Michael Maisey
Mental health is now a board-level cost line, yet most workplace wellbeing programmes still struggle to move people from passive consumption of resources to honest conversation. Managers know empathy and communication matter. They lack the language, and often the permission, to use either when it counts. The gap between policy and practice is where the damage compounds.
Michael Maisey is a TEDx speaker, author and founder of The CIP Project who helps organisations build a more honest workplace conversation around mental health, empathy and recovery from adversity.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Michael Maisey
- Lived experience that lands in rooms where wellbeing decks usually do not, drawn from five years in Feltham Young Offenders Institute and a documented twenty-year rebuild.
- Operates an active service organisation. The CIP Project runs residential workshops from a 25-acre Devon retreat centre, giving him a working view of what actually helps people recover, not a theoretical one.
- Two published works that hold up to corporate scrutiny: Young Offender (Pan Macmillan, 2019) and Change is Possible: The Seven Stages to Healing Trauma (2025). The second gives him a named framework, not just a story.
- Civic recognition by the London Borough of Hounslow and the Metropolitan Police in 2014, a useful third-party validation when buyers vet speakers with criminal-record backgrounds.
- Talks designed to give managers practical language for the empathy-and-communication conversation, rather than a motivational arc that leaves the audience moved but unequipped.
Biography highlights
- Founder of The CIP Project, a UK non-profit operating from a 25-acre retreat centre in Devon.
- Author of Young Offender: My Life from Armed Robber to Local Hero, published by Pan Macmillan in 2019.
- Author of Change is Possible: The Seven Stages to Healing Trauma, published in 2025.
- TEDx speaker. Talk title: “The Healing Power of Connection”.
- Honoured by the London Borough of Hounslow and the Metropolitan Police in 2014 for services to the community.
- Over 17 years sober. Public advocacy work across UK prisons, including author visits to HMYOI Aylesbury.
Biography
Most corporate wellbeing programmes do not fail on intent. They fail on permission. Employees are offered resources, apps and policies, but rarely the model of what an honest conversation about mental health, addiction or trauma actually sounds like in a working environment. Michael Maisey’s contribution is to provide that model in a room of senior managers, with credibility earned outside the wellness industry.
His route into the work is unusually direct. At sixteen he was sentenced for armed robbery and spent much of his teenage years in Feltham Young Offenders Institute. The rebuild that followed produced two things organisations care about: a published autobiography with Pan Macmillan, Young Offender, in 2019; and a working non-profit, The CIP Project, founded in 2018 on a 25-acre site in Devon, supporting people with addiction, mental health, PTSD and childhood trauma.
A second book, Change is Possible: The Seven Stages to Healing Trauma, followed in 2025 and gives him a structured framework rather than a single biographical story. His TEDx talk, “The Healing Power of Connection”, is the most-quoted piece of his keynote content in workplace settings. In 2014, the London Borough of Hounslow and the Metropolitan Police recognised him formally for services to the community.
For a head of people or culture, the practical value is twofold. Maisey can hold a room on the subjects that most speakers either soften or skirt: suicidal ideation, addiction, the texture of trauma. And he can hand managers a vocabulary for the empathy-and-communication conversation that has otherwise sat in the wellbeing policy and never made it onto the floor.
Key speaking topics
- Workplace mental health
- Empathy and compassion at work
- Trauma recovery
- Addiction and the workplace
- Personal transformation and lived experience
- Communication around wellbeing
Ideal for
- CHROs, heads of people, heads of culture and wellbeing leads commissioning workplace mental health content
- Internal manager populations responsible for direct conversations about wellbeing
- Employee resource groups and DEI forums focused on mental health and recovery
- Conference programmes seeking a lived-experience anchor on wellbeing alongside clinical or academic speakers
Audience outcomes
- Sharper language for raising mental health, addiction or trauma in a workplace conversation without making it clinical
- A more concrete view of what recovery actually requires, drawn from operating a residential support model
- Permission, observed in the room, for senior people to speak honestly about their own experience
- A framework, drawn from the seven stages in Change is Possible, for thinking about trauma in stages rather than as a single event
Talks
A TEDx-format talk on why human connection, not programmes or policy, does the heavy lifting in mental-health recovery.
Key takeaways:
- Why most workplace mental-health conversations stall at the point of disclosure
- The role of small acts of kindness in long recoveries, drawn from the speaker’s own
- What it takes for a manager to be useful in the moment rather than a referrer
A practical session for managers and people teams on the specific language that opens or closes a conversation about mental health at work.
Key takeaways:
- The phrases that shut down disclosure, and the phrases that hold it open
- How to handle a mental-health conversation without crossing into a clinical role
- Where to take the conversation next, inside and outside the organisation
A keynote on empathy as an operating capability, not a soft skill, drawn from the speaker’s work with people recovering from trauma and addiction.
Key takeaways:
- Why empathy fails when it is treated as a personality trait
- The cost of low-empathy management on retention, performance and reporting
- How leaders can model empathy publicly without performing it