Petra Velzeboer
Workplace mental health programmes have multiplied. Burnout, attrition, and disengagement have not. The gap is not awareness but a culture that still rewards the behaviours that erode people, and a generation of leaders who were never trained to manage the human cost of constant change.
Petra Velzeboer is a psychotherapist and CEO of mental health consultancy PVL who helps organisations move workplace wellbeing from awareness campaign to operating practice.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Petra Velzeboer
- A clinical practitioner, not a wellbeing personality. She holds an MSc in Psychodynamics of Human Development from Birkbeck and works as a qualified psychotherapist, which gives her recommendations weight with sceptical executive audiences.
- She runs the consultancy she speaks from. PVL serves named corporate clients including PwC, Novartis, Accenture, Herbert Smith Freehills, Monzo, and Channel 4, so the case material in the room is current, not anecdotal.
- A first-person account of recovery from a high-control religious group and addiction, used to draw direct, uncomfortable parallels with corporate cultures that suppress dissent. This is the argument of her book Begin With You, published by Kogan Page.
- Comfortable across formats. Keynote, masterclass, panel chair, and leadership programme design, which suits clients building a multi-touch internal wellbeing strategy rather than a one-off event.
- Her TEDx talks and the Adversity to Advantage podcast give organisations a recognisable external voice to anchor internal campaigns around.
Biography highlights
- CEO and founder of PVL, a mental health consultancy working with large employers including PwC, Novartis, Accenture, Herbert Smith Freehills, Monzo, and Channel 4.
- Author of Begin With You: Invest in Your Mental Wellbeing and Satisfaction at Work (Kogan Page).
- Finalist, 2024 International Book Awards (Business: Motivational), and finalist, Goody Business Book Award 2024 (Self-Help: Personal Transformation).
- TEDx speaker. Talks include “Three Ways to Live the Life You Want” and “Reframing Diagnosis and the Road to Recovery.”
- Qualified psychotherapist with an MSc in Psychodynamics of Human Development, Birkbeck, University of London.
- Host of the podcast Adversity to Advantage.
Biography
Most corporate wellbeing programmes are organised around the wrong question. They ask how to support people who are already exhausted, when the harder question is what in the operating culture is exhausting them. Petra Velzeboer built PVL around that distinction. The consultancy works with large employers, including PwC, Novartis, Accenture, Herbert Smith Freehills, Monzo, and Channel 4, advising on the cultural conditions that determine whether a wellbeing strategy lands or quietly fails.
Her credibility rests on two unusual lines at once. She is a qualified psychotherapist with an MSc in Psychodynamics of Human Development from Birkbeck, University of London, which keeps the clinical content honest. She also lived through a recovery story that gives her an unusual angle on organisational culture, having grown up inside the Children of God, a high-control religious group, and worked her way back through addiction and depression. Her book Begin With You: Invest in Your Mental Wellbeing and Satisfaction at Work was published by Kogan Page and was a finalist for the 2024 International Book Awards in Business: Motivational.
The argument she makes to senior teams is direct. Cultures that punish dissent, reward overwork, and treat vulnerability as weakness produce predictable mental health outcomes, and no amount of mindfulness app subscription will offset them. Her TEDx talks and the Adversity to Advantage podcast extend that case to a wider audience, which is useful when an internal programme needs an external anchor.
She is most useful inside boards, executive offsites, and leadership cohorts where the wellbeing conversation has stalled at the level of perks and posters. Her work pushes it back to the design choices that leaders actually control: how teams are structured, how performance is measured, and what behaviour the culture quietly rewards.
Key speaking topics
- Workplace mental health strategy
- Organisational culture and toxic behaviours
- Resilience and recovery from adversity
- Leadership and vulnerability
- Burnout prevention
- Future of work and employee wellbeing
- Digital wellbeing and focus
Ideal for
- CHROs, Chief People Officers, and heads of wellbeing are redesigning a stalled mental health programme.
- Executive teams and boards are examining the cultural drivers of attrition and burnout.
- Leadership development cohorts are being trained to manage hybrid, high-pressure, change-fatigued teams.
- Internal Mental Health Awareness Week, ERG, or culture-change events that need a credible external voice.
Audience outcomes
- A clearer view of which cultural behaviours, not which benefits, drive mental health outcomes inside their own organisation.
- Practical language for talking about mental health at work without slipping into either clinical jargon or corporate platitude.
- A reframing of resilience as an organisational design problem, not a personal deficiency.
- Specific prompts leaders can use with their teams the following week, drawn from clinical practice and Velzeboer’s consulting work.
Talks
A keynote built around the question of what work would look like if it improved mental health rather than depleted it.
Key takeaways:
- The cultural assumptions that quietly produce burnout in high-performing teams.
- What hybrid and AI-era working patterns demand of leaders managing wellbeing at distance.
- Practical shifts organisations can make without launching another wellbeing initiative.
A personal and professional account of using lived recovery as a lens on organisational culture.
Key takeaways:
- How the dynamics of high-control groups echo in corporate cultures, and what to watch for.
- Why vulnerability, used precisely, is a leadership tool rather than a liability.
- A model for turning personal setback into renewed performance, drawn from clinical practice.
A session for senior leaders on moving wellbeing from HR initiative to leadership accountability.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between wellbeing programmes that report well and wellbeing programmes that work.
- How leaders should talk about mental health without overstepping clinical boundaries.
- The behaviours that create psychologically safe teams in practice.