For our guest, food is where his story began, working in his uncle's grocery store from an early age. After college, he returned to Jamaica to run his uncle's food manufacturing plant before eventually making his way back to Canada to build a career in sales. 

Then the economic downturn of 2008 arrived, and with it, a pull back toward his entrepreneurial roots that he could no longer ignore. What followed started with a single article in a magazine, one recipe, and a university food lab.

Today he runs a Jamaican hot sauce business built on a commitment to authenticity that goes back to the soil, truly farm to table before that phrase became a trend.

#pivotalmoment #entrepreneurship #roots #niceitup

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Lesley Hawkins is a keynote speaker, leadership developer, and storyteller who believes that our most defining moments are rarely the ones we plan for. 

 Drawing on years of experience leading, guiding, and mentoring teams, Lesley brings authenticity, curiosity, and genuine warmth to every conversation, creating space for guests to share the stories they don’t always get to tell. 

 One question. One turning point. One powerful story. 

 To learn more about Lesley visit www.lesleyhawkins.ca / www.marsley.ca

She was climbing the corporate ladder, working all hours of the day and night, but one question kept surfacing: Is this all there is?

So she did something radical by stepping away from everything, sold her house, left her career, and spent a year at a monastery learning about ancient wisdom. What she found in that silence was the emotions she had carried for decades, rooted in an unimaginable childhood trauma, that led to a long and painful work of grief, anger, survivor's guilt, forgiveness.

What she chose to do with all of that is what makes her story remarkable.

Today she runs a company in the mental wellness space, bringing what she learned in her darkest moments into the workplace. Because we have always known, even if we rarely say it out loud: we don't leave work at the office. And we don't leave home at the door.

This is a conversation about what happens when you finally stop running. About the courage it takes to face what's been buried. And about turning the heaviest parts of your story into a lifeline for others.

#pivotalmoment #mentalhealth #letthatshitgo

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Lesley Hawkins is a keynote speaker, leadership developer, and storyteller who believes that our most defining moments are rarely the ones we plan for. 

 Drawing on years of experience leading, guiding, and mentoring teams, Lesley brings authenticity, curiosity, and genuine warmth to every conversation, creating space for guests to share the stories they don’t always get to tell. 

 One question. One turning point. One powerful story. 

 To learn more about Lesley visit www.lesleyhawkins.ca / www.marsley.ca

Our guest built a career she loved, working freelance across entertainment, sports, and news media. Then the pandemic arrived. And like so many in her industry, everything went quiet overnight.

So she did what felt natural. She went into hyper-drive. Lots of calls, emails. More and more outreach. Chasing every opening, knocking on every door.

And every rejection hit harder than the last.

So she made a decision that went against every instinct, and every piece of advice she had ever been given. She stopped. She calls it the anti-pivot. Less hustle, less noise, less chasing. And instead more focus on the pause.

What she found in that stillness is still unfolding.

This is a conversation about the courage it takes to sit with uncertainty and what opens up when you choose stillness over hustle. 

#pivotalmoment #stillness #humanconnection

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Lesley Hawkins is a keynote speaker, leadership developer, and storyteller who believes that our most defining moments are rarely the ones we plan for. 

 Drawing on years of experience leading, guiding, and mentoring teams, Lesley brings authenticity, curiosity, and genuine warmth to every conversation, creating space for guests to share the stories they don’t always get to tell. 

 One question. One turning point. One powerful story. 

 To learn more about Lesley visit www.lesleyhawkins.ca / www.marsley.ca

We tell ourselves it doesn't happen here. Not in our neighbourhood. Not behind those doors. Not to someone like her.

But domestic abuse doesn't announce itself. And for our guest, it wasn't just her own story, it was a pattern that had quietly shaped the generations before her.

Until she chose to make it stop.

Finding herself in a domestic abuse situation with children to protect, she had to rebuild physically, emotionally, and financially, not just for herself, but for them.

In the hardest season of her life, she found Yellow Brick House. A place where she felt safe, where she felt seen, with three simple words “I believe you”. The community offered a quiet, steady reminder that she was not alone, and that support changed everything.

This is a conversation about survival, courage, and the extraordinary strength it takes to break a cycle. And about what becomes possible when you refuse to let the past write the future.

#pivotalmoment #domesticabuse #survivor

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Lesley Hawkins is a keynote speaker, leadership developer, and storyteller who believes that our most defining moments are rarely the ones we plan for. 

 Drawing on years of experience leading, guiding, and mentoring teams, Lesley brings authenticity, curiosity, and genuine warmth to every conversation, creating space for guests to share the stories they don’t always get to tell. 

 One question. One turning point. One powerful story. 

 To learn more about Lesley visit www.lesleyhawkins.ca / www.marsley.ca

Hockey was never just a game for our guest. It was in his blood. Growing up, he had one dream: to one day be the voice on Hockey Night in Canada.

But life had a different play in mind. He found himself in sales, comfortable but restless, knowing he wanted something different.

Then an unlikely opportunity appeared: to buy a bankrupt hockey stick manufacturer. And despite not having any experience in manufacturing, something in him said yes. 

Through creativity, hard work, and the kind of relationship building that never goes out of style, he has built a business that has taken him right back to the heart of the game he always loved.

#pivotalmoment #hockey #livingthedream

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Lesley Hawkins is a keynote speaker, leadership developer, and storyteller who believes that our most defining moments are rarely the ones we plan for. 

 Drawing on years of experience leading, guiding, and mentoring teams, Lesley brings authenticity, curiosity, and genuine warmth to every conversation, creating space for guests to share the stories they don’t always get to tell. 

 One question. One turning point. One powerful story. 

 To learn more about Lesley visit www.lesleyhawkins.ca / www.marsley.ca

As a teenager, our guest was a high-performance athlete. Her body was strong, capable, built for competition. Then it started to change and what followed was a battle with an eating disorder that reshaped not just her relationship with her body, but her understanding of the forces working against young people every single day.

Because this isn't just a personal story. It's a much bigger one.

She has spent her career speaking to youth about the devastating impact of cultural norms, societal systems, and more recently, the impact of social media on mental health. And she is not mincing words. The youth are not alright. And the platforms designed to connect us are doing something far more sinister by feeding an addiction, one scroll at a time.

This is a conversation about activism, feminism, and protecting our youth loudly and unapologetically.

#pivotalmoment #lovetheskinyourein #selflove

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Lesley Hawkins is a keynote speaker, leadership developer, and storyteller who believes that our most defining moments are rarely the ones we plan for. 

 Drawing on years of experience leading, guiding, and mentoring teams, Lesley brings authenticity, curiosity, and genuine warmth to every conversation, creating space for guests to share the stories they don’t always get to tell. 

 One question. One turning point. One powerful story. 

 To learn more about Lesley visit www.lesleyhawkins.ca / www.marsley.ca

Some people wait for the perfect moment to pursue an idea. Our guest decided that maternity leave was hers. While most people use that time to simply survive the newborn stage, she used it to quietly build a two-sided marketplace gig platform that had been living in her mind, waiting for its moment.

But having an idea and actually making the leap are two very different things. So she returned to corporate life, back to the world of advertising she knew well. Until her agency offered a one-month sabbatical, and something in her knew, this was the moment.

She took the leap.

Since then, her platform has captured more than 1,500 events. But the road from idea to execution has been anything but smooth. Scaling a tech business means moving beyond the comfort of your inner circle. It means sitting with failure in a way that feels entirely different when you're the founder, when it's your vision, your name, and your mental health on the line.

This is a conversation about reinvention, the gap between a great idea and the courage to act on it, and what entrepreneurship really costs.

#pivotalmoment #entrepreneurship #shutterb

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Lesley Hawkins is a keynote speaker, leadership developer, and storyteller who believes that our most defining moments are rarely the ones we plan for. 

 Drawing on years of experience leading, guiding, and mentoring teams, Lesley brings authenticity, curiosity, and genuine warmth to every conversation, creating space for guests to share the stories they don’t always get to tell. 

 One question. One turning point. One powerful story. 

 To learn more about Lesley visit www.lesleyhawkins.ca / www.marsley.ca

Our guest was a business owner. Driven, entrepreneurial, building her own social media company. Then she met a client and what started as a business relationship led to a vacation in the Caribbean. But when she returned to Canada, she was arrested with 2kg of cocaine strapped to her body.

What followed was a period of her life she never anticipated: a 4-year prison sentence. Behind those walls, with everything stripped away, she came face to face with herself. And she made the choice to rebuild. To rebuild her health, her family, her community, and her life.

Today, her popcorn company is on the shelves of more than 1,300 stores across Canada. And many of the people she hires are walking the same road back that she once walked herself.

This is a conversation about second chances. About rebuilding from the ground up. And about how the hardest chapter of your story can become the foundation for something extraordinary.

#pivotalmoment #prison #popcorn #comeback

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Lesley Hawkins is a keynote speaker, leadership developer, and storyteller who believes that our most defining moments are rarely the ones we plan for. 

 Drawing on years of experience leading, guiding, and mentoring teams, Lesley brings authenticity, curiosity, and genuine warmth to every conversation, creating space for guests to share the stories they don’t always get to tell. 

 One question. One turning point. One powerful story. 

 To learn more about Lesley visit www.lesleyhawkins.ca / www.marsley.ca

From the outside, our guest was living the life. A beautiful family, a career as an executive in the public sector with upward momentum. She had the kind of résumé that screamed success, prestige, power.

But something was off. A persistent, uncomfortable feeling that the life she had built wasn't quite the life she was meant to live.

So she did something that took equal parts clarity and conviction. She stepped away, taking an unpaid sabbatical for a full year, to finally get quiet enough to listen.

And what she heard changed everything.

This is a conversation about the gap between a successful life and a fulfilling one. 

#pivotalmoment #innervoice #passion 

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Lesley Hawkins is a keynote speaker, leadership developer, and storyteller who believes that our most defining moments are rarely the ones we plan for. 

 Drawing on years of experience leading, guiding, and mentoring teams, Lesley brings authenticity, curiosity, and genuine warmth to every conversation, creating space for guests to share the stories they don’t always get to tell. 

 One question. One turning point. One powerful story. 

 To learn more about Lesley visit www.lesleyhawkins.ca / www.marsley.ca

His father opened a sports store in Toronto, and from an early age, the family business wasn't just where he worked, but where he grew up.

But not everything built with love is easy to sustain. So he walked away, not from the work, but to save the relationship that mattered most. 

He forged his own path in entrepreneurship, until his father called him back. This time, not to run the business, but to sell it.

Then came the hardest transition of all. Learning, for the first time, to work for someone else. What followed was a masterclass in people leadership, built on a foundation his father had laid years before.

This is a conversation about family, identity, and a legacy that has nothing to do with what you sell and everything to do with how you make people feel.

#pivotalmoment #family #leadership #legacy

Send us Fan Mail

Lesley Hawkins is a keynote speaker, leadership developer, and storyteller who believes that our most defining moments are rarely the ones we plan for. 

 Drawing on years of experience leading, guiding, and mentoring teams, Lesley brings authenticity, curiosity, and genuine warmth to every conversation, creating space for guests to share the stories they don’t always get to tell. 

 One question. One turning point. One powerful story. 

 To learn more about Lesley visit www.lesleyhawkins.ca / www.marsley.ca