María Belón

Why organisations work with Maria Belon

• A first-person account of catastrophic crisis delivered with the clinical precision of a physician, not the drama of a motivational speaker. The audience leaves with vocabulary, not adrenaline.
• Clinical and psychotherapy training that gives her a working language for fear, dissociation, and recovery that translates directly into leadership conversations about teams under pressure.
• A reference point that senior audiences already know. The story behind The Impossible carries instant recognition; Belon uses that recognition as a way in, then takes the conversation somewhere serious.
• Credibility on both sides of the room. An ESADE MBA and a teaching record in Human Resources at ESADE Business School mean she speaks the language of executive audiences before she ever turns to her own experience.
• A clear point of view on values and human connection as the operating system that holds organisations together when systems fail, drawn from what she observed in herself, her family, and the strangers around them.

Biography highlights

• Survivor of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Khao Lak, Thailand, with her husband and three sons; sustained life-threatening injuries and underwent a two-year recovery.
• Spanish physician with additional training as a Humanistic Gestalt psychotherapist.
• MBA from ESADE; former Human Resources instructor at ESADE Business School.
• Story formed the basis of The Impossible (2012), directed by J.A. Bayona, with Naomi Watts nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal.
• Author of the illustrated children’s book Kokoro y el Mar, published by Editorial Libre Albedrio as the first title in her “Yo soy” collection.
• Speaker at international platforms including the World Business Forum and the Share Iuvare Business Convention.

Biography

The wave that struck Khao Lak on 26 December 2004 separated a family of five and gave one of them, a Spanish physician on holiday with her husband and three sons, two years of surgery and recovery before something like a normal life returned. Maria Belon now works with senior leaders on what that experience taught her about people under maximum pressure.

Her professional background matters here. Belon trained as a physician and as a Humanistic Gestalt psychotherapist, and she holds an MBA from ESADE, where she later taught Human Resources. The combination is unusual. She can speak about the body’s response to trauma with clinical accuracy, and she can speak about organisations with the vocabulary executive audiences already use.

What she offers a leadership team is not a survival story performed for effect. It is a precise account of what stayed intact when planning, control, and competence were all stripped away, and what that suggests for the way leaders prepare their people for the unplannable. She has tested the material across international audiences, including the World Business Forum and the Share Iuvare Business Convention.

The work has continued in print. Her illustrated children’s book Kokoro y el Mar, published by Editorial Libre Albedrio, distils for a younger reader the same question that director J.A. Bayona once asked her, and that her keynotes return to: what do you bring back from the experiences that life forces on you.

Key speaking topics

• Resilience under extreme adversity
• Crisis response and recovery
• Values and human connection in organisations
• Leadership in moments of breakdown
• Post-traumatic growth
• Wellbeing and the human side of performance

Ideal for

• Executive teams and boards preparing for, or reckoning with, organisational crisis
• CHROs and people leaders building resilience and wellbeing into how their organisation operates
• Closing keynotes at senior leadership conferences where the brief is to leave the room changed, not informed
• Healthcare, emergency services and public sector leadership audiences whose work runs close to crisis

Audience outcomes

• A working vocabulary for fear, loss, and recovery that leaders can use with their own teams.
• A sharper sense of which values actually carry weight when the systems of an organisation fail.
• An honest reference point for the difference between performance and presence in a crisis.
• Permission, often missing in senior rooms, to talk about the human cost of pressure without flinching.