Ask Brenda Viola about her company's name and she'll first make sure you say it right.
"It's Vici," she says. "Vici in Latin means I conquer."
The name isn't decoration. Before she ran her own business, Viola spent years doing what so many professionals do: working 12- to 14-hour days for someone else and wearing what she calls "the golden handcuffs of corporate America." She was fine with that, she says, until one year made it impossible to keep going the same way.
"In 2021, within a series of months, I lost my mom, the love of my life, my dog, almost my home in a hurricane, and almost my life in a choking incident," she says. "Maybe I'm a hard head, but that's what it took to wake me up and say, 'Okay, are you living the life you want to live?'"
Today, through Vici Communications LLC, Viola is a keynote speaker, author, culture consultant and executive coach. She still works those long days. The difference, she says, is that now they're on her terms, doing what she believes she was meant to do: "which is actually just to encourage people."
A one-year bet on San Diego
After that year of loss, Viola made a decision most people would only daydream about. She sold her house in Sarasota, Florida, with everything in it, and moved to San Diego.
"I gave myself a year," she says. "And I said, if it works, great. And if not, I know how to get a job."
It's coming up on four years now, and it's working.
"In my opinion, San Diego is the most amazing, most beautiful place that you could ever possibly live," she says. "The weather, the energy, the people." She made more friends in her first year here, she says, than in the entire decade she lived in Sarasota. "It's just that I'm where I belong, and when you are where you belong, your roots can grow and you can flourish."
Viola is based in La Jolla and splits her home time between Southern California and suburban Philadelphia. She travels constantly for work, "everywhere from Sitka, Alaska, to Miami, Florida, and everything in between." But a San Diego booking is still her favorite. "When I get to do an engagement right here in my hometown, it's such a joy for me."
From the anchor desk to QVC
Her résumé reads like several careers. She has been a news anchor, an award-winning public information officer, a QVC show host and a builder of workplace cultures. One of her favorite lessons came from the moment her path took an unexpected turn.
Early on, she was a news anchor and reporter at a very small station in New Jersey, headed, she thought, toward broadcast journalism on a major scale. Someone whose opinion she valued saw that QVC was holding open-call auditions. Knowing she was barely scraping by on a small-market salary, they urged her to try out.
So she did, on a whim. She crushed the audition, partly, she thinks, because she didn't want the job. She went back for a second interview as a good exercise in speaking off the cuff. By the third, she planned to let them down gently.
Then they made her an offer: triple her salary, a wardrobe allowance, and regular hair and nail appointments.
"As a 25-year-old, to me it was like, holy cow! I just hit the jackpot," she says. "So broadcast journalism went out the window. All of a sudden, I was all about selling gold chains and Capodimonte at 2 o'clock in the morning."
People love that story, she says. But she also tells it as a warning.
"When you abandon what you really want to make other people happy, you end up living your life for other people instead of yourself," she says. "There is one person you're guaranteed to spend the rest of your life with, and it's you. So start listening to yourself."
A keynote for a moment of fear
Viola offers a catalog of keynotes on courage, burnout, empathy, culture and self-worth. Right now the one everybody is asking for is "Embrace the Shift: Turning Uncertainty into Opportunity."
She built it for organizations where change, and especially AI, has people worried about their jobs.
"When fear is in a culture, it shuts down creativity, curiosity, and innovation," she says. The talk pairs science-based tools with real-life stories, because, as she puts it, "I have to live it to give it."
Her message isn't that fear goes away. "Fear is a part of life," she says. "The question is: Are you putting it in the driver's seat, or is it just a passenger?" She encourages audiences to approach life more like scientists, who expect failure because they know it's the path to breakthroughs, and to stop "awfulizing," which she describes as filling in the gaps with negative stories that make you shut down.
If you'd asked her six months ago which talk mattered most, she says, she would have named a different one. She thinks of her keynotes and books as her children, each one born out of a need she sees in her clients. "Sometimes I'll build something special for them that ends up being useful to many other organizations."
"Until you learn how to say no"
The biggest "aha" moments in her rooms come, she says, when people realize they are "the CEO of themselves," the gatekeepers of their own well-being.
"Until you learn how to say no, your yeses will have no meaning," she tells audiences.
That doesn't mean saying no "like a jerk," she says. "You can say no with grace." But when you start to value and protect your own time and energy, she says, respect for you grows, and so does your executive presence.
She didn't learn it easily. "I burned myself out for many years because I was the people pleaser," she says. "I felt like if I could make everybody else happy, that surely I would be happy. And what I realized, I was just draining my tank."
She shared lessons like these recently with the Women in Business group at San Diego State University, telling a room of young women all the things she wishes someone had told her. "It's the school of hard knocks," she says, "but it's not a failure if you've learned something from it, and I have learned from every failure. In fact, I say my messes are my message."
"Don't borrow tomorrow's heartache"
Viola also works one-on-one with executives, and one line comes up again and again.
"Don't borrow tomorrow's heartache," she says.
She'll be mind-mapping a problem with a leader when the conversation slides into what-ifs: if this happens, then that could happen, and then that. She watches their energy drop over a problem that isn't real yet. So she stops and asks what the odds really are that the first thing will happen. If it's anything under 80%, she tells them they're borrowing heartache.
"When it's real, you will have the skills to deal with it," she says. "But let's deal with what's actually real and what's on your plate."
She likes to quote a line often attributed to Mark Twain: "I lived through many terrible things, and some of them actually happened." And she reminds clients that what-ifs can work in both directions. "Flip the script, because your what-ifs also can lead to your biggest dreams come true too," she says.
Standing up for public servants
Viola's background as a public information officer shows up in one of her best-known books, The Public Servants' Survival Guide. She wrote it, she says, because she saw public servants "burning out left and right." The book lays out 10 warning signs of burnout with ways to course-correct, and its lessons are the basis of her Beyond Burnout keynote and workshops she has delivered around the country.
Ask her what people outside government misunderstand, and she doesn't hesitate.
"They are some of the most hardworking people I've ever met," she says. "They don't necessarily have the perks or the salary of those that are in the private sector." She points to the crews filling potholes, the clerks who make sure you get your public record, and the police on patrol. "These are selfless people."
She also wants people to know that many firefighters across the country are volunteers. "If there is something going on in the middle of the Super Bowl, they have to leave their Barcalounger and run and respond," she says. "They don't have to do this, and yet they do."
How Vici works with clients
Vici Communications coordinates Brenda's keynotes along with her advisory, consulting and coaching work. That includes corporate training, culture consulting and one-on-one executive coaching, including presentation coaching for leaders who need to deliver a high-stakes talk. Beyond The Public Servants’ Survival Guide, she has written a communication book, How to Be Heard Without Screaming!, and a children's book, Annabelle the Octopus, a story about friendship and asking for help.
She doesn't give "canned" speeches. She spends time with each client to understand the audience and its pain points, then shapes the message to fit.
And if you run a San Diego organization, she'd love to hear from you.
"If any of your listeners need either corporate training, keynotes, culture consulting, or even one-on-one executive coaching," she says, "I would love to serve them."
Vici Communications LLC coordinates Brenda Viola's keynote speaking, advisory, consulting and executive coaching services. Learn more or book Brenda at https://www.brendaviola.com.
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