Employee Wellbeing

Why organisations work with Neil Laybourn He runs Neil Laybourn Consultancy as a functioning advisory business, with frameworks and partner networks built around measurable workplace outcomes, not as a retainer attached to a keynote. The story is widely known. The corporate value sits in what he built afterwards: This Can Happen as the workplace mental health conference, the This Can Happen Awards as the practice benchmark, and the consultancy that operationalises both. He sits at the centre of the UK workplace mental health network as founder of This Can Happen, Ambassador for Mental Health UK, former Heads Together collaborator, and the UK LinkedIn Changemaker for Mental Health in 2021. The credibility chain is unusual for the category. The University of Bristol awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in 2018; the Pride of Britain Award (2014) and the Mind Media Award (2015) recognised the campaigning work; Channel 4 commissioned the Stranger on the Bridge documentary. He has addressed leadership teams at Bank of Ireland UK, HSBC, Coutts, Direct Line Group, Ticketmaster, BlackRock, and Yale School of Management. Biography highlights Founder of This Can Happen, the workplace mental health conference, and director of the This Can Happen Awards. Founder of Neil Laybourn Consultancy, a workplace mental health advisory firm. Co-founder, with Jonny Benjamin MBE, of Beyond, the youth mental health charity. Honorary Doctorate, University of Bristol; Pride of Britain Award; Mind Media Award for Making a Difference (with Jonny Benjamin). LinkedIn Changemaker for Mental Health (2021); LinkedIn Top Voice and Creator. Ambassador for Mental Health UK; subject of the Channel 4 documentary Stranger on the Bridge. Biography Workplace mental health is a category that absorbs budget and produces awareness, without reliably producing managers who know what to do when a colleague is in distress. The gap between corporate policy and operational practice is where the value sits, and where most programmes fail. On 14 January 2008, Neil Laybourn was walking across Waterloo Bridge to work when he saw a stranger preparing to jump into the Thames. He stopped, talked to him for half an hour, and persuaded him to step back. Six years later that stranger, Jonny Benjamin MBE, launched the #FindMike campaign on social media to find the man who had saved his life. The campaign reached over 300 million people and became the subject of the Channel 4 documentary Stranger on the Bridge. That intervention is the entry point. The offering, built over the decade since, is unusually operational for the workplace mental health category. He founded This Can Happen, the conference convening employers around what works, and the This Can Happen Awards that recognise the practice. Through Neil Laybourn Consultancy he advises organisations on the design and measurement of mental health programmes. He has delivered over 250 keynotes to more than 200 organisations across 25 sectors. Clients include Bank of Ireland UK, HSBC, Coutts, Direct Line Group, and Ticketmaster, with international audiences at Yale School of Management and BlackRock in New York. The University of Bristol awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in 2018, and LinkedIn selected him as the UK Changemaker for Mental Health in 2021. With Jonny Benjamin MBE he co-founded Beyond, the youth mental health charity, and remains an Ambassador for Mental Health UK. Key speaking topics Workplace mental health strategy Suicide intervention and prevention Manager capability for mental health conversations Employee wellbeing programme design Stigma in corporate environments Mental health and senior leadership Ideal for CHROs and Heads of People setting workplace wellbeing strategy HR Directors implementing or auditing mental health programmes CEOs and executive teams accountable for culture as a board-level outcome Line managers and people leaders who need usable tools for difficult conversations Audience outcomes A clear sense of why most workplace wellbeing programmes plateau, and where the operational gaps actually sit Practical language and protocols for managers in the moments that matter, from a colleague in distress to a return-to-work conversation A grounded view of what mental health strategy looks like at scale, from a practitioner who runs the conferences and advises the boards The confidence to talk about mental health at senior leadership level without retreating into corporate jargon

Why organisations work with Martine Wright A first-hand account of recovery from catastrophic injury that gives leaders concrete language for talking about adversity, mental health, and return to work without slipping into platitudes. Paralympic-level perspective on marginal gains, team performance, and selection, drawn from competing for Great Britain in sitting volleyball at London 2012 rather than from a textbook. Credibility on inclusion and belonging that comes from being inside the disability sport system, not commenting on it. Useful for ERG launches, accessibility programmes, and culture work where lived authority matters. An MBE, the BBC Helen Rollason Award, and a Sports Book Award-winning memoir give buyers external validation that holds up in front of senior audiences. Consistent broadcast presence with the BBC and Channel 4, including Rio 2016 and Invictus Games, which translates into stage presence and timing that work in front of 10,000-seat audiences and intimate leadership rooms alike. Biography highlights Survivor of the 7 July 2005 London bombings; was the last person extracted alive from the Aldgate carriage and lost both legs above the knee. Member of Great Britain’s women’s sitting volleyball team at the London 2012 Paralympic Games and later team captain. Appointed MBE in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to sport. Recipient of the BBC Helen Rollason Award at the 2012 BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Author of Unbroken: My Story of Survival from 7/7 Bombings to Paralympic Success (Simon and Schuster, 2017), winner of Autobiography of the Year at the 2018 Sports Book Awards. Broadcaster for the BBC and Channel 4, including roving reporter at the Rio 2016 Paralympics and Invictus Games coverage. Biography The Aldgate bomb on 7 July 2005 killed seven people in a single Circle Line carriage. Martine Wright was the last person brought out alive. She lost roughly eighty percent of her blood, spent a week in a coma, and underwent ten months of surgery and double above-knee amputation. The detail that matters for a corporate audience is what came after: a deliberate decision, sustained over years, to treat recovery as work rather than a wait. That work led to elite sport. Wright took up sitting volleyball during rehabilitation, made the British squad, and was selected for the home Paralympic Games at London 2012, where Team GB fielded a women’s sitting volleyball side for the first time. She later captained the team and earned forty international caps. The 2012 BBC Helen Rollason Award and a 2016 MBE for services to sport followed. Her memoir Unbroken (Simon and Schuster, 2017) won Autobiography of the Year at the 2018 Sports Book Awards and remains the primary text behind her speaking. Alongside the book, she has built a steady broadcast career with the BBC and Channel 4, covering the Rio 2016 Paralympics and Invictus Games, which gives her a level of stage craft most lived-experience speakers do not have. What organisations actually book her for is the translation. Wright takes the language of marginal gains, team selection, mental health, and belonging out of the abstract and grounds it in specific decisions she made and watched others make. NatWest, the NHS, John Lewis, Deloitte, Salesforce, Pfizer, and Aon are among the named clients on her own record. The room leaves with usable vocabulary for the conversations leadership teams already know they need to have. Key speaking topics Resilience and recovery from adversity Mental health and return to work Inclusion, disability, and belonging in the workplace Marginal gains and high-performance teams Change and uncertainty Paralympic sport and elite competition Leadership through crisis Ideal for CHROs and people leaders rolling out wellbeing, mental health, or return-to-work programmes DEI leads and ERG sponsors building disability inclusion and belonging work Leadership teams briefing staff through restructures, crises, or major change programmes All-staff conferences and town halls where the brief calls for an authentic, high-impact keynote rather than a research talk Audience outcomes A vocabulary for talking about adversity, mental health, and recovery that does not feel scripted. Specific examples of how marginal gains and team selection work inside an elite sport environment, drawn from London 2012. A sharper sense of what disability inclusion looks like from inside the experience, useful for shaping ERG and accessibility work. A reset on what is actually possible after a catastrophic setback, anchored in a verifiable personal story rather than abstract motivation.

Why organisations work with Frankie Bridge She turns a wellbeing agenda into a conversation employees actually join. Lived-experience voices move audiences past the policy document in a way clinical presentations rarely do. Her two books, OPEN and GROW, are co-written with clinical psychologist Maleha Khan and psychiatrist Dr Mike McPhillips, which gives the material a structure beyond memoir and a reference employees can take home. She is a formal ambassador for Mind, the UK’s largest mental health charity, anchoring her advocacy in a named institution rather than personal testimony alone. Her platform reaches the employee demographic most corporate wellbeing programmes struggle to engage: women aged 25 to 45, working parents, and audiences outside the usual executive wellbeing circuit. Biography highlights Ambassador for Mind, the UK mental health charity, following hospitalisation in May 2012 for anxiety, depression and panic attacks. Author of OPEN: Why Asking for Help Can Save Your Life, a Sunday Times bestseller co-written with clinical psychologist Maleha Khan and psychiatrist Dr Mike McPhillips. Author of GROW: Motherhood, mental health and me, published 2021, again with Khan and McPhillips. Host of Open Mind with Frankie Bridge, a podcast running since 2019 across Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Global Player. Regular panellist on ITV’s Loose Women since 2021, speaking publicly on anxiety and women’s health. Former member of The Saturdays (2007 to 2014) and runner-up on BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing 2014. Biography A wellbeing programme only works when employees believe the people in front of them have been where they have. That credibility is hard to manufacture from a policy deck or a clinician’s slide set. Bridge built her audience on the opposite ground, by talking openly about her 2012 hospitalisation for anxiety and depression while still a member of one of the UK’s biggest pop acts. Her book OPEN: Why Asking for Help Can Save Your Life came out of that period and became a Sunday Times bestseller. It was co-written with clinical psychologist Maleha Khan and psychiatrist Dr Mike McPhillips, which is what separates it from a standard celebrity memoir. GROW, published in 2021, applied the same format to maternal mental health, again with Khan and McPhillips, and addressed anxiety in pregnancy and the early years of parenting. The advocacy sits inside a formal relationship with Mind, the UK mental health charity, where she is a named ambassador. Her Open Mind podcast extends the work across longer conversations with guests from public life, and her seat on ITV’s Loose Women keeps mental health vocabulary in mainstream women’s broadcasting. For a corporate audience, the specific value is reach into the employee groups that wellbeing programmes most often miss. Working women in their late twenties to mid forties recognise her from television, bookshops and podcasts, and listen differently because of it. That is the variable most internal mental-health campaigns cannot solve with budget alone. Key speaking topics Mental health in the workplace Maternal mental health Anxiety, depression and panic Employee wellbeing and lived experience Women’s health at work Reducing stigma in corporate mental health conversations Ideal for Employee wellbeing days, mental health awareness events and internal conferences where lived experience lands harder than clinical theory alone. HR, people and DEI teams building programmes for working parents, particularly women returning from maternity leave. Women’s networks and ERGs looking for a recognisable broadcaster who speaks credibly on anxiety and maternal mental health. Audience outcomes A clear reference point, anchored in two published books, for how to talk about anxiety and depression at work without defaulting to policy language. A direct look at how maternal mental health shows up in the early years of a career return, drawn from Bridge’s work with her clinical co-authors. Permission for employees to treat mental health conversations as normal rather than escalatory, which in turn lifts engagement with existing wellbeing resources. A concrete answer to the question most wellbeing programmes struggle with: what does asking for help actually look like in practice, from someone who has done it.

Why organisations work with Dr Alex George He brings a clinician’s framework to workplace wellbeing, grounding corporate mental health conversations in the same preventative medicine thinking used on an emergency medicine ward. His policy work as the UK Government’s Youth Mental Health Ambassador gives him rare authority on what structural mental health support actually looks like at scale, from curriculum design to Early Support Hubs. Two Sunday Times bestsellers, Live Well Every Day and The Mind Manual, give his sessions a concrete toolkit audiences can take away, not a set of slogans. He connects the wellbeing agenda to the emerging workforce, with direct credibility on Gen Z mental health, early career burnout, and the intergenerational shift inside organisations. He speaks publicly about losing his brother Llyr to suicide in 2020, which turns the topic from corporate compliance into a conversation leaders feel obligated to lead. Biography highlights NHS-trained emergency medicine doctor, University Hospital Lewisham, London Medical degree, University of Exeter Medical School (2015); honorary degree from the University of Exeter (2024) First UK Government Youth Mental Health Ambassador, appointed by the Prime Minister, Department for Education (2021-2024) Author of Sunday Times bestsellers Live Well Every Day and The Mind Manual Host of Stompcast and The Waiting Room, walking and health interview podcasts Campaigner behind the Early Support Hubs initiative, which secured nearly 5 million pounds of UK government funding for open-access youth mental health drop-ins Biography Most workplace wellbeing programmes are built by committees. Dr Alex George builds them the way an emergency medicine doctor assesses a patient: triage the real risks first, then design habits that people will actually repeat. That clinical instinct sits underneath everything he does on stage. Training at the University of Exeter Medical School and working in emergency medicine at University Hospital Lewisham gave him a direct view of how mental and physical health present together, and how late most people arrive for help. His public profile opened a second track. In February 2021 the Prime Minister appointed him the UK’s first Youth Mental Health Ambassador, based in the Department for Education, where he spent four years shaping policy on school and college support, curriculum, and early intervention. The campaign that defines that period is Early Support Hubs. Working with the Fund the Hubs Coalition, Mind, and YoungMinds, he pushed for walk-in mental health services for young people and helped secure nearly 5 million pounds of initial UK government investment. The same logic drives his writing. Live Well Every Day and The Mind Manual, both Sunday Times bestsellers, turn clinical ideas into daily practice for a non-medical reader. For corporate audiences, that body of work translates into an unusually practical session: clinician-grade framing of the mental health risks inside a workforce, paired with habits leaders can install this quarter. In 2024 the University of Exeter awarded him an honorary degree in recognition of the campaigning. Key speaking topics Workplace mental health and employee wellbeing Preventative health and mental fitness Youth mental health and the Gen Z workforce Burnout, resilience, and recovery Public health communication and behaviour change Suicide prevention and mental health literacy for leaders Ideal for CHROs and Chief Wellbeing Officers redesigning mental health provision beyond EAP minimums Leadership teams accountable for burnout, attrition, and engagement metrics Early careers, graduate, and Gen Z talent programmes Healthcare, education, and public sector organisations with frontline workforce pressures Audience outcomes A clinician’s read on which mental health risks are most material to their workforce right now A concrete set of daily habits, drawn from his books, that leaders can model and cascade A sharper understanding of how Gen Z employees experience mental health differently, and what that means for policy and line management Practical language for leaders to open mental health conversations without overstepping into clinical territory A clear view of what structural mental health support looks like, drawn from his government policy work

Why organisations work with Dalia Feldheim She led the brand team behind Always #LikeAGirl, a campaign that won 14 Cannes Lions and was named by Forbes as one of the most influential of the decade. She now translates that instinct for cultural change into how leaders run teams. Her book “Dare to Lead Like a Girl”, with a foreword by Sheryl Sandberg, sets out a specific playbook built on purpose, perseverance, people-first and positivity, rooted in both corporate practice and organisational psychology. She teaches the Science of Happiness and Resilience as an Adjunct Professor at Singapore Management University, bringing applied positive psychology into the room, not just a founder story. Her credentials are practitioner-plus-clinician: an INSEAD Executive Masters in Consulting and Coaching for Change, ICF coach accreditation, and training as a psychodynamic group therapist. That range lets her work with executive teams on culture change without oversimplifying. She speaks from inside the marketing craft, which makes her credible with commercial leaders who are suspicious of wellbeing content that does not understand how businesses actually grow. Biography highlights 17 years at Procter and Gamble as a C-suite global marketing executive, leading Always, Tampax and Whisper brand teams. Led the Always #LikeAGirl campaign, 14 Cannes Lions, named by Forbes as one of the most influential campaigns of the decade. Author of “Dare to Lead Like a Girl” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022), foreword by Sheryl Sandberg. Revised paperback “Lead Like a Girl” followed in 2024. Adjunct Professor at Singapore Management University, teaching the Science of Happiness and Resilience. Executive Masters in Consulting and Coaching for Change, INSEAD. Certified teacher in the Science of Happiness via the Happiness Studies Academy with Tal Ben-Shahar. Founder of Flow Leadership Consultancy and of Uppiness, a positive-psychology game for employees. Featured in McKinsey Author Talks and on TED.com via TEDxJaffaWomen. Biography Always #LikeAGirl rewired how a generation talks about what girls can do. Dalia Feldheim led the brand team behind it at Procter and Gamble. The campaign won 14 Cannes Lions and was later listed by Forbes among the most influential campaigns of the decade. That work sits at the centre of how she thinks about leadership today. After 17 years running global marketing for P and G brands including Always, Tampax and Whisper, she retrained as an organisational psychologist at INSEAD and as a certified teacher in the Science of Happiness at the Happiness Studies Academy with Tal Ben-Shahar. Flow Leadership Consultancy grew out of that combination. Her book “Dare to Lead Like a Girl” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022, foreword by Sheryl Sandberg) argues that the most durable response to burnout is a leadership style built on purpose, perseverance, people-first and positivity, for men and women alike. McKinsey featured her in its Author Talks series on the same thesis. She teaches the Science of Happiness and Resilience as an Adjunct Professor at Singapore Management University, and works with executive teams on building cultures that combine psychological safety with commercial ambition. Her TEDxJaffaWomen talk, also titled “Dare to Lead Like a Girl”, is published on TED.com. Key speaking topics Purpose-driven leadership and the four Ps: purpose, perseverance, people-first, positivity Psychological safety and culture change Resilience and the science of happiness at work Women in leadership and gender equality in the workplace Burnout, wellbeing and sustainable performance Purpose-led brand building Ideal for CHROs and heads of leadership development rethinking how they build leaders through sustained pressure. CMOs and brand leaders looking at purpose-led marketing from someone who has led it at scale. Executive teams running culture, DEI or wellbeing programmes that need credibility with commercial leaders. Leadership offsites where the audience wants substance from a practitioner, not motivational content. Audience outcomes A language for leading with empathy and purpose that commercial leaders can actually use with their teams. A clearer view of how psychological safety links to commercial performance, not just engagement scores. Specific positive-psychology practices leaders can apply to manage burnout in themselves and their teams. A sharper read on how purpose shows up in brand and culture, drawn from the Always #LikeAGirl playbook. A framework for rethinking gender and leadership style without reducing the conversation to representation numbers.

Why organisations work with Marissa Afton She brings a published, board-ready framework for compassion paired with difficult action, set out in Compassionate Leadership (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022), not a generic wellbeing message. She works at the inside edge of what leaders actually face right now: how to communicate restructure, layoff and AI-driven role change in a way that retains the people who stay. Her client base spans Apple, Bloomberg, Cisco, Google, Eli Lilly and Amgen, so her examples are drawn from leadership teams operating at the same scale and pressure as the buyer’s. She is one of the few voices on this topic with 25 years of mindfulness practice behind the management argument, which gives the material a depth of practice that pure consulting frameworks lack. Her recent HBR work on AI and compassionate leadership puts her ahead of most leadership speakers on the question of what changes when machines do more of the cognitive work. Biography highlights Partner and Head of Global Accounts, Potential Project. Co-author, Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022). Contributing author, The Mind of the Leader (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). Recurring contributor to Harvard Business Review, including “Connect with Empathy, But Lead with Compassion” and “Using AI to Make You a More Compassionate Leader.” Client engagements at Apple, Bloomberg, Cisco, Eli Lilly, Google and Amgen. Twenty-five years of formal mindfulness practice, applied to executive development at scale. Biography Hard decisions are arriving faster, and the audience for them has changed. Boards are being asked to restructure, redeploy and let people go in the same year they ask for innovation, retention and engagement. The leaders inside that contradiction need a way to act decisively without becoming the problem they were hired to solve. That is the territory Marissa Afton works in. As Partner and Head of Global Accounts at Potential Project, she runs leadership engagements with companies including Apple, Bloomberg, Cisco, Google, Eli Lilly and Amgen, and the brief is consistently the same: how do senior people deliver difficult news, drive hard change and still hold the room. Her co-authored book Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022) is the published frame for that work. The argument, also developed in her HBR pieces with Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter, is that empathy on its own makes leaders worse at hard decisions, and that the discipline organisations need is wise compassion, the willingness to act on hard truth while keeping the human in view. She brings a quarter century of mindfulness practice to the management argument, which gives her work a depth of attention that consulting frameworks typically lack. Her more recent HBR writing on AI and compassionate leadership pushes the same discipline into the next phase of corporate change, where the question is what kind of human presence still matters when more of the cognitive work runs through machines. Key speaking topics Compassionate leadership and hard decisions Leading through restructure, layoffs and change The mind of the leader and mental agility Mindful leadership and self-leadership at senior levels Resilience and burnout prevention for executives Women in senior leadership Leading in the age of AI Building human connection in hybrid work Ideal for CEOs, CHROs and senior HR leaders running restructure, redeployment or layoff programmes Executive leadership teams working on culture and trust through periods of significant change Boards and ELT offsites where the brief is to combine commercial honesty with humane delivery Women’s leadership programmes and senior leadership development cohorts Audience outcomes A working language for combining hard decisions with humane delivery, drawn from a published HBR Press framework A clearer view of where empathy helps leaders and where it begins to undermine them Specific practices for self-leadership under pressure, grounded in mental training rather than motivation A perspective on AI-era leadership that treats human attention as a scarce, trainable resource

Why organisations work with Isaac Kenyon He carries three credentials in one room: working energy-transition geoscientist, trustee of Mind, and record-setting endurance athlete. That triangulation lets him speak to wellbeing, sustainability and performance without losing the audience on any of them. His lived mental health story is paired with a formal governance role at a national mental health charity, which raises the credibility floor for sessions on burnout and men’s mental health well above the standard adventurer-speaker offer. The Climate Explorers CIC platform gives him a real operating context for sustainability content. He is talking about ESG and nature-based solutions as a founder running campaigns, not as a commentator. Kenyon’s expedition material (Atlantic row, waterbike crossing, weighted Ironman) is used as evidence for specific arguments about teaming, recovery and decision-making, rather than as standalone motivation. Biography highlights Co-founder of Climate Explorers CIC, a community interest company campaigning on nature-based climate solutions. Trustee of Mind in Mid Herts, the regional arm of national mental health charity Mind. BSc (Hons) Geology and MSc Geoscience, Royal Holloway, University of London; works as an energy transition geoscientist. Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Geological Society of London, and member of the Scientific Exploration Society. Completed the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge in 40 days, finishing sixth in 2019. World-record London Marathon run in a brain costume, raising funds and awareness for men’s mental health. Biography Most workforces are not short of wellbeing content. They are short of credible voices who can connect resilience, purpose and sustainability without sliding into slogans. That is the gap Isaac Kenyon fills, with a portfolio that holds together because every claim is backed by a role he actually performs. He is a working energy-transition geoscientist trained at Royal Holloway, University of London, with a BSc in Geology and an MSc in Geoscience. He co-founded Climate Explorers CIC, a community interest company that builds campaigns around nature-based climate solutions and eco-adventure. The sustainability content in his keynotes is grounded in that operating reality, not in commentary. The wellbeing line is anchored just as concretely. Kenyon is a trustee of Mind in Mid Herts, the regional arm of the national mental health charity, and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Geological Society of London and Scientific Exploration Society. His own experience of burnout sits alongside a governance role at a mental health charity, which is what raises the credibility floor on his men’s mental health and resilience material. The expeditions are where the arguments land. A 40-day row across the Atlantic, finishing sixth in the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge. A London Marathon was completed in a brain costume to set a record for men’s mental health. A waterbike crossing of the UK from Orkney to the Isles of Scilly. Kenyon uses each one to make a specific point about decision-making under fatigue, team behaviour at the limit, and what sustainable performance actually costs. Key speaking topics Resilience and burnout recovery Sustainable high performance Mental health and men’s wellbeing Climate action and nature-based sustainability Purpose-driven culture Team performance under pressure Energy transition and ESG storytelling Ideal for CHROs, heads of people and wellbeing leads dealing with workforce burnout and engagement. ESG, sustainability and corporate responsibility teams are looking for a credible voice that links climate to culture. Leadership offsites and conferences where resilience and purpose need to land in the same session. Organisations running men’s mental health, Mental Health Awareness Week or sustainability campaigns that need a named, accredited voice. Audience outcomes A clearer view of how burnout shows up in teams and what leaders can actually do about it. A working language for talking about sustainability and wellbeing as a single agenda, not two parallel ones. Specific decision-making lessons drawn from extreme endurance contexts and applied to workplace pressure. Practical entry points for men’s mental health conversations that often stall in corporate settings. A reframing of purpose that connects individual resilience with organisational and environmental responsibility.

Why organisations work with YuJin Wong He treats mental fitness as a performance discipline with measurable inputs, not a wellness theme, which gives HR and operational leaders something they can run beyond awareness days. His R.O.C.K formula, trademarked and built out across the book Mental Rockstar, gives audiences a named structure to take into Monday morning rather than a motivational hit that fades by the weekend. He is the first speaker in Asia to hold the Certified Speaking Professional designation from Asia Professional Speakers Singapore, a credential held by fewer than 5% of professional speakers worldwide. His material is built from a corporate insider lens. As a former lawyer and investment banker, he speaks to the specific pressure profile of finance, professional services, and high-output commercial environments rather than to a general wellness audience. He brings an Asia-anchored perspective on mental fitness, which matters for regional headquarters, APAC workforces, and global firms whose employee mental health programmes have so far been designed in the US or UK. Biography highlights First speaker in Asia to earn the Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) designation from Asia Professional Speakers Singapore. Author of Mental Rockstar: How to build mental toughness, face your fears, embrace change and unleash greatness (2020), built on the trademarked R.O.C.K formula. Certified by the International Sports Science Association and the Mental Toughness Research Institute (USA). Hosts the Mental Toughness for Business segment on MONEY FM 89.3, Singapore’s business radio. Former lawyer and investment banker with more than fifteen years working with corporate audiences on resilience, stress, and peak performance. Named recipient of Asia’s Innovation Leadership Award (2022), Asia’s Best Brands Award (2018), and the Global Brands Awards (2017). Biography Employee mental health has become an executive line item without becoming an executive capability. Most large employers now report a wellbeing programme, an EAP contract, and a calendar of awareness moments. Engagement scores, attrition, and presenteeism keep telling a different story. YuJin Wong works at exactly that gap. His material treats mental fitness the way operational leaders already treat physical fitness or safety, as a set of trainable behaviours with measurable inputs, not a campaign about awareness. The trademarked R.O.C.K formula, set out across his 2020 book Mental Rockstar, gives organisations a named structure to teach, repeat, and reinforce inside teams. His credibility with commercial audiences comes from inside the room rather than outside it. Before mental fitness work, he was a corporate lawyer and then an investment banker, before a personal collapse pushed him to rebuild around resilience and peak performance training. That history is why his material reads to finance, professional services, and sales leaders as a description of their environment, not an external commentary on it. The institutional signal is clear. He was the first speaker in Asia to earn the Certified Speaking Professional designation from Asia Professional Speakers Singapore, a credential held by fewer than 5% of professional speakers globally. He holds further certifications from the International Sports Science Association and the Mental Toughness Research Institute in the United States, and hosts the Mental Toughness for Business segment on MONEY FM 89.3, Singapore’s business radio station. Key speaking topics Mental fitness as an organisational capability Resilience and stress mastery for commercial environments Peak performance under sustained pressure Burnout prevention in high-output workforces Confidence and self-leadership for senior individual contributors Mental toughness for sales and revenue teams Ideal for CHROs and heads of wellbeing redesigning mental health programmes beyond awareness campaigns Sales leadership and revenue teams operating under sustained quota pressure APAC regional leadership and global firms briefing mental fitness work for Asian workforces Professional services and financial services firms managing burnout risk inside high-output teams Audience outcomes A working understanding of mental fitness as a trainable capability rather than a mood or trait The R.O.C.K formula as a shared vocabulary for teams to use after the session A specific read on the stress and burnout signals that precede performance loss Practical behaviours for sustaining output under pressure without normalising overwork Confidence that mental health work can be taken back into the organisation as a leadership task, not a clinical referral

Why organisations work with Caitriona Ellis She connects employee financial wellness directly to retention, giving HR and reward leaders a way to frame money support as a workforce outcome rather than a soft benefit. Her credentials as a qualified financial adviser mean the content stands up to scrutiny, which matters when an employer is putting financial guidance in front of staff. She speaks from a first-person recovery from serious financial difficulty, so audiences who feel quietly ashamed about money see someone credible who has been where they are. Her corporate sessions carry no product sales or advice agenda, which lets an employer put financial guidance in front of staff without the conflict of interest that adviser-led content usually brings. Biography highlights Qualified financial adviser with an honours Commerce degree and a career background in the banking sector. Founder of the Financial Wellness Academy, running structured financial wellbeing programmes for individuals and organisations. Buy-to-let property investor who acquired six properties remotely in the North East of England within a single 12-month period. Fellow of the National Estate Agents Association, with a Level 4 qualification in Residential Estate Agency. Delivers keynotes, workshops, and financial wellbeing programmes to employers, behaviour-led and free of any product or advice agenda. Regular speaker and podcast guest on financial wellness, including Institute of Directors International Women’s Day events and International Women Connected. Biography Money is the wellbeing problem most employers leave out. Mental health and physical health have a place in the corporate programme; financial anxiety, which sits underneath both, usually does not. Caitriona Ellis built her work in that gap, founding the Financial Wellness Academy to bring structured financial education to people who carry money stress quietly. Her authority rests on two things that rarely sit together. She is a qualified financial adviser with an honours Commerce degree and a banking background, so the technical content is sound. She has also worked her own way out of serious financial difficulty, which is why audiences who feel exposed about money tend to trust her rather than tune out. That credibility extends into practice. She is an active buy-to-let property investor who acquired six properties remotely in the North East of England inside a year, and a Fellow of the National Estate Agents Association. Her corporate sessions carry no product sales or advice agenda, so an employer can offer staff real financial guidance without the conflict that adviser-led content invites. For an organisation, the argument she makes is concrete: employees who feel in control of their money are easier to keep. She frames financial wellbeing as a retention lever, the part of the employee relationship that engagement surveys miss and exit interviews reveal too late. Key speaking topics Employee financial wellbeing Financial literacy and money confidence Financial wellbeing and staff retention Women and money Personal resilience and financial recovery Property investment and income diversification Ideal for CHROs, reward, and benefits leaders building or reviewing an employee wellbeing programme. Employee resource groups and women’s networks running financial confidence sessions. Organisations whose staff are visibly affected by cost-of-living pressure and financial stress. Audience outcomes Audiences leave able to name the first practical steps to take control of their own finances, regardless of starting point. Employees who felt isolated about money see that the problem is common and addressable, lowering the shame that keeps it hidden. HR and reward attendees leave with a clearer case for treating financial wellbeing as a retention issue, not a perk. Audiences gain a basic working understanding of income diversification and longer-term financial planning.

Why organisations work with Mike Lee Direct credibility transfer from elite sport. Fifteen years coaching NBA MVPs Stephen Curry and Joel Embiid, plus Malcolm Brogdon, gives audiences a vocabulary for high performance that lands harder than any management framework. A useable account of mental health from the inside. Lee built his methodology while working through severe anxiety, depression and antidepressant withdrawal, which lets him talk about wellbeing without the abstraction that usually surrounds it in corporate settings. A specific argument about belonging. The book New Rules For The Future Of Leadership makes engagement, talent and belonging culture a single connected problem, useful for CHROs trying to defend headcount and engagement budgets in the same conversation. An unusually low-friction speaker for the brief. Bureau testimonials repeatedly call out preparation and adaptability, which matters when the room is a board offsite rather than a conference plenary. Biography highlights Founder, MindShift Labs, a performance and leadership consultancy. Author, New Rules For The Future Of Leadership (Heartmind Media, 2023). Fifteen years coaching elite basketball, including NBA MVPs Stephen Curry and Joel Embiid and Rookie of the Year Malcolm Brogdon. Host of The MindShift Lab podcast, with guests including Mo Gawdat (formerly Google X) and Cy Wakeman. Keynote and workshop client list: Google, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Deloitte, IBM, Cisco, American Family Insurance, BMO Harris, ALPLA, and SHRM. Biography Elite athletes have always operated under conditions that resemble what senior corporate leaders now face every day: high stakes, public scrutiny, narrow margins between winning and losing, and almost no recovery time. The transfer of how that world handles performance is more useful to organisations than another framework borrowed from management literature. Lee spent fifteen years inside that world. He built an international basketball training business from a college apartment and ended up working with NBA MVPs Stephen Curry and Joel Embiid, and Rookie of the Year Malcolm Brogdon, among others. While the business grew, he was also working through severe anxiety, depression and the withdrawal from antidepressant medication. The combination of elite-performance coaching and a personal route through mental health is what shaped the methodology he now brings to corporate audiences. That methodology is set out in New Rules For The Future Of Leadership (Heartmind Media, 2023). The book argues that engagement, the contest for talent and the felt experience of belonging are the same operating problem, and that leaders need both the composure of a mindful practitioner and the mindset of an elite athlete to address it. It draws on neuroscience, sports psychology and his own first-person experience. Lee now runs MindShift Labs and works with companies including Google, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Deloitte, IBM, Cisco, American Family Insurance, BMO Harris, and ALPLA, alongside professional bodies such as SHRM. His podcast, The MindShift Lab, ran twenty-nine episodes between 2021 and 2022 with guests including Mo Gawdat, formerly Chief Business Officer at Google X. Key speaking topics High-performance leadership Engagement and belonging culture Mindfulness and presence at work Mental health and burnout Resilience under uncertainty Peak performance psychology Talent and retention Ideal for CHROs and people leaders carrying engagement, retention and culture targets. Senior leadership offsites where performance and wellbeing need to be addressed in the same room. Sales, client-facing and high-pressure commercial teams. Talent and learning leads designing leadership development at the manager and director tier. Audience outcomes A practical view of how elite athletes manage focus, recovery and pressure, applied to corporate conditions. A clearer line between belonging culture and the commercial cost of attrition. Specific mindfulness and presence techniques leaders can use before a high-stakes conversation, not as a wellbeing perk. A more honest internal language for mental health that senior leaders can use without sounding either performative or clinical.

Why organisations work with Emilie Bellet She has built one of the UK’s largest women-focused financial education communities from scratch, which gives her a live read on what employees actually ask, avoid and misunderstand about money. She pairs a Lehman Brothers and Trilantic private equity background with a mass-market book and weekly podcast, so she can move between a CFO audience and a shop-floor audience without shifting register. Her work gives employers a concrete way to connect financial wellbeing, pay equity and retention of senior women, three agendas that are usually owned by different teams and rarely joined up. She is a named voice in the UK financial media (Financial Times, The i Paper, Vogue, BBC), which makes her credible to finance services clients where brand risk around money content is high. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of Vestpod, a financial education platform and community for women. Author of “You’re Not Broke, You’re Pre-Rich” (Octopus / Little, Brown) and contributor to “The WealthTech Book” (Wiley). Host of “The Wallet”, a weekly personal finance podcast. Columnist for the Financial Times and The i Paper; featured in Vogue, Forbes, BBC, The Guardian, Stylist and Courier. Former private equity professional at Lehman Brothers Merchant Banking and Trilantic Capital Partners, London. Named in the Women in FinTech Powerlist (Rising Stars) and shortlisted for Disruptor of the Year at the Women in Finance Awards. Biography Most financial education inside large employers stops at pensions and payroll. It rarely answers the questions people actually carry into Monday morning: how to invest a first bonus, whether to buy, how to talk about money with a partner, what to do with a redundancy package. Vestpod was built to close that gap, and it has become one of the UK’s most engaged communities on women and money. The founder’s route in is unusual. Emilie spent seven years in private equity at Lehman Brothers Merchant Banking and Trilantic Capital Partners in London before leaving the buy-side to build a platform she felt the market was not serving. That background matters for corporate audiences because she is not a lifestyle commentator, she is a former investor who now translates institutional finance into language a general workforce can use. The work has two sides that employers buy together. “You’re Not Broke, You’re Pre-Rich”, published by Octopus, codified the personal finance curriculum; the weekly newsletter, The Wallet podcast and Money Matters festival keep it current. Inside companies, that content becomes workshops on investing basics, the gender wealth gap and financial confidence, delivered for names including Amazon, BCG, Coutts, NatWest and Palo Alto Networks. Her media footprint is the credibility backstop. Regular columns in the Financial Times and The i Paper, plus coverage in Vogue, Forbes, BBC and The Guardian, put her in front of the audience senior HR and DEI teams are trying to reach, and give risk-sensitive financial services clients a known name they can put on a programme. Key speaking topics Women and wealth Financial wellbeing in the workplace The gender wealth and investment gap Personal finance and investing fundamentals Financial confidence and money mindset WealthTech and financial inclusion Entrepreneurship and building a consumer brand Ideal for CHROs and heads of reward designing financial wellbeing into benefits strategy DEI and women’s network leads who need content beyond mentoring and panels Financial services and WealthTech firms running client-facing events for women investors Internal International Women’s Day, Financial Wellness Month and employee festival programmes Audience outcomes A clear picture of where the gender wealth gap comes from and which levers an employer can actually pull Specific language and frameworks employees can use to take the next step on saving, investing or debt Renewed confidence to engage with pension, share scheme and investment decisions that many defer by default A sharper internal case for treating financial wellbeing as part of retention and inclusion strategy, not a standalone perk

Why organisations work with Ashley Edwards She has built, funded, and scaled a care model specifically for the populations most wellbeing strategies fail to reach, and can translate that design logic into enterprise benefits and DEI programmes. MindRight is one of the few mental health platforms to make a non-clinical, text-based coaching service Medicaid-reimbursable, a proof point leaders can use to argue for culturally responsive care inside their own benefits stack. She is the first Black woman founder in New Jersey to raise over $1M in venture capital, which gives her an unusually credible voice on what it takes to back and build underrepresented leaders. As the inaugural Visiting Social Entrepreneur at Stanford GSB’s Center for Social Innovation, she brings a practitioner view sharpened by coaching the next wave of founders, not a consulting framework. She speaks from inside the problem: an operator running payroll, payer contracts, and clinical safety decisions, not a commentator. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of MindRight Health, a venture-backed mental health startup delivering text-message coaching for underserved youth, with Medicaid-reimbursable pathways. First Black woman founder in New Jersey to raise over $1M in venture capital. Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur; named by Forbes among “Healers” shaping the next century. Inaugural Visiting Social Entrepreneur, Center for Social Innovation, Stanford Graduate School of Business. MBA and MA in Education, Stanford University (Miller Social Change Leadership Award); BA in Economics, Yale University. Previous platforms include Aspen Ideas, US Chamber of Commerce, Google, the WNBA, Harvard Business School, Stanford, and Yale; work covered in ELLE, Business Insider, and Inc. Biography Most young people in underserved communities never touch the clinical mental health system. They text. MindRight Health was built around that fact. Founded by Ashley Edwards in 2019 after she watched her students in Newark carry untreated trauma into school every day, the company delivers non-clinical mental health coaching by text, meets users where they already are, and has engineered its service to be reimbursed by Medicaid and commercial payers. That design choice is where the organisational lesson sits. Benefits and wellbeing programmes built for a narrow group of users rarely work for everyone else. MindRight’s published retention and usage data with BIPOC youth, which exceed industry benchmarks, make a concrete argument for culturally responsive, preventative care as the first line of support, not the fallback. Edwards brings the credentials to be heard by serious buyers. An MBA and MA in Education from Stanford, where she received the Miller Social Change Leadership Award, and a BA in Economics from Yale. She is the first Black woman founder in New Jersey to raise over $1M in venture capital, one of a small group to have done so in the United States, and serves as the inaugural Visiting Social Entrepreneur at Stanford GSB’s Center for Social Innovation, coaching a new cohort of social impact founders. For leaders responsible for employee wellbeing, DEI, and benefits strategy, her value is practical. She has made the trade-offs between clinical rigour, cultural fit, affordability, and scale, and she can explain, with numbers, what it takes to reach the workforce a wellbeing policy is supposed to serve. Key speaking topics Mental health in the workplace Employee wellbeing and benefits design Health equity and access to care Inclusive leadership and DEI strategy Social entrepreneurship and venture-backed impact Digital health and care delivery innovation Building and funding underrepresented founders Ideal for CHROs, Heads of Benefits, and Chief Wellbeing Officers redesigning mental health support for a multigenerational, multicultural workforce. Chief Diversity Officers and DEI leads connecting wellbeing strategy to equity outcomes. Healthcare payers, providers, and employer coalitions evaluating non-clinical, preventative, culturally responsive care models. Foundations, investors, and corporate venture teams backing social impact and health equity founders. Audience outcomes A sharper picture of why current mental health benefits fail the employees who most need them, and what design choices close that gap. A working understanding of how non-clinical, digital, culturally responsive care models fit alongside clinical pathways inside a benefits strategy. Specific evidence from MindRight’s payer partnerships and retention data that leaders can use to pressure-test their own wellbeing and DEI investments. A direct view from an operator-founder on what it takes to fund, build, and scale services for underrepresented populations.