A speaker who speaks from the heart and who makes a positive impact to lives: driving entrepreneurs, corporate teams, leaders and women to aspire to excel, and to dare to be phenomenal.

Liza Pavlakos is a motivational speaker, business mentor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, author and avid supporter of human rights, particularly of disadvantaged women. Today, she travels the world to mobilize people towards discovering "the diamonds within" each and every one of us, inspiring them to reach for their goals with confidence. Drawing on her own inspiring story of incredible resilience, she motivates audiences, ranging from entrepreneurs to corporate executives and business leaders, to triumph over every obstacle, and to get on the path to success.

Having had to negotiate her way through the most challenging circumstances from a very young age, she made the remarkable journey from a homeless, abused teenager to a self-made millionaire entrepreneur. Aged 23, she pulled-off the daunting task of planning and staging a new international beauty pageant – the Miss India International Pageant – which generated around $100,000 in ticket sales in its very first year. Following this initial success, she took the plunge as a young, self-taught businesswoman, to take over and transform a struggling restaurant and bar, Minibar Piccollo. This became one of the most popular cafés in Melbourne. She similarly transformed Finest Alterations, a floundering clothing alteration and tailoring enterprise, into a profitable five-outlet franchise, which now attracts many celebrity clients.

In 2016, she embarked on her new career as a keynote and motivational speaker, being invited to prestigious events such as the 10th Annual HR Congress (Philippines) and 2016 Miss Earth Coronation Night, among others. Liza is already engaging and inspiring thousands of people at various international events and guiding corporate teams to tap their full leadership potential and to achieve their business goals. Liza speaks are international business conferences, and at companies' internal leadership programmes.  Audiences range from large senior business executives to young aspiring entrepreneurs to audiences of women leaders in business.

Liza has been featured on CNN as a thought leader from Australia, encouraging women to embrace a positive attitude no matter what the situation, have faith in their innate strength and capabilities, and dare to be phenomenal.

Her book "The Diamonds Within" is due to be published in 2018.

Liza lives with her family in Melbourne.

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Recent speaking engagements have included: The WIN Summit in New York (May 2018) where she delivered her "Discover the Diamonds Within"; The ASFA Conference in Sydney, the largest pensions event in the world, addressing an audience of 1,600 banking leaders; The Spark-Up Leadership Conference tour in Africa, held in Benin City, Nigeria, sponsored by Qatar Airways, and with whom she is partnering in 2018 on two further leadership events.

• Discover the Diamonds Within: Her own motivational story proves that it's not the challenges in life but how you handle adversity that defines you. She presents her unique stories of resilience triumphing over unimaginable hardship and adversity, based on the invaluable lessons she learnt from making the phenomenal leap from a homeless adolescent to a millionaire entrepreneur.
• Cultivating a Winning Mindset: Her message that "adversities can be overcome" is one that resonates readily with a wide range of audiences, ranging from young professionals to corporate CEOs, all over the world. By connecting with peoples' hearts, she convinces them that they can succeed, and inspire them to be better corporate leaders to lead their teams to produce better sustainable results.
• Women in Leadership: Her uplifting presentation inspires women who aspire to run a lucrative business venture, but who need trusted guidance from someone who has already been through this herself. Her presentations over actionable tools for optimising their skills and natural talents.