Business Leader | Keynote Speaker |
Strategic Advisor | Mental Health Advocate
YAEL GEFFEN.
MEET YAEL
Aside from having a love affair with sloths, Yael Geffen is the CEO and a shareholder of Lew Geffen Sotheby’s International Realty as well as a member of the Europe, Middle East, India and Africa region task force for Sotheby’s International Realty. She grew up in a real estate dynasty established by her grandmother, Aida, and, prior to joining the family business in 2009, she acquired extensive real estate marketing, brand building and business development experience in the United States.
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Yael is an accomplished public and motivational speaker and her broadcast experience includes hosting and producing her own radio show from 2013 to 2017. Yael is the winner of the 2020 Standard Bank’s prestigious Top Woman in Property Award and is the 2023 winner of Woman of Stature’s CEO of the Year. She was chosen to represent South Africa as a speaker for the World Leaders Summit in November 2021. She is a mental health advocate and is passionate about authentic leadership. Her speaker career highlight is having the honour to interview Dr Edith Eger in 2021. Edith is an Auschwitz survivor and renowned author of worldwide best sellers The Choice and The Gift. Yael featured as a Tedx speaker at Tedx Gresham Place delivering her talk “Make it without Faking it” in November 2022.
Authentic Confidence and Leadership
Leaning into Risk
Teamwork
Effective Self Promotion
Cultivating Clients for Life
Mental Health
Resilience - Reimagining it
​The powerblocks that hold women back
The Cinderella Myth and how we are the ones we have been
waiting for
TOPICS
...her talks are always totally sincere and honest...
Margaret Hirsch
Yael Geffen
What People Say>
WHAT YAEL DOES
In Yael’s latest talk Re-Imagine Resilience, Yael shares her journey of having endured childhood sexual abuse, her brother’s suicide, multiple miscarriages and a divorce with a young baby. Professionally, she took over the group CEO position of a prestigious national brand, after the previous CEO was charged and convicted of murdering his wife at a company event. She is the only female leader, and the youngest CEO of the top 5 real national estate brands in South Africa. Yael inspires the audience to embrace resilience differently.
Her other popular talk is called “Make it without Faking it” which addresses the dilemma “How do we promote ourselves without making ourselves and other’s cringe?”
In this highly enlightening keynote Yael Geffen uses her international business leadership and powerful networking skill set to help guide the audience to build long lasting credibility, develop more meaningful relationships and greater success both inside and outside the workplace. She discusses how we find ourselves caught in a COC “Crisis of Confidence”. Either we self-promote using the adage of ‘fake it till you make it’ but fall short of expectations and come across as arrogant OR we avoid self-promotion all together and never get ahead because we feel it makes us and others uncomfortable.
Her key takeaways are understanding the fundamental difference between self-promotion and self-inflation and giving her audience a war chest to lead with real authority from a place of authentic confidence.