AS FEATURED BY
STORYTELLING IS MY POWER
If you need a speaker who will keep your audience engaged and inspired, bring awareness to your cause, move your audience to action and increase your prestige, then you need Basirat.
Basirat believes that stories bring data to life, offers us deeper connection and has the power to bridge divides.
KEYNOTE & TRAINING TOPICS
Using a combination of research evidence, lived experience, practice knowledge and anecdotes, Basirat speaks on subjects including courage in leading self and others, inclusive leadership, women in leadership, mothers' emotional well-being and disability-inclusive education.
Signature topics include:
Current leadership systems have become inadequate and leaders feel the impact not just in their organisational results but in themselves, the way they feel disconnected, misaligned, and inauthentic. This keynote challenges traditional leadership approaches that have rewarded comfort, staying quiet, protecting the status quo, and avoiding hard conversations. It calls to question leadership assumptions that performance is proof of integrity, that ambition and humanity are in tension, and that the most important leadership decisions are the public ones. Drawing from two decades of cross-sector experience, Cambridge research, and her own story of leading through fear, grief and self-doubt, Dr Basirat provides the audience with a clear language for the gap between their values and their decisions, a framework for making courageous choices in high-pressure environments, and a renewed understanding of what it means to lead as a whole person, not just a high-performing one.
Authentic inclusion comes with real costs: time, resources, uncomfortable truths, and sometimes, turnover. Most leaders stop there. Dr Basirat flips the question: what does exclusion cost? Drawing on her PhD research and board-level experience, she quantifies both sides of the ledger and shows why the ROI of genuine inclusion far outweighs the price of doing nothing. This talk is for leaders ready to stop performing inclusion and start investing in it.
When external uncertainty peaks, internal clarity becomes your greatest asset. This talk goes beyond the generic “leadership frameworks” to focus on self-leadership: the daily practice of aligning your values, voice, and actions before you attempt to lead anyone else. Dr Basirat combines Cambridge research, real-world boardroom examples, and reflective exercises to help you listen to your inner teacher, reduce decision fatigue, and lead with authenticity even when the ground shifts beneath you.
In this talk, Dr Basirat names what most organisations tiptoe around: mothers in leadership are burning out, stepping back, or leaving entirely, not because they lack ambition, but because the status quo demands they perform as if caregiving doesn’t exist. The damage doesn’t stop with the individual. It fractures the entire female leadership pipeline starting from accomplished women leaders who decide the C-suite isn’t worth the cost, to mid-career mothers who opt out, to emerging senior women who leave and never return. Drawing on research and real-world cases, Dr Basirat reveals the hidden pattern of attrition, guilt, and silent exits. Then she gives you a practical roadmap to retain and elevate maternal leaders, without forcing them to choose between their child and their chair, and a strategy to rebuild a leadership pipeline that actually works for women.
The gap between what education promises and what disabled learners experience remains vast. Dr Basirat draws on research, policy analysis, and lived-experience leadership to map exactly where the system breaks down and how leaders can begin to fix it. This talk moves beyond compliance and accommodations to ask: what would genuinely equitable education look like? Using critical provocations, she provides practical frameworks, and a clear call to action for educators, policymakers, and institutional leaders.