<p>With infectious humor and riveting anecdotes from her extraordinary journeys, Shailee Basnet shares inspiring lessons in courage, leadership, teamwork, and the importance of diversity for success.</p><p>In spite of their proximity to Mt. Everest, not many women in Nepal climb mountains. Shailee Basnet is an exception. After she completed her first summit of the world’s highest mountain, she led the Seven Summits Women Team. Shailee and the other members of the team rotated between summiting and on-the-ground support roles, ultimately completing all seven climbs as a team—making them the world’s first all-female team to scale the highest peak on each continent.</p><p>Today Shailee leads executive leadership treks in the Himalayas and speaks to executives and teams around the world sharing the lessons learned from her epic missions on leadership, teamwork and dealing with conflict together with key takeaways on what makes a team “a force,” why mountain leadership translates so well to business, why the ego must take a back seat to the goal, and why diversity in a team’s makeup is critical to its success.</p><p>Shailee and her team have been featured on news, sports and entertainment media platforms around the world, including the BBC, PBS and ESPN. The 2019 French documentary <em>Les belles envolées</em> tells the story of the team’s journey to “break the glass ceiling” that has kept women from climbing the highest peaks. Shailee has been a guest lecturer for multiple business programs, including the NYU Business program and the Entrepreneurial Master’s Program. She is also in demand as a speaker for international organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations and NGOs, and for non-profits, government and university audiences across the world.</p><p>In addition to her work with business teams and leaders, Shailee runs a program to empower young Nepalese survivors of sex trafficking and encourage more women in Nepal to climb mountains and achieve their dreams. She is also a standup comic in three languages, and she brings her warmth, high energy and sense of humor to deliver inspiring and unforgettable keynotes on teamwork, leadership and motivation.</p>
Leader of the first female team to climb the highest peak on every continent, Seven Summits Women Team
<ul><li><strong>Everest to Empowerment: Leadership Lessons from the Mountains</strong> </li><li>Since making history climbing the world’s tallest peaks, Shailee Basnet has been leading transformative leadership treks in the Himalayas, sharing riveting anecdotes about navigating perilous situations with teams around the world, and running her own nonprofit providing career training to female survivors of human trafficking and other abuses. In each of these endeavors, she has been applying the lessons learned on her climbs to help others, sharing insights that anyone can use to scale any mountain—be it a personal challenge or a professional goal. </li><li>In this speech, Shailee shares her belief that people always have the power to overcome crisis, to chase ambitious goals, and to redefine what is possible—and she gives audiences the tools to apply the lessons of the seven summits, including:<ul><li>Why ego must take a back seat to vision </li><li>Why you’re only as strong as your next step</li><li>When to be patient and wait out a bad weather day, even when you want to keep moving</li><li>Why diversity in a team’s makeup is critical to its success</li></ul></li><li><strong>Everest to Empowerment: Women Helping Women</strong></li><li>Shailee grew up in Kathmandu, where her school had zero sports opportunities for girls. It became her secret passion to play freely one day and discover just what her physical abilities were. In 2008, she defied cultural ideas about what women could do when she set off to become a mountaineer and climbed Mt. Everest. She then led the Seven Summits Women Team: the first all-woman team in the world to climb the highest peak on each continent. </li><li>Shailee now leads a program to educate and train female survivors of human trafficking and other abuse, guiding them toward transformative career paths. The journey started as a personal challenge and has now become a platform to empower the next generation of women.</li><li>In this speech, Shailee applies the lessons learned both on and off the mountain, sharing how women support each other mentally and physically, how we must prioritize expanding opportunities for young girls, and how women in leadership must become the rule—not the exception. </li><li><strong>Everest to Empowerment: Inclusivity Was the Key to Our Success</strong></li><li>When Shailee Basnet joined the Seven Summits Women Team—originally called the First Inclusive Women Sagarmata Expedition—she quickly discovered that her group of ten teammates represented six different cultures and six different languages. In this speech, she explains how her group’s diversity, despite naysayers’ concerns, improved their confidence, strength, and base of knowledge as a team. She discusses how diversity is crucial to any team’s success, and why embracing our differences can help us reach our highest peaks—as individuals and as organizations.</li><li><strong>Risk Management: Preparing for the Worst, Striving for the Best</strong></li><li>How do high-performing teams—whether they’re climbing mountains or making critical business decisions—prepare for and manage risk in order to succeed? Drawing from her own experience leading her expedition teams to climb the world’s highest mountains, sharing riveting anecdotes about navigating perilous life-or-death situations, Shailee offers a five-step risk management framework relevant for anyone facing a challenge or venture. She explains how by Defining Success, Identifying Risks, Preparing, Response-Planning, and Reassessing, individuals and organizations can create optimum results and reach unimaginable heights. </li></ul>