Speaker profile last updated by AAE Talent Team on 04/29/2025.
Unlocking Your Team's Potential
Many organizations struggle with teamwork, causing role confusion and difficulty balancing individual and collective success. This leads to demotivation and disconnection from the bigger picture. Without a clear team strategy and commitment, organizations face communication breakdowns, trust issues, conflicting work styles, and lack of collaboration, leading to overall failure. Effective teamwork is crucial for success and progress.
In this keynote, JJ Birden leverages his contrasting NFL experiences to provide actionable insights and delivers powerful lessons on building successful teams. He compares the 1993 Kansas City Chiefs, who nearly reached the Super Bowl, with the 1989 Dallas Cowboys, who struggled through a 1-15 season. Through these experiences, he illustrates essential strategies for creating winning teams in any environment.
JJ aims to empower organizations to achieve their goals and cultivate a high-performance culture by translating the principles that made his teams great. This keynote inspires leaders and teams to embrace change, foster growth, and create environments where everyone can thrive.
Key Takeaways:
Being an underdog gives you a STEALTH opportunity to win
In today's fiercely competitive landscape, organizations often find themselves at a perceived disadvantage when pitted against industry giants with larger market shares, extensive budgets, and formidable resources. However, this perceived weakness can be transformed into a strategic advantage with the right guidance. Rather than limiting their growth potential, these organizations can harness their unique strengths to foster alignment, momentum, and ultimately, sustainable growth.
Drawing inspiration from his own journey as an underdog, JJ Birden, a former NFL player and successful business professional, shares invaluable insights in his compelling keynote, "Winning As an Underdog." Despite facing odds stacked against him—where the average NFL player towered over him by 43%—JJ mastered the "underdog mentality," leveraging his perceived shortcomings to fuel his success both on and off the field. Through over a decade of experience in the medical and fitness equipment industries, JJ continued to embody this mentality, defying expectations and achieving remarkable success.
In his captivating keynote, Winning As an Underdog, JJ empowers attendees to embrace their underdog status and capitalize on every opportunity. With a blend of undeniable truths, actionable strategies, and inspiring anecdotes, JJ guides participants through a collaborative experience, showcasing how underdogs can not only thrive but also revolutionize established business norms. Join JJ Birden as he reveals how underdogs are the true catalysts for innovation and change in the business world.
Attendees will walk away:
Success is not going to be given to you--you have to go get it!
Businesses have always aimed to get more out of their people, but it is becoming increasingly hard to provide resources, instruction, and encouragement that actually motivate employees to show up and give their best. To truly succeed in today’s extremely competitive business world, organizations need employees who are genuinely motivated to give their best, improve each day, and do whatever it takes to win. Unfortunately, not everyone has this capacity; JJ Birden does, and he can help anyone develop it, too.
Seize Your Opportunities focuses on the individual and what one must do for success as part of a larger group—no matter the odds, and no matter how much hard work it requires.
As a former NFL wide receiver, JJ knows what it takes to reach the highest level of performance and have the capacity to maintain it. Many of the success principles he learned as a professional athlete have helped him thrive in the business world as an entrepreneur and professional speaker. In this presentation, JJ shares his winning principles and strategies and teaches audiences how to maximize and seize the opportunities in their lives.
Success is not going to be given to you. You have to achieve success; and once you have it, you can't stay at that same level. You have to continue to work to fight mediocrity and complacency. JJ will show you how.
Key Takeaways from Seize Your Opportunity:
• what JJ learned playing with one of the greatest athletes of all time
JJ Birden is a keynote speaker and industry expert who speaks on a wide range of topics such as From the Field to the Boardroom: Building a Winning Team, Winning as an Underdog and Seize Your Opportunities. The estimated speaking fee range to book JJ Birden for your event is $10,000 - $20,000. JJ Birden generally travels from Phoenix, AZ, USA and can be booked for (private) corporate events, personal appearances, keynote speeches, or other performances. Similar motivational celebrity speakers are Rudy Ruettiger, Jim Morris, Rocky Bleier, Eric Boles and Shawn Harper. Contact All American Speakers for ratings, reviews, videos and information on scheduling JJ Birden for an upcoming live or virtual event.
This website is a resource for event professionals and strives to provide the most comprehensive catalog of thought leaders and industry experts to consider for speaking engagements. A listing or profile on this website does not imply an agency affiliation or endorsement by the talent.
All American Entertainment (AAE) exclusively represents the interests of talent buyers, and does not claim to be the agency or management for any speaker or artist on this site. AAE is a talent booking agency for paid events only. We do not handle requests for donation of time or media requests for interviews, and cannot provide celebrity contact information.
If you are the talent and wish to request a profile update or removal from our online directory, please submit a profile request form.