Employee Wellbeing speakers

Why organisations work with Steve Peters A clinical psychiatrist’s model of how the mind actually behaves under stress, not a coaching framework borrowed from adjacent fields. The Chimp Model has been pressure-tested with British Cycling, Sky ProCycling, Liverpool FC and more than twenty Olympic and national sports programmes, where the cost of a wrong decision is immediate and public. Author of The Chimp Paradox, with over 1.4 million copies sold, plus three further books extending the model into resilience, child development and daily practice. Equips leaders with a shared vocabulary for emotional regulation that travels into the executive team and downward through the organisation, not a one-off motivational hit. Senior academic standing at Sheffield Medical School and Expert Advisor status with the World Anti-Doping Agency anchor the work in formal medicine and ethics, not pop psychology. Biography highlights Consultant psychiatrist and CEO of Chimp Management Ltd. Undergraduate Dean and Senior Clinical Lecturer, Sheffield University Medical School, since 1994. Former Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist, Rampton High Security Hospital. Author of The Chimp Paradox (Vermilion, 2012), My Hidden Chimp, The Silent Guides and A Path Through the Jungle. Consultant to British Cycling, Sky ProCycling, Liverpool FC, GB Taekwondo, England Rugby, England Football, British Swimming and UK Track and Field. Expert Advisor to the World Anti-Doping Agency; long-serving examination panellist for the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Biography The most expensive moments in a leader’s career are the ones where the emotional brain takes over and the rational mind catches up too late. The reaction in the meeting, the email sent at midnight, the call made under fatigue. These are not character flaws. They are predictable outputs of how the human mind is structured. Steve Peters spent more than two decades as a consultant psychiatrist before that observation became a model. His Chimp Model, set out in The Chimp Paradox, separates the emotional system of the brain from the rational one and gives people a working vocabulary for managing the gap between them. The book has sold more than 1.4 million copies and remains a fixture on UK self-development lists more than a decade after publication. The model earned its reputation in elite sport. Peters worked with British Cycling through its dominant Olympic period, with Sky ProCycling at the top of professional road racing, and with Liverpool FC, GB Taekwondo, England Rugby and England Football. Athletes including Sir Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton, Ronnie O’Sullivan and Adam Peaty have credited him by name. The point is not the celebrity roster. It is that the model has been used in environments where a single emotional misfire is captured on camera and replayed millions of times. His standing in the formal medical world gives the work a different weight from most performance content. Peters is Undergraduate Dean and Senior Clinical Lecturer at Sheffield University Medical School, was Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist at Rampton High Security Hospital, and serves as an Expert Advisor to the World Anti-Doping Agency. Leaders come away with something rare in this category: a clinically anchored model of their own mind that they can still use the morning after the keynote. Key speaking topics Mind management and the Chimp Model Emotional regulation under pressure Resilience and psychological robustness High performance under scrutiny Self-leadership for senior executives Mental health in the workplace Team dynamics and interpersonal conflict Ideal for CEOs, executive committees and boards facing high-stakes decision-making cycles CHROs and Heads of Talent commissioning substantive wellbeing and resilience programmes Leadership development directors building executive presence in newly senior leaders Sales, trading and operating teams whose performance is shaped by composure under pressure Audience outcomes A working model of how the emotional mind behaves under pressure, in a vocabulary that survives Monday morning A method for separating impulsive reactions from considered decisions in the moment Specific tools for managing fear, conflict, fatigue and post-event recovery A shared organisational language that makes mental performance discussable rather than private Confidence that the content is grounded in clinical psychiatry, not motivational reframing

Why organisations work with Steven Laureys He brings the working brain into board-level conversations on performance and wellbeing, grounded in clinical neurology rather than wellness orthodoxy. He runs one of the few research groups in the world studying consciousness across coma, anaesthesia, sleep, hypnosis, and meditation, which gives audiences a single coherent framework for thinking about attention and recovery. His Francqui Prize and Canada Excellence Research Chair give a buyer hard evidence of scientific standing in a field crowded with popularisers. He has translated his research into a bestselling popular book on meditation, so audiences get a scientist who can talk to non-scientists without losing accuracy. He works in English, French, and Dutch, which makes him directly usable across European leadership audiences without an interpreter. Biography highlights Founder and head of the Coma Science Group, GIGA Consciousness, University of Liège. Canada Excellence Research Chair in Neuroplasticity, Laval University and CERVO Brain Research Centre. Research Director at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS). Winner of the Francqui Prize 2017 and the Generet Prize 2019. Author of The No-Nonsense Meditation Book, an international bestseller published by Bloomsbury and translated into multiple languages. TEDx speaker at TEDxBrussels and TEDxLiège, with research featured across major international media. Biography Most of what is sold to organisations as “wellbeing” is built on intuition. The brain that is meant to be helping is the most expensive and least understood asset on the payroll. Steven Laureys studies the brain for a living, and his work has spent two decades pushing the boundary of what can be measured in coma, sleep, anaesthesia, hypnosis, and meditation. He founded the Coma Science Group within GIGA Consciousness at the University of Liège in 2014, and now also holds the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Neuroplasticity at Laval University, based at the CERVO Brain Research Centre. He is a Research Director at Belgium’s FNRS and a clinical professor of neurology, board-certified in neurology and in palliative medicine. The Francqui Prize, Belgium’s highest scientific honour, was awarded to him in 2017 for his work on disorders of consciousness. His public reach is unusual for a clinician of this seniority. The No-Nonsense Meditation Book, published by Bloomsbury, became an international bestseller and made the case for meditation in the language of neuroimaging rather than spirituality. He has spoken at TEDxBrussels and TEDxLiège, and his research has been picked up across mainstream international media. For corporate audiences, he turns the same instruments he uses on coma patients and Buddhist monks toward the working brain: attention, stress, sleep, cognitive recovery, and the conditions under which people make good decisions. The argument he brings is simple. The science is now specific enough to act on, and most organisations are not yet using it. Key speaking topics Neuroscience of attention and focus Stress and cognitive recovery Sleep and performance Meditation and the brain Mental wellbeing in the workplace Human intelligence and artificial intelligence Consciousness, anaesthesia, and altered states Neuroplasticity and lifestyle interventions Ideal for CHROs and chief wellbeing officers are building credible mental health and performance programmes. Executive teams and boards are considering attention, sleep, and stress as performance variables. Leadership development audiences in healthcare, professional services, and high-stakes operating environments. Innovation and R&D leaders interested in the brain science behind creativity and cognitive load. Audience outcomes A clinician’s view of what neuroscience can and cannot yet say about attention, stress, sleep, and meditation. Specific, evidence-based practices that senior people can use on themselves and inside their teams. A clearer line between credible neuroscience and the wellness industry’s claims. Confidence to challenge wellbeing programmes that rest on intuition rather than evidence. A working mental model of the brain under load that maps onto real organisational decisions.

Why organisations work with Steven MacGregor He has built a single, named methodology, the Sustaining Executive Performance programme, and tested it on more than 20,000 executives in person across markets ranging from Peru to Qatar. The Chief Wellbeing Officer platform gives senior teams an operating model for sustaining leadership performance under pressure, delivered inside Google, Salesforce, Uber, Accenture, Santander, and Oracle. He founded the General Counsel Wellbeing Network, a global peer network for senior in-house counsel partnered with Pinsent Masons and shortlisted for Mental Health & Wellbeing Initiative of the Year at the Legal 500 ESG Awards 2026, evidence the platform holds up in one of the highest-pressure leadership populations. A decade-long trilogy, Sustaining Executive Performance (Pearson, 2015), Chief Wellbeing Officer (LID, 2018), and The Daily Reset (2024), gives him a coherent body of work that connects performance science, organisational design, and behavioural change. He sits inside McKinsey’s People and Organizational Performance practice as a Senior Advisor, so the work is calibrated to how serious operating companies actually run. Biography highlights Founder, Chief Wellbeing Officer (CWO) leadership development platform, delivered to executive teams at Google, Salesforce, Uber, Accenture, Santander, and Oracle Founder, General Counsel Wellbeing Network, a global peer network for senior in-house counsel with chapters across the UK, Spain, Ireland, and the Middle East Founder and CEO, Leadership Academy of Barcelona (LAB) Senior Advisor, People and Organizational Performance practice, McKinsey & Company Honorary Professor of Health and Wellbeing, Glasgow School of Art Faculty experience at IESE, IE Business School, IMD (Lausanne and Singapore), and CEIBS (Shanghai and Jakarta) Author of Sustaining Executive Performance (Pearson, 2015), Chief Wellbeing Officer (LID, 2018, with Rory Simpson), and The Daily Reset (2024) Biography Most senior leaders today are running a workload their predecessors would not recognise. Decision volume has compounded, recovery time has collapsed, and the pressure is no longer episodic. The harder question is what organisations actually invest in to make that sustainable. That is the line of work Steven MacGregor has spent two decades building, first inside business schools, then through the Leadership Academy of Barcelona, and now through the Chief Wellbeing Officer platform and as a Senior Advisor inside McKinsey’s People and Organizational Performance practice. The Sustaining Executive Performance programme started as an applied research project drawing on elite sport, including time with FC Barcelona’s athletics team, and elements of human-centred design. It has since been delivered to more than 20,000 executives in person, from Peru to Qatar. Today the Chief Wellbeing Officer platform sits on top of that foundation, and is delivered inside executive teams at Google, Salesforce, Uber, Accenture, Santander, and Oracle, with teaching at IESE, IE, IMD, CEIBS, and the Glasgow School of Art. The decade-long trilogy gives the work its intellectual spine. Sustaining Executive Performance (Pearson, 2015) set out the evidence-based link between wellbeing and decision-making, clarity, and long-term execution. Chief Wellbeing Officer (LID, 2018), written with former Telefónica Chief Learning Officer Rory Simpson, formalised the argument that wellbeing needs an owner at the top table, with metrics, budget, and authority. The Daily Reset (2024) translates behavioural science and habit formation into the everyday practices that make performance stick. The General Counsel Wellbeing Network, which MacGregor founded in 2024, is where the platform meets one of the most pressured leadership populations in business. It now operates across the UK, Spain, Ireland, and the Middle East, with a partnership with Pinsent Masons and a Legal 500 ESG Awards 2026 shortlisting for Mental Health & Wellbeing Initiative of the Year. His training is unusual for the field: a doctorate in engineering design management with research periods at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, and an Honorary Professorship at the Glasgow School of Art. That background shapes the work. The focus is less on motivation and more on the design of work itself, which is what makes the material useful to senior teams trying to convert wellbeing language into operating change. Key speaking topics Sustainable leadership performance under pressure Executive resilience, clarity, and recovery Workplace wellbeing as an operating discipline The Chief Wellbeing Officer platform Personal energy and recovery for senior leaders Health, performance, and the design of work Behaviour change inside corporate environments Ideal for CHROs, Chief People Officers, and Chief Wellbeing Officers building enterprise-wide leadership performance and wellbeing strategies Executive committees and boards reviewing burnout, attrition, and human-capital risk General Counsel, Chief Legal Officers, and senior in-house counsel managing performance under chronic load Partner groups in professional services and law firms managing performance under chronic load Audience outcomes A working definition of what wellbeing means as a leadership performance discipline, not a benefit category The Sustaining Executive Performance framework as a concrete tool for senior leaders to apply to themselves and their teams A view on where the Chief Wellbeing Officer function sits in an operating model, with named accountabilities Practical habit-formation tools drawn from elite sport, behavioural science, and design that senior leaders can adopt in their own week

Why organisations work with Stew Friedman Total Leadership is one of the few leadership methods built inside a Fortune 10 operating environment, Ford Motor Company, and then road-tested through a top-five business school for two decades. It has the rigour of academic work and the realism of factory-floor change. He gives executive teams a usable language for the trade-off they actually face, which is not work versus life but performance under pressure versus depletion of the people delivering it. His framework converts a soft topic into a measurable one. Participants run small structured experiments and report performance gains across four domains, which gives HR and L&D leaders something concrete to point at. Thinkers50 named him the world’s number one thinker on talent in 2015 and inducted him into the Hall of Fame in 2023, which is unusually strong recognition in a category that buyers are now under board pressure to take seriously. He works at the level senior buyers want, which is senior leaders and high-potential cohorts, and he is comfortable in front of a board, an executive offsite, or a long-form development programme. Biography highlights Emeritus Practice Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, on faculty since 1984. Founder of the Wharton Leadership Program and the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, both established in 1991. Former senior executive for leadership development at Ford Motor Company, where he ran the Leadership Development Center and a corporate programme reaching 2,500 managers a year. Author of Total Leadership (Harvard Business Review Press), Leading the Life You Want, and Parents Who Lead. Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award for Talent, 2015, and inductee into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, 2023. Families and Work Institute Work Life Legacy Award, 2013. Host of Work and Life on SiriusXM Wharton Business Radio. Biography Ford Motor Company in the late 1990s was the proving ground for an idea that most leadership programmes still avoid: that the performance of senior leaders is inseparable from the rest of their lives, and that pretending otherwise produces fragile executives and exhausted teams. Friedman ran that experiment as the company’s senior executive for leadership development from 1999 to 2001, leading the Leadership Development Center and a programme that touched 2,500 managers a year. What he took back to Wharton became Total Leadership, the book and the method. The argument is simple to state and difficult to execute. A leader has four domains, work, home, community and self, and the job is to design small experiments that produce gains across all four at once. The method is taught inside Wharton’s MBA and executive programmes and has been delivered to thousands of leaders inside companies that cannot afford to treat senior burnout as a private matter. The intellectual home for the work is the Wharton Leadership Program and the Work/Life Integration Project, both of which Friedman founded in 1991 and ran for decades. He has written Total Leadership, Leading the Life You Want, and, with Alyssa F. Westring, Parents Who Lead. Harvard Business Review has carried more than fifty of his digital pieces. The external recognition matters because the category does. Thinkers50 ranked him the world’s number one thinker on talent in 2015 and inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2023. The Families and Work Institute gave him its Work Life Legacy Award. For a senior buyer trying to fix the gap between what their leaders are asked to deliver and what their workforce is willing to give, that is the body of work in the room. Key speaking topics Leadership impact in all parts of life Total Leadership and four-way wins Leadership development inside large organisations Work and life integration as a performance question Engagement and the contract between leaders and the people they lead Talent strategy and senior leader development Parenting, career, and the dual-career executive household Ideal for CEO, COO, and executive committees rebuilding the leadership model after restructure or sustained pressure CHRO and chief talent officers responsible for senior leader development and retention Boards looking at engagement and burnout as a governance and risk issue, not a perks question High-potential cohorts inside leadership academies and corporate universities Audience outcomes A different working definition of leadership performance, one that includes the durability of the leader and the team, not just quarterly output A simple structure for designing small experiments that improve performance and wellbeing at the same time A language senior teams can use with each other about pressure, depletion and trade-offs without it sliding into a wellbeing conversation A clearer sense of what the next generation of senior leaders actually need from their organisations, and what they will not accept

Why organisations work with Stuart Sandeman He turns a research-grounded physiological practice into something a CFO will actually use on a Tuesday morning, not a wellness add-on that lives outside the working day. His book “Breathe In, Breathe Out” reached the Sunday Times bestseller list and gives buyers a defensible reference point for the substance behind the session. He has run programmes inside Google, Nike, Spotify, Adidas, PwC and Warner Music, with the same framework adapted for Olympic athletes, UFC fighters and the England football squad at Euro 2024. The format pairs structured breathing protocols with curated music, drawing on his prior career as a DJ and producer. The room experience is part of the product, not a backdrop. BBC Radio 1’s “Decompression Session”, now in its sixth series, gives him a public platform that very few corporate wellbeing speakers can match. Biography highlights Founder of Breathpod, a breathwork and corporate wellbeing business with clients including Google, Nike, Spotify, Adidas, PwC, Warner Music, MediaCom and Merkle. Sunday Times bestselling author of “Breathe In, Breathe Out”, published by HarperCollins. Host of BBC Radio 1’s “Decompression Session”, a guided breathwork and electronic music programme now in its sixth series. Performance work with Olympic athletes, UFC fighters, the US rugby sevens team and the England team at the 2024 Euros. Former financial markets professional in the UK and Asia, music producer and DJ, and a Scottish national-level judo black belt. Featured in The Times, The Guardian and The Evening Standard. Biography Most corporate wellbeing programmes fail the same test. They are voluntary, optional and asynchronous, and the people who most need them never turn up. The result is a category of spend that boards struggle to defend when the next round of cost cuts arrives. Stuart Sandeman built Breathpod to sit inside the working day rather than outside it. Sessions are short, structured and physiological, designed for boardrooms, sales floors and athletic preparation rooms. The clients on the list, Google, Nike, Spotify, Adidas, PwC and Warner Music, repeat-book because the practice produces a measurable shift in state inside the meeting it is delivered in. His credibility as a practitioner is reinforced by two adjacent platforms. “Breathe In, Breathe Out” reached the Sunday Times bestseller list and gave the field a serious mainstream reference book. BBC Radio 1’s “Decompression Session”, now in its sixth series, pairs guided breathing with curated electronic music for a national audience. The hybrid, scientific instruction inside a broadcast-quality sound experience is the same form he brings to corporate rooms. The route in is unusual. A career in financial markets in the UK and Asia, a parallel life as a DJ and producer, a Scottish judo black belt, then a turn to breathwork after losing his partner to cancer in 2016. Performance clients have followed: Olympic athletes, UFC fighters, the US rugby sevens team, and the England squad at Euro 2024. Key speaking topics Breathwork for stress and recovery Focus and performance under pressure Sleep and energy management Wellbeing inside high-performance cultures Emotional regulation and resilience Mental health in the workplace Ideal for CHROs, CPOs and wellbeing leads designing interventions that need to land with senior populations, not just with HR. Executive teams and leadership offsites where stress, sleep and focus are direct constraints on output. High-performance environments in sport, broadcast and creative industries where physiological state is part of the job. Sales, trading and consulting teams operating in sustained high-pressure cycles. Audience outcomes A small set of breathing protocols that audiences can use the same day, in meetings, before pitches and during recovery. A clearer mental model for how breath, nervous system and performance interact, drawn from research rather than wellness language. A shared room experience, structured breathing inside a curated soundscape, that resets state and shifts the energy of the day. Practical tools for sleep, focus and emotional regulation that do not depend on apps, kits, or further enrolment.

Why organisations work with Dr Sue Mitchell Her PEP framework gives leaders a portable and memorable model for navigating uncertainty – field-tested across sectors from global pharma to policing, and consistently recalled by participants months after delivery. Her background in evolutionary ecology – studying adaptive strategies across complex, dynamic systems – informs an analytical approach to leadership that goes beyond behavioural coaching, connecting individual mindset to systemic structures. She completed training with Peter Senge in Compassionate Systems Leadership, giving her work a rigorous intellectual foundation that distinguishes her from practitioners working from applied psychology or HR frameworks alone. Her concept of “inner sustainability” reframes resilience as a proactive leadership capacity rather than a reactive stress-management tool – a distinction that senior leaders in high-change environments find practically useful. Biography highlights PhD in evolutionary ecology; post-doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh and a Max Planck Institute, Germany Trained in Compassionate Systems Leadership with Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline Author, The Authority Guide to Engaging Your People (SRA Books) Founder and Director, Aeona Ltd; clients include EY, Lloyds Banking Group, Bayer, Gilead Sciences, Scottish Enterprise, and Police Scotland Fellow and former Regional President (Scotland, 2019–2020), Professional Speaking Association UK & Ireland Co-founder, IDG Edinburgh Resilience Hub – applying the Inner Development Goals framework to leadership and organisational change Biography When engagement falls and burnout rises, the root cause is rarely individual. It is usually a leadership culture that was built for stability and has not been redesigned for permanent disruption. Dr Sue Mitchell has spent two decades helping organisations close that gap. Her starting point is unusual. Before moving into coaching and leadership development, she was an evolutionary ecologist, with post-doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh and a Max Planck Institute in Germany. The discipline – studying how organisms sustain effective strategies across dynamic, interconnected systems – gave her a framework for understanding organisations that is structurally different from standard behavioural models. She later trained with Peter Senge in Compassionate Systems Leadership, deepening that foundation. That systems perspective runs through her proprietary PEP framework: a practical model for helping leaders maintain clarity, commitment and adaptability under pressure. It has been delivered across a client base that includes EY, Lloyds Banking Group, Gilead Sciences, Bayer, Scottish Enterprise, and Police Scotland. More recently, she co-founded the IDG Edinburgh Resilience Hub, bringing the Inner Development Goals framework – developed as a companion to the UN Sustainable Development Goals – into leadership and organisational practice. She is the author of The Authority Guide to Engaging Your People (SRA Books) and a Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association UK & Ireland, where she served as Regional President for Scotland. Through Aeona, her Edinburgh-based consultancy, she works across keynote speaking, executive coaching, and multiday leadership development programmes. Key speaking topics Adaptable leadership Navigating change and uncertainty Employee engagement and sustainable performance Systems thinking in organisations Organisational resilience Inner sustainability and mindset Diversity, decision-making and team dynamics Ideal for Senior leadership teams navigating restructure, sustained organisational change, or rapid growth HR directors and heads of OD commissioning leadership development programmes or all-staff development events Organisations in professional services, financial services, life sciences, or public sector seeking structured leadership development programmes Mid-to-senior management cohorts where engagement, performance, and wellbeing are competing tensions Audience outcomes A portable framework (PEP) for managing their own mindset and their team’s behaviour through uncertainty and change Clearer understanding of how unconscious mental models shape decision-making under pressure – and how to intervene A common language for discussing change, resilience and engagement across a leadership group Practical tools for sustaining performance without trading off wellbeing Greater awareness of how organisational systems and structures – not just individual behaviour – drive or undermine engagement

Why organisations work with Sylvia Marusyk A practising occupational therapist, not a wellness coach, which gives wellbeing content credibility with EHS, operations and unionised audiences who routinely dismiss soft programming. 30 years of clinical work translated into language that holds a room of utility engineers, nurses, municipal workers and aerospace technicians, not only an HR audience. A repeatable session catalogue covering stress, engagement, respectful conduct and self-health, with named talks that buyers can match to a specific workforce problem. Author of Testing Positive: 365 Days of Calm Through Chaos, written through her own cancer diagnosis, which gives the wellbeing material lived authority rather than borrowed theory. Track record across Manitoba Hydro, Great-West Life, City of Winnipeg, Transport Canada, Health Canada, StandardAero and the Manitoba Nurses Union, so buyers can see the work has held up across regulated, industrial and public sector environments. Biography highlights Founder and owner of MindBody Works Inc., a Canadian workplace health and wellness consultancy. Registered occupational therapist with more than 30 years of practice in health, safety and workplace wellbeing. Author of Testing Positive: 365 Days of Calm Through Chaos, a daily guide written after her cancer diagnosis during the pandemic. Former host of the Happy Hour with Sylvia! radio programme and a regular podcast guest on workplace health and safety. Speaking and training clients include Manitoba Hydro, Great-West Life, Transport Canada, Health Canada, City of Winnipeg, StandardAero, Reynolds Consumer Products, the Manitoba Nurses Union, and CAPPA. Signature programmes include Surviving to Thriving, Stressed to Kill, Happy Hour Begins at 9am, Respectfully, Up Yours and Rules of Engagement. Biography Wellbeing budgets have grown for a decade, yet absence, burnout and turnover keep rising. The problem is not awareness. It is that most workplace health content sits a long way from the physical and cognitive reality of the people actually doing the work, which is precisely the gap Sylvia Marusyk has spent her career closing. She trained as an occupational therapist and has practised in the field for more than 30 years. That clinical grounding shapes everything she does on stage: the body and the brain treated as a single working system, stress described in biochemical and behavioural terms, prevention framed as an operational discipline rather than a lifestyle choice. As founder of MindBody Works Inc., she has built a Canadian workplace health consultancy around that approach. Her session catalogue is unusually concrete for the wellbeing category. Stressed to Kill unpacks the physical, cognitive, emotional and environmental components of stress. Surviving to Thriving offers self-health tools that hold up under pressure. Respectfully, Up Yours turns psychological safety into a behavioural conversation, and Rules of Engagement tackles retention and engagement. Beyond keynotes, her S.H.O.P (Safety and Health for Organizations and People) programme takes leadership teams through a structured diagnostic and planning engagement, with a follow-up review some months later to test whether anything actually changed. The book Testing Positive: 365 Days of Calm Through Chaos, written through her own cancer diagnosis, supplies the personal spine to the clinical content. The credibility shows up in who books her. Manitoba Hydro, Great-West Life, Transport Canada, Health Canada, the City of Winnipeg, StandardAero, Reynolds Consumer Products and the Manitoba Nurses Union have all put her in front of audiences that are unforgiving of generic wellness talk: engineers, nurses, municipal staff, aerospace technicians. That is the market she has built her work for. Key speaking topics Workplace stress and burnout prevention Employee wellbeing and mental health at work Occupational health and injury prevention Respectful workplace culture and psychological safety Employee engagement and retention Resilience and self-health practices Workplace happiness and work-life conflict Ideal for CHROs, heads of wellbeing and EHS leaders rebuilding stress, absence and injury programmes Operations and safety leaders in utilities, healthcare, aerospace, manufacturing and municipal services Union and member organisations commissioning content for frontline and clinical workforces HR and culture leads addressing respectful conduct, engagement and retention in fatigued teams Audience outcomes A clinical understanding of how stress affects the body, brain and behaviour at work Specific self-health practices audiences can apply during and after the working day Language for naming and addressing disrespectful conduct without escalating it A sharper sense of where wellbeing programmes are working and where they are theatre Renewed energy and humour in rooms that often arrive defensive about wellbeing content

Why organisations work with Tal Ben-Shahar The Harvard credential is unusually specific. His Positive Psychology course became the most-taken class in the university’s history, which means his material has been pressure-tested in a room he did not own rather than rehearsed for conferences. His SPIRE framework, the basis of the Happiness Studies Academy curriculum, gives organisations a shared language for wellbeing that is specific enough to act on and simple enough to deploy at scale. Potentialife, co-founded with a former McKinsey senior partner, has translated positive psychology into a leadership development platform rather than a keynote; he speaks from inside that operating experience. Eight books, Happier a New York Times bestseller, translated into 25 languages, makes him one of the most cited authorities on happiness science that a buyer can put in front of a large internal audience. His work connects wellbeing to performance in a way most wellness speakers cannot, which is what senior leadership teams need when they are being asked to justify the investment. Biography highlights PhD in Organizational Behavior and BA in Philosophy and Psychology, Harvard University Former teacher of Positive Psychology 1504 at Harvard, the most-taken course in the university’s history Co-founder of the Happiness Studies Academy and creator of the SPIRE wellbeing framework Co-founder of Potentialife, a positive-psychology-based leadership development platform Author of eight books including the New York Times bestseller Happier, translated into 25 languages Helped establish the Maytiv Center for positive psychology at IDC Herzliya (now Reichman University) Biography A generation of Harvard students sat in Positive Psychology 1504 because it was the most-enrolled course in the university’s history. The argument that drew them is the argument Tal Ben-Shahar has since built into an international body of work: that happiness is not a soft subject, it is a measurable driver of performance, judgment and resilience, and the organisations that understand it will outperform the ones that treat it as HR decoration. His academic grounding is Harvard across the board, with a BA in Philosophy and Psychology and a PhD in Organizational Behavior. The teaching track ran alongside a popular-writing career that now spans eight books, including the New York Times bestseller Happier, translated into 25 languages. These are not motivational titles, they are the popular expression of an empirical research tradition he has been teaching since the early 2000s. The organisational application comes through two vehicles. The Happiness Studies Academy, which he co-founded, is the home of the SPIRE framework, which codifies wellbeing as the integration of spiritual, physical, intellectual, relational and emotional health. Potentialife, co-founded with former McKinsey senior partner Angus Ridgway, delivers a positive-psychology-based leadership programme at corporate scale, with a platform that tracks behaviour in and out of work. For senior leadership teams, the combination is what matters. Ben-Shahar can translate a research finding into a board-level case for investment, and translate that case into a programme employees will actually use. In a period when wellbeing spend is under scrutiny and the cost of burnout is appearing on the P&L, that is a short list of people who can hold both ends of the conversation. Key speaking topics Positive psychology and the science of wellbeing The SPIRE framework for wholeperson wellbeing Positive leadership and performance Resilience and happiness in uncertain times Burnout, meaning and motivation at work Organisational applications of happiness research Ideal for CHROs, chief wellbeing officers and people-and-culture leaders designing enterprise-wide wellbeing strategy CEOs and executive teams looking to connect wellbeing investment to performance outcomes Leadership development and learning functions building positive leadership capability at scale All-hands, leadership offsites and customer or partner conferences where a credible, research-anchored wellbeing voice is required Audience outcomes A research-grounded vocabulary for talking about wellbeing with the same rigour the organisation applies to strategy or finance A working grasp of the SPIRE framework and how its five dimensions map to concrete workplace practices Specific habits and behavioural shifts drawn from positive psychology that leaders can apply to themselves and their teams A clearer view of the link between individual flourishing, leadership effectiveness and organisational performance Reference points from Harvard teaching and from Potentialife’s corporate deployments rather than generic wellness advice

Why organisations work with Tanya O’Callaghan She speaks to consumer scepticism from the inside. Fifteen years touring globally in arena rock, paired with lifelong plant-based advocacy, gives her credibility with the audience corporate sustainability teams are trying to reach but rarely understand. Her Highway to Health documentary series with Sepultura’s Derrick Green, distributed through UNCHAINEDTV, has road-tested her arguments with farmers, chefs, scientists and figures including Moby and Kat Von D. The material on stage is sourced, not theoretical. The Leadership Rhapsody keynote, co-built with former Hallmark executive Wayne Strickland, translates band dynamics into a working language for senior teams on cohesion, performance under pressure and creative discipline. As the first woman in Whitesnake, she carries a story senior audiences remember. The hook draws the room; the content keeps them. She is unusual in the speaker market for combining a working stage career with serious advocacy on plant-based business, animal welfare and consumer-led change, which gives her access to audiences and corporate briefs that purely corporate speakers cannot reach. Biography highlights Bassist of Whitesnake, the first woman to hold a permanent member position in the band’s history. Toured and recorded with Bruce Dickinson, Puscifer (Maynard James Keenan), Dee Snider, Steven Adler, Nuno Bettencourt, Orianthi and Sharon Corr. Creator and co-host of Highway to Health, a plant-based travel and sustainability documentary series on UNCHAINEDTV with Sepultura frontman Derrick Green. Co-creator of the Leadership Rhapsody corporate keynote with Wayne Strickland, a 38-year Hallmark executive. Featured on the Rich Roll Podcast and profiled by Bass Magazine, Guitar World, Thrive Global, Sentient Media and Lady Freethinker. Lifelong vegan and public advocate for plant-based living, environmental sustainability and animal welfare. Biography Consumer trust in corporate sustainability claims is thinner than the marketing budget behind them. Brand teams know it, and they know the people they most need to reach are exactly the ones least likely to listen to another ESG report. That gap, between claim and credibility, is where Tanya O’Callaghan’s corporate work lives. She came to it from rock and roll. The first woman to hold a permanent place in Whitesnake, she has toured and recorded with Bruce Dickinson, Puscifer, Dee Snider, Steven Adler, Nuno Bettencourt and Sharon Corr. The stage career is not the message. It is the credibility that lets her tell sustainability stories to audiences who tune out the standard sustainability voice. Highway to Health, the documentary series she created with Sepultura’s Derrick Green and distributes on UNCHAINEDTV, takes that approach further. The show follows the two musicians around the world meeting farmers, chefs, scientists and cultural figures including Moby and Kat Von D, building a working picture of what plant-based living and authentic sustainability look like in practice. The material she brings to corporate stages is field-tested, not theoretical. Her Leadership Rhapsody keynote, co-built with former Hallmark executive Wayne Strickland, takes the same translation approach in the other direction. Forty years of stage discipline, ensemble cohesion and live decision-making become a language senior teams can use to talk about performance, trust and creative work without resorting to the usual corporate vocabulary. It is a rare profile: a working professional musician with a serious second act in business conversation, picked up by sustainability and people teams that want a different kind of voice on greenwashing, consumer power and the social contract between brands and the audiences who buy from them. Key speaking topics Sustainability and authentic ESG communication Consumer power and brand credibility Plant-based business and food systems Corporate social leadership Creative performance and ensemble dynamics Health and wellbeing for travelling and remote workforces Ideal for ESG, sustainability and brand teams briefing for consumer-facing change CHROs and people leaders looking for an outside voice on wellbeing and engagement Senior leadership offsites where a different register is needed to open a difficult conversation Conferences in food, retail, consumer goods and lifestyle sectors Audience outcomes A sharper read on how younger and sustainability-conscious consumers test corporate claims Practical examples of where greenwashing is exposed and where credibility is earned A working framework for translating ensemble performance into corporate team dynamics New language for talking about health and sustainability inside the organisation without the usual jargon A memorable opening that gets a senior room engaged on subjects they would normally resist

Why organisations work with Tara Renze Twenty years inside CareerBuilder and Stella & Dot give her a sales-floor credibility that few EQ speakers carry. She has run the number, trained the new hires, and built a multi-million-dollar book of business before stepping onto the stage. She works in the practical intersection of Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence and applied emotional intelligence, translating both into language that revenue teams and women’s networks will sit through, take notes on, and act on. Her core framework, “Be Who You Came To Be”, is a trademarked through-line across keynote, workshop and book, which gives client teams a shared vocabulary that survives past the event. Repeat work from operationally serious clients including T-Mobile, Pfizer, Aflac, Amazon, Shaw Industries and Women’s Foodservice Forum, not only inspiration-circuit buyers. Biography highlights Author, Be Who You Came To Be, published by Amplify Publishing Group (second edition). Host, Be Who You Came To Be podcast. Certified practitioner in Emotional Intelligence and Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence methodology. Former Sales Leader of the Year at CareerBuilder.com; led the company’s national new hire sales training programme. Founder of a multi-million-dollar nationwide social selling business with Stella & Dot. Degree from the University of Kansas; executive leadership studies at the Wharton School and the Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Biography A sales floor is one of the more honest places in a corporation. The number is the number, the pipeline is the pipeline, and the people carrying the quota tell you quickly whether the culture, the leadership and the personal motivation are real. That environment is where Tara Renze spent two decades before she ever called herself a speaker, first as Sales Leader of the Year at CareerBuilder.com, then as the founder of a multi-million-dollar national social selling business with Stella & Dot. She moved into the emotional intelligence and positive intelligence space with that operating background still attached. Her practitioner work draws on the EQ tradition and on Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence methodology, which she applies to the specific tensions she watched up close for twenty years: high performers who lose their edge, women leaders who hide their ambition, sales teams whose self-talk eats their pipeline. The frame she has built around this work, “Be Who You Came To Be”, anchors a book published by Amplify Publishing Group, a podcast of the same name, and the keynote and workshop programme she takes into clients including T-Mobile, Pfizer, Aflac, Amazon, Shaw Industries and Women’s Foodservice Forum. The through-line is consistent. Authenticity is treated as a performance variable, not a wellness slogan, and mental fitness is taught as a learnable discipline with practical tools that a sales manager or a CHRO can actually deploy on Monday morning. What clients tend to book her for is the combination buyers struggle to assemble otherwise: a speaker who can hold the room on confidence, self-leadership and EQ, who has also personally carried a quota, run a sales training programme and built a national business. Key speaking topics Emotional intelligence in commercial environments Positive intelligence and mental fitness Authentic leadership for women Sales leadership and seller mindset Self-sabotage and saboteur patterns at work Culture, engagement and team performance Ideal for Chief Revenue Officers and sales leadership teams running enterprise sales kick-offs. CHROs and L&D leaders designing manager development and women’s leadership programming. Direct-selling and field-force organisations where individual mindset determines revenue. Industry associations and women’s networks (Women’s Foodservice Forum profile) seeking a keynote that holds an executive room. Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for the internal patterns (self-doubt, saboteur voices, performance anxiety) that quietly degrade individual and team results. Specific Positive Intelligence techniques for interrupting those patterns in real working conditions. A practical reframe of authenticity as a performance discipline, not a personality trait or a wellness extra. A shared language across a team or sales force that survives past the event and can be reinforced by managers.

Why organisations work with The Tempest Two A two-handed delivery rooted in shared, verifiable experience. Most resilience content is told solo. The duo dynamic, including dialogue and disagreement on stage, lands as conversation rather than lecture. The Atlantic row, Patagonia ultra-triathlon and El Capitan ascent are all self-funded, self-organised expeditions started without the relevant skills. The lesson on agency is structurally different from a story told by a former soldier or elite athlete. Operating discipline behind the talks. Through Dose, the same lessons are productised into workplace programmes for clients such as Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb, so a keynote can sit inside a wider engagement rather than ending at the closing slide. Tonal range commercial buyers actually want. The act works on a sales kick-off stage, an EMEA marketing conference or an internal wellbeing day without code-switching, which is rare in the adventure-speaker field. Biography highlights 3,000-mile unaided ocean row from the Canary Islands to Barbados, completed in 54 days, with no prior rowing or sailing experience. World-first ultra-triathlon across Patagonia in 2017: 1,600km cycle, 65km Huemul Circuit run, 100km stand-up paddleboard descent of the La Leona river. Winter ascent of Mont Blanc and El Capitan summit in Yosemite, the latter on roughly 18 months of climbing experience. Co-founders of Dose, a workplace wellbeing company working with Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb among others. Keynote clients include Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Heineken, Vodafone, Red Bull, Dropbox, Tesco, Waitrose & Partners, NatWest and Gymshark. Hosts of The Tempest Two Pod on adventure, mindset and performance. Biography Two friends in marketing jobs decided to row the Atlantic. Neither had sat in a rowing boat. Fifty-four days after leaving the Canary Islands, James Whittle and Tom Caulfield reached Barbados, having met the first hurricane to form in the Atlantic in fifty years on the way. The story matters because the starting point was ordinary, which is the point of every keynote that has followed. What came next was a deliberate run of self-organised expeditions: a winter ascent of Mont Blanc, a climb of El Capitan, a London-to-Sahara motorbike ride, and a self-styled world-first ultra-triathlon across Patagonia stitching together a 1,600km cycle, the 65km Huemul Circuit and a 100km paddleboard descent of the La Leona river. None were undertaken with the relevant elite credentials beforehand. That gap, between what they could obviously do and what they did anyway, became the working material. In 2018 they built Dose, a workplace wellbeing and performance company, around the same idea. Resilience and growth mindset are taught not as motivational concepts but as practices for teams under load. Clients include Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb. The keynote and the operating business reinforce each other; an event can lead to a programme rather than a one-off morale lift. The act sits in a specific commercial niche. It is not pure adventure inspiration, and it is not corporate consulting in disguise. It is a two-person performance for the part of an organisation that has heard the resilience message before and stopped listening, told by two people who keep proving the premise on themselves. Key speaking topics Growth mindset Resilience under pressure Team performance and trust Operating outside the comfort zone Embracing risk and failure Courage-based leadership Workplace wellbeing and engagement Ideal for CHROs and heads of employee engagement designing resilience and wellbeing programmes that need a credible opening moment. Sales, marketing and commercial leadership running annual kick-offs that need energy without slipping into hype. Culture and L&D leads looking for keynote content that can be extended into team workshops rather than ending at applause. Founder-led and high-growth companies whose teams are carrying sustained pressure and need a shared language for it. Audience outcomes A working definition of growth mindset that survives contact with a hard week back in the office. Specific habits the duo use to prepare for, push through and recover from extended pressure, transferable to a team context. A reframing of failure and risk that gives more junior staff permission to act with higher agency. A shared reference point across a team that lasts beyond the event, often picked up by Dose programming where it follows.

Why organisations work with Tim Harris He speaks from inside the problem. Twenty-five years in commodities, ending as Global Head of Fuel Oil at PVM Oil Associates, gives him fluency with the pressures executive audiences actually face. He carries a formal coaching credential. ACC accreditation with the International Coaching Federation puts substance behind the lived experience. He has worked at the sharp end with organisations that test psychological content rigorously, including the Royal Marines, the Royal Navy, the NHS, Thames Valley Police and Google. The Atlantic row is more than a story. Fifty-two days at sea, 3,000 miles unassisted with one teammate, raising around £160,000 for teenage mental health, gives him a concrete reference point for talking about sustained pressure and recovery. He addresses suicide ideation directly. Few corporate speakers can hold that subject in front of a senior audience with honesty and without flinching. Biography highlights Twelve years as Global Head of Fuel Oil at PVM Oil Associates, capping a 25-year City career Completed the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge with Simon Calver, rowing 3,000 miles in 52 days Raised approximately £160,000 for teenage mental health charity through the row ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC) Keynote and coaching clients include Google, the Royal Marines, the Royal Navy, the NHS, Thames Valley Police and The Times HMS Warrior keynote endorsed by Vice Admiral Martin Connell CBE as “a masterclass in self-awareness and resilience” Biography Burnout among senior performers rarely announces itself. It shows up as quiet resignations, eroded judgement and capable people stepping back from work they used to run. The organisations that take it seriously want speakers who can talk about it without the soft-focus vocabulary of the wellness industry. That is the space Tim Harris occupies. After 25 years in the City, the last twelve as Global Head of Fuel Oil at PVM Oil Associates, he left the industry having lived through severe depression and suicide ideation under sustained corporate pressure. His response was unusual. With Simon Calver, he rowed unassisted across the Atlantic, 3,000 miles in 52 days, raising around £160,000 for teenage mental health charity. He has since trained as an Associate Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation and built a coaching and keynote practice working with the Royal Marines, the Royal Navy, the NHS, Thames Valley Police, Google and The Times. Vice Admiral Martin Connell CBE described his HMS Warrior keynote as “a masterclass in self-awareness and resilience.” What he offers a corporate audience is the rare combination of credible coaching content and a lived reference point most rooms cannot match. He talks about burnout, recovery and sustained performance without the platitudes, and he talks about suicide directly when the brief calls for it. Key speaking topics Burnout in high-performance environments Mental resilience and recovery Stress management for senior leaders Suicide ideation and mental health honesty at work Self-leadership under sustained pressure Endurance and decision-making under fatigue Teamwork in extreme conditions Ideal for CHROs and heads of wellbeing designing serious mental health interventions for senior populations Leadership teams in high-pressure sectors (financial services, energy, defence, healthcare) Frontline and uniformed services audiences where psychological honesty is a credibility test Sales, trading and other commission-driven environments with elevated burnout risk Audience outcomes A clearer view of what burnout actually looks like inside senior teams, before it becomes attrition Practical language for talking about mental health at work without sentimentality A coaching practitioner’s perspective on stress and recovery, grounded in personal experience Greater comfort engaging with subjects most executive audiences avoid, including suicide