Keynote Speaker · Author · Entrepreneur

Life only makes sense
looking backward.

The moments that change your life rarely announce themselves. They often arrive disguised as just coincidences.

I help people trust that when the life you planned gives way, the one waiting for you is worth finding.

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About Jeanne

Every important thing in my life began with a yes I wasn't prepared to say.

Jeanne Chung

She had a plan. Investment banking. Business school. A husband and kids. An as-expected life.

Then, one by one, the plan gave way — to a yoga class that changed everything, to a yes she said to an off-the-cuff idea about a studio halfway around the world, to opening a boutique hotel on a Thai island, to a brother's stroke that required her to give up everything she'd built and discover what she was actually made of.

To starting over at midlife.

And finally, when she had become someone ready to receive it — to be seen, to be heard, and to be fully loved.

Jeanne Chung is a keynote speaker and author whose life is proof that the detours aren't unfortunate departures from the plan. They're upgrades to it.

She is the daughter of North Korean immigrant parents whose plans and dreams carried her — until she started to say yes on her own.

Speaking

A keynote that changes how your audience sees their own story.

Signature Keynote

Life Only Makes Sense Looking Backward

How saying yes before you're ready unlocks the extraordinary life waiting for you on the other side. For women's conferences, wellness summits, corporate ERGs, and entrepreneurial audiences.

Speaker reel — coming soon

Every person in your audience has had a plan. Then life happened.

This talk is an invitation to reframe a life that didn't follow the plan to the life that was waiting beyond it. Through the stories of one woman's unscripted journey, your audience will discover that coincidences, unpredictable moments, detours — weren't departures from the plan. They were upgrades to it. Your audience leaves not just inspired, but reoriented — with a new way of seeing the life they've already built and the willingness to trust what they can't yet see.

Women's Conferences

Personal growth, reinvention, and the unplanned life

Wellness Summits

Mind-body connection and trusting your full-body yes

Entrepreneurs

Every great business starts with a yes before you're ready

Corporate ERGs

Intellectual depth with emotional resonance — rare and memorable

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The Memoir

Before I Was Ready — the life you couldn't have planned

Part family saga, part adventure story, part love letter, Before I Was Ready follows Jeanne Chung from childhood to adulthood through four essential relationships — her mother, her father, her brother and ultimately herself.

What the title Before I Was Ready insists upon — and what the book delivers — is that readiness was never the point. The yoga studio, an award-winning boutique hotel, the pursuit of motherhood, the guardianship, the grief: none of it arrived on schedule, none of it was planned, and all of it was exactly right in ways she couldn't see until she looked back. This is a book about the extraordinary life that gets built when you don't wait to be prepared — and the hard-won wisdom that makes sense only from the other side.

And after years of saying yes before she was ready, she finally became ready for the thing that mattered most — to be fully seen, fully heard, and fully loved.

Before I Was Ready — a memoir by Jeanne Chung
Expected Fall 2026

Looking Backward to Move Forward

Stories from an unplanned life.

Contact

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