Most keynote speakers leave a room and hope something stuck. I leave a room with data.
For years I have believed that happiness at work is not a mood, it is a skill, and skills can be taught, practiced, and measured. So when event organizers ask me what makes my keynotes different from a typical motivational talk, my answer is simple. I do not just aim to move a room emotionally for an hour. I aim to move a measurable needle, and I check whether it actually moved.
The Tool: The Edo Questionnaire
Before I speak to an audience, and again afterward, I read the same twelve questions aloud, using the Edo Questionnaire, developed by physician scientist Dr. Alphonsus Obayuwana, founder and CEO of the Triple H Project. I use this instrument verbally with his permission. Dr. Obayuwana spent decades studying human hope and happiness, and the Edo Questionnaire, sometimes known as the PISA Scale, was built specifically to produce what he calls a Personal Happiness Index, a real, quantifiable number that can identify where a person or a room falls on a spectrum from languishing to flourishing.
This is not a homemade survey. The Edo Questionnaire has real psychometric credentials behind it, including strong internal consistency and strong test retest reliability, which means it measures what it claims to measure, consistently, across different people and different points in time. Reading the same twelve validated questions aloud before and after my keynote gives me something most motivational content never offers. A real before and after number, not just a felt sense of whether the room enjoyed itself.
Why Twelve Questions, and Why Before and After
A single survey at the end of an event only tells you how someone felt about the talk. It does not tell you whether the talk changed anything inside them. By reading the same twelve Edo Questionnaire items at the start of a session and again at the end, I can see the actual shift in the room’s Personal Happiness Index, not just the applause.
This approach reflects a broader shift happening across the science of workplace wellbeing right now, away from vague, single item satisfaction questions and toward structured, validated, multi item measures that can be tracked over time and tied to real outcomes. The Edo Questionnaire lets me bring that same rigor into a single hour on a stage, using a tool that already carries decades of clinical development behind it rather than something I invented myself.
What This Means for the Organizations That Book Me
If you are planning a conference, leadership offsite, or internal summit, this matters for one practical reason. You are not just buying an hour of stage time. You are buying a way to show your leadership, your board, or your HR team that the investment in that hour actually did something. When I speak, I can hand your organization a clear before and after picture of how the room’s self reported happiness and practical readiness shifted during our time together, using the same twelve questions consistently across every event I do.
This also means my content is never just inspiration. Every habit I teach in the room is chosen because it is testable. If a habit cannot show up as a shift in how someone answers one of those twelve questions, I do not include it in the talk. That discipline keeps my keynotes practical rather than performative.
I bring this same commitment to evidence into everything I offer around a keynote, including my book, *The Future of Work Is Human*. For events that want to extend the experience beyond the stage, I’m happy to include a book signing as part of the engagement, giving your attendees a chance to walk away with something tangible to reinforce the habits and ideas from the talk, and a moment of real, in person connection after we’ve spent an hour building it together in the room.
If your organization wants a keynote that leaves behind more than a good feeling, and instead leaves behind a number your leadership can actually point to, let’s talk about what your audience needs.
alexia@knoxvillehappinesscoalition.com
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