Mental Health in the Workplace

Why organisations work with Oliver Burkeman His «efficiency trap» argument; that pursuing greater efficiency increases the demands made on time rather than reducing them, gives leaders a named, evidence-based explanation for why their productivity programmes are making things worse. This is not a motivational reframe; it is a structural diagnosis. Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals are already in the hands of senior leaders and knowledge workers. A session with Burkeman builds on a shared conceptual vocabulary rather than introducing one from scratch, which shortens the distance from insight to action. His «imperfectionism» framework, developed in Meditations for Mortals, gives teams a practical operating principle: that meaningful action does not require ideal conditions, and that waiting for control is itself the performance problem. He approaches this as a journalist with fourteen years of empirical investigation into the psychology of time and attention, not as a consultant with a methodology to sell. His arguments are critical rather than prescriptive, which gives them greater durability in boardroom and executive conversations. Two national bestsellers, two TEDx talks, and a decade-long BBC Radio 4 presenting record mean his material has been tested across audiences, formats, and cultures without dilution. Biography highlights Author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller; named one of the best books of 2021 by the Financial Times, The Times, The Observer, Audible, Time, and Barnes & Noble Author of Meditations for Mortals (2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – national bestseller; introduces his operational philosophy of «imperfectionism» Former staff writer and weekly columnist at The Guardian; «This Column Will Change Your Life» ran for fourteen years (2006–2020) Writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Psychologies, and New Philosopher Winner, Foreign Press Association Young Journalist of the Year Award (2002); shortlisted, Orwell Prize (2006); FPA science story of the year (2015) Educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge (BA Social and Political Sciences) Presenter of BBC Radio 4 series including «Oliver Burkeman is Busy» and «Living with the News» TEDx talks: «How to stop fighting against time» (TEDxUniversityofNicosia) and «Why patience is a superpower» (TEDxManchester) Biography Most senior leaders know their organisations are overloaded. Fewer can explain why every investment in productivity appears to make it worse. Oliver Burkeman spent fourteen years as a columnist and journalist at The Guardian investigating exactly this tension, and his conclusion was not a better system, but a structural critique of the system itself. His 2021 New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals names this «the efficiency trap»: the more capacity organisations and individuals create, the more demands expand to fill it. The book argues that the premise of eventually getting on top of everything is not a problem to be solved with better methods, but a structural illusion that drives the overload it promises to end. For leaders navigating performance culture debates, it provides intellectual grounding that goes well beyond the self-help category. His 2024 follow-up, Meditations for Mortals, develops a named operational philosophy, «imperfectionism» as a practical alternative. The argument is not that people should do less, but that taking meaningful action requires abandoning the precondition that conditions be ideal first. This gives teams and their leaders a durable, non-sentimental vocabulary for moving from awareness of overload to genuinely different behaviour. Burkeman trained at Christ’s College, Cambridge, reported from London, Washington, and New York, and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and New Philosopher, and he presents BBC Radio 4 series alongside his newsletter, The Imperfectionist, which has built a substantial professional following. Key speaking topics Productivity culture and the efficiency trap Time, attention, and human finitude Imperfectionism as an organisational operating philosophy Burnout, overload, and performance culture Meaningful work and prioritisation under constraint The psychology of distraction and focus Patience as a strategic capability Ideal for CHROs and People directors addressing burnout, overload, and performance culture Senior leadership teams reviewing the assumptions underlying their productivity and ways-of-working programmes Conference audiences in knowledge-intensive sectors where attention, prioritisation, and sustainable output are live strategic concerns Boards and executive teams examining the relationship between culture, wellbeing, and long-term organisational performance Audience outcomes A named framework (the efficiency trap) for explaining why productivity investment can increase rather than reduce overload, applicable immediately in leadership conversations Clearer language for the tension between performance expectations and human limits, reducing the vagueness that makes wellbeing conversations difficult to act on Familiarity with «imperfectionism» as a practical operating principle for individuals and teams working under conditions of permanent overload A reframing of prioritisation: not as a time management technique, but as the fundamental capability that determines organisational focus Greater confidence in decisions to stop, delay, or deprioritise – backed by a rigorous philosophical and psychological argument rather than sentiment

Why organisations work with Pete Cann He shifts the energy of a conference room in minutes, which is what event owners are actually buying when they book a wellbeing slot after lunch or before a heavy strategy session. He gives a wellbeing message a physical experience, not a slide. Audiences leave having done the thing, not having been told about it. He is comfortable across formats most keynote speakers will not touch: opener, closer, after-dinner, awards host, virtual energiser, team-building lead. The brand is unusually defensible. There is no other UK speaker selling laughter yoga at this scale into corporate audiences, which removes the comparison shop for buyers commissioning a wellbeing or culture moment. Biography highlights Founder of Canned Laughter (2019), the corporate laughter yoga practice trading as Pete Cann “The Laughter Man”. Managing Director and co-founder of The Chef Tree, a UK chef recruitment business he built with his wife Chloe before launching the speaking practice. International corporate client base spanning the UK, the USA and India, delivered in-person and virtually. Host of the podcast “Laughter & Positivity with Pete” on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Featured on Britain’s Got Talent as a laughter yoga teacher. Active YouTube channel and Laughter Club community under the “The Laughter Man” brand. Biography Most corporate wellbeing content is delivered as instruction. People sit, take notes about resilience, and return to their desks unchanged. Pete Cann sells the opposite product. The audience laughs for fifteen minutes and leaves the room with a different nervous system than the one they walked in with. He came to this from business, not from wellness. Pete and his wife Chloe built The Chef Tree, a chef recruitment company, from a spare room into a multi-office operation, where he remains Managing Director. The laughter yoga practice started after a session at a summer wellness festival, and in 2019 he launched Canned Laughter as a separate corporate-facing brand. Since then the work has scaled internationally. Clients book him in the UK, the USA and India, in person and on video, for conference openers, after-lunch resets, awards hosting, team-building days and wellbeing programmes. His podcast “Laughter & Positivity with Pete” runs alongside the keynote work, and a Britain’s Got Talent appearance gave the brand a national audience. What he is selling is unusual in the bureau market. It is not a keynote on resilience theory. It is a physical wellbeing intervention that doubles as event energy, delivered by an operator who understands what it costs to run a business with a payroll attached. Key speaking topics Laughter yoga in the workplace Corporate wellbeing and stress reduction Team energy and engagement Mental health at work Event hosting and audience activation Hybrid and virtual team connection Ideal for Conference organisers booking a wellbeing slot, an opener, a post-lunch reset or an after-dinner act HR, internal communications and culture leads running wellbeing weeks or mental health awareness moments Sales kickoffs, awards nights and town halls that need an energiser rather than a strategy keynote Distributed teams running virtual culture or connection sessions Audience outcomes A measurable shift in room energy that carries into the next session of the agenda Direct experience of laughter as a stress and tension release, not a description of it A simple set of practices people can use on their own when they need to reset A shared moment that breaks formality and helps a group connect across hierarchy A wellbeing message that lands without lecturing

Why organisations work with Julie Montagu Four published wellness books with a major UK trade publisher, including Recharge: A Year of Self-Care to Focus on You (Little, Brown, 2018), give her wellbeing material a structured, tested foundation rather than a personal-anecdote frame. She runs a live teaching practice through Whole Self Yoga, including 200-hour teacher training, so the content she delivers to a corporate room is the same content she teaches week to week, not a keynote-only construct. Her cross-cultural vantage point, American by upbringing, English Countess by marriage, makes her an unusual host and after-dinner choice for events that need warmth and storytelling alongside subject expertise. She is an experienced broadcast voice, with royal and heritage commentary credits across BBC and CNN coverage of the Sussex wedding, the Platinum Jubilee, the Queen’s funeral and the Coronation, which translates directly into stage presence and live-event composure. Her academic work on American heiresses of the British Gilded Age, completed as an MA with Distinction at the University of Buckingham, gives her a serious second register for heritage, leadership history and women-in-power conversations. Biography highlights Author of Superfoods, Eat Real Food, Superfoods Superfast and Recharge: A Year of Self-Care to Focus on You, published by Little, Brown / Piatkus. Author of Secrets of an English Country House: A Year at Mapperton, published in 2024. Founder of Whole Self Yoga, including a 200-hour yoga teacher training programme. MA with Distinction in English Country House Studies, University of Buckingham, 2021. Royal and heritage commentator for BBC and CNN across the Sussex wedding, Platinum Jubilee, Queen Elizabeth II’s state funeral and the Coronation of King Charles III. Television credits including Bravo’s Ladies of London and Smithsonian Channel’s An American Aristocrat’s Guide to Great Estates. Co-custodian of Mapperton Estate in Dorset alongside Luke Montagu, 12th Earl of Sandwich. Biography Most corporate wellbeing programmes are built by people who have never had to keep one going through a 70-hour week. Julie Montagu is not one of them. She trained and qualified as a yoga teacher and nutrition educator while raising four children, wrote four books with Little, Brown on plant-forward eating and structured self-care, and built Whole Self Yoga, a teaching practice that includes a 200-hour teacher training programme. Recharge, published in 2018, is the title that travels best into corporate rooms. It is built as a month-by-month framework rather than a lifestyle manifesto, which is why it lands with audiences who have heard the wellbeing pitch many times and want something they can actually use on Monday. The second register is heritage. Montagu lives at Mapperton Estate in Dorset, the seat of the Earls of Sandwich, and completed an MA with Distinction at the University of Buckingham on American heiresses of the British Gilded Age. That work fed Secrets of an English Country House: A Year at Mapperton, published in 2024, and a steady run of royal commentary for BBC and CNN across the Sussex wedding, the Platinum Jubilee, the Queen’s funeral and the Coronation. The result is a speaker who can hold a corporate wellbeing keynote with real depth, then host the dinner that follows it with the kind of cross-cultural ease most subject-matter experts cannot offer. For organisations that want both substance and presence, that combination is what makes the booking commercial. Key speaking topics Self-care and wellbeing for high-pressure careers Yoga, nutrition and sustainable energy management Resilience and burnout prevention Female leadership and personal reinvention British heritage, country houses and royal traditions Corporate event hosting and after-dinner speaking Ideal for Corporate wellbeing days and HR-led leadership offsites Women’s leadership networks and ERG events Executive retreats where wellbeing is the headline rather than a side track Awards dinners, hosted panels and after-dinner engagements requiring a heritage or transatlantic register Audience outcomes A clear, month-by-month structure for self-care that survives a real working calendar Practical anchors on nutrition, movement and recovery that do not require a lifestyle overhaul A more honest read on what burnout looks like before it becomes attrition An hour with a speaker who can carry both the substance of wellbeing content and the warmth of a strong host

Why organisations work with Helen Richardson-Walsh A first-hand account of the cultural reset that took GB women’s hockey from Olympic underachievers to Rio 2016 gold, told by a senior player who was inside the leadership group for 11 years. A working performance psychologist’s view of how psychological safety, belonging and honest feedback are engineered in a daily training environment, drawn from her current role with Tottenham Hotspur Women. A credible voice on mental health at the top of high-pressure environments, grounded in her own documented recovery from clinical depression and career-threatening back surgery between London 2012 and Rio 2016. A practical perspective on inclusion as a performance variable, informed by being part of the first same-sex married couple to win Olympic gold on the same team and the cultural work that made that possible inside the squad. Co-author of “Winning Together” (Hachette, 2020), a book leaders cite as a tactical, behaviour-level account of building a winning team, not a memoir. Biography highlights Olympic gold medallist, Rio 2016, with Team GB women’s hockey; one of only two players to score in the shootout that beat the Netherlands in the final. Youngest woman ever to represent GB hockey at an Olympic Games, on debut at Sydney 2000, aged 18. Olympic bronze, London 2012; European champion, 2015; 293 caps for England and Great Britain across four Olympic Games. MBE for services to hockey, 2017 New Year Honours. Co-author of “Winning Together: An Olympic-Winning Approach to Building Better Teams” (Hachette, 2020), with Kate Richardson-Walsh. Performance Psychologist with Tottenham Hotspur Women since 2021; holds a Master’s in Organisational Psychology from City, University of London, and trains as a sport psychologist with elite teams. Biography GB women’s hockey arrived at London 2012 with a bronze medal and an open question about whether the squad could ever win at the level its talent suggested. The four years that followed were not a story of more training. They were a story of a deliberate cultural rebuild: explicit team values, leadership shared across the senior players, hard conversations about behaviour, and a willingness to treat psychology as a daily performance system. Rio 2016 produced the first Olympic gold for British women’s hockey. Helen Richardson-Walsh made her Olympic debut at Sydney 2000 as the youngest woman ever to represent GB hockey, and sat inside that leadership group for 11 of her 18 years in the squad. Her experience is unusually specific. Between the two Olympics she also went through two ruptured discs, multiple back and ankle surgeries, and a period of clinical depression severe enough to require professional treatment. The Rio gold was won by a player who had been told she might not play again, who had used therapy and mindfulness to come back, and who was one of only two players to score in the shootout that won the final against the Netherlands. That combination of operating inside an elite team culture and rebuilding her own performance from the inside is the content she now works with. She is co-author, with Kate Richardson-Walsh, of “Winning Together” (Hachette, 2020), a working manual on team building drawn directly from the Rio cycle. She is a Performance Psychologist with Tottenham Hotspur Women, where her brief includes individual mindset work and squad culture, and she holds a Master’s in Organisational Psychology from City, University of London. For senior teams the value is in the precision of her examples. How psychological safety actually shows up in a meeting. What belonging looks like when a married couple are competing for the same shirt. How a high performer talks about depression without losing their place in the team. What inclusion does to performance when the pressure is on. The credibility is the medal; the substance is what she did to get there and what she does now. Key speaking topics High-performance team culture Psychological safety and belonging Inclusion in elite performance environments Resilience after injury, setback and depression Mental health and wellbeing at senior level Leadership inside high-pressure teams Performance mindset Ideal for CHROs, heads of talent and culture leads building team norms in pressured commercial environments. Executive teams and senior leadership groups going through performance reset or post-restructure rebuild. Wellbeing, DEI and people leaders working on inclusion and psychological safety as performance issues, not compliance. Sales, trading floor and operating leadership groups where sustained pressure is the working environment. Audience outcomes A concrete account of how an elite team rebuilt its culture in four years, with the specific behaviours that changed. A working definition of psychological safety drawn from a team where the cost of getting it wrong was visible in performance. Language for talking about mental health and recovery at senior level without softening or sensationalising it. A view of inclusion as a performance variable, not a values statement. Practical mental tools used by elite athletes that translate to commercial high-pressure roles.

Why organisations work with Richard Coles He is one of the very few public figures in Britain who can speak about bereavement, faith and sexuality in front of a corporate audience without the room flinching. Audiences trust him because he has lived each subject in public. Twelve years co-presenting BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live gives him the interviewer’s craft: he can host an awards night, chair a panel of executives, or turn a CEO conversation into something a room actually wants to listen to. He is a Sunday Times number one bestselling novelist, the writer of The Madness of Grief, and the inspiration for the BBC comedy Rev. The cultural recognition gets him in the door; the substance is why he is asked back. His pop-to-pulpit story (member of The Communards, “Don’t Leave Me This Way” at number one in 1986, then ordination as an Anglican priest) is the most genuinely unusual second-career narrative on the speaking circuit, and he tells it without nostalgia. Biography highlights Co-presenter, BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live, 2011 to 2023 Church of England priest, ordained 2005; former vicar of Finedon, Northamptonshire Multi-instrumentalist in The Communards with Jimmy Somerville; UK number one with “Don’t Leave Me This Way” in 1986 Author of twelve books, including the Sunday Times bestseller The Madness of Grief (2021) and the Canon Clement crime series, optioned by ITV Regular panellist on Have I Got News For You, QI, and Would I Lie To You? Inspiration and consultant for the BBC comedy Rev Biography “Don’t Leave Me This Way” was the best-selling single in the UK in 1986. The man playing the keyboards on it is now a Church of England priest, a Sunday Times bestselling novelist and one of the most recognisable broadcasters on British radio. Few public lives have travelled this far between chapters, and fewer still have done so with the same lack of edit. Coles spent twelve years co-presenting BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live, the long-form Saturday morning programme heard by more than two million listeners. The role made him a national interviewer: a priest who could draw a stranger out, hold a difficult moment on air, and make space for the kind of conversation British broadcasting often avoids. The Communards, the priesthood, the radio, the books, the dachshunds, the dance floor on Strictly: each chapter brought a new audience without losing the previous one. The writing has become its own career. The Madness of Grief, published in 2021 after the death of his civil partner David, is a Sunday Times bestseller and one of the rare popular books on bereavement written from inside the experience rather than around it. The Canon Clement Mysteries, beginning with Murder Before Evensong in 2022, became a Sunday Times number one cosy crime series and an ITV drama starring Matthew Lewis. For corporate audiences, the value is the combination most public figures cannot offer: a hosting craft built over twelve years of live radio, lived experience of the subjects organisations now want to discuss honestly (grief, faith, identity, sexuality, mental health), and a sense of timing that comes from working a microphone for three decades. The result is a speaker who can carry a black-tie dinner, a leadership offsite or a memorial event with the same register. Key speaking topics Grief and bereavement in public life Faith, ethics and the modern workplace Identity, sexuality and being openly gay in public roles Reinvention and second careers The craft of conversation and interviewing Mental health and the inner life Public broadcasting and cultural commentary Ideal for Awards ceremonies, gala dinners and milestone events seeking a host who can carry the room Leadership and culture conferences addressing grief, mental health, identity or inclusion Internal employee events tied to wellbeing, faith networks or LGBTQ+ programming Membership organisations and professional bodies booking a literary, cultural keynote Audience outcomes A frank, unsentimental treatment of grief and bereavement that gives leaders language they can actually use at work A model of public conversation about faith and sexuality that does not retreat into either piety or politics A reframing of mid-career reinvention drawn from one of the most unusual second-career trajectories in British public life An event hosted or anchored with the timing, warmth and interviewing craft of a senior BBC broadcaster

Why organisations work with Karun Chandhok He has lived inside two of the most exposed environments in elite sport: the cockpit of a backmarker F1 team trying to build a car around him, and a Sky Sports broadcast booth analysing the same paddock in real time. He sits on the Motorsport UK Board and the FIA Drivers’ Commission, so the governance, safety and DEI conversations he brings into the room are ones he is actively shaping, not commenting on from the outside. He translates how F1 teams turn millions of data points per race into decisive calls that engineers, strategists and a driver all act on within seconds, with examples a non-motorsport audience can follow. He is one of only two Indians ever to race in Formula One, which gives weight to his work on talent pipelines, representation and what it takes to break into a closed competitive system. He is a working broadcaster for a global audience, so the keynote is paced and structured for the room rather than delivered as a career retrospective. Biography highlights 11 Formula One Grand Prix starts for Hispania Racing in 2010 and Team Lotus in 2011. Sky Sports F1 analyst, co-commentator and pit-lane reporter, full-time since 2019. Board Director, Motorsport UK, and member of its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Founding member of the FIA Drivers’ Commission since 2013, with further roles on the FIA Single Seater Commission and Driver Grading Committee. Williams Heritage driver since 2016, demonstrating the team’s championship-winning cars. Author of “Drive to Victory: Incredible True Stories from the Fastest Sport in the World”, Hachette Children’s, 2025. Biography A modern Formula One team is roughly a thousand engineers, strategists and operations staff who have to redesign their product every two weeks, inside a moving regulatory frame, while a driver they have never met executes the result on television. Karun Chandhok has been the driver in that picture, the analyst describing it for Sky Sports F1, and a director on the boards that write the rules around it. He raced 11 Grands Prix for Hispania Racing and Team Lotus, becoming the second Indian to compete in the championship. From there he moved into the FIA World Endurance Championship and five starts at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, then drove for Mahindra Racing in the inaugural Formula E season. The breadth matters: very few people have raced across the three categories actively reshaping motorsport’s relationship with technology, sustainability and global audiences. Since 2019 he has been part of the core Sky Sports F1 line-up as analyst, co-commentator and pit-lane reporter. The role is unusual because it sits between the engineers and the public; he has to read live telemetry, strategy calls and team radio quickly enough to explain them on air, and accurately enough that the paddock will keep talking to him next weekend. His governance work gives the keynote its third dimension. He has served on the FIA Drivers’ Commission since 2013 and joined the Motorsport UK board in 2021, where he sits on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Those seats are why his material on talent pipelines, safety reform and competitive integrity carries authority that most sports speakers cannot match. Key speaking topics Decision-making in high-pressure performance environments Leadership and team coordination in elite motorsport Data, technology and human judgement in Formula One Safety, governance and regulatory change Diversity, inclusion and talent pipelines in closed competitive systems Continuous transformation under external pressure Global sport as a commercial and operational system Ideal for Executive teams and boards working through sustained operational or regulatory change. CHROs, DEI leads and talent functions building pipelines into historically closed industries. Engineering, technology and data leadership audiences interested in how F1 turns data into action. Sales conferences and client events where a credible, broadcast-quality headline speaker is needed. Audience outcomes A clearer view of how elite teams sustain judgement and coordination when conditions keep shifting. A working sense of how F1 organisations turn data and technology into faster human decisions. Specific examples of how regulation, safety and competitive performance trade against each other inside a sport. A more honest picture of what genuine inclusion looks like in a sector that historically locked talent out.

Why organisations work with Charles Clark A first-person account of a career ending in a single training session, used to give audiences a concrete frame for setbacks they are currently sitting with. Habit and goal-setting tools (Thrive Planner, Recap Journal) that give attendees something to take back to their desk on Monday rather than a feeling that fades by Wednesday. A book catalogue covering self-therapy, team dynamics, and personal goal design, which lets buyers match the talk to a sales kickoff, a wellbeing day, or a leadership offsite. Comfort across audience types: Fortune 500 sales teams, professional sports organisations, and college and military audiences, all referenced in his published client list. Biography highlights 3-time NCAA National Champion and 10-time All-American at Florida State University. Ranked 6th in the world over 100m at the IAAF World Championships in Berlin. Author of “Become Your Ideal Self: How to Heal Through Self Therapy” and “Guide to Thrive.” Creator of the Thrive Planner goal-setting system and the Recap Journal. Host of the Thrive Tribe Podcast on mindset, business, and athletic development. Speaking and training engagements referenced with Nike, Amazon, Google, NFL, MLB, NCAA, Raymond James, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi Co, and the US Army. Biography A 99% tear in the right quadriceps ends a sprinter’s career. For Charles Clark, it ended a track career that had already produced three NCAA titles, ten All-American honours, and a sixth-place finish at the IAAF World Championships in Berlin. The injury removed the only professional path he had built for. What replaced it was a deliberate second discipline. Clark studied habits, goal design, and recovery from setback, then built tools around them: the Thrive Planner, the Recap Journal, and a set of books beginning with “Guide to Thrive” and “Become Your Ideal Self.” Each is a practical product, not a memoir. That practicality is what corporate buyers are responding to. Clark works with sales organisations at Raymond James, Frontier Communications, and Pepsi, with sports bodies including the NFL, MLB, and NCAA, and with military and education audiences. The story opens the room. The planner-and-habits content gives people something to do with what they heard. Clark’s work fits an organisation that has tried wellbeing weeks and motivational posters and wants something with a real exercise attached. He is not a leadership theorist. He is a performer who learned a second craft after the first one was taken away, and who teaches the second one with the same discipline. Key speaking topics Personal resilience after setback Habit design and goal-setting Mindset and mental health for high-pressure roles Sales-team motivation and kickoff energy Team culture and relationship-building Performance under pressure Ideal for Sales kickoffs and annual conferences in commercial organisations. Wellbeing days and mental health weeks where leaders want substance over slogans. Professional sports organisations and high-performance environments. College, university, and military audiences working on resilience and personal development. Audience outcomes A specific reframe for the setback the audience is currently sitting with, drawn from Clark’s own career-ending injury. A working set of habit and goal-setting tools attendees can apply the next day. Language for talking about mental health and personal performance inside a commercial culture. Practical decisions about where attention, energy, and recovery time should go in the next quarter.

Why organisations work with Liz Earle A 30-year track record as a trusted public voice on women’s health, built through ITV’s This Morning, more than 30 books, and the Liz Earle Wellbeing magazine and podcast Authorship of The Good Menopause Guide and the Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller A Better Second Half, giving her a defined body of work that women’s networks and ERGs already recognise Co-founder credibility from Liz Earle Beauty Co., a brand she built with Kim Buckland from 1995 and sold to Avon in 2010, is useful for entrepreneurship and women-led business audiences An MBE for services to business and ambassador roles with The Menopause Charity and The Soil Association, evidence that she is taken seriously beyond the consumer brand Hosting fluency that lets her chair panels, lead Q&A, and run on-stage conversations on health and sustainability, not only delivers a fixed keynote Biography highlights Co-founder, Liz Earle Beauty Co. (1995, sold to Avon in 2010) Founder, Liz Earle Wellbeing (magazine, podcast, digital platform) Author of more than 30 books, including The Good Menopause Guide and A Better Second Half (Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller) MBE for services to business; Honorary Doctorate of Laws, Portsmouth University and Staffordshire University Long-running broadcaster on ITV’s This Morning since the late 1980s; podcast host of the Liz Earle Wellbeing Show Ambassador, The Menopause Charity; founder of the LiveTwice charity Biography Most large employers now agree that menopause is a workplace issue. Far fewer have a credible voice that women in their forties and fifties will actually listen to. That is the gap Liz Earle has spent three decades filling on national television and in print, and increasingly inside corporate audiences. Earle co-founded Liz Earle Beauty Co. with Kim Buckland in 1995 and sold the business to Avon in 2010, by which point the brand had become a benchmark for botanical, ethically sourced skincare. She left the company in 2017 and built Liz Earle Wellbeing into a magazine, podcast and publishing platform focused on midlife women’s health. Her writing extends the same authority. The Good Menopause Guide became a defining popular reference on the subject, and A Better Second Half reached No. 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list, with more than 30 books behind it on nutrition, beauty and women’s health. She holds an MBE for services to business and Honorary Doctorates of Law from Portsmouth and Staffordshire. For an audience of senior HR leaders, women’s network sponsors or wellbeing buyers, what Earle offers is rare in the speaker market: a public figure with the longevity, broadcast skill and named body of work to make a women’s health agenda land inside an organisation, rather than another clinical talk that the people most affected will not show up to. Key speaking topics Menopause and midlife women’s health Wellbeing and healthy ageing Women in business and entrepreneurship Nutrition and gut health Sustainable and ethical sourcing Building a consumer brand and a trusted public profile Ideal for CHROs, heads of DEI, and women’s network sponsors are building menopause and midlife policies Employee wellbeing leads and benefits buyers commissioning credible women’s health programming Female-leadership conferences, ERG summits, International Women’s Day platforms Consumer brands and retailers seeking a trusted host or panel chair on health, beauty or sustainability Audience outcomes A clearer view of menopause as a workplace and leadership issue, not only a personal health one Practical, evidence-grounded reference points on midlife health that audiences can act on without clinical jargon Confidence that women’s health content has been delivered by a voice their workforce already trusts A more honest conversation about ageing, energy, and performance for women in senior roles

Why organisations work with Lecyca Curiel A first-person Gen Z voice grounded in anthropological field research, rather than a marketing-agency reading of survey data. Affiliation with WHETSTON, the Dutch strategic foresight house that briefs senior leaders across Europe, gives her work analytical weight beyond the usual “young person on stage” booking. Track record of putting the Gen Z question in front of buyers who are unusually demanding: Walmart international executives, Google marketing managers, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway. Recognised by Het Financieele Dagblad in its 2019 list of 50 most promising young talents in the Netherlands, a credential that signals she was taken seriously inside Dutch business media before the speaking circuit picked her up. Brings an inclusion lens shaped by Indonesian and Dutch Caribbean heritage and a Humanity in Action fellowship, so DEI inside her sessions reads as substance, not decoration. Biography highlights Generation Z researcher and keynote speaker with WHETSTON, the strategic foresight think tank founded by Thimon de Jong. Selected by Het Financieele Dagblad as one of 50 promising young talents in the Netherlands, 2019. Studied Liberal Arts and Sciences with a Cultural Anthropology focus at Erasmus University College, Rotterdam. 2019 Amsterdam Fellow with Humanity in Action; co-author of an action project on inclusive Dutch national remembrance. Speaking clients include Walmart, Google, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway, FRED Leadership Forum, and Institute for the Future. Working anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, with projects on cultural heritage, decolonisation, and intergenerational memory. Biography Generation Z is the first cohort that grew up entirely inside the platforms most companies are still learning to manage. The numbers are familiar to any CHRO. The interpretation of those numbers, almost without exception, is filtered through people who are not part of the cohort. Lecyca Curiel works on the other side of that filter. She joined WHETSTON, the Amsterdam-based strategic foresight think tank founded by Thimon de Jong, after he scouted her at age seventeen following a public talk at the IMC Weekendschool. She has been delivering keynote work and strategic research for the firm since, with clients that include Walmart international executives, Google marketing managers, the European Parliament Youth Outreach Unit, BDO Norway, and FRED Leadership Forum. Het Financieele Dagblad named her one of 50 promising young talents in the Netherlands in 2019. Her academic grounding is in Cultural Anthropology at Erasmus University College, and she works in parallel as a documentary filmmaker on questions of heritage, memory, and decolonisation. As a 2019 Amsterdam Fellow with Humanity in Action she co-led a project on whether Dutch national remembrance is genuinely inclusive. The combination matters in the room. When she discusses what young employees actually want from work, it lands as field observation, not opinion. The argument she brings to leadership teams is narrower and harder than the usual generational keynote. Stereotypes about Gen Z are inexpensive to repeat and expensive to act on. What organisations need, on her reading, is a working model of intergenerational collaboration that makes sense to a 58-year-old executive and a 24-year-old engineer in the same conversation. That is the work she does on stage and in the strategy rooms WHETSTON is invited into. Key speaking topics Generation Z in the workforce Intergenerational collaboration Diversity, equity and inclusion from a Gen Z perspective Mental health across generations Future of work and talent retention Strategic foresight on cultural and demographic change Ideal for CHROs and heads of talent designing retention and engagement strategy for a multigenerational workforce. Boards and executive committees stress-testing assumptions about younger consumers and younger employees. DEI leads moving from awareness programmes to operational change. Leadership development teams building cross-generational management capability. Audience outcomes A clearer, evidence-based picture of what Gen Z employees and consumers actually expect, sourced from inside the cohort. Specific entry points for retention and engagement work in organisations with four or five active generations. A working language for intergenerational conversations that does not collapse into stereotype. A sharper read on where DEI commitments stall between stated policy and daily management.

Why organisations work with Lauren Steadman She has reinvented her elite career twice, from Paralympic swimmer to gold-medal paratriathlete, which gives her a precise vocabulary for what changing disciplines actually costs and what it returns. She speaks with the authority of medals at three consecutive Paralympic Games and competition across five, not a single peak moment, so the resilience argument is built on sustained output across sixteen years. Her Master’s in Business and Management from Portsmouth means she translates training-floor language into the operating language of strategy, KPIs and talent, rather than leaving the audience to do the work. Mainstream broadcast credibility from Strictly Come Dancing and SAS: Who Dares Wins makes her instantly recognisable to a mixed corporate audience without diluting the seriousness of the sporting record. An MBE for services to triathlon and a body of charity work through her wellness brand Sizu give the wellbeing material a real foundation rather than a borrowed one. Biography highlights Five-time Paralympian: Beijing 2008 and London 2012 in swimming; Rio 2016 silver, Tokyo 2020 gold and Paris 2024 bronze in paratriathlon. Three-time World Paratriathlon Champion (Edmonton 2014, Chicago 2015, Gold Coast 2018) and eight-time European Champion. Appointed MBE in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to triathlon. BSc (Hons) Psychology and MSc Business and Management, University of Portsmouth. Strictly Come Dancing 2018 semi-finalist and joint winner of Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins. Co-founder of Sizu, a wellness apparel brand whose proceeds support mental health and children’s charities. Biography Most elite athletes peak in one sport. Lauren Steadman has done it in two, taking podium finishes as a Paralympic swimmer at Beijing 2008 and London 2012 before switching disciplines and going on to win paratriathlon medals at Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024. Five Paralympic Games across sixteen years is the rare kind of record that lets a speaker talk about reinvention from the inside. The intellectual frame she brings to that record matters as much as the medals. A first-class psychology degree and an MSc in Business and Management from the University of Portsmouth give her a working language for how organisations actually run. She is not borrowing business metaphors. She is using a vocabulary she has studied and tested. Her TV work, a Strictly Come Dancing semi-final with AJ Pritchard and a joint win on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, has put her in front of audiences far beyond sport. The result is a speaker who is recognisable to a generalist boardroom and credible to a high-performance one. An MBE in the 2022 New Year Honours sits alongside her co-founding of Sizu, a wellness brand that channels proceeds into mental health and children’s charities. The argument for booking her is straightforward. When the question is how a team holds its standards through a change of discipline, three Paralympic cycles of medal-winning evidence is a sharper answer than most. Key speaking topics Performance and reinvention through career change Resilience under sustained pressure Mindset and preparation in elite environments Mental health and athlete wellbeing Goal setting across long horizons Adapting standards when the discipline changes Women in high-performance careers Ideal for Leadership offsites and senior conferences focused on change and reinvention Sales kick-offs and performance events where sustained output is the brief Talent and people functions running wellbeing or resilience programmes Graduate, early-career and women-in-business audiences Audience outcomes A clearer working definition of what resilience looks like across years, not weeks. Specific reference points for how to hold standards through a change of role or discipline. A grounded view on the relationship between mental health and high performance. Confidence that reinvention is a process with named stages, not a personality trait. Language that connects elite preparation to the everyday rhythm of corporate work.

Why organisations work with Dame Kelly Holmes A first-hand account of competing, and winning, at the highest level while concealing identity for fear of personal and professional consequence, a story directly relevant to inclusion, wellbeing, and retention agendas. Operational credibility on mental health: trained Mental Health First Aider and Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, not a generic wellness presence. A track record of building a durable institution beyond sport. The Dame Kelly Holmes Trust has paired retired elite athletes with disadvantaged young people since 2008, giving her practical, not theoretical, content on mentoring and transition. Cross-format flexibility for major corporate moments: keynote, after-dinner, awards host, panel chair, in-conversation interviewee, television-grade on stage. Biography highlights Won 800m and 1500m gold at Athens 2004; first British woman to win two golds at the same Olympic Games. Appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005; MBE in 1998 for service in the British Army. Served almost a decade in the British Army, including as an HGV driver and Physical Training Instructor, before turning fully professional in athletics. Founded the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust in 2008, mentoring disadvantaged young people through retired elite athletes. Author of “Unique: A Memoir” (2023), shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2024. Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (2024) and a trained Mental Health First Aider. Biography Winning two Olympic gold medals in the same week, at 34, is rare. Doing it while hiding a private fear that began in the British Army, where being gay was illegal until 2000, is the part of the story that matters most to organisations now. That is the spine of Holmes’s public work today. Her sporting record is well documented. Athens 2004, 800m then 1500m, made her the first British woman to win two golds at a single Games and the oldest woman to win either distance at the Olympics. The MBE in 1998 recognised her army service. The Damehood followed in 2005. The substance of her speaking comes from what happened next. In 2008, she founded the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust, an institution that pairs retired elite athletes with disadvantaged young people, now nearly two decades old. She trained as a Mental Health First Aider and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2024, anchoring her wellbeing work in something more rigorous than personal testimony. In June 2022, she came out publicly through an ITV documentary, “Kelly Holmes: Being Me”, and a year later published “Unique: A Memoir”, shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2024. The book traces 34 years of concealment, including standing on the Athens podium in fear of being outed. For a corporate audience it is unusually specific evidence of what hidden identity costs a high performer, and how that cost compounds under pressure. Key speaking topics Mental health and wellbeing in high-performance environments Resilience and performance under pressure Identity, belonging, and the cost of concealment at work Mentoring and the transition out of elite careers Inclusion and LGBTQ+ visibility in regulated and uniformed settings Goal-setting and sustained motivation across long careers Ideal for HR, CPO, and CHRO audiences responsible for wellbeing, mental health, and inclusion programming Leadership conferences where peak performance and personal resilience are central themes DEI and ERG events, particularly around LGBTQ+ inclusion in regulated, military, or traditional sectors Awards dinners, anniversary moments, and major town halls requiring a recognisable keynote presence with substantive content Audience outcomes A direct, named example of what concealing identity costs senior performers over a career Practical language for talking about mental health at work without slipping into wellness cliche A clear account of how mentoring, structured rather than informal, changes outcomes for young people and post-career athletes An honest read on how high performers actually manage pressure, injury, and self-doubt over time

Why organisations work with Kate Silverton A trusted, recognisable broadcaster who can hold a room of senior leaders, run a Q&A with executives, and chair a panel without losing the thread, which is why McLaren, KPMG, Transport for London, NatWest, Lloyds, and American Express have used her at conferences and ceremonies. A qualified child therapist trained through Place2Be, with a BSc in Psychology and clinical practice, which makes her credible to parental-leave, family-benefits, and employee-wellbeing audiences in a way few broadcasters are. Author of two Sunday Times bestsellers on child development, including an instant Sunday Times number one, giving her a defined public thesis on how the developing brain shapes behaviour. Two decades of frontline reporting, including Iraq and Afghanistan for Panorama, which gives her real ballast when chairing serious conversations rather than purely celebratory ones. Ambassador roles with Place2Be, the Anna Freud Centre, NSPCC, and Trauma Informed Schools UK, which sit naturally alongside corporate ESG, mental health, and family-benefits commitments. Biography highlights Former BBC News presenter, including BBC News at One and BBC Weekend News, and Panorama reporter from Iraq and Afghanistan. BSc in Psychology; qualified child therapist trained through the Place2Be charity. Author of “There’s No Such Thing As ‘Naughty'”, an instant Sunday Times No.1 bestseller, and its follow-up “There’s Still No Such Thing As ‘Naughty'”. Conference and awards host for Transport for London, KPMG, NatWest, Lloyds, McLaren, the NHS, and American Express. Ambassador for Place2Be, the Anna Freud Centre, NSPCC, NHS Maudsley Foundation Trust, and Trauma Informed Schools UK. Contestant on BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, Series 16, in 2018. Biography Most parenting advice is folklore. Silverton’s books are a deliberate counter to that, written by a journalist who went back to the science. “There’s No Such Thing As ‘Naughty'” reached number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list on release, and the follow-up volume covered the primary years on the same evidence base. The route to that work is unusual. Two decades inside the BBC, presenting BBC News at One and BBC Weekend News, and reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan for Panorama, gave her the public profile. A BSc in Psychology and a clinical retraining through the Place2Be charity gave her the substance. She qualified as a child therapist in 2023 and now combines clinical practice with writing and corporate work. For organisations, the value sits in two places. The first is hosting craft. Conferences and award ceremonies for Transport for London, KPMG, NatWest, Lloyds, McLaren, the NHS, and American Express trust her to chair senior conversations and run executive Q&As without losing rigour. The second is content. When the brief is wellbeing, working parents, or the emotional regulation that sits underneath leadership composure, she has a defined thesis grounded in clinical work and published research, not anecdote. Her ambassadorial work with Place2Be, the Anna Freud Centre, NSPCC, NHS Maudsley Foundation Trust, and Trauma Informed Schools UK keeps her connected to the front edge of children’s mental health practice in the UK, which is the source material her keynote draws on. Key speaking topics Children’s mental health and emotional development The science of parenting and behaviour Working parents and family-friendly workplaces Employee wellbeing and emotional regulation Conference hosting and panel moderation After-dinner speaking Ideal for Heads of HR, reward, and benefits leaders shaping parental and family wellbeing programmes Conference and event organisers needing a senior, calm, journalistically credible host Internal communications and leadership-development teams running wellbeing or working-parent strands Award ceremony and industry-event organisers seeking a trusted on-stage presenter Audience outcomes A clearer model of how brain development shapes the behaviour of children, and what that implies for parents inside the workforce Practical language for managers and HR leaders speaking to working parents on stress, regulation, and family pressure A grounded view of what employer-sponsored mental health and family support actually has to do to make a difference For hosted events, sharper executive Q&As, tighter panel discussions, and a credible on-stage thread between sessions