A reflection on delivering the keynote at the International Working Women of Finland Gala, and what it means to speak to a room that has already lived your subject matter.
There’s a particular kind of stage that demands more from a speaker than charisma or a clean slide deck.
It’s the stage where the room already knows.
The IWWOF — International Working Women of Finland Gala was exactly that kind of stage. A sold-out evening. A room full of women who have built careers in a country that wasn’t always built for them. Women navigating two languages, three cultures, and the quiet daily mathematics of being international, professional, and female in Finland – often all at the same time.
You cannot give those women a generic empowerment speech. They have heard them. They have given them. Many of them have lived past them.
What you can do is show up with something honest.
Why I said yes
I rarely talk publicly about which keynotes I accept and which I decline, but it’s worth saying here: I am protective of where I lend my voice as a speaker.
When the invitation came from IWWOF, I said yes immediately, for three reasons.
One, this is my community. As a multilingual professional who built a career between Helsinki and Tashkent, I am one of those international working women. I know the texture of this audience because I am part of it.
Two, IWWOF is a genuine community-building organisation. It is not a logo on a programme. It is a network that has, for years, done the slow, unglamorous work of helping international women in Finland find each other, find work, find footing. That deserves the best I can offer.
Three, gala settings are deceptively hard. People assume “celebratory” means “easy.” It doesn’t. A gala speech has to honour the achievement in the room and push the audience somewhere new – without lecturing, without flattening the joy of the evening, and without overstaying its welcome. That is craft.
What I bring to a keynote stage
Hosting and moderating are about holding a room. Keynote speaking is about moving a room.
It is a different muscle, and one I work on deliberately.
When organisations book me as a keynote speaker, here is what they are buying:
A point of view, not a performance. I do not give one keynote with the names changed. Each talk is built from scratch around the audience, the moment, and the question the organisers actually need their room to leave thinking about.
A multilingual, multicultural lens. I have spoken on stages in Helsinki, Tashkent, Copenhagen, Vaasa and beyond – across English, Russian and Uzbek. I work fluently across Nordic and Central Asian professional contexts, which is increasingly rare and increasingly needed.
Stories that earn their place. I draw from a real working life – moderating water security forums, hosting executive days, marching for women’s rights, raising a four-year-old, building a community across two countries. The stories on stage are not props. They are the working material of someone still in motion.
A working theory of trust. My TEDxVaasa talk argued that trust must not become a casualty of an AI-driven, power-driven world. That argument runs underneath almost every keynote I now give, because it is the question every audience is quietly asking, whether the topic is leadership, diversity, community-building or change.
Calibration to the room. A gala audience needs different energy than a CIO summit. A founders’ room needs different language than a public-sector forum. Reading a room well enough to know what it can absorb, and what it needs, is part of the job, and it starts long before I walk on stage.
What the IWWOF audience reminded me
There is a particular strength that emerges in a room of women showing up for each other, and the IWWOF gala had it in full force.
It is not loud. It is not theatrical. It is the steady, almost businesslike strength of women who have already done the difficult thing of building careers in a country that asked them to translate themselves daily, and who choose, on a Saturday evening, to spend the night celebrating each other instead of resting.
That kind of audience does not want to be inspired. They are already inspiring. What they want is to be seen accurately, addressed seriously, and trusted with something worth thinking about.
That is the bar for any keynote in a room like that. And it should be the bar everywhere.
What this engagement says about how I work
If your organisation is considering booking me as a keynote speaker, the IWWOF Gala is a useful reference point. Here is what it makes visible:
1. I take audiences seriously, especially audiences who have heard it all before. The harder the room is to impress, the more carefully I prepare. Sophistication in the audience is a feature, not a problem.
2. I bring values and craft to the same stage. The two are not separable in my work. A keynote without a value system underneath it is theatre. A value system without craft is a sermon. The job is to deliver both, and to make it look easy.
3. I represent the audiences I speak to, when it matters. I am a multilingual, multicultural, immigrant-origin Finn who has spent years building professional ground in two countries. When I speak to international, intergenerational or cross-cultural rooms, I am not visiting. I am part of the conversation.
4. I work where I am needed, not just where I am paid. Some of the most strategic keynotes in my year are the ones for community organisations, equality forums, and audiences that other speakers bypass. That choice is a feature of how I build a body of work, not a footnote to it.
What I do and what I bring to the rooms I’m hired for
I work as a multilingual event host, moderator, facilitator, keynote speaker, and organisational community-building consultant across the Nordics, Central Asia and beyond.
For keynote bookings specifically, I am a strong fit when your organisation is looking for:
- A speaker who can address sophisticated international or cross-cultural audiences without leaning on cliché.
- A voice on leadership, community-building, trust, equality and the future of work – grounded in real practice, not borrowed frameworks.
- A multilingual presence comfortable on Nordic, Central Asian and global stages.
- Someone who can hold both the gravity and the joy of a moment – galas, anniversaries, leadership offsites, conference openings, equality days, and pivotal organisational moments.
- A keynote that fits inside a longer engagement, a workshop, a facilitation day, a consulting project, when you want the speech to land and then keep working inside the organisation afterwards.
If that sounds like the room you are building, I would love to hear from you.
A final thank you
To IWWOF (International Working Women of Finland) for the invitation, the trust, and the years of community work that made the gala possible. To every woman in that sold-out room who showed up for the others around her. And to the organisers, volunteers and speakers who keep this kind of evening on Helsinki’s calendar.
Rooms like that one are the reason I do this work.
