Mental Health in the Workplace

Why organisations work with Lisa Ventura An MBE-recognised authority on the cultural and behavioural side of cyber security, the area boards now name as their largest residual exposure once tooling is in place. Founder of Cyber Security Unity, a global community of practitioners, which gives her live cross-industry visibility into what is actually working against social engineering, phishing, and insider risk. A practical voice on neurodiversity and inclusion in cyber security hiring, useful for organisations trying to widen a tight talent pool without diluting capability. Speaks to the human cost inside security teams, burnout, imposter syndrome, and workplace harassment that quietly degrade incident response and retention. Author of “The Rise of the Cyber Women” series, with credibility built through the practitioner community rather than vendor marketing. Biography highlights MBE, King Charles III Birthday Honours 2023, for services to cyber security and diversity and inclusion. Founder, Cyber Security Unity (formerly the UK Cyber Security Association). Author of “The Rise of the Cyber Women: Volume One and Two” and “The Varied Origins of the Cyber Men: Volume One”. Winner, “Outstanding Contribution to Cyber Security”, SC Magazine Awards Europe. Winner, “Cyber Security Personality of the Year”, UK Cyber Security Awards. Listed on IT Security Guru’s Most Inspiring Women in Cyber Security (2022, 2024), We Are Tech Women Top 100, and IFSEC Global Influencers. Biography The cybersecurity industry sells controls. What has been slower to sell is culture. Most organisations now have endpoint protection, SIEM platforms, and incident response retainers. The breaches that still happen are almost always human, a click, a credential, a process gap, an exhausted analyst missing a signal at 3 am. That is the territory Lisa Ventura works in. She founded Cyber Security Unity, a global community organisation for cyber security practitioners, on the view that the industry remains fragmented and works in silos. Her consulting work with security leadership teams focuses on collaboration, awareness, and the cultural conditions that determine whether a security programme actually changes behaviour or just produces compliance evidence. Her books “The Rise of the Cyber Women,” Volumes One and Two, and “The Varied Origins of the Cyber Men,” Volume One, profile the routes practitioners take into the industry. The point is practical, not celebratory. Cybersecurity has a hiring problem, and one of the cheapest ways to widen the pipeline is to take neurodiversity and non-linear career paths seriously. Ventura is openly autistic and uses that experience to make the business case to CISOs and HR teams who are losing talent they could keep. In 2023, she received an MBE for services to cyber security and to diversity and inclusion. The recognition is useful shorthand for what she actually does in a room: she translates cybersecurity from a technical risk into a leadership and culture problem, and she has the practitioner network to back the argument. Key speaking topics Cyber security awareness and culture change The human layer of cyber risk Neurodiversity in cybersecurity hiring and retention Social engineering and phishing defence Burnout, stress, and mental health in security teams Cloud security collaboration Women and underrepresented groups in cybersecurity careers Ideal for CISOs and security leadership teams running awareness programmes that have stalled CHROs and talent leads trying to widen the cybersecurity hiring pipeline Boards and audit committees treating cyber as a culture and conduct issue, not only a control issue Industry conferences and corporate events on cybersecurity, technology workforce, and inclusion Audience outcomes A clearer view of where human factors sit inside the organisation’s actual cyber risk picture Specific, applicable approaches to awareness training that move behaviour, not just completion rates A practical case for treating neurodiversity as a hiring advantage in security teams Recognition of the burnout patterns that quietly damage incident response capability Cross-sector reference points from a practitioner community rather than a vendor stack

Why organisations work with Kate Cook Twenty-five years running a Harley Street nutrition practice gives her a clinical evidence base that most wellbeing speakers do not have. Audiences hear from a practitioner, not a motivational presenter. A defined corporate proposition built around three named talks (Sugar Bites Back, Genes Load the Gun, Lifestyle Pulls the Trigger, Vibrant Energy) rather than a single generalist wellness keynote. Author of The Corporate Wellness Bible, a workplace-specific text that frames nutrition and energy as organisational concerns, not personal lifestyle advice. Track record with demanding employers, including Bank of England, JP Morgan, Shell, Accenture and GE Healthcare, where the audience is sceptical and time-poor. TEDx speaker for Fidelity International, with a media presence in The Sunday Express, Marie Claire and Red that gives her communication credibility outside the wellness echo chamber. Biography highlights Founder of The Nutrition Coach, Harley Street, since 2000. Trained at the Institute for Optimum Nutrition; Master’s in the Anthropology of Food; undergraduate degree from Royal Holloway, University of London. Author of The Corporate Wellness Bible, Get Healthy for Good and Be Incredibly Healthy (with Sally Brown). TEDx speaker for Fidelity International on workplace wellness. Corporate clients include Bank of England, JP Morgan, EDF Energy, Accenture, Shell, GE Healthcare and Pret a Manger. Columnist for The Sunday Express and Marie Claire; television appearances, including The Truth of Beauty. Biography Corporate wellbeing is one of the easier line items to fund and one of the harder ones to measure. Programmes proliferate, engagement stays patchy, and the link between workforce health and commercial output remains anecdotal. Kate Cook has spent twenty-five years working on that gap from the practitioner side. She founded The Nutrition Coach on Harley Street in 2000 and has since worked with more than 7,000 individual clients alongside an international corporate practice. The mix matters. Clinical work with senior professionals informs the corporate sessions; the corporate sessions stress-test what actually changes behaviour at scale inside a working week. Her writing reflects the same orientation. The Corporate Wellness Bible treats workplace nutrition, energy and stress as organisational concerns rather than personal projects. Get Healthy for Good and Be Incredibly Healthy, co-authored with Sally Brown, sit alongside columns for The Sunday Express and Marie Claire and a TEDx talk delivered for Fidelity International. The audience she is built for is an employer trying to make wellbeing operational. Clients have included Bank of England, JP Morgan, Shell, EDF Energy, Accenture and GE Healthcare, organisations where the standard for an external voice is high and the tolerance for generic wellness messaging is low. Key speaking topics Workplace wellbeing and productivity Nutrition and sustained energy at work Sugar, stress and behavioural change Lifestyle, genetics and long-term health Corporate wellness strategy and programme design Mental and physical health in high-pressure roles Ideal for CHROs, heads of wellbeing and culture leads are designing or refreshing corporate wellness programmes. Senior leadership offsites where energy, focus and resilience are part of the agenda. Employee conferences in high-intensity sectors such as financial services, professional services and energy. Health and wellbeing weeks where the brief calls for clinical credibility alongside accessible delivery. Audience outcomes A working understanding of how nutrition, sleep and stress interact to shape daily performance. Practical changes audiences can make the same week, drawn from clinical practice rather than wellness trend cycles. A clearer organisational case for why wellbeing investment should be measured against engagement and productivity, not participation. Specific tools for managing energy through long days, travel and high-cognitive-load periods. Confidence to challenge the sugar, caffeine and convenience defaults built into corporate working life.

Why organisations work with Dr Ranj Singh Clinical authority on health and wellbeing, drawn from active NHS paediatric emergency practice and membership of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, not a wellness brand. A broadcast track record that translates into the room: five years as resident doctor on ITV’s This Morning, two BAFTA Children’s Awards for Get Well Soon, and a Sunday Times bestseller in Save Money Lose Weight. First-person credibility on LGBTQ+ inclusion as a Sikh-heritage gay clinician, recognised with the 2019 Attitude Award for advocacy on ethnic minority and LGBTQ+ representation. A communicator who has spent a career simplifying medical information for non-specialist audiences, including pandemic misinformation work, which means complex health and inclusion content lands with employees who would tune out a textbook talk. Biography highlights NHS clinician specialising in paediatric emergency medicine; member of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health since 2007. Resident doctor on ITV’s This Morning, 2016 to 2021. Co-creator and host of CBeebies’ Get Well Soon and Get Well Soon Hospital; winner of BAFTA Children’s Awards in 2016 and 2018. Sunday Times bestselling author of Save Money Lose Weight (Transworld, 2019); children’s titles with Oxford University Press and Hachette. Attitude Award winner, 2019, for representation of ethnic minorities and LGBTQ+ people in media. Honorary doctorate from Canterbury Christ Church University, February 2025, for contributions to public life and medical science. Biography Most workforces have heard the wellbeing message before. They have sat through resilience modules, downloaded the meditation app, and still report record sickness absence. The reason is rarely the content. It is who is delivering it. That is the problem Singh’s profile is built to solve. He is a working NHS paediatric emergency doctor and a member of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, with the clinical grounding to talk about physical and mental health without slipping into the language of corporate wellness. Five years as the resident doctor on ITV’s This Morning, alongside two BAFTA Children’s Awards for Get Well Soon, gave him the rarer skill of making medicine intelligible to viewers who are not patients yet. The same mix shapes his work on inclusion. As a gay clinician from a Sikh background, Singh writes and speaks about LGBTQ+ representation with the authority of someone who has lived the question. The Attitude Award in 2019 recognised that body of media advocacy. His Sunday Times bestseller Save Money Lose Weight, columns for Attitude and NetDoctor, and his pandemic work countering health misinformation extend the same instinct into print and public health. In February 2025 Canterbury Christ Church University awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contribution to public life and medical science, a useful marker of how seriously the clinical and academic community takes the broadcast persona. Key speaking topics Employee mental health and wellbeing Health communication for non-clinical audiences LGBTQ+ inclusion and intersectional identity Burnout and pressure in high-stakes professions Public health, misinformation and trust Diversity, representation and lived experience Ideal for CHROs, heads of wellbeing and DEI leads building credible mental health and inclusion programmes Healthcare, life sciences and public-sector audiences seeking a clinician’s voice Internal conferences and employee networks marking Pride, Mental Health Awareness Week, or South Asian heritage moments Leadership audiences in regulated industries where trust and communication matter as much as policy Audience outcomes A clearer language for talking about mental and physical health at work, grounded in clinical reality rather than wellness slogans Sharper understanding of how identity, family expectation and culture shape who speaks up about health and who stays silent Practical reframes for managers on supporting LGBTQ+ employees and ethnic minority staff without performative gestures Confidence to address health misinformation in workforces, including on vaccines, diet and mental health A more honest conversation in the room about pressure, burnout and asking for help

Why organisations work with Christian Jessen Clinical authority paired with a household-name broadcast platform. GMC-registered, UCL-trained, and the public face of Channel 4’s Embarrassing Bodies for eight years, which gives him a rare ability to hold a corporate audience on subjects most staff avoid. Substantive expertise in sexual health, HIV and LGBT+ health equity, including work in Kenya and Uganda and an appointment as National HIV Testing Week Ambassador in 2015. Useful when inclusion and health intersect with real clinical content. First-person testimony on depression, bulimia and muscle dysmorphia, delivered without performance. Audiences hear from a clinician who has been the patient, which moves the conversation past awareness scripts. A communication style built over two decades of primetime television: plain language, comfort with discomfort, no euphemism. The right register for a room where leaders have been told mental health matters but do not know what to say next. Biography highlights MBBS, University College London (2001). MSc in sexual health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Co-presenter, Embarrassing Bodies, Channel 4 (2007 to 2015), alongside Pixie McKenna and Dawn Harper. Co-presenter, Supersize vs Superskinny, Channel 4 (2008 to 2014). National HIV Testing Week Ambassador, 2015. Author of Can I Just Ask? (2010) and a three-book Scholastic series for adolescents covering growing up, sensitive subjects and the self. Patron of Humanists UK. Biography Stigma is the reason health conversations stall inside organisations. People know what they should disclose, and they know what their employer says it supports, and they still do not speak. Christian Jessen has spent two decades working at the point where that silence breaks, first as a clinician in sexual health and infectious disease, then as the face of Channel 4’s most successful health franchise. The medical training is substantive. UCL for the MBBS in 2001, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for an MSc in sexual health, with field experience on HIV and malaria in Kenya and Uganda. That clinical grounding ran through eight years co-presenting Embarrassing Bodies and six years on Supersize vs Superskinny, where the production worked because the doctor on screen was a doctor, not a presenter playing one. His written work for younger readers, the Scholastic trilogy on growing up and the everyday questions adolescents will not ask aloud, shows the same instinct. Take subjects coded as awkward, name them in plain language, treat the audience as intelligent. The 2015 appointment as National HIV Testing Week Ambassador reflected the same trust in his communication: clinical accuracy without moralising. In corporate rooms the relevance is specific. He has spoken openly about his own experience of depression, bulimia and muscle dysmorphia, which lets him hold a discussion on workplace mental health that does not collapse into either policy summary or personal anecdote. For organisations moving beyond awareness campaigns into harder questions about disclosure, manager capability and clinical literacy, that combination of credentials and lived experience is the value. Key speaking topics Mental health in the workplace Body image and eating disorders Sexual health and LGBT+ health equity Stigma and disclosure in organisational settings Men’s health Health communication and behaviour change Ideal for CHROs, wellbeing leads and chief people officers building substantive mental health programmes DEI and ERG leaders running health-equity sessions, particularly around LGBT+ inclusion Employee Assistance Programme partners and benefits leaders looking for clinical credibility on stage All-staff wellbeing weeks and Mental Health Awareness events that need a clinician, not a motivational act Audience outcomes A clearer line between what wellbeing programmes can do and what clinical support is for Confidence to talk about eating disorders, body dysmorphia and men’s mental health in plain terms at work A working understanding of why stigma persists even where policy support exists A sharper sense of what good disclosure conversations sound like between staff and managers

Why organisations work with Leon Rolle A first-hand recovery story told by a working musician with a Grammy-nominated, BRIT-winning back catalogue, not a wellness practitioner reaching for cultural relevance. Credibility with younger employees and apprentice cohorts that traditional wellbeing speakers struggle to hold, built on Rudimental’s chart presence and his media profile. Physical proof behind the mental health argument: completion of Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins and the London Marathon, used to make the link between body and mind concrete rather than abstract. A voice that travels across audience types in one event, from an apprentice intake to a leadership dinner, because the source material is biography, not theory. Biography highlights Member of Rudimental, the British drum and bass band behind the UK number one single “Feel the Love” featuring John Newman. BRIT Award winner for British Single of the Year in 2014 for “Waiting All Night”. MOBO Award winner for Best Album in 2013 for the debut record “Home”. Former Arsenal FC academy footballer before moving full-time into music. Completed Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, one of only two recruits to finish the selection process in his series. Soccer Aid participant in 2019, playing for Harry Redknapp’s Rest of the World team, and Celebrity MasterChef contestant in 2023. Biography Most workplace mental health conversations stall in the same place. The language is correct, the policies are in place, and the people the message is meant to reach quietly opt out. Locksmith is what changes the temperature in the room. He arrives with the credibility of a working career, a chart-topping band, and a recovery story that he has lived rather than studied. Leon Rolle came up through the Arsenal academy before music took over. As one third of Rudimental with Piers Aggett and Kesi Dryden, he is part of the group behind “Feel the Love” with John Newman, which went to number one in the UK in 2012, and the debut album “Home”, which took the 2013 MOBO Award for Best Album. “Waiting All Night” won the BRIT for British Single of the Year in 2014. The platform is real and the audience knows it. What he speaks about is the part the platform did not fix. Tour cycles, anxiety and the practical work of getting back to a functioning baseline sit at the centre of the keynote. Fitness is the mechanism he points to: training, running, and the long endurance commitments that gave him a way back. He completed Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins as one of only two recruits to finish his series, and has run the London Marathon. These are evidence points, not anecdotes. For corporate audiences the value is reach. Apprentice intakes and younger employees listen to him because of the music. Senior teams listen because the story is specific, structured and free of the wellness vocabulary that has worn thin in most organisations. Key speaking topics Mental health in the workplace Resilience and stress management Fitness and physical health as recovery infrastructure Motivation and inspiration for apprentice and early-career audiences Mental health storytelling for younger workforces After-dinner and entertainment speaking Ideal for HR, wellbeing and culture leads commissioning mental health programming for mixed audiences Apprentice intakes, graduate cohorts and early-career employee networks Internal town halls, conferences and away-days where the wellbeing slot needs to land rather than fill time After-dinner and entertainment briefs that also need a substantive personal story Audience outcomes A concrete account of what mental health recovery looked like for a working professional, not a clinical overview A working link between physical training and psychological resilience, evidenced by named endurance commitments Language that younger employees and apprentices recognise and respond to Renewed permission for senior teams to talk about their own pressures in workplace settings

Why organisations work with Jonny Benjamin He brings a globally tracked story (the Find Mike campaign reached more than 319 million people) into a corporate room without it becoming a tribute act. The point is what changed in the bystander, not the bridge. He has built two of the institutions he speaks about. Beyond, the youth mental health charity, and This Can Happen, the workplace conference, are not anecdotes; they are operating organisations he co-founded. He pairs lived clinical experience of schizoaffective disorder with a public campaigning record recognised by Rethink Mental Illness (first Janey Antoniou Award) and an MBE for suicide prevention. That combination changes how senior audiences listen. His material works as a managerial primer, not a memoir reading. Audiences leave with a clearer sense of what to say in the first ninety seconds when a colleague signals they are not okay. Biography highlights Awarded an MBE in 2017 for services to mental health and suicide prevention. Founder of Beyond, a youth mental health charity established in 2018 funding interventions in UK schools and colleges. Co-founder of This Can Happen, the workplace mental health conference launched in 2017. First recipient of the Janey Antoniou Award from Rethink Mental Illness (2013) for campaigning on severe mental illness. Co-author with Britt Pfluger of “The Stranger on the Bridge” (Pan Macmillan, 2018, foreword by HRH The Duke of Cambridge) and “The Book of Hope: 101 Voices on Overcoming Adversity” (Pan Macmillan, 2021). Subject of the Channel 4 documentary “The Stranger on the Bridge” (2015), which charted his successful search for Neil Laybourn, the stranger who intervened on Waterloo Bridge in 2008. Biography Most workplace mental health programmes are well written and quietly underused. The policy is in the handbook, the EAP is on the intranet, and the manager who notices a struggling colleague still hesitates to say the first sentence. Jonny Benjamin’s work sits in that hesitation. His own story explains the angle. Diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in his early twenties, he wrote “The Stranger on the Bridge” with Britt Pfluger to chart how he came to be on Waterloo Bridge in 2008 and what the stranger, later identified as Neil Laybourn, actually did in those minutes. The 2014 Find Mike campaign that reunited them reached more than 319 million people and became a Channel 4 documentary the following year. What followed is what makes him useful to serious organisations. He co-founded This Can Happen in 2017, the workplace mental health conference now used by HR and wellbeing leads to benchmark practice, and founded the youth charity Beyond in 2018 to fund early intervention in UK schools. Rethink Mental Illness gave him the first Janey Antoniou Award in 2013; the MBE followed in 2017. In a corporate room he resists the inspirational frame. The talk is closer to a briefing for managers and colleagues on the specific moves that make a workplace one where people speak up early, and the specific failures that keep them quiet. Key speaking topics Workplace mental health and psychological safety Suicide prevention and early intervention Severe mental illness and stigma in the workplace Wellbeing strategy and line-manager capability Youth mental health and the school-to-work transition Storytelling as a tool for cultural change Ideal for CHROs, wellbeing leads and DEI directors building the next iteration of a mental health strategy. Line manager and senior leadership development programmes where the brief is on confidence in difficult conversations. All-staff conferences where the organisation wants a mental health session that engages the room without slipping into platitude. Education sector audiences (schools, universities, sector bodies) addressing youth mental health and pastoral practice. Audience outcomes A direct account of what helped and what did not, from someone with diagnosed severe mental illness rather than a generalist commentator. A clearer sense of the small interventions that change outcomes, drawn from the bystander side of his own story. Practical language for managers and colleagues to use in the first conversation, not the third meeting. A sharper read on why workplace wellbeing programmes underperform and what closes the gap between policy and behaviour. An informed view of youth mental health drawn from Beyond’s grant-making and school work in the UK.

Why organisations work with Matt Haig A first-person account of severe depression and suicidal crisis that has shaped public mental health conversation in the UK, told by someone whose books on the subject have topped national bestseller charts. A literary platform of unusual scale: The Midnight Library alone has sold over ten million copies and won the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, which means his name lands with employees and leaders before he opens his mouth. Notes on a Nervous Planet gives him a developed argument about anxiety and the digital environment that maps directly onto how work now feels for most knowledge workers. He sits outside the clinical and HR registers that dominate workplace wellbeing content. The voice is a working writer’s, which is why audiences listen rather than tolerate. Biography highlights Author of Reasons to Stay Alive, a number one Sunday Times bestseller that spent 46 weeks in the UK top 10 and won the 2016 Books Are My Bag Readers’ Award for Non-Fiction. Author of The Midnight Library, winner of the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction and a New York Times bestseller with more than ten million copies sold worldwide. Author of the Sunday Times number one bestseller Notes on a Nervous Planet, on anxiety, social media, and modern life. Novelist whose adult fiction includes The Humans, How to Stop Time, The Radleys, The Comfort Book, and The Life Impossible. Children’s author whose Shadow Forest won the Nestle Smarties Book Prize Gold Award and whose A Boy Called Christmas was adapted into a feature film with Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Sally Hawkins, and Kristen Wiig. Translated into more than fifty languages, with a public platform on mental health that reaches well beyond the literary audience. Biography The honest conversation about anxiety and depression inside organisations is harder than the policy version. Most employees have read the wellbeing email. Far fewer have heard a senior voice describe what panic actually feels like at three in the morning, or why the always-on environment makes recovery slower than it should be. That is the gap Matt Haig’s writing has been filling for a decade. Reasons to Stay Alive, his memoir of a near-fatal breakdown at twenty-four, was a number one Sunday Times bestseller and stayed in the UK top ten for forty-six weeks. It won the 2016 Books Are My Bag Readers’ Award for Non-Fiction and changed how a generation of British readers spoke about depression. Notes on a Nervous Planet followed in 2018 with a sharper argument: that the texture of modern life, especially digital life, is a major part of why so many people feel ill. Both books are short, plain, and unguarded, which is why they have travelled. Alongside the memoirs is a serious fiction career. The Midnight Library won the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, became an instant New York Times bestseller, and has sold over ten million copies worldwide. The Humans, How to Stop Time, The Radleys, The Comfort Book, and The Life Impossible sit alongside it. Children’s titles include Shadow Forest, a Nestle Smarties Gold winner, and A Boy Called Christmas, adapted in 2021 into a feature film with Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Sally Hawkins, and Kristen Wiig. For organisations, the value is straightforward. Haig is not a clinician and does not pretend to be. He is a working writer with a global readership who has thought longer and more publicly about anxiety, depression, and modern overload than almost any non-specialist alive. Audiences listen because he has earned the subject, and because the language is recognisably his own. Key speaking topics Mental health in the workplace Depression and anxiety in modern life Digital overload and always-on culture Resilience and recovery Storytelling and the language of wellbeing Creativity under pressure Ideal for CHROs and heads of wellbeing programming a serious-register keynote on mental health. Internal events tied to World Mental Health Day, Mental Health Awareness Week, or wider EVP and culture moments. Leadership offsites where the brief is to model open conversation about anxiety, burnout, and pressure rather than to brief on policy. Employee audiences in high-intensity sectors (finance, professional services, media, tech) where always-on working is part of the culture. Audience outcomes A first-person account of severe depression and recovery that gives employees permission to talk about their own experience. A clearer argument for why digital life and modern work conditions amplify anxiety, drawn from Notes on a Nervous Planet. Practical anchors for managing low moods, panic, and the social media environment, in language that does not sound like a wellness pamphlet. A reminder, useful for leaders, that the most credible communications about mental health do not sound like communications. Permission to treat mental health as a normal subject of adult conversation rather than a compliance topic.

Why organisations work with Kellie Maloney A first-hand account of coming out inside professional boxing, one of the least forgiving commercial environments in sport, given by someone who managed a world heavyweight champion. A direct, unsanitised perspective on suicide, depression and recovery in the LGBT+ community from someone who has lived it and chosen to talk about it publicly. Credibility on female participation in sport grounded in actual commercial activity, having returned to promotion in 2020 to back female boxers at the start of their careers. Public profile built through Celebrity Big Brother, two documentaries and a published autobiography, giving the story reach beyond a corporate audience. Biography highlights Managed Lennox Lewis to the undisputed world heavyweight title between 1989 and 2001. Guided four further fighters to world titles plus British, European and Commonwealth champions. Named Transgender Champion at the 2015 Glamour Women of the Year Awards. Author of Frankly Kellie: Becoming a Woman in a Man’s World, Blink Publishing, 2015. Subject of Amazon Prime documentary From Frank to Kellie (2020) and feature documentary Knock Out Blonde: The Kellie Maloney Story (2025). Returned to boxing promotion in 2020 with a focus on female fighters at the start of their careers. Biography Professional boxing is not where most people would expect a public gender transition to begin. Kellie Maloney spent nearly three decades inside it, managing Lennox Lewis from 1989 to 2001 to the undisputed world heavyweight championship and steering four more fighters to world titles. Her standing in the sport was earned in a culture that did not make room for what came next. In August 2014 she announced publicly that she would live as Kellie. The decision was effectively forced by tabloid pressure rather than chosen on her own timing, a detail that matters when organisations talk about psychological safety. The aftermath included Celebrity Big Brother, the 2015 Glamour Women of the Year Transgender Champion award, the autobiography Frankly Kellie: Becoming a Woman in a Man’s World, and a period of severe depression that culminated in a suicide attempt and recovery. She now speaks about identity, mental health and inclusion from inside the experience, not from theory. The Amazon Prime documentary From Frank to Kellie and the 2025 feature Knock Out Blonde: The Kellie Maloney Story give the material a reach most corporate speakers do not have. Her audience is HR, DEI and wellbeing leaders who want a session that lands emotionally and tells the truth about what inclusion costs the people it is aimed at. In 2020 she returned to boxing promotion with a stated commitment to female fighters at the start of their careers. That detail closes the circle. The story is not only about transition; it is about going back into the same hard commercial environment as a different person and changing what it is willing to back. Key speaking topics Identity and transition in commercial environments LGBT+ inclusion in male-dominated cultures Mental health, depression and suicide prevention Resilience after public exposure Female participation in sport Personal courage and reinvention Ideal for HR, DEI and ERG leads designing inclusion programmes that have to work in practice Wellbeing and mental health leads building suicide prevention and crisis support content Sports, security, construction, manufacturing and other traditionally male-dominated sectors Internal events tied to Pride, Mental Health Awareness Month, or International Women’s Day Audience outcomes A clearer picture of what inclusion policies look like from the perspective of the person they are written about. A direct, lived account of depression, suicidal crisis and recovery in the LGBT+ community. An honest read on how hard cultures can change, and what individuals inside them carry when they do. Renewed willingness to ask colleagues about mental health rather than assume.

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