Available to book
Elissa Kalver
Resilience
Purpose
Adversity
Build resilience and redefine success with Elissa Kalver, founder of WeGotThis.org, the world’s first nonprofit cancer gift registry. Elissa works with sales teams, healthcare organizations, and nonprofits on resilience, purpose, and workplace culture, drawing on national media coverage and her memoir.
Author
Motivational
Inspirational
Entrepreneur
Philanthropy
Healthcare
Mindset
Personal Development
Podcast
At 34, Elissa Kalver was diagnosed with Stage IV Metastatic Breast Cancer just before her daughter's first birthday. During her fifth round of chemotherapy, she founded WeGotThis.org, the world's first nonprofit cancer gift registry, helping patients ask for what they truly need. She has since written We Got This: How I Learned to Thrive with Terminal Cancer, hosts the podcast Live Like It Matters, and has appeared on Good Morning America, Today, and in People.
Elissa now speaks for sales organizations, financial institutions, nonprofits, and healthcare providers, delivering keynotes including Live Like It Means Something, The Joy Imperative, and Redefining the Win. She has spoken for Amazon, ADP, Babson College, Celonis, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and the Motion Picture and Television Fund, turning her own experience into a working definition of resilience audiences can carry back into their teams.
Elissa's talks move audiences away from grit-and-grind survival mode toward clarity, connection, and a redefined sense of what winning actually means, whether that shows up in a team chasing new goals, a culture recovering from burnout, or colleagues supporting each other through hardship.
Book Elissa to help your organization replace survival mode with purpose, connection, and a sturdier definition of success.
Topics, sessions and talks
Elissa Kalver treats joy as a strategy rather than an afterthought, tracing the mindset shift that took hold once she stopped treating thriving as optional. She teaches individuals and organizations how to put joy at the center of how they lead and live, connecting it directly to energy, engagement, and empathy on a team. Elissa's own story gives the argument weight, reframing what gets measured when a culture takes joy seriously.
Elissa Kalver reframes modern resilience as more than bouncing back, inviting audiences to build forward instead. Drawing on her own diagnosis, she shows how to trade grit-and-grind survival mode for clarity, connection, and purpose-driven action. Elissa's delivery blends candor with warmth, giving teams a working language for leadership and culture that holds up once the applause fades and Monday morning arrives, whether that shows up in how goals get set or how a team recovers from setbacks.
Elissa Kalver challenges the finish-line version of success, helping individuals and organizations build new goals rooted in impact, integrity, and sustainability. She draws on her own experience of redefining what winning means after a life-changing diagnosis, translating that shift into a framework for rethinking achievement in a burnout-prone world. The talk moves audiences toward meaning over metrics, and toward workplaces that value presence as much as performance, long after the keynote ends.
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frequently asked questions
Something we've not covered here?
Email elissa.kalver@getapeptalk.com or call PepTalk on +44 20 3835 2929 (UK) or +1 737 888 5112 (US), and one of our speaker agents will contact you within hours to confirm Elissa's availability and fees. If you can, please include your budget upfront – it helps us fast-track your request. It’s also helpful to know the date, format (virtual or in-person), location, and a bit about your audience.
Elissa Kalver structures her talks around her own experience of being diagnosed with Stage IV Metastatic Breast Cancer at 34, using that narrative arc to move audiences from a grit-and-grind framing of resilience toward a purpose-led model she calls building forward. Each session translates that personal trajectory into a transferable framework — covering joy, resilience, or redefined success — that teams can apply to goal-setting, culture recovery, and leadership after the event ends.
Elissa Kalver speaks on joy as organisational strategy, resilience and purpose-driven leadership, and redefining success beyond conventional metrics. She founded WeGotThis.org, the world's first nonprofit cancer gift registry, following her Stage IV Metastatic Breast Cancer diagnosis at 34, and has since spoken for Amazon, ADP, and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, among others.
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