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

Like most lives, mine started with a plan. Then life happened.

Just coincidences. Part of a sentence in someone else's conversation or an off-the-cuff idea.

I said yes to them all — before I was ready. Every single time.

Then life handed me a yes I didn't choose — the kind that required giving everything I had and gave back something I couldn't have earned any other way — to love someone, to love yourself, and — the hardest of all — to let the world love you back.

I'm the daughter of Korean immigrant parents whose plans and dreams carried me — until I started to say yes on my own. My life is a testament that the unplanned path can lead somewhere extraordinary. My memoir, Before I Was Ready, is the story of a life I couldn't have imagined — and why, looking back, I wouldn't change a single yes.

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 creates the extraordinary life you couldn't have planned. For women's conferences, wellness summits, corporate ERGs, and entrepreneurial audiences.

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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 stop waiting to feel 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.

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