Khaliah Guillory
World's Leading Expert on Performance, Wellness & Leadership
Khaliah Guillory
World's Leading Expert on Performance, Wellness & Leadership
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Biography
Khaliah O. Guillory has spent two decades leading high performance teams and sitting with the uncomfortable truth about what chronic overperformance does to people. As a former Vice President and Marketing Strategy Manager at a Fortune 100 financial services company and former NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Team Captain at the University of Central Florida, she did not observe high performance from a distance. She led it, managed it, and eventually had to face what chronic overperformance was quietly doing to the people responsible for delivering it.
Khaliah created Performance Rehab™ Methodology because she lived the gap between what organizations ask of their people and what they give them to sustain it. Today, Khaliah helps global organizations redesign the culture around performance through innovation, technology, and human centered leadership, creating environments where people can think clearly, lead well, and sustain the kind of output that does not come at the expense of their health or their humanity.
She is a Certified Sleep Coach, TEDx Speaker, Forbes-featured thought leader, and the creator of the Performance Rehab™ blueprint. She is also an avid napper who has made nervous system recovery a serious business conversation on stages worldwide.
Her thought leadership has reached organizations including but not limited to United Airlines, Microsoft, Synchrony Bank, Shell, NASA, and LinkedIn. She has been featured in Forbes, Essence, Sleep.com, The Houston Business Journal, and ABC News.
Khaliah is the recipient of the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award, and October 29th has been declared Khaliah O. Guillory Day in recognition of her philanthropic impact and service to the community. Khaliah Guillory works in partnership with APB Speakers for speaking engagements worldwide.
Speaker Videos
Wellness Keynote
Sizzle Reel
Culture & Performance
Leadership
Khaliah O. Guillory | University of Houston Downtown Commencement Speaker 2018
Speech Topics
Performance Rehab™: Rehabbing the Culture Around Performance
Most organizations are not struggling with talent. They are struggling with the conditions built around their talent.
Performance Rehab™ is the keynote that names what most organizations have been circling for years without ever landing on. Your people are not the problem. The system they are performing inside of is. This keynote gives leaders a blueprint for diagnosing what is draining performance at the organizational level and redesigning the conditions that make sustained high performance possible. Khaliah weaves lived leadership experience and her proprietary rest technology into a session that reframes how organizations think about performance entirely. Not just what it produces. What it demands. And what it extracts when the conditions around it are never addressed.
PARTICIPANTS LEAVE WITH
A blueprint for diagnosing what is draining performance at the organizational and team level.
A clear understanding of how leadership behavior either protects or quietly depletes the people responsible for delivering results.
Specific, actionable next steps for redesigning the conditions around performance, not just the people inside them.
The Human Layer: Culture and Leadership Are Your Competitive Advantage or Your Biggest Liability
The gap between the culture organizations say they have and the one people feel every day is exactly where trust goes to die.
The Human Layer is the keynote that gets into the gap between what is posted on the breakroom wall and what people feel walking down the hallway and gives leaders a blueprint for closing it in a way that lasts.
Every organization has a stated culture and a lived one. Khaliah examines the daily behaviors, leadership patterns, and structural decisions that shape what culture feels like on the ground, regardless of what the values wall says.
PARTICIPANTS LEAVE WITH
A way of reading the culture they are inside of that goes beyond surveys and town halls.
Specific leadership behaviors that either widen or close the culture gap at the team and organizational level.
A starting point for building culture that is felt, not just posted.
The Recovery Edge: The Science Behind High Performance
Most organizations are getting about sixty percent of their people. The other forty percent is sitting in the recovery gap.
The Recovery Edge connects the neuroscience of performance to the leadership decisions that either protect human capacity or quietly drain it one quarter at a time. When rest and recovery are designed into the system rather than treated as optional, everything changes. Decision quality improves. Creative capacity returns. Leadership presence shows up consistently instead of only on good days. Most organizations have been treating wellness as a perk. This keynote makes the case that it belongs on the balance sheet.
PARTICIPANTS LEAVE WITH
A grounded understanding of what the neuroscience of recovery means for the leadership decisions they are making every week.
Specific leadership behaviors and structural decisions that protect human capacity rather than drain it.
A blueprint for building recovery into how the team operates rather than treating it as something people have to find on their own time.
Performance Rx: The Prescription for Sales Leaders and High Performers Carrying a Number That Keeps Getting Bigger
There is a version of high performance that wins every award and exhausts the person holding them.
Khaliah knows that gap firsthand. As a former Vice President at a Fortune 100 company, overseeing a billion-dollar book of business, she lived at the intersection of elite sales performance and personal depletion long enough to know that one eventually destroys the other if nobody intervenes.
Performance Rx is for the top performer, the sales leader, and the high achiever who has been hitting every number, leading every initiative, closing every deal, while quietly running on empty longer than they want to admit. Khaliah shares the negative impact of those demands at the individual level.
The decisions made on empty. The creativity that stopped showing up. The version of yourself that used to walk into a room and command it, and somewhere along the way got replaced by the version that just gets it done and goes home exhausted.
This keynote is the prescription nobody gave you when they handed you the quota.
PARTICIPANTS LEAVE WITH
A clear read on where their performance has been running on habit rather than intention, and what that shift has been doing to their output and their leadership.
A concrete starting point for reclaiming the version of themselves that leads with energy, not just effort.
Permission to treat their own recovery as a professional responsibility rather than a personal luxury.
Workshop: Culture By Design
The Human Layer gives leaders a blueprint for understanding the distance between the culture on the wall and the one people feel walking down the hallway. Culture by Design is where that blueprint becomes a plan. This is the workshop where teams stop describing the gap and start doing something about it.
Culture is the lived experience of what it feels like to work inside your organization on a Tuesday afternoon when everything is on fire. In this workshop, leaders get direct about the gap between the culture they say they have and the one their people are operating inside. Khaliah guides teams through a practical examination of the behaviors, structures, and leadership patterns that either support people or quietly strain them. The output is not a culture deck. It is clarity about what needs to change and a shared language for making that change sustainable.
WHAT WE COVER
How to read the gap between the stated culture and the lived one using real data from inside the room.
The leadership behaviors that build culture and the ones that quietly erode it, even when intentions are good.
How to design cultural agreements that are specific enough to be held accountable.
A shared language for the culture conversation that people can take back into their teams and use on Monday morning.
A 90-day accountability structure so the work does not stop when the workshop ends.
Workshop: The Rehab Room
Performance Rehab™ diagnoses the system. This is where the work gets done.
Performance Rehab™ gives organizations a blueprint for understanding what is draining performance at the system level. The Rehab Room is where that blueprint becomes a working plan. This is not a debrief of the keynote. It is the next step.
Most organizations leave a keynote energized and return to the same environment that created the problem in the first place. The Rehab Room closes that gap.
Khaliah guides leaders through a structured examination of the conditions, behaviors, and systems that are either supporting performance or quietly working against it, and the session does not end until there is a plan on the table that people can act on.
WHAT WE COVER
A live diagnostic of the current performance environment using real input from the people in the room.
The organizational conditions that protect human capacity and the ones that drain it one decision at a time.
How to identify the gap between what the organization asks of its people and what it gives them to deliver it.
Leadership behaviors and structural decisions that either compound pressure or create the conditions for sustainable performance.
Workshop: The Performance Refill
Where the science of recovery meets the reality of what sustained high performance requires.
The Recovery Edge makes the business case. Performance Rx names the personal consequences. The Performance Refill builds the protocol.
You have been taught to perform in a way that is slowly making you less effective. The pace, the pressure, the expectation to deliver at a high level without ever fully recovering from the last thing it compounds. And most organizations have never given their people a structured way out of it.
The Performance Refill is where that changes. Khaliah draws on sleep science, neuroscience, and two decades of lived leadership experience to build something in the room that most high performers have never been given: a structured, science-backed recovery protocol designed around their schedule and demands. Not an aspirational wellness plan. An operational system for refilling the capacity that sustained high performance requires.
WHAT WE COVER
The neuroscience of performance depletion and what is happening inside the brain and body when recovery is consistently skipped and how fast the damage compounds.
The four recovery gaps most high performers are living inside right now: sleep debt, cognitive overload, emotional dysregulation, and decision fatigue.
How to design recovery into schedule, not around it, including meeting structures, micro-recovery protocols, and boundaries that protect capacity without killing productivity.
A Personal Recovery Audit every participant completes during the session with data about where their capacity is being drained and where it can be rebuilt.
Organizational recovery protocols leaders can implement immediately within their teams.