goes out.