Chris Bertish
Resilience has become an overused term in corporate vocabulary, often reduced to navigating short-term challenges like a difficult quarter or organisational change. Sustaining performance under prolonged, unpredictable pressure is a different test, one that many senior teams are still learning to navigate.
Chris Bertish is a Mavericks Big Wave champion and record-breaking solo ocean adventurer who shows senior teams what resilience under sustained, genuine pressure actually requires.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Chris Bertish
- The only person to have crossed the Atlantic Ocean alone on a stand-up paddleboard, a 93-day unsupported crossing completed in 2017. That body of lived experience gives his lessons on preparation and sustained performance an authority almost no other speaker can claim.
- Speaks from five years of deliberate engineering and rehearsal before each expedition. Leaders hear how contingency planning and fear management get built long before they are ever needed.
- Holds Guinness World Records in big wave surfing, open-ocean stand-up paddleboarding and solo wing-foil ocean crossing. Few speakers can demonstrate sustained performance across this range of unrelated operational systems.
- Structures every major expedition around raising funds for named charities including Operation Smile and The Lunchbox Fund. Audiences see purpose functioning as an actual operating constraint on decisions taken at sea.
Biography highlights
- First person to complete a solo, unsupported crossing of the Atlantic Ocean on a stand-up paddleboard (Morocco to Antigua, 93 days, March 2017).
- First person to complete a solo, unsupported wing-foil crossing of the Pacific Ocean (California to Hawaii, 48 days, 2022).
- Winner of the Mavericks Big Wave Invitational at Half Moon Bay, California, in 2010.
- Best-selling author of Stoked! (Penguin Random House) and All In!; co-director of the award-winning documentaries Ocean Driven and Last Known Coordinates.
- Featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and on BBC, CNN, NPR and National Geographic.
- Selected as a Genius 100 Visionary by the Albert Einstein Foundation, alongside figures including Deepak Chopra and Sir Ken Robinson.
Biography
The Atlantic Ocean was crossed for the first time on a stand-up paddleboard in March 2017. The crossing took 93 days at sea and required roughly two million paddle strokes. Chris Bertish was alone for every one of them, in a custom-built 20-foot craft designed by naval architect Phil Morrison.
Before the crossing, Bertish had already won the 2010 Mavericks Big Wave Invitational at Half Moon Bay in the largest waves in the competition’s history. He arrived in California without his board or a sponsor, borrowing both. The value organisations draw from his story lies in the five years of engineering and rehearsal that preceded the expedition, the part that never appears in the documentary.
His body of work covers ocean disciplines that do not naturally overlap. In 2022 he became the first person to wing-foil solo across the Pacific, from California to Hawaii in 48 days. In 2025 he sailed an open beach catamaran from San Diego toward Oahu with no cabin, again solo and unsupported. Each expedition is a new operating system built under different constraints, which maps closely onto what senior teams face through extended transformation programmes.
Every expedition sits inside a structure of named beneficiaries. The Atlantic crossing raised more than $400,000 for Operation Smile, The Lunchbox Fund and Signature of Hope Trust. His company, Chris Bertish Impossible, is a certified B Corp, and his Chris Bertish Foundation is a registered 501(c)(3). Audiences come away with a working example of how purpose operates as an actual constraint on decisions at sea, a form of evidence most leadership keynotes cannot offer.
Key speaking topics
- Resilience under sustained, real-world pressure
- Risk and fear management in high-consequence decisions
- Preparation discipline and systems redundancy
- Purpose-driven leadership
- Change and adaptability under uncertainty
- Peak performance and mindset
- Ocean conservation and sustainable business
Ideal for
- Leadership teams asking their people to sustain effort through extended transformation or recovery programmes.
- Sales, commercial and delivery organisations facing high-stakes, high-pressure execution cycles.
- Senior offsites, executive retreats and all-hands conferences focused on resilience, purpose or culture change.
- ESG, sustainability and B Corp-aligned organisations looking for a credible voice on purpose as operating principle.
Audience outcomes
- A concrete sense of what preparation looks like when failure carries real consequences.
- Practical tools for managing fear and risk when systems fail and no external help is available.
- A working example of purpose operating as a genuine constraint on decisions under pressure.
- A shift in how teams think about the scale of goals that are achievable through sustained preparation.
Talks
The narrative and audio-visual account of the first solo, unsupported stand-up paddleboard crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, unpacking what made 93 consecutive days of sustained solo execution possible.
Key takeaways:
- The role of meticulous planning and systems redundancy in high-stakes execution
- Managing fear, risk and decision-making when no external support is available
- How resilience gets engineered in the years of preparation before an expedition begins
The story behind winning the 2010 Mavericks Big Wave Invitational in the largest waves in the competition’s history, as an unsponsored surfer who arrived in California on borrowed equipment.
Key takeaways:
- The limiting beliefs that keep organisations and individuals operating below their capacity
- How visualisation and deliberate practice translate into performance under real risk
- The gap between preparation and the moment it is tested
A talk built around the mindset and operating principles required to commit fully to goals that look implausible from the outside, drawing on five years of preparation for the Atlantic crossing and the expeditions that followed.
Key takeaways:
- What full commitment looks like operationally, in planning and in execution
- How teams sustain effort through extended periods of uncertainty
- The relationship between purpose and decision-making under sustained pressure