Tess Gouws
Human-Centred Strategist, Facilitator, Coach | She / Hers.
George, South Africa
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Tess is a facilitator, coach, and experience designer who works at the intersection of people, technology, and business.
She's helped organisations untangle complex problems, from culture design and employee experience to customer journeys and leadership development. She's worked across telecoms, financial services, education, and SaaS, with everyone from junior managers to C-suite executives.
Her approach is curiosity-led and human-first. She designs and facilitates sessions that create genuine space for people to think, challenge, and move forward, guided by theory but never driven by it.
People leave her sessions equipped with clarity, confidence, and the curiosity to keep going long after they leave the room.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Impostor Syndrome, Anyone? Why feeling like a fraud probably means you're doing something right
If you’ve ever second-guessed your own success, downplayed your abilities, or had that creeping feeling that you're about to be "found out", this session’s for you.
We’ll take a practical look at the neuroscience and evolutionary wiring behind impostor syndrome (through a bit of brain geekery), and why your brain is awkwardly just trying to protect you from embarrassment, failure, and… lions?
I’ll share a few tried and tested tools that help when your brain isn’t helping. Some from personal experience, others borrowed from thinkers, doers, and celebrated professionals who have been there too.
This talk won't help you get rid of that back seat driver completely, but it will give you a few tools to keep it from taking the wheel.
Hack the System, But Hold the Door
This isn’t a talk about tech, it’s about people. It’s about how we navigate the barriers that hold us back and how we can (should) create access for others once we’ve made it. Sharing from my own journey - navigating spaces where I didn’t quite fit and choosing to move beyond the rules that weren’t made for me - I’ll challenge you to think beyond individual success and explore how you can bring others along for the ride. Because no matter your field, real innovation begins with sharing the keys.
Debugging humans. A practical guide to surviving humans at work
Sometimes it feels like everyone around you is running a different operating system, with undocumented behaviours, unpredictable responses, and no helpful error messages when something goes wrong.
So what do you don't know what's going on?
You troubleshoot.
This talk explores empathy as a practical tool, not a personality trait. It offers a framework for gathering signals, reducing ambiguity, and lowering the “WTF?” factor in everyday human interactions.
It’s not about being right all the time. It’s about being less wrong, more often.
Whether you’re navigating awkward one-on-ones, retro weirdness, or trying to make sense of confusing colleagues, you’ll leave with a lightweight mental model that helps you decode behaviour and make better decisions with less emotional lag.
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