By Mary Tucker | Senior Communications and Content Manager | IAEE

The excitement is building as Expo! Expo! IAEE’s Annual Meeting & Exhibition 2026 heads to the Baird Center in Milwaukee on 16-18 November, and it’s shaping up to be the industry gathering of the year. This is the ONE EPIC EVENT where exhibitions and events professionals from every corner of the business come together under one roof to trade ideas, build partnerships and walk away with powerful tools to level up their coming events.

Whether you’re scouting the exhibition floor for fresh vendors, sharpening your skills in the learning experiences or networking with the industry’s go-getters, Expo! Expo! delivers three days of insight and inspiration you won’t find anywhere else. And this year’s General Session keynote, brought to you by Visit Anchorage, is ready to bring the energy!

Meet Your Keynote Speaker: Judi Holler

If you’ve ever watched a brilliant idea die in a meeting because nobody wanted to be the one to say it out loud, you already understand the problem Judi Holler has built her career around. A USA TODAY bestselling author on a mission to infuse soul into work and strengthen humanity in a digital world, Judi has spent years studying why smart, capable teams freeze up when boldness matters most. More importantly, she’s interested in what actually gets them moving again.

Judi has spent more than 25 years smashing through glass ceilings; first as an executive in the meetings and events space, and then building a thriving speaking and publishing business over the past decade. She’s lived the exact tension between the corporate pressure and creative risk-taking that she now helps others navigate.

Judi’s approach is compelling because of the unlikely combination she brings to the table: hard-won hospitality industry leadership fused with professional improv training. She trained as an alumnus of Second City’s Conservatory in Chicago, and blends that improv background with her spoken-word poetry roots and a 15-year award-winning career in hospitality sales and marketing. The result is a full body experience that global brands like Marriott, Ford Motor Company and Bank of America have sought out, and her ideas have landed in Forbes and Success Magazine.

Judi is also the bestselling author behind “Fear Is My Homeboy” and hosts a top-rated podcast exploring how to take more confident action. When Judi takes the stage at Expo! Expo!’s General Session, expect fewer slides and more moments where the whole room will be a part of the action.

Here, Judi shares an inside look at the HOLLER Method, her framework for building courage and self-trust under pressure, plus how attendees can put it to work the moment they walk out of the ballroom.

You describe courage as something you build, not something you feel first. What’s the smallest action someone can take today to start practicing building courage?

Judi: Pull yourself off autopilot once a day.

So much of life is repetition. We take the same route, sit in the same seat, talk to the same people, make decisions the same way, and then wonder why nothing changes.

Courage is a muscle, and you build it through experimentation. I tell people to keep a simple tracker and ask themselves at the end of the day: How did I get uncomfortable today?

It doesn’t have to be dramatic. Brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand. Sit in the front row. Ask the first question on the Zoom. Wear the color you normally wouldn’t wear. Try the thing you usually avoid.

The goal is to deliberately choose the brave thing over the familiar thing, even in tiny ways. Do that regularly and you start proving to yourself: I can handle unfamiliar. I can move before I feel completely ready.

That’s how courage becomes confidence.

What’s the earliest sign that a team has started “playing it safe” without even realizing it?

Judi: Sameness.

The same people speak. The same ideas get recycled. Meetings become predictable. Energy gets flat. People stop asking questions, challenging assumptions or bringing forward ideas that might not work.

You also start hearing some version of, “That’s just how we do things here.”

Playing it safe can look like:

• People withholding ideas because they don’t feel safe enough to say them out loud.
• Low energy, disengagement and people simply phoning it in.
• A deep resistance to change or experimentation.
• Everyone beginning to talk, think and create the same way.
• Teams copying what everyone else in the industry is doing instead of developing their own point of view.
• Very little evidence that the organization itself is evolving.

Of course you want to retain great people and protect what works. But healthy organizations should still have movement. New perspectives enter. People grow. Roles evolve. Ideas change. Experiments happen.

If everything has looked and sounded exactly the same for years, that’s worth paying attention to. Comfort can quietly become stagnation.

Improv has no script, so how does that translate into a skill people can use in a high-stakes business meeting?

Judi: We can have the strategy, the agenda, the planner and, especially in the events business, a beautiful run of show. Structure matters. Preparation matters. But then something happens that nobody planned for.

That’s life. And that’s improv.

The way I think about improv is people collaborating inside uncertainty with the shared goal of creating something together. That is also a pretty good description of business.

One of the most powerful improv principles leaders can borrow is Yes, And. It doesn’t mean saying yes to everything. It means receiving what is actually happening before immediately blocking it.

Someone brings you an unexpected idea? Get curious before you kill it. A problem appears Monday morning that wasn’t there Friday? Acknowledge the reality and start building from it.

If I walk into my office and suddenly there’s a mountain in the middle of the room, I can spend all day saying, “I don’t climb mountains.” Or I can say, “Okay. Somebody hand me a backpack, some water and some trail mix. Apparently we’re climbing a mountain today.”

There will always be mountains.

The skill is staying open enough, flexible enough and self-trusting enough to work with what shows up.

As AI reshapes so much of the workplace, why do you believe human traits like flexibility and self-awareness are becoming more valuable?

Judi: They’re going to be everything.

I joke that these days I actually love seeing a typo in an email. I love when someone gets a little nervous onstage or there’s an imperfect moment in a presentation because I think, Ahhh, a human made this.

And yes, I use AI. I think these tools can help us research, refine, organize, package and work smarter. But my philosophy is simple: I use AI. AI does not use me.

We cannot outsource our creativity, judgment, taste or point of view to the robots.

What makes someone truly original is everything technology cannot replicate: lived experience, curiosity, perspective, relationships, interests, weird ideas, mistakes, intuition and a life outside of work. All of that comes back into the room with you and influences how you lead and solve problems.

And as uncertainty increases, self-trust becomes even more valuable. You may not always be certain about what is happening around you, but you can become more certain about the person navigating it.

That’s why I come back to three principles:

Know thyself. Be thyself. Lead thyself.

In that order.

Because if you don’t know yourself, it’s difficult to truly be yourself. And if you aren’t being yourself, it’s very difficult to lead yourself or anyone else effectively.

What does it look like when a team gets the HOLLER Method right?

Judi: It looks like movement.

People trust themselves enough to contribute instead of constantly second-guessing. They feel safer bringing forward ideas. There’s collaboration, experimentation, creativity and energy in the room again.

It doesn’t mean everyone is running around being fearless. It means people are willing to move while uncertainty is still present.

You see more openness. Fresher ideas. More initiative. More honest conversations. More willingness to try something, learn from it and adjust.

And yes, you see results.

Because the whole point of this work is activation. Activation creates movement. Movement creates momentum. And momentum creates results.

The quality of an organization’s results is always connected to the humans responsible for creating them. If we want better outcomes, we have to invest in the courage, creativity and self-trust of the people doing the work.

If someone leaves your keynote fired up but the feeling starts to fade by Monday, what’s one habit they can apply to retain that momentum?

Judi: HOLLER at it.

Motivation is wonderful, but motivation fades. Practice is what changes you.

People sometimes tell me, “Your keynote changed my life,” or “Your book changed my life,” and I’m always honored, but I remind them: No, you changed your life. Maybe something I said was the catalyst, but you were the person brave enough to do something with it.

That’s what HOLLER means to me: go scared on purpose.

Make your life a laboratory and run one small experiment every day with your courage, creativity or self-expression. Say the thing. Ask the question. Try the idea. Make the call. Take the different route. Do something that interrupts your autopilot.

We aren’t born confident, courageous or creative and then magically get to keep those qualities forever. We court them. We practice them. We build them.

So don’t try to hold on to the feeling you had in the ballroom.

Do something with it.

That’s how the feeling becomes movement, and the movement becomes part of who you are.

Join the industry’s top pros at the ONE EPIC EVENT that will take you from “okay” to “holla!” – click here to register for Expo! Expo! and get in on the action before the BE SMART registration rate ends on 30 September.

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