Mental Health in the Workplace

Why organisations work with Nicole DuBois A practising CHRO of a 600-person child welfare nonprofit, not a former operator. The HR strategy advice is current, not retrospective. A first-person account of an MS diagnosis, divorce and reinvention published as Unparalyzed, brought into corporate rooms by someone whose day job is running people strategy. Repeated recognition as a Top 100 HR Professional by OnConferences across multiple years, alongside membership of Chief and the OnCon Senior Council. A specific point of view on what authentic leadership costs women in senior roles, anchored in her own decision to publish under her real name after using a pseudonym. Useful to organisations whose own internal HR conversations on illness, caregiving and identity have outgrown the standard wellbeing vendor script. Biography highlights Chief Human Resources Officer, Graham Windham (NYC), responsible for HR strategy across talent, learning, compensation, benefits, employee relations and engagement for around 600 employees. Author of Unparalyzed: Beating an Invisible Pre-Midlife Crisis, originally published as Danielle M. Bryan and later reclaimed under her own name. Named a Top 100 HR Professional in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2025. Connector Award, New Jersey Human Resources Council (2024); Joint Legislative Commendation, State of New Jersey. Bachelor’s in Psychology and Urban Studies from Fordham, Master’s in Mental Health Counselling from NYU, Executive Education for Nonprofit Professionals at Columbia Business School. Member of Chief and the OnCon Senior Council. Biography Most organisations now talk openly about wellbeing, inclusion and authentic leadership. Fewer have senior people who can speak about those subjects in the first person without breaking the corporate register. Nicole DuBois sits in that smaller group. Her day job is running people strategy at Graham Windham, a New York child welfare nonprofit with around 600 employees. As Chief Human Resources Officer she leads talent, learning, compensation, benefits, employee relations and engagement, and she has done so since 2006. The work is operational and current, not a retired executive’s view of how HR used to function. The second layer is her memoir, Unparalyzed: Beating an Invisible Pre-Midlife Crisis. It tracks an MS diagnosis, a divorce after seventeen years of marriage, and a deliberate reinvention. The book was first published under a pseudonym at her publisher’s legal advice, and she has since chosen to reclaim it under her own name. That choice is the spine of her keynote on what authentic leadership actually costs women in senior roles. Repeated recognition as a Top 100 HR Professional, the Connector Award from the New Jersey Human Resources Council, and membership of Chief and the OnCon Senior Council place her inside the professional HR community her audiences are typically drawn from. Her education runs from Fordham and NYU through executive nonprofit work at Columbia Business School. The combination gives organisations a speaker who can hold an HR strategy conversation in the morning and a wellbeing keynote in the afternoon without either feeling rehearsed. Key speaking topics Authentic leadership for women in senior roles Employee wellbeing and the corporate response to chronic illness Engagement and retention in mission-driven organisations Multigenerational workforces Non-linear career paths and personal reinvention Coaching, mentoring and sponsorship inside HR-led talent strategies Ideal for CHROs, CPOs and heads of HR shaping wellbeing, engagement and DEI strategies ERG leaders and women’s networks looking for a senior voice on authentic leadership Nonprofit and mission-driven employers managing retention in lean workforces Internal leadership development programmes for high-potential women Audience outcomes A clearer sense of what authentic leadership looks like in practice when the leader is also living through chronic illness, caregiving or major personal change A current CHRO view on what employee wellbeing programmes get right and where they still miss the people they are aimed at Language and confidence to raise invisible health conditions inside leadership conversations A reframing of non-linear careers as a credibility asset rather than a gap to be explained

Why organisations work with Anelia Uzunova A corporate operator’s read on wellbeing. She has run point for a CEO at Galderma and managed global innovation projects at Novartis, so the inner-leadership conversation lands as an executive discipline rather than a soft-skills add-on. Founder of the wellbeing community at the World Economic Forum, which gives her a credible vantage point on how peer organisations are actually structuring this work, not just how they describe it on their careers page. A structured method, the RISE Inner Leadership framework, that gives leadership teams something concrete to take back to their day-to-day, rather than a workshop afterglow. A bilingual, cross-cultural speaker with working experience across Switzerland, the US, and the UK, well suited to executive audiences in pharma, healthcare, and globally distributed corporate teams. INSEAD-trained executive coach who lectures on Leading for Wellbeing to its MBA audience, which translates into content that survives a sceptical senior room. Biography highlights Chief of Staff to the CEO, Galderma Global Leadership Fellow, World Economic Forum; founder of the WEF wellbeing community Former global digital innovation project lead at Novartis, Switzerland MBA and executive coaching certification, INSEAD Executive Masters in Global Leadership, World Economic Forum programme Lecturer to INSEAD MBA audiences on Leading for Wellbeing Biography Pharma is a useful test case for the limits of conventional wellbeing programmes. The work is high-stakes, the regulatory load is heavy, and the senior teams running global functions tend to be senior precisely because they absorb pressure for everyone else. That is the environment Anelia Uzunova has worked inside for most of her career, first at Novartis in Switzerland and then as Chief of Staff to the CEO of Galderma. Her shift from operating roles to coaching and speaking was not a reinvention away from corporate life. It was a decision to teach explicitly what she saw working at the top of complex organisations. The Global Leadership Fellows Programme at the World Economic Forum gave her a comparative view across industries; founding the WEF’s wellbeing community gave her a structured one. Both inform a body of work focused on the inner state of the leader as an operational variable. The teachable form of that work is the RISE Inner Leadership framework, organised around four stages: Root, Ignite, Surrender, Embody. It is used with executive audiences and with the INSEAD MBA cohort she lectures to on Leading for Wellbeing. The framing is not therapeutic. It is closer to executive coaching with a clear curriculum, designed for senior leaders who have already tried the surface interventions and want something that holds up under pressure. Her credentials sit across INSEAD, the World Economic Forum, and a fifteen-year corporate track record in pharma and healthcare. The reason this matters for serious organisations is straightforward: when wellbeing is treated as an HR programme, it stays peripheral. When it is treated as a leadership capability, it changes how people work. Uzunova argues, and demonstrates, that the second framing is the one that pays back. Key speaking topics Inner leadership and executive composure Wellbeing as a leadership capability Personal transformation and reinvention for senior leaders Leading through change and uncertainty Purpose and alignment in executive careers Mindful leadership for high-pressure industries Women in senior leadership Ideal for CHROs and Chief People Officers building wellbeing into the leadership agenda rather than the benefits stack C-suite and senior leadership offsites in pharma, healthcare, and other high-pressure regulated industries Executive development programmes and high-potential cohorts Women’s leadership and senior talent forums Audience outcomes A working definition of inner leadership that an executive team can use, not a wellness vocabulary The four-stage RISE framework as a reference structure for how senior leaders manage their own state A sharper view of how composure, alignment, and presence affect team performance and retention Practical anchors for executives navigating role transitions, restructure, or extended pressure A frame for treating wellbeing as a leadership discipline that boards and CEOs can sponsor with confidence

Why organisations work with Jeanette Bronée She treats self-care as a leadership discipline, not a wellbeing programme. Her Power-Pausing method is built for executives who cannot afford to slow down but cannot afford to decide badly either. She brings two decades of work with Fortune 500 organisations including Microsoft, BlackRock, HSBC, Siemens, and the U.S. Navy, and has presented at the United Nations. Her book The Self-Care Mindset (Wiley, 2022) gives clients a tested framework leaders can apply between sessions, not a speaker high that fades by Monday. She contributed the chapter on Power-Pausing in Thinkers50 and Wiley’s Connectedness, a recognition that places her work alongside the field’s most cited voices on human connection and leadership. Her Danish business background and US executive experience give her a register that travels comfortably across European and North American leadership audiences. Biography highlights Author, The Self-Care Mindset, Wiley (2022) Contributing author, Connectedness, Thinkers50 and Wiley, foreword by Rita McGrath Three-time TEDx speaker, including TEDxUNCPembroke Founder of Path for Life, established 2004 Former Board Member, National Speakers Association New York Speaking clients include Microsoft, BlackRock, HSBC, Siemens, eBay, McKesson, U.S. Navy, SHRM, and the United Nations Biography Most leadership advice on pressure assumes the answer is more discipline. Bronée argues the opposite. The capacity to lead well under sustained load is built by what happens in the seconds before a decision, not by what happens after burnout has already arrived. Her Power-Pausing method, developed over twenty years of consulting work, treats that micro-pause as a metacognitive operating practice, not a wellness habit. The work has a specific origin. She built her first company at 23, ran a team of 50 by 25, and was diagnosed with the early markers of the cancer that had killed both her parents. She left the fashion industry, founded Path for Life in 2004, and spent the next two decades testing what actually changes when leaders rebuild their relationship to attention, stress, and trust. That research now sits in The Self-Care Mindset, published by Wiley in 2022, and in her contributing chapter to Connectedness, the Thinkers50 and Wiley volume on authentic human connection at work, with a foreword by Columbia Business School’s Rita McGrath. She has delivered three TEDx talks and worked with Microsoft, BlackRock, HSBC, Siemens, McKesson, the U.S. Navy, and the United Nations. The current emphasis is on trust and judgement in AI-saturated workplaces. As more cognitive load shifts to machines, the leadership variables that matter most are the ones that cannot be automated: the quality of attention a leader brings to a hard call, and the conditions that allow a team to disagree well. Bronée’s argument is that those variables are trainable. Key speaking topics Self-leadership under pressure Power-Pausing as a decision-making practice Building cultures of trust in AI-saturated workplaces The Self-Care Mindset for senior leaders Care-Driven Leadership Resilience and sustainable performance Human capacity in the age of AI Ideal for CEOs, CHROs and senior HR leaders rebuilding the social contract with their workforce Leadership development sponsors designing programmes for newly senior executives Organisations introducing AI tools and worried about the cultural cost of speed without judgement Conferences for women in senior leadership and executive transition programmes Audience outcomes A working definition of self-care as a leadership capability, separate from wellbeing programming The Power-Pausing practice as a tool for higher-quality decisions under time pressure A clearer view of how trust is built or eroded in the small interactions that precede big calls Language to use with their own teams about capacity, not just performance An honest read on where their current culture rewards urgency at the expense of judgement

Why organisations work with Kelly Mackin A research instrument leaders can actually use. The Motives Met Human Needs Assessment surfaces the 28 psychological, emotional, and social needs that drive a specific employee, team, or culture, replacing one-size-fits-all engagement scores with personalised data. A direct challenge to universal hierarchy thinking. Mackin’s research argues that Maslow-style and engagement-survey frameworks misrepresent how needs actually distribute across a workforce, and gives leaders a defensible alternative. Award-winning published work. Work Life Well-Lived is a Nonfiction Authors Association Bronze Award winner and an Amazon best-seller in its category, giving senior buyers a citable reference point. Practical depth beyond keynote theatre. Mackin trained as a cognitive behavioural coach and meditation teacher and runs assessments, workshops, and leadership accelerators, so the keynote connects to a delivery system the organisation can run after she leaves. Biography highlights CEO and co-founder, Motives Met, the workplace well-being platform behind her research. Author of Work Life Well-Lived: The Motives Met Pathway to No-B.S. Well-Being at Work (Greenleaf Book Group, 2024). Nonfiction Authors Association Bronze Book Award winner. Creator of the Motives Met Human Needs Assessment, identifying 28 motives that drive thriving at work. BA in Communications, Wittenberg University; certified cognitive behavioural therapy practitioner and meditation teacher. Host of DisruptHR San Diego; featured in Authority Magazine and the Human Capital Innovations webinar series. Biography Most workplace well-being programmes assume that everyone is motivated by the same things in roughly the same order. That assumption shapes every engagement survey, every wellness benefit, every “top reasons people quit” list. It is also wrong. Kelly Mackin’s research at Motives Met identifies 28 distinct psychological, emotional, and social motives, and shows that the ranking varies sharply between individuals, teams, and roles. The work sits inside Motives Met, the platform she co-founded and leads as CEO. Its core instrument, the Human Needs Assessment, surfaces an individual’s top motives and maps them against the conditions a manager or organisation is actually providing. The output is a usable diagnostic for leaders who have run out of patience with engagement scores that do not tell them what to do next. Her 2024 book, Work Life Well-Lived: The Motives Met Pathway to No-B.S. Well-Being at Work, became an Amazon category best-seller and won a Bronze Book Award from the Nonfiction Authors Association. The technical foundation comes from her training as a cognitive behavioural therapy practitioner and meditation teacher, which she pairs with quantitative research methods to keep the framework empirical rather than inspirational. For HR and culture leaders, the relevance is operational. Mackin gives them a vocabulary for the gap between what a workforce reports on a survey and what individual people actually need from their work, and a measurement layer they can act on across hybrid teams, multigenerational workforces, and post-restructure cultures. Key speaking topics Workplace well-being and the science of thriving at work Psychological needs and motivation at work Human-first leadership and management practice Stress, burnout, and work-life harmony Psychological safety and emotional inclusion Culture design for hybrid and multigenerational teams Ideal for CHROs and heads of people redesigning engagement and well-being strategy Culture, DEI, and talent leaders responsible for retention and inclusion outcomes Senior managers and team leaders running large or multigenerational teams Leadership development and L&D heads designing manager capability programmes Audience outcomes A working understanding of the 28 motives framework and how it differs from Maslow and engagement-survey models Specific questions leaders can ask their teams to surface individual motives, not just aggregate sentiment A diagnostic lens on where current well-being and engagement spend is misaligned with actual employee needs Language and structure for conversations on burnout, work-life harmony, and psychological safety A clearer link between well-being investment and performance outcomes leaders can defend internally

Why organisations work with Mimi Nicklin A productised methodology, ALUR (Authenticity, Listening, Understanding, Recognition), that gives line managers something more usable than “be more empathetic” and translates into engagement, psychological safety, and retention conversations. Practitioner credibility from a former CEO of a global advertising agency, so the empathy argument is framed in commercial language CHROs can defend to the CFO. Deep multigenerational fluency, including the HBR IdeaCast on generational differences and a thesis on listening to Millennial and Gen Z employees instead of forcing conformity. Strong Asia-Pacific and MENA market footprint, which is rare for an English-language workplace culture speaker and useful for regional and global rollouts beyond the usual US and UK circuit. Three published books on empathy at work, including Softening the Edge and Empathy at Work, that give internal HR sponsors something concrete to circulate before and after the session. Biography highlights Founder of Empathy Everywhere, a global empathy training and engagement platform. Author of Softening the Edge: Empathy: How Humanity’s Oldest Leadership Trait is Changing the World, and Empathy at Work. Featured guest on the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast, episode “How Empathy Helps Bridge Generational Differences”. Host of the Empathy Everywhere podcast (previously Empathy for Breakfast). Former CEO of a global advertising agency with 15+ years in marketing and brand strategy across 25 markets. Recognised on LinkedIn as the Number 1 Workplace Wellbeing Leader in Malaysia and named Malaysian Female Leader 2024. Biography Most empathy conversations in corporate settings die at the values poster. Leaders nod, HR runs a workshop, engagement scores barely move, and managers go back to managing on output. Mimi Nicklin’s work starts from the assumption that the problem is operational, not philosophical: empathy has no traction inside a business until it is broken into behaviours a tired manager can use on a Tuesday afternoon. That is what the ALUR methodology, the framework behind her platform Empathy Everywhere, attempts to do. Authenticity, Listening, Understanding, Recognition. Four practices, taught as habits, that sit underneath the messier work of running multigenerational teams, restoring psychological safety after restructure, and rebuilding engagement when hybrid has flattened the cues people used to read each other by. Her credibility on this is unusual because it is commercial first. She built and ran a global advertising agency before she became a full-time author and speaker, and her writing in Softening the Edge and Empathy at Work argues the business case in numbers a CFO will accept, not in the language of wellbeing alone. Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast brought her on to make the case that generational friction is mostly a listening failure, an argument that has since shaped how a number of her client organisations talk about Gen Z retention. The work sits at the practical end of the people agenda, which is why CHROs, heads of culture, and senior HR leaders book her rather than chief executives. She is the speaker you commission when the engagement survey came back worse than last year, the exit interviews keep using the same words, and someone needs to give the leadership population a usable answer. Key speaking topics Listening-led leadership and the ALUR methodology Empathy as a measurable workplace capability Multigenerational engagement and Gen Z retention Psychological safety in restructured and hybrid teams Mental health and wellbeing at work Conflict resolution and difficult conversations Inclusion as an everyday management practice Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers commissioning culture or engagement programmes after a low survey or restructure Heads of L&D rolling out leadership development to senior managers across multigenerational, multi-market teams Heads of DEI, wellbeing, or culture transformation looking for a substantive empathy capability that does not collapse into wellness theatre Regional HR leaders in Asia-Pacific, MENA, and Europe running global culture programmes that need a speaker with cross-market fluency Audience outcomes A practical operating definition of empathy at work, broken into the four ALUR behaviours, that managers can apply the next day Specific tactics for closing the engagement gap between senior leaders and Millennial or Gen Z talent without forcing either side to conform A clearer reading of where psychological safety has eroded inside hybrid and restructured teams, and what restores it A commercial case for empathy that connects to retention, productivity, and customer outcomes, not only wellbeing Confidence that empathy is a teachable management skill, not a personality trait some managers happen to have

Why organisations work with Mel Abraham A practitioner’s view of personal finance, not a motivational one. Thirty years as a CPA advising founders and high earners sits behind every framework he teaches. Financial wellbeing translated into a workforce metric. His employee financial wellness sessions connect personal money stress directly to productivity, retention, and engagement numbers a CFO recognises. A published, repeatable system. Building Your Money Machine and its Wealth Priority Ladder give audiences a sequenced model they can act on the next morning, not a set of principles to remember. Credibility at the top of the speaker profession. The Certified Speaking Professional designation is held by fewer than one in ten working speakers, and Abraham earned it on top of the CPA qualification. A founder’s story buyers can verify. He built, sold, and reinvested through a cancer diagnosis and recovery, which is why the work avoids the abstract optimism that defines most personal-finance content. Biography highlights USA Today bestselling author of Building Your Money Machine (Hay House, 2024). International bestselling author of The Entrepreneur’s Solution. Certified Public Accountant with more than 30 years of advisory experience to founders and entrepreneurs. Certified Speaking Professional, National Speakers Association. Host of the Building Your Money Machine podcast and YouTube show, reaching around two million viewers. Has shared stages with Tony Robbins, Brendon Burchard, Arianna Huffington, Ed Mylett, and Amy Porterfield. Biography The gap between earning a high income and being financially free is wider than most professionals expect. Lifestyle absorbs salary growth, savings sit idle, and the moment when work becomes a choice keeps moving further out. Mel Abraham has spent three decades inside that gap as a CPA advising founders and high earners, and his work begins with the mechanics of closing it. Building Your Money Machine, his 2024 USA Today bestseller, sets out the sequence: earn, grow, protect. The book introduces the Wealth Priority Ladder and the Five Incomes, frameworks he uses to move audiences from a single salary to a portfolio of cash-producing assets. It followed The Entrepreneur’s Solution, an earlier international bestseller written for owner-operators trying to scale without trading their lives for the business. Inside organisations, Abraham translates the same material into a workforce argument. Personal financial stress shows up as distraction, presenteeism, and turnover, and his Financial Wellness, The Missing Link to Employee Wellness programme reframes it as a measurable productivity issue rather than a soft benefit. Buyers tend to be CHROs, founders, and benefits leads who want financial literacy treated with the same seriousness as physical and mental health. The Certified Speaking Professional designation, held by under one in ten working speakers, sits alongside the CPA credential. The combination is unusual, and it is what allows Abraham to take a stage at a sales kickoff of 20,000 or a boardroom of 10 and treat both as exercises in numerical precision. Key speaking topics Personal financial freedom and wealth-building systems Employee financial wellness and productivity Entrepreneurship and founder economics Wealth priority sequencing for high earners Legacy planning and intergenerational wealth Money mindset and behavioural finance Ideal for Sales conferences, founder summits, and entrepreneur networks CHROs and benefits leads building financial wellbeing into the employee proposition Wealth management, banking, and financial services events for client audiences Professional services firms and partnerships addressing partner and associate financial literacy Audience outcomes A sequenced model for converting earned income into income-producing assets A clearer view of which financial moves come first, second, and third Language for treating financial wellbeing as a measurable workforce outcome, not a benefit line item A founder’s account of building wealth through health crisis and business reinvention Tools drawn from a CPA practice rather than a motivational frame

Why organisations work with Jeff Salzenstein He brings a verified elite-performance credential into the executive room. ATP top 100, two NCAA team titles at Stanford, and a return to the top 100 at age 30 after two career-threatening injuries. The recovery story is not metaphor; it is the source material for the framework. The Own Your Zone of Excellence methodology is structured, not motivational. Four named pillars (rapid stress reduction, mindset shifts, emotional regulation, rest and recovery) that map onto the specific nervous-system and recovery decisions a senior leader can make inside a week. He is booked by organisations whose leaders are visibly under load: Duck Creek Technologies, U.S. Radiology Specialists, Weil Gotshal & Manges, Vistage chairs. The repeat work in private practice, healthcare, and legal services indicates the framework holds up in high-intensity professional settings. He runs Tennis Evolution, a coaching business with a 85,000-subscriber YouTube channel. He has built and scaled a teaching product, which is rare among speakers whose credibility rests on a past career. Biography highlights Former ATP top 100 singles player; career-high world No. 100 reached in June 2004, the oldest American to first crack the top 100 at that age. Two-time Stanford All-American, NCAA team champion 1995 and 1996, played No. 1 singles, team captain, coached by Dick Gould. Tennis Week magazine Rookie of the Year, 1997. Competed in the main draw of all four Grand Slams. Inducted into the Colorado Tennis Hall of Fame, 2005. Founder of Tennis Evolution, an online coaching platform with a YouTube channel exceeding 85,000 subscribers. Contributing author of “The Ultimate Success Guide” with Brian Tracy. Biography Most executive wellbeing programmes are designed for the workforce and ignore the layer under the most pressure. The leadership team gets a slide on resilience and a meditation app. The mechanics of how senior leaders actually regulate stress, recover, and stay sharp through compressed cycles rarely make it into the conversation. Salzenstein’s work starts where that conversation gives up. The credential is unusually concrete. He played No. 1 singles for Stanford under Dick Gould, captained back-to-back NCAA team championships in 1995 and 1996, and reached world No. 100 on the ATP tour. He then broke into the top 100 a second time, at 30, after two career-threatening injuries. Tennis Week named him Rookie of the Year in 1997. The Colorado Tennis Hall of Fame inducted him in 2005. The Own Your Zone of Excellence framework grew out of that arc and out of a family mental health and addiction crisis that ended his playing career. It is built around four operational pillars: rapid stress reduction, mindset shifts, emotional regulation, and rest and recovery. The content is closer to applied performance science than to motivational speaking, and it is structured so leaders can use it inside an ordinary working week. Organisations that book him tend to be in high-intensity professional settings where the executive layer is visibly under load. Duck Creek Technologies, U.S. Radiology Specialists, Weil Gotshal & Manges, Lightspeed Systems, The Mortgage Collaborative, and Vistage chairs have used him as keynote or coach. He also runs Tennis Evolution, an online coaching business with a YouTube channel of more than 85,000 subscribers, which makes him one of the few speakers in the performance space who has built and sustained a teaching product alongside his keynote work. Key speaking topics Executive resilience and burnout prevention Stress regulation and nervous system recovery Peak performance under pressure Mental and emotional health for senior leaders Mindset and focus for high-performing teams Sales team performance and pressure Culture and engagement for executive teams Ideal for CEOs and executive leadership teams running high-intensity cycles, particularly in professional services, healthcare, technology, and financial services CHROs and chief people officers building wellbeing programmes that include the senior layer, not just the broader workforce Sales leaders and revenue teams operating under sustained quota pressure Vistage chairs, peer-advisory groups, and leadership offsites focused on personal performance and recovery Audience outcomes A concrete set of practices for rapid stress reduction and nervous system regulation that senior leaders can use during the working day A vocabulary for talking about executive burnout and recovery inside the leadership team Specific techniques for reframing pressure moments without losing edge or focus A clearer sense of what rest and recovery look like at the executive level, beyond holiday and headspace apps

Why organisations work with Rashmi Airan She has lived the failure she now teaches against. A Columbia-trained lawyer who went to federal prison for fraud tied to the housing crisis is a different category of voice on judgement under pressure than a consultant or compliance trainer. Her Clarity Loop gives leadership teams a four-question, sixty-second discipline they can actually run inside a real decision, not a values poster they nod at and forget. She names the specific mechanisms that erode judgement, rationalisation, normalisation, silence, group pressure, and urgency, from the inside, because they are the ones that took down her own career. Her work connects judgement, resilience, and mental health, which makes her relevant to leaders under sustained strain rather than only to the compliance function. Biography highlights Columbia Law School graduate, with honours; undergraduate degree from UNC-Chapel Hill; former Wall Street investment banker. Served six months in federal prison for fraud tied to the US housing crisis, after a conspiracy conviction as a closing attorney. Creator of the Clarity Loop, a four-question decision framework, and the RISE Through It® process for recovering judgement after setback. Author of ALL RISE: A Lawyer’s Evolution from Prison to Purpose, endorsed by Marshall Goldsmith. TEDx speaker, Against the Slippery Slope (TEDxGreenville), on ethical blind spots and decision-making under pressure. Has delivered keynotes for leaders at Deloitte, Coca-Cola, Merck, Comcast, Cardinal Health, and Medtronic. Media appearances on ABC, PBS, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal; board director, Overtown Youth Center and Alonzo Mourning Foundation. Biography Most damaging decisions in business are not made by reckless people. They are made by capable, experienced leaders under pressure, one reasonable-seeming compromise at a time. Rashmi Airan knows the pattern from the inside. A Columbia Law School graduate and former Wall Street investment banker, she built a successful legal career before a conspiracy conviction tied to the housing crisis sent her to federal prison. That collapse became the subject of her work rather than a footnote to it. For more than a decade she has studied how speed, incentives, and the stories leaders tell themselves quietly bend judgement, and how to interrupt that drift before it hardens into damage. Her central idea is that integrity needs infrastructure: strong values are necessary but not sufficient under real pressure. The practical answer she teaches is the Clarity Loop, a four-question pause that takes about sixty seconds and forces a leader to name the pressure, examine their incentives, find the blind spot, and check the decision before acting. Her longer RISE Through It® process, Reframe, Identify, Surrender, Evolve, addresses the harder climb back after a setback. She has brought both to leadership teams at Deloitte, Coca-Cola, Merck, Comcast, Cardinal Health, and Medtronic. She is the author of ALL RISE: A Lawyer’s Evolution from Prison to Purpose, and her story has been covered by ABC, PBS, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. She serves on the board of the Overtown Youth Center and the Alonzo Mourning Foundation and is an ambassador for The Key Clubhouse, work rooted in mental health and second-chance opportunity, the ground she had to rebuild on herself. Key speaking topics Decision-making under pressure Values-based leadership Resilience after professional setback Decision drift and the conditions for ethical lapse Behavioural science and judgement Mental health and senior leadership Risk awareness for boards and executive teams Ideal for Boards, general counsel, and compliance leadership setting the ethical operating standard for the organisation. Partner groups in law, accounting, banking, and professional services where individual judgement carries firm-wide risk. Senior leadership development programmes inside Fortune-scale companies focused on decision quality and resilience. Women’s leadership forums and emerging-leader cohorts where authority, voice, and self-knowledge are central. Audience outcomes A four-question method, the Clarity Loop, they can run inside a real decision before they act. The vocabulary to name decision drift as it happens in their teams, rather than after the damage. A more honest account of how pressure, incentives, and culture combine to bend capable people’s judgement. Permission to treat mental health, fear, and self-doubt as leadership issues rather than private weakness. A first-person reference point that leaders carry back into their own teams when the pressure starts to rise.

Why organisations work with Kait Borsay A working broadcast journalist on national radio, not a former presenter. Her interview craft is rehearsed live four nights a week on Times Radio, in front of a politically literate audience. Built and sold a media property. She co-founded The Offside Rule, took it to acquisition by The New York Times in 2022, and understands the commercial side of content from the inside. Comfortable across registers, from Invictus Games and the Boat Race to corporate town halls for PWC, Cisco, Capital One and BNY Mellon. She does not have a single mode. Recognised credibility with senior commercial brands as a podcast host, including P&G and EY, where the brief is sustained editorial conversation rather than one-off stage presence. A reporter’s instinct for the awkward question. Her Times Radio editorial agenda covers Long Covid, care home residents’ rights, children’s mental health and neurodiversity in women, themes that demand a host who can hold difficult material without flinching. Biography highlights Presenter, The Evening Edition, Times Radio, Monday to Thursday Co-founder, The Offside Rule, part-acquired by The New York Times in 2022 Former Drivetime host on talkRADIO, presenting alongside Eamonn Holmes Television news experience at Sky News, Reuters and ITN Began career in sports journalism at Sky Sports Corporate hosting clients include PWC, Capital One, Cisco, BNY Mellon, P&G and EY Live event credits include the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and the Invictus Games The Offside Rule named in the Guardian’s top five sport podcasts; Vogue’s best football podcast of 2018 Biography The Evening Edition on Times Radio runs four nights a week, covering politics, health, education and social affairs. Kait Borsay presents it. The discipline of live national radio, where every interview is unscripted and audience tolerance for filler is zero, shapes how she works on every other stage she steps onto. Her broadcast career started in sport at Sky Sports, and ran through Sky News, Reuters and ITN before her move into long-form audio. In 2012, she co-founded The Offside Rule, a female-fronted football podcast that took ten years to build and was part-acquired by The New York Times in 2022. It featured in the Guardian’s top five sport podcasts and Vogue’s best football podcast list. The corporate work sits alongside the journalism. She hosts and moderates for PWC, Capital One, Cisco and BNY Mellon, and has run brand podcasts for P&G and EY. Live event credits include the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and the Invictus Games, formats where the host has to carry hours of unscripted broadcast in front of a live audience. What she brings to a corporate stage is the same discipline she applies to Times Radio. A reporter’s prep, a willingness to push past the corporate answer, and a calm register that holds a room when the agenda slips, when a speaker overruns, or when a sensitive subject lands in the middle of the programme. Key speaking topics Event hosting and conference moderation Panel chairing for senior leadership audiences Awards ceremony presenting Live event hosting for sport and broadcast formats Corporate podcast hosting and brand audio Interview-led fireside conversations Mental health, wellbeing and women’s health in editorial conversation Ideal for Corporate communications and events leads commissioning a flagship conference, town hall or AGM Brand and marketing teams are developing a corporate podcast series or long-form audio CHRO and internal communications functions are running sensitive all-staff conversations on health and wellbeing Sports rights holders and sponsors running live broadcasts or hospitality formats Audience outcomes A live event that runs to time and holds executive audience attention across long sessions Panel conversations that move beyond rehearsed answers, with interventions calibrated to the room Sensitive editorial content, mental health, women’s health, lived experience, handled with broadcast judgement A presenter that the audience associates with national-quality journalism rather than generic compering

Why organisations work with Marverine Cole She has anchored live news under pressure for Sky News, 5 News, ITV and the BBC, and brings that discipline to stage hosting where the running order changes in the moment. Her Mind Media Award for Journalist of the Year, won for the BBC Radio 4 documentary Black Girls Don’t Cry, gives her standing to chair sessions on mental health, race and representation without sounding rehearsed. An honorary doctorate from Birmingham City University and a four-year stint running its undergraduate journalism courses mean she can interview senior leaders and academics on equal footing. As Britain’s first Black female accredited beer sommelier and BBC Good Food columnist, she opens unusual commercial routes for brand and consumer events where culture, lifestyle and gender intersect. Biography highlights Newsreader on ITV1’s Good Morning Britain; previous news anchor roles at Sky News (World News and Business Report), 5 News, BBC Midlands Today and ITV Central News Journalist of the Year, Mind Media Awards 2019, for the BBC Radio 4 documentary Black Girls Don’t Cry Honorary doctorate from Birmingham City University; former Director of Undergraduate Journalism courses, Birmingham School of Media (2018 to 2022) Britain’s first Black female accredited beer sommelier; resident beer columnist for BBC Good Food magazine Co-presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live; presenter on Classic FM; contributor to BBC Radio 1Xtra and BBC 5 Live Contributing essayist to Sir Lenny Henry’s 2021 book Black British Lives Matter; board member of Birmingham Royal Ballet and The Student View Biography Live broadcast craft is a narrow skill, and it sits at the centre of what flagship corporate events still need. Cole has spent more than two decades inside that craft, presenting news for Sky News, 5 News, ITV Central, BBC Midlands Today and now ITV1’s Good Morning Britain. Sky News audiences watched her front a five-hour overnight World News and Business Report bulletin, including coverage of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The journalism is not a sideline. Her BBC Radio 4 documentary Black Girls Don’t Cry, on the disproportionate mental health pressures facing Black women, won Journalist of the Year at the Mind Media Awards in 2019. She has produced and presented further work for BBC Radio 4 and BBC 1Xtra on female gambling addiction and on women in UK rap, and contributed an essay to Sir Lenny Henry’s Black British Lives Matter in 2021. Birmingham City University, where she trained as a broadcast journalist, brought her back as Director of Undergraduate Journalism courses from 2018 to 2022 and later awarded her an honorary doctorate. That academic spell shows in her interviewing: she frames questions for senior leaders without losing the audience in the room. The off-news work fills out the brief. She is Britain’s first Black female accredited beer sommelier and BBC Good Food magazine’s resident beer columnist, presents on Classic FM, and co-presents Saturday Live on BBC Radio 4 with Reverend Richard Coles. For event organisers, that range translates into a host who can move from a board panel on workplace mental health to a brand showcase to a closing-night cultural conversation without changing register. Key speaking topics Event hosting, moderation and on-stage interviewing Awards ceremony presentation Mental health and Black women’s experience Race, representation and inclusion in media Women in broadcast journalism Consumer culture, lifestyle and the beer industry Birmingham, the Midlands and regional creative industries Ideal for Conference organisers commissioning a senior host for live, multi-track main-stage programmes DEI, wellbeing and ERG leaders running flagship internal events on race, mental health or women in the workplace Brand and consumer marketing teams hosting product launches, awards or media events Cultural and arts organisations seeking a credible chair for public conversations and panels Audience outcomes A live programme that holds energy through agenda changes, technical hitches and difficult guests Sharper, more candid contributions from senior panellists prompted by a journalistically trained interviewer A session on mental health or representation that lands with substance, drawn from her own reported work rather than secondhand framing A consistent on-brand voice across a multi-day event run by a single experienced anchor

Why organisations work with Lucrezia Millarini Fifteen years of live anchoring at ITV News, including the ITV News at Ten and the network’s breaking news announcement of the Duke of Edinburgh’s death, translates directly into composure on stage when a session goes off script. Background in law before journalism: a Bristol law degree and barrister training, useful when chairing panels on regulation, policy, or geopolitics, where the questioning needs to land precisely. Genuine breadth across hard news and softer territory. She has reported from the Grenfell inquiry coverage and co-hosted ITV’s Mental Health Special with Martin Lewis, so audiences trust her to handle difficult subject matter without slipping into either solemnity or gloss. Recognisable network face for UK audiences. Booking her signals to delegates that the event is serious enough to warrant a household-name anchor at the lectern. Biography highlights Anchor, ITV News: ITV Lunchtime News, ITV Evening News and ITV News at Ten. Presenter, ITV London evening bulletin; regular reporter for ITV’s documentary series On Assignment. Reported on the RTS award-winning ITV coverage of the Grenfell Tower Fire. Co-host, The Martin Lewis Money Show: Live Mental Health Special and Mortgage Crisis Special. Law graduate, Bristol University; barrister training; postgraduate diploma in Broadcast Journalism, City University, London. Patron, Dogs on the Street and Support Dogs; supporter of Alzheimer’s Society campaigns. Biography Live news anchoring is the closest analogue in television to chairing a senior conference. The host has a fixed window, a moving brief, contributors who may go long or off-piste, and an audience that expects clarity without theatrics. Lucrezia Millarini has done that work on ITV News for more than fifteen years, across the Lunchtime News, the Evening News and the News at Ten. Her route in matters. She read law at Bristol and trained as a barrister before moving to journalism via a postgraduate diploma at City University. That legal grounding shows up in how she questions panellists on regulation, policy and geopolitics, where loose framing produces loose answers. The range of stories she has handled on air is proof of the point for sensitive corporate sessions. She fronted ITV’s RTS award-winning coverage of the Grenfell Tower Fire, broke the news of the death of the Duke of Edinburgh in a special announcement in April 2021, and was part of ITV’s team at the Windsor wedding of Harry and Meghan. She has co-hosted ITV’s Mental Health Special with Martin Lewis, and reports for the network’s foreign affairs documentary strand, On Assignment. Corporate clients book her for conference chairing, panel moderation and award hosting. The recurring feedback is composure on stage, warmth with contributors, and a refusal to let a panel meander. For organisations putting a flagship event in front of customers, regulators or the board, those are the variables that actually decide whether the day lands. Key speaking topics Conference chairing and panel moderation Award ceremony and gala hosting Geopolitics and current affairs Mental health and wellbeing in the workplace Media, journalism and the modern newsroom Women in leadership and career conversations Ideal for Boards and CEOs commissioning a flagship customer, investor or industry conference where the chair has to hold the room. CHROs and internal communications leads running town halls or all-hands sessions on sensitive topics, including mental health and restructuring. Awards organisers and gala hosts want a recognisable UK broadcast face at the lectern. Audience outcomes A conference agenda that lands as a coherent argument rather than a sequence of unrelated talks. Panels in which the senior contributors are pushed on the points that matter without the session losing pace. Sessions on sensitive subjects, mental health, restructuring, and geopolitical risk, are handled with the steadiness audiences associate with live news. A day that delegates remember for the substance of the conversation, not for the moments that went wrong.

Why organisations work with Matthias Schmitt He has scaled and exited the companies his audience is still inside. wealthpilot reached over 100,000 European customers under his co-founding, and Skigaudi became Germany’s leading student winter festival brand. His Expansion State Method is a named, proprietary coaching framework, not a borrowed model. It is designed specifically for founders navigating the gap between commercial success and personal meaning. He addresses burnout from inside the experience, having walked out of his own companies after hitting it. The credibility with senior operators is earned, not theoretical. He works in the territory most leadership programmes avoid: nervous system regulation, identity after exit, and the practical mechanics of sustaining decision quality under sustained pressure. Entrepreneur Asia Pacific named him to its Top Five Life Coaches to Watch in 2024, which gives the work external editorial validation in a category usually short of it. Biography highlights Co-founder of wealthpilot, a Munich-based FinTech SaaS serving over 100,000 European customers Co-founder of Skigaudi, Germany’s leading winter festival brand for students Founder of the Expansion State Method, a proprietary coaching framework for post-exit founders Named to Entrepreneur Asia Pacific’s Top Five Life Coaches to Watch in 2024 Trained in NLP, behavioural science, nervous system regulation, and meditation as applied to executive performance Works publicly under the title “Chief Fulfillment Officer,” focused on post-exit founders and conscious leaders Biography The exit is supposed to be the win. For many founders, it is also the moment the architecture they built their identity on disappears. The high-performance habits that scaled the company keep firing into an empty room. Matthias Schmitt co-founded wealthpilot, a Munich FinTech that scaled past 100,000 European customers, and Skigaudi, the leading German winter festival brand for students. He exited and hit burnout. The recovery became the work. Today he coaches post-exit entrepreneurs and senior leaders through that transition, using a proprietary framework he calls the Expansion State Method. The practical content draws on NLP, behavioural science, nervous system regulation, and meditation, applied to the specific problem of how senior operators sustain decision quality and meaning after the pressure that organised their lives lifts. Entrepreneur Asia Pacific named him to its Top Five Life Coaches to Watch in 2024. The recognition matters because the category he works in, founder coaching, is crowded with generalists. The differentiator here is operational time served at the level his clients are leaving. Key speaking topics Burnout recovery for founders and senior operators Post-exit identity and purpose Peak performance without collapse Nervous system regulation for high-pressure leadership Sales leadership and revenue performance Purpose-led business building Ideal for Founder communities, scale-up CEO peer groups, and post-exit networks Sales leadership offsites where revenue performance and team wellbeing are both on the table Private wealth and family office audiences working with HNW and UHNW founders Executive development programmes addressing sustained performance and burnout risk at senior levels Audience outcomes A clearer read on where current performance habits are producing diminishing returns Specific practices for nervous system regulation under sustained executive pressure A language for the post-exit transition that senior operators rarely have available Permission to treat fulfilment as a performance variable, not a soft topic