WORKING
WITH SHASTA
Common questions about booking Shasta Nelson as a keynote speaker on friendship, trust, connection, and belonging at work — audience sizes, formats, customization, research, and availability.
What size and type of events does Shasta typically speak for?
Most of Shasta’s audiences range from 500 to 2,000 people, though she’s keynoted conferences as large as 10,000. Some of her favorite sessions are the opposite end of that spectrum — a dozen people in a room, ready to workshop, get vulnerable, and actually bond. Whatever the size, Shasta speaks on friendship, trust, and connection at work — and adjusts the format, not the science, to fit the room.
Does Shasta customize her talks for our industry or audience?
Yes — and it starts with speaking your language, literally. For radiologists, the framework becomes the x-ray of a friendship. For financial planners who can read a portfolio’s health from its assets and liabilities, she shows which three metrics determine the health of a relationship portfolio. For mechanics, she lifts the hood and shows them exactly how the engine runs.
That’s the hook, not the whole job. From there Shasta digs into what your people are actually facing — the shift work, the client load, the turnover, the remote teams, whatever the real relational strain is in your industry — and builds the examples, the language, and the application around it.
She has dedicated programs for associations and conferences, healthcare, technology, customer experience, financial services, women’s leadership events, and construction, engineering and safety.
What’s the difference between Shasta’s keynote topics — how do I pick?
All of Shasta’s keynotes teach the same research-backed foundation — The Three Requirements of Relationship™ — and every audience walks out with both the data on why relationships matter and a practical framework for building them. The real difference is the angle of application:
The Science of Friendship at Work — applied to workplace culture and team performance
The Connected Leader — applied to leadership, and the relationships leaders themselves need
Relationally Fit — applied to personal well-being and a longer, happier life
Not sure which fits? Tell Shasta your organization’s biggest relational gap, and she’ll customize accordingly.
Can Shasta do a workshop or half-day session, not just a keynote?
This is one of Shasta’s favorite questions to answer, because full-day work with a team is what she loves the most. She’s always happy to take another 15 minutes to facilitate connection with your people or 4 more hours to go deeper with assessments and concrete plans. It’s remarkable how often a group wishes they’d booked more time — more questions, more real evaluation, more actual team-building. A full day is easy to fill and keep energizing, meaningful, and directly relevant to the room. If your event has room for it, ask about the off-site and all-hands formats built for exactly this.
Learn more about Shasta's All-Hands Gatherings and Off-Site Team and Organization Belonging.
What’s it like to actually work with Shasta before and during the event?
Fortunately, Shasta believes it would be a little absurd to teach relationship-building for a living and then be difficult to reach.
So the practical version: she answers her own email. She’ll get on a call before the event to learn what’s actually going on with your people — not to run through a script, but because the talk gets better when she knows what the room is walking in carrying. She’ll ask about your theme, your other speakers, and what happened last year that you’re hoping to avoid. She shows up early. She’s kind to your AV team.
And she doesn’t just show up for the keynote. Whenever she can, Shasta stays for the reception, sits at the table, joins the hallway conversations, and takes the time to actually meet people — partly because that’s the job, and partly because it’s genuinely her favorite part. Her view is that her job isn’t to deliver a talk, it’s to make your event successful, and a lot of that happens off the stage.
One thing worth mentioning, since she’d never say it herself: Shasta will be the first to tell you that friendship takes “200 hours” and can’t be rushed. Her clients keep introducing her as “our new friend Shasta” anyway.
Is Shasta available? How far in advance do we need to book her?
Shasta’s calendar typically starts filling up six months out — but that doesn’t mean she’s unavailable for a last-minute need next week! It never hurts to ask so reach out with your preferred date and she’ll let you know as quickly as possible whether your date is available.
Does Shasta’s work on friendship also address trust?
It doesn’t just address trust — it explains where trust comes from. Trust isn’t a personality trait or a value statement on a wall. It’s what accumulates when three specific things are present, and it’s what erodes when one goes missing.
Those three are the same requirements every healthy relationship runs on:
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Positivity — I experience you as someone who means me well
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Consistency — I have enough of a track record with you to predict what you’ll do
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Vulnerability — I’ve let you see something real, and you didn’t use it against me
Take away any one and trust stalls. The colleague who’s warm and open but unreliable. The one who’s dependable but never real. The one who knows everything about you and makes you regret it.
Here’s the part that surprises leadership audiences: psychological safety — the most rigorously studied construct in organizational research, and the single strongest predictor of team effectiveness in Google’s Project Aristotle — contains all three by definition. Amy Edmondson defines it as a shared belief (that’s consistency; a shared belief can’t form in one interaction) that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking (vulnerability) without fear of embarrassment, rejection, or punishment (positivity).
Psychological safety isn’t a separate thing from friendship science. It’s what these three requirements look like when they show up on a team.
Which is why Shasta’s work is practical where most trust conversations aren’t. Google’s research proved psychological safety matters; it didn’t explain how to build it. Naming the three requirements gives leaders something to actually diagnose — and Shasta’s Relational Results assessment measures each one separately, so a team can see which of the three is missing rather than being told to “build more trust.”
What’s the difference between a “connection” speaker and a “friendship” speaker?
If you’re looking for a connection speaker, this is the right page. But the distinction is worth understanding, because it’s the difference between a talk your people enjoy and a talk that changes something.
“Connection” and “belonging” are the words the workplace conversation has landed on, and for good reason — they name something real that people are missing. The trouble is they’re abstract. You can’t assign connection. You can’t measure belonging directly. Most talks on these topics leave a room feeling inspired and slightly unsure what to do Monday morning, because the subject was named without ever being made concrete.
Friendship is the concrete version. It’s the specific, observable, buildable form that connection takes between two actual people — and it’s the one the research can actually measure. When Gallup wanted to find the item that most predicted engagement, they didn’t ask whether employees felt a sense of belonging. They asked whether they had a best friend at work. That question predicted 7x higher engagement, lower turnover, and fewer safety incidents.
When Shasta’s own assessment ran with a Fortune 500 company, employees who described a coworker as “one of my closest friends at work” scored 35% higher across every relational measure than those who described their coworkers as strictly professional.
Belonging is what people feel. Friendship is what produces it.
So if your goal is a room that leaves feeling connected, plenty of speakers can do that. If your goal is a room that leaves knowing what specifically to do — which of three requirements their relationships are missing, and what to change — that’s what fifteen years of friendship research buys you.
Same subject. One is the outcome; the other is the mechanism.
What research does Shasta’s work draw on?
Both established science and her own data. Shasta draws on some of the most respected research available — Gallup and BetterUp on workplace engagement, the Harvard Study of Adult Development on lifelong happiness, and Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s public health research showing that lacking social connection carries health risks comparable to smoking. She layers in 15 years of her own data on top of that: qualitative insight from thousands of relationship coaching and facilitation conversations, plus quantitative results from her Relational Results workplace assessment and the 10,000+ people who’ve taken her Frientimacy quiz. Most recently, as Chief Friendship Officer of the U.S. Chamber of Connection, Shasta helped lead a 2026 national study identifying the Six Points of Connection that distinguish the lives of people who are genuinely socially thriving. She calls herself a relationship data geek for a reason — every keynote is backed by real numbers, not just stories.
CLICK HERE TO SEE A SAMPLING OF SHASTA'S RESEARCH LIBRARY
How is Shasta different from other speakers on connection and belonging?
Shasta has been studying, researching, writing, and speaking about friendship and connection for over 15 years — across four books, 500+ keynotes, and thousands of real coaching conversations.
But the roots go back further than that. In her twenties, she was a pastor — building community was her actual job. In her thirties, she founded a friendship-matching platform, which meant spending the better part of a decade watching at scale what actually makes strangers become friends, and what makes friendships quietly fall apart. She was doing this work long before connection and belonging became conference themes.
That’s the real difference. Most speakers in this space arrived at connection from somewhere adjacent — leadership, culture, psychology, burnout. Shasta started here. Friendship has been her singular subject for her entire career, not an application of a different one.
She brings original data: a proprietary workplace assessment that measures how connected an organization actually feels, 10,000+ people who’ve taken her Frientimacy quiz, and a research framework audiences consistently say they wish they’d heard years earlier. She’s the friendship expert journalists call when they need someone who knows the research —including the USA Today, New York Times, and Harvard Business Review.
Warm and genuinely fun onstage. But she treats the subject as serious, measurable business. And for what it’s worth: Shasta is a fan of anyone bringing connection into the workplace conversation — the world needs all of us, and then some. If she’s not the right fit for your event, or not available, she’s friends with several excellent speakers in this space and is more than happy to recommend someone else.
