On 18 May 2026, at age 54, Jen Willis became the first Australian living with multiple sclerosis to summit Mount Everest. She is now available to book as a keynote speaker on human performance, identity and change.
Jen’s climb is the headline, but it isn’t the story. Her real subject is what happens to people and organisations when the plan falls apart and they have to find a way forward anyway.
A career built before the mountain
Jen has spent more than 25 years working across education and leadership in Australia and internationally. She has stepped into senior leadership roles inside organisations facing serious challenges, led a school through COVID, managed risk and experiential education at a large international school in South Korea, and lived and led within residential education communities of more than 100 people.
That experience gave her a close view of what sits beneath sustainable performance: the values, relationships, beliefs, behaviours and systems that determine how people and organisations respond under pressure.
She backs it up with academic depth. Jen holds master’s degrees in Education, Business Management and Leadership, and Positive Psychology, and is a trained NLP Trainer and Social and Emotional Intelligence Coach.
Everest, twice
In 2023, Jen reached Everest’s South Col at almost 8,000 metres before her summit attempt ended. She came home carrying what felt like failure, and an unexpected discovery: the summit had become tangled up with who she believed she needed to become.
That failure did more than end a climb. It disrupted her sense of identity and the future she’d imagined for herself.
By the time she returned to Everest in 2026, Jen still wanted to reach the summit. She just no longer needed to. That shift, from needing an outcome to simply pursuing one, is the heart of her keynote work today.
What she speaks about
Jen offers three keynotes, each using her story as the way into bigger questions for audiences:
If She Can Do That… challenges the limits people assume are real but have never actually tested.
How Far Would You Go to Find Yourself? unpacks what happens when change, loss or failure destabilises identity, built around Jen’s own Identity Realignment Cycle.
The Stories That Shape Success takes the same framework to the organisational level, examining the gap between what a workplace says it values and how it actually behaves.
All three are described as deeply human, candid and sometimes confronting, while staying practical for contemporary workplaces.
Book Jen Willis
Jen Willis is available now for corporate events, conferences and leadership offsites. Contact us to check her availability and discuss your event.