MuRay (Courtney A. Kazembe) Speaker biography and topics Website: https://courtneykazembe.com Booking enquiries: courtney@kazembelaw.com Biography in the Third Person Courtney A. Kazembe, known as MuRay, is a lawyer, author, speaker, and transformational coach whose work explores awareness, human potential, and the freedom to make conscious choices. He is the founder of the Global Institute for Freedom, Transformation, and Enlightenment (GIFTE) and the author of I AM: A Guide to Awakening from the Programmed Mind and Living as Awareness. His work brings together two disciplines that are rarely considered side by side: the careful questioning of legal practice and the direct observation of contemplative inquiry. Law taught him to examine evidence, challenge assumptions, and pay close attention to language. Meditation and reflection invited him to apply that same scrutiny to the beliefs, reactions, and identities shaping his own life. Through contemplative practice, silent retreats, and encounters with wisdom traditions across cultures, Kazembe has explored a question that remains central to his teaching: Who are we beyond the stories we have learned to tell about ourselves? His approach brings that inquiry into everyday situations, including professional pressure, difficult relationships, disappointment, uncertainty, and change. His speaking focuses on presence, attention, authentic leadership, personal responsibility, and the assumptions that influence human behavior. Rather than asking audiences simply to adopt another set of ideas, he invites them to examine their own experience. Personal stories, guided reflection, practical questions, and audience dialogue help participants connect the material to decisions they are facing now. His sessions are designed for corporate and professional audiences, schools and colleges, educators, parents, and community organizations. For leaders, the emphasis is on the relationship between awareness, integrity, and the way others experience their leadership. For students and educators, it is on attention, agency, learning, and creating conditions in which people can participate more fully. In I AM, published under the name MuRay, Kazembe explores inherited beliefs and identities and the possibility of living with greater awareness. The same invitation runs through his speaking and coaching: pause long enough to notice what is happening, question what has been assumed, and choose the next action with greater clarity. His central question is simple and demanding: Who am I being, and is this who I choose to be? Topic Descriptions 1. Who Am I Being Right Now? Subtitle: The Power of Presence in Leadership, Relationships, and Everyday Decisions When pressure rises, people often focus on what they need to do while overlooking how they are showing up. A leader enters a meeting already defensive. A teacher carries frustration into the classroom. A parent responds to a child before hearing the whole story. The task matters, but so does the person we become while handling it. In this keynote or interactive workshop, MuRay invites participants to examine a practical question: Who am I being right now, and is this who I choose to be? Drawing on his experience in legal practice and contemplative inquiry, he explores the space between a familiar reaction and a deliberate response. Participants consider how assumptions, emotional pressure, and the need to be right can influence their decisions and relationships. The session combines personal stories, guided reflection, and audience dialogue. Participants are invited to notice their reactions without immediately defending or condemning them, return their attention to the situation at hand, and identify a useful next action. Presence becomes something they can practice in a difficult conversation, a demanding workday, or a moment of uncertainty. For organizational audiences, the emphasis is on listening, accountability, and leadership through conduct. For educators and parents, the focus shifts to the quality of attention they bring to others and the example their behavior provides. The content can be adapted to the audience’s responsibilities and the challenges identified by the event organizer. Participants leave with questions and practices for recognizing habitual responses, listening more carefully, and acting with greater clarity, courage, and compassion. They are encouraged to choose one recurring situation in which to apply the learning immediately. The aim is to make conscious participation available in ordinary moments, especially when circumstances are difficult and a decision affects others. 2. Awakening from the Programmed Mind Subtitle: Recognizing Inherited Beliefs and Discovering Greater Freedom to Choose Many of the beliefs that shape our lives were learned before we were old enough to question them. Ideas about success, belonging, authority, identity, and personal worth can become so familiar that we mistake them for facts. Those assumptions influence what we attempt, what we avoid, and how we interpret the people around us. Based on the central inquiry of his book I AM, MuRay invites audiences to examine the patterns he calls the programmed mind. This session explores how learned narratives can operate beneath decisions and how observing those narratives can create room for different choices. The emphasis is on recognition through personal experience, with participants encouraged to test the ideas against their own lives. Through storytelling, reflective questions, and facilitated discussion, participants consider the difference between an event and the meaning they give it. They examine a familiar belief, ask where it came from, and explore whether it still serves the life or work they want to create. The session also addresses the discomfort of questioning an identity that once offered security or approval. For workplace audiences, this inquiry can illuminate assumptions about leadership, conflict, achievement, and collaboration. For students, it can open discussion about labels, comparison, expectations, and the perceived limits of their future. For community audiences, it offers a starting point for exploring authenticity, belonging, and personal responsibility. Participants leave with an accessible process for noticing an assumption, distinguishing interpretation from observation, and considering an alternative response. They identify one belief worth examining further and one action that would become possible if that belief loosened its hold. The session invites curiosity without demanding agreement. Its purpose is to help people see more clearly how they participate in their own experience and bring greater awareness to the choices available to them in work, relationships, and learning. 3. Attention Is Your Life Subtitle: Reclaiming Focus and Agency in a World of Digital Distraction Attention shapes what we learn, the relationships we build, and the work we complete. Yet much of the day can disappear into notifications, habitual checking, comparison, and the pressure to remain available. By evening, we may have responded to everyone else’s priorities while giving little attention to what matters most to us. In this keynote or interactive workshop, MuRay explores the relationship between attention and personal agency. The session invites participants to examine where their attention goes, what repeatedly pulls it away, and how those patterns affect their participation in everyday life. Digital habits become a practical entry point into a wider inquiry about presence, purpose, and choice. Participants reflect on moments when they reach for a device automatically, divide their attention during a conversation, or postpone meaningful work. Through guided exercises and discussion, they consider the needs beneath those habits, including stimulation, reassurance, connection, and escape from discomfort. The emphasis is on observing their experience honestly and making changes they can sustain. For schools and colleges, the session connects attention to learning, academic engagement, peer comparison, and responsible participation online. For professional audiences, it addresses competing demands, meeting habits, and the quality of attention brought to colleagues and clients. For parents and educators, it creates space to examine the digital example adults provide as well as the expectations placed on young people. Participants leave with a personal attention audit, questions for evaluating recurring distractions, and a plan for protecting one meaningful activity or relationship. They choose a practical boundary and consider how to maintain it when the initial motivation fades. The invitation is to use technology with greater intention and recognize that each return of attention is an opportunity to participate more fully in the life already here, one conversation and one decision at a time. 4. The Courage to Say “I Don’t Know” Subtitle: Opening the Door to Curiosity, Better Questions, and Deeper Listening Certainty can be useful, but it can also close a conversation before anyone has understood the problem. A professional assumes what a client needs. A manager dismisses an unfamiliar suggestion. A student avoids asking a question for fear of appearing uninformed. In each situation, the desire to know can interfere with the willingness to learn. MuRay explores the practical value of admitting uncertainty and remaining curious. Drawing on the questioning discipline of law and his own contemplative inquiry, he invites participants to distinguish what they have observed from what they have assumed. The session considers how confident interpretations become entrenched and how a sincere question can reveal information that certainty overlooked. Through personal stories, guided reflection, and audience conversation, participants examine a situation in which they reached a conclusion too quickly. They practice identifying the unanswered question, listening without preparing an immediate rebuttal, and considering an interpretation different from their first one. The discussion also addresses how to remain decisive when complete information is unavailable. For leaders and professionals, the session connects curiosity to judgment, collaboration, and conversations across differences. For educators and students, it explores the learning environment created when questions are welcomed and mistakes can be examined. For community audiences, it offers a way to approach disagreement with openness while retaining personal discernment. Participants leave with practical questions for testing assumptions, clarifying meaning, and discovering what they still need to understand. They identify one conversation in which curiosity could change their approach and prepare a question they are willing to ask. The aim is to support thoughtful action grounded in honest inquiry. Saying “I don’t know” becomes a beginning: a chance to listen more closely, learn something unexpected, and make a decision that reflects the situation more accurately than their first answer did. 5. Freedom, Leadership, and the Examined Life Subtitle: Aligning Who You Are Being with the Impact You Want to Have Leadership is expressed in ordinary conduct: how a person handles disagreement, responds to a mistake, keeps a commitment, and treats someone with less authority. Titles and intentions matter, but people experience the choices made in their presence. A leader’s unexamined habits can therefore shape a team as powerfully as any stated organizational value. In this keynote or facilitated workshop, MuRay invites participants to examine the relationship between inner awareness and outward responsibility. The central question is practical: Does the way I am showing up support the impact I say I want to have? Participants explore how identity, approval, defensiveness, and the need for control can influence leadership decisions. Drawing on legal practice, coaching, and contemplative inquiry, MuRay uses personal stories and reflective exercises to bring the discussion into everyday situations. Participants consider a difficult conversation, an unmet commitment, or a recurring tension and examine their own contribution. They explore how to acknowledge that contribution, listen to the people affected, and identify an action consistent with their responsibilities. The session can be adapted for organizational leaders, professional teams, educators, and community stakeholders. Workplace applications include accountability, collaboration, and the gap between stated values and daily behavior. In education and community settings, the emphasis includes example, shared responsibility, and the influence adults have on the people who depend on them. Participants leave with a clearer view of one leadership pattern they want to change and a practical commitment they can communicate and review. They consider whose perspective they need to hear and what evidence would show that their conduct has changed. The invitation is to treat leadership as a practice of awareness and action. Greater freedom begins with recognizing the response available now and choosing it with regard for the people, commitments, and consequences involved .