Resilience & Stress Management

Why organisations work with Thomas Erikson A four-colour behavioural vocabulary that a 200-person sales team or a board can adopt in a single session and use in the next meeting, with no consultancy follow-up required. One of the highest-recognition author brands in European business: “Surrounded by Idiots” alone is one of Sweden’s best-selling non-fiction titles ever, with the series at over seven million copies in more than 70 languages. Direct application across the hardest interpersonal terrain leaders actually face: difficult bosses, narcissistic colleagues, manipulative behaviour, conflict in cross-cultural and hybrid teams. More than two decades inside companies such as IKEA, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Volvo and KIA, with roughly 120 keynotes a year keeping the material tested against live corporate audiences. A communicator first: the material is built for retention by non-specialists, so the language survives the journey from the keynote room into Monday-morning behaviour. Biography highlights Author of the “Surrounded by” series, including Surrounded by Idiots, Surrounded by Psychopaths, Surrounded by Bad Bosses and Lazy Employees, Surrounded by Narcissists, Surrounded by Setbacks, Surrounded by Energy Vampires and Surrounded by Liars. More than 12 million books sold across the series, translated into over 70 languages; one of the most translated living Swedish authors. Delivers approximately 120 keynote lectures per year to executive and corporate audiences across Europe. Has mentored executives and run sessions at companies including IKEA, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Volvo and KIA Motors. Twenty-plus years specialising in communication, personality dynamics and interpersonal behaviour in professional settings. Built his keynote material on the colour-coded DISC framework (Red, Yellow, Green, Blue), used to map how people decide, communicate and react under pressure. Biography Most workplace tension is not philosophical. It is two competent people reading the same situation in incompatible ways and deciding the other one is the problem. The “Surrounded by Idiots” series turned that observation into a vocabulary that millions of readers now apply at work without having to read a textbook to use it. The series, beginning with Surrounded by Idiots, has sold more than 12 million copies across more than 70 languages, with subsequent titles extending the framework to psychopaths, narcissists, bad bosses, setbacks, energy vampires and liars. The books rest on the colour-coded DISC model, mapping behaviour onto four types (Red, Yellow, Green, Blue) that describe how different people make decisions, give feedback and behave under pressure. The keynote work has run in parallel for over two decades, with roughly 120 corporate lectures a year. Audiences have included IKEA, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Volvo and KIA Motors. The session is built to leave a room of 50 or 500 with the same shared language, so the colour-coding survives into the next sales call, the next performance review and the next conflict between two senior people who quietly cannot stand each other. What is unusual is the reach. Most communication frameworks live inside training departments. This one has crossed into mass-market reading culture, which means a leadership audience often arrives already half-fluent. The job of the keynote is to turn that recognition into something the organisation can actually use. Key speaking topics Behavioural styles and the DISC colour model Communication across different personality types Difficult colleagues, manipulation and narcissism at work Leadership and how to read your team Sales and the behaviour of the buyer Conflict, feedback and tough conversations Resilience and managing setbacks Ideal for Leadership teams that want a shared language for behaviour and communication Sales and customer-facing organisations whose results depend on reading the other side of the table HR, L&D and culture leads designing development around feedback, conflict and team dynamics Cross-cultural, hybrid and matrix teams where misreads between colleagues compound quickly Audience outcomes A shared four-colour vocabulary the whole audience can use to describe colleagues and clients within the same week A clearer read on their own default style and how it is experienced by people who do not share it Practical adjustments for handling the colleague, boss or client they currently find hardest to deal with A working frame for recognising manipulation, narcissism and other high-cost behaviours before they damage the team A common reference point that survives the keynote and shows up in the next round of meetings, reviews and sales calls

Why organisations work with Thomas Curran He owns the primary data. Curran’s 2017 meta-analysis with Andrew Hill, covering 41,641 participants across the US, UK and Canada, is the headline study that most current writing on burnout and generational stress traces back to. His translation of academic findings into operating language is sharp. Leaders leave with vocabulary for tensions their engagement data hints at but rarely names: socially prescribed perfectionism, fear of evaluation, the meritocratic treadmill. He sits inside a credible institution. LSE association means his framing of mental health risk carries weight with boards that discount wellness vendors. His public platform is rare for an academic. The TEDMED talk passed three million views; The Perfection Trap is a Sunday Times bestseller; HBR, TIME, NYT and the WSJ have published or covered him. He addresses the workforce most likely to leave. His research is specifically about the rising cohorts under 35, the population that boards are most worried about engaging and retaining. Biography highlights Associate Professor of Social Psychology, London School of Economics and Political Science Author of The Perfection Trap, Penguin UK (2023), Simon and Schuster US Lead author of the Psychological Bulletin meta-analysis on rising perfectionism, 1989 to 2016 TEDMED 2018 speaker, “Our Dangerous Obsession with Perfectionism is Getting Worse”, more than 3 million views Contributor to Harvard Business Review and TIME; research covered by NYT, WSJ, Economist, BBC, CNN BPS Chartered Psychologist; recipient of the APA Division 47 Dissertation Award Biography Perfectionism has risen sharply in the US, UK and Canada since the late 1980s, and it tracks closely with the same period in which workplace burnout and youth mental ill-health have climbed. That correlation is the centre of Curran’s academic work and the reason his findings have travelled well beyond psychology journals. His 2017 meta-analysis with Andrew Hill, published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin, pooled 164 samples and 41,641 participants. It found socially prescribed perfectionism, the belief that other people demand perfection from you, had risen 33 percent in a generation. The study is now the standard reference for almost every serious treatment of generational stress and engagement decline. The Perfection Trap, published by Penguin in 2023, sets that research into the cultures that produce it: meritocratic competition, social comparison at scale, and organisations that reward striving over sustainability. His TEDMED talk on the same theme has been viewed more than three million times. For corporate audiences, the value is in the precision of the diagnosis. Curran gives leaders language for the pattern they see in their own engagement and retention data, and a defensible account of where the pressure is coming from. His credentials are LSE faculty status, peer-reviewed authorship of the foundational dataset, and recognition from the American Psychological Association. Key speaking topics Perfectionism in the workplace Burnout and sustainable performance Mental health and wellbeing Self-criticism and imposter syndrome Generational shifts in workplace expectations The psychology of high-performance cultures Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers responding to rising burnout and attrition data Executive leadership teams setting performance and culture standards Wellbeing, talent and engagement leads briefing the board on mental health risk Professional services, finance and consulting firms with high-pressure delivery cultures Audience outcomes A clearer account of why perfectionism has risen and how it shows up in their workforce Specific vocabulary, drawn from peer-reviewed research, for tensions that engagement surveys hint at but rarely name A framework for distinguishing healthy striving from socially prescribed perfectionism Evidence-based approaches to self-compassion and self-criticism that leaders can apply personally and model in teams A more defensible view of what mental health support should look like inside a high-performance culture

Why organisations work with Georgia Harrison A first-hand voice on intimate image abuse with a direct line to legislative outcome. Her decision to waive anonymity during the Stephen Bear prosecution and her work with government produced amendments inside the Online Safety Act 2023, which is rare evidence of citizen campaigning translating into statute. Credibility with the people most affected. Harrison reaches young employees, customers, students and frontline staff in a register a senior policy speaker cannot match, which matters for internal wellbeing programmes, customer-facing safeguarding training and brand purpose work. Operational experience of consent and online safety campaigning. Named partnerships with Thames Valley Police (“Consent Conversations”) and Superdrug (“You before Yes”) give her a track record of building education programmes for adult and young-adult audiences. A working broadcaster and author on the subject. Her ITV documentaries Revenge Porn: Georgia vs Bear and Porn, Power, Profit, and her 2024 memoir Taking Back My Power, give the talk a body of public-facing work behind it rather than a single anecdote. A clear, current public profile. MBE recipient, BBC 100 Women 2023, Glamour Women of the Year 2023, which gives the booking external visibility and helps drive internal turnout. Biography highlights MBE awarded in the 2025 King’s Birthday Honours for services to the prevention of violence against women and girls and for campaigning on online privacy and cyber crime. First Love Island contestant to receive an MBE. Campaigning contributed to amendments to the Online Safety Act 2023 on intimate image abuse. Listed on BBC 100 Women 2023; Glamour Women of the Year 2023 (Activist Award). Author of Taking Back My Power (Dialogue / Hachette, 2024). Fronted ITV documentaries Revenge Porn: Georgia vs Bear (2023) and Georgia Harrison: Porn, Power, Profit (2025). Named campaigns with Thames Valley Police (“Consent Conversations”) and Superdrug (“You before Yes”); has interviewed Tony Blair, Sir Keir Starmer, Lord Hague and Sadiq Khan in policy interview work. Biography In December 2022 Stephen Bear was sentenced to 21 months in prison for voyeurism and for disclosing private sexual images. The complainant in that case had waived her anonymity to speak publicly. That decision turned a personal harm into the most-covered intimate image abuse prosecution in UK media and forced the issue out of the safeguarding column and into the policy column. The campaigning that followed contributed to amendments inside the Online Safety Act 2023, including the move away from requiring prosecutors to prove an intent to cause distress. That is a substantive legislative outcome traceable to one person’s public testimony and to sustained work with government, the Crown Prosecution Service stakeholders and victim groups. Georgia Harrison MBE has since built the public-facing apparatus around that work. Two ITV documentaries, Revenge Porn: Georgia vs Bear and Porn, Power, Profit, examined the legal and commercial mechanics of image-based abuse and the deepfake economy. Her 2024 memoir Taking Back My Power, published by Hachette’s Dialogue imprint, sets out the case story and the campaigning arc. Named partnerships with Thames Valley Police on consent education and with Superdrug on the “You before Yes” campaign extend the work into school and high-street audiences. For corporate buyers, the value is specific. Boards, HR teams and customer-facing brands are being asked to take positions on online safety, deepfakes and consent that they were not asked to take five years ago. Harrison brings a lived voice on those issues that policy expertise alone cannot supply, alongside the public profile of an MBE, a BBC 100 Women listing and a Glamour Women of the Year award. Key speaking topics Image-based sexual abuse and online safety Consent education and the workplace social contract Resilience after public trauma Reform of the Online Safety Act Deepfakes and the harms economy Personal advocacy and citizen campaigning Mental health and self-worth in the digital age Ideal for HR, DEI and wellbeing leads building internal programmes on online safety, consent and respect at work Customer-facing brands with young adult audiences (retail, telco, social platforms, education providers) Schools, universities and police forces commissioning consent and digital safety education Internal women’s networks, ERG events and International Women’s Day platforms Audience outcomes A clear account of how UK law on intimate image abuse changed and what is still unresolved A working vocabulary for talking about consent, image-based abuse and deepfakes inside an organisation A frank view of what online harm looks like from the receiving end, in language that lands with non-specialist audiences A direct example of how citizen advocacy turns into legislative change Renewed permission to take online safety seriously as a culture and wellbeing issue, not only a compliance one

Why organisations work with Michelle Moore Her conscious leadership course on LinkedIn Learning has reached more than 25,000 learners, giving her a teaching method that has been tested at scale before it reaches a client’s leadership team. She has sat on a national regulatory commission (the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket) whose findings forced the ECB into a public reckoning, which means she speaks about inclusion from the inside of governance, not from the outside. Her book Real Wins, published by Hachette and shortlisted for the CMI Management Book of the Year, gives leaders a vocabulary for connecting identity, resilience, and performance without reducing any of the three to a slogan. She works across business, sport, government, and education, with named clients including the Premier League, UNICEF, the University of Cambridge, and BAFTA, so her examples translate across sectors instead of staying locked inside one. Biography highlights Author of Real Wins: Race, Leadership and How to Redefine Success (Nicholas Brealey, Hachette UK), shortlisted for the Chartered Management Institute Book of the Year and the Business Book Awards. LinkedIn Learning instructor on Conscious Leadership, 25,000+ learners. Former commissioner, Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket, whose 2023 report led to the ECB’s public apology. Trustee, SportsAid; member, Sport England Talent Inclusion Advisory Board; advisor, Women’s Sport Trust. Senior honorary associate lecturer, University of Worcester; former instructor, The Guardian Masterclasses. Winner of the 2016 PRECIOUS Award for Outstanding Woman in Sport and a national Changemaker award. Biography Conscious leadership is often misread as a softer register of the same management language. In Moore’s hands it is a working discipline: how leaders relate to themselves, how they hold values under pressure, and how they make decisions that survive scrutiny. Her LinkedIn Learning course on the subject has reached more than 25,000 learners, which is a rare evidence base for any one speaker’s framework. The credibility behind the framework comes from where Moore has used it. She served as a commissioner on the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket, the body whose 2023 report compelled the England and Wales Cricket Board to issue an unreserved apology over racism, sexism, and class exclusion in the English game. She holds board roles with SportsAid, Sport England’s Talent Inclusion Advisory Board, and the Women’s Sport Trust. Real Wins, published by Nicholas Brealey at Hachette UK, was shortlisted for the Chartered Management Institute Book of the Year and the Business Book Awards. The book argues that resilience, identity, and performance are linked, and that leaders who try to separate them tend to manage all three badly. The same argument shapes her keynotes for the Premier League, UNICEF, the University of Cambridge, and BAFTA. What makes her useful to a boardroom is the combination of governance-grade experience and a teaching practice that has been pressure-tested at scale. She talks about inclusion as something senior leaders do under cost, not something they declare without one. Key speaking topics Conscious leadership Values-based and inclusive leadership Executive presence and credibility Resilience under sustained pressure Identity, performance, and self-leadership Inclusion as a leadership capability Changemaking in regulated and high-scrutiny environments Ideal for CEOs, CHROs, and senior leadership teams navigating inclusion as a governance question rather than a communications one Boards and executive committees in sport, media, and regulated industries facing public scrutiny on culture and equity Leadership development programmes for newly senior leaders building presence, values clarity, and resilience ERG sponsors, transformation leads, and inclusion councils that want a speaker with governance credibility, not bureau polish Audience outcomes A working definition of conscious leadership that leaders can apply to their own decisions, not an abstract model Language for connecting identity, resilience, and performance in ways that hold up in performance reviews and board conversations A clearer view of where inclusion becomes a leadership behaviour and where it stops being one Reference points drawn from elite sport governance, regulatory work, and corporate leadership development that tr

Why organisations work with Oswald Rodrigo Pereira He has summited five eight-thousand-metre peaks without supplementary oxygen or Sherpa support, a credential held by a small population of climbers worldwide and one that gives his risk material a basis no simulation can replicate. He has been on the active end of two high-altitude rescues, including the 2023 evacuation of 84-year-old Carlos Soria from Dhaulagiri, and uses both as worked examples of crisis decision-making rather than as anecdote. His twelve years as a television journalist before mountaineering give him a working method for information triage under deadline, which he applies directly to how leadership teams handle incomplete data. He directs and shoots his own documentary work in the death zone, including The Silent Escape, which gives his sessions visual evidence at a level most speakers in the resilience category cannot match. Biography highlights Five eight-thousand-metre summits without supplementary oxygen: Broad Peak, Annapurna, Dhaulagiri, Makalu, Kangchenjunga Ten Himalayan and Karakoram expeditions in seven years, including two winter K2 attempts Director of The Silent Escape, awarded Best Mountain Film at the Krakow Mountain Festival 2023 and screened in more than twenty countries Co-led the 2023 high-altitude rescue of climber Carlos Soria on Dhaulagiri Twelve-year prior career as a television journalist in Poland covering politics, economics and sport Law studies at the University of Warsaw and the University of Lisbon Biography The death zone above eight thousand metres is the highest-stakes operating environment a person can voluntarily enter. Judgement degrades, oxygen falls below half of sea-level value, and the consequences of a slow decision are irreversible. Oswald Rodrigo Pereira has worked in that environment for seven years, on ten expeditions, and has summited five of its peaks without supplementary oxygen. His route to the mountain ran through journalism. Twelve years in Polish television covering politics, economics and sport gave him a working discipline around information under deadline. The pivot came on a winter K2 expedition, where he went as a correspondent and stayed as a climber. He now films what he climbs. The documentary The Silent Escape premiered in Seoul in October 2023, won Best Mountain Film at the Krakow Mountain Festival, and has since screened in over twenty countries. Two rescues anchor his crisis material. The 2023 evacuation of 84-year-old Carlos Soria from Dhaulagiri, reported in detail by Explorersweb, required him and climbing partner Bartek Ziemski to return to altitude with stretcher and oxygen after their own summit and ski descent. The decisions in that sequence, who moves, in what order, with what margin, are the substance of his risk and decision-making sessions, not the dressing. What he offers leadership audiences is not motivation. It is a working description of how a small team triages information, allocates physical and cognitive reserve, and decides what to abandon when conditions change faster than the plan. The translation to boardroom risk is left to the audience, deliberately, and that is the strongest test of whether the material lands. Key speaking topics Risk management in extreme conditions Decision-making under sustained pressure Crisis response and rescue operations Resilience and recovery Information triage from journalism to crisis leadership High-altitude filmmaking and storytelling Personal transformation and physical reinvention Ideal for Executive teams and boards running risk, safety, or crisis-response remits Operations and field leaders in industries with consequential physical risk (energy, construction, logistics, defence) Leadership offsites focused on decision-making under pressure Conferences in insurance, security, or resilience adjacent sectors Audience outcomes A concrete picture of how a small team makes consequential decisions when information is partial and time is short Two worked examples of high-altitude crisis response, used to surface the structure of good and bad calls under load A framing of risk that separates the avoidable from the inherent, and treats the inherent as something to be managed rather than removed Footage and first-person material from inside the death zone that gives the abstract content concrete weight

Why organisations work with Ross Reekie He brings primary research material that most engagement speakers do not have: the Fun Jobs Project is a multi-year field experiment in which he personally took on roles from ski instructor to stand-up comedian to test where meaning actually originates at work. He treats meaning as a performance variable, not a wellbeing variable. The argument lands with operating leaders who have stopped believing engagement programmes pay back. His academic base is serious. An Engineering degree from Edinburgh, an MBA and a Master’s in Sustainable Leadership from MGSM Sydney, and PhD-track research at Macquarie give him a credible research spine to sit alongside the field work. He is built for interactive formats. His keynote uses live experiments, props and audience participation rather than slide narration, which suits internal leadership offsites and culture-launch events. He has tested the same content across two continents and across sectors, with named conference platforms including TEDxMonashUniversity, TEDxGlasgowCaledonianUniversity, and the Urban Future Global Conference. Biography highlights Founder of Rise Consulting, Sydney, working with leadership teams on meaningful work and workplace culture. TEDx speaker at TEDxMonashUniversity (2019) and TEDxGlasgowCaledonianUniversity (2019). Creator of the Fun Jobs Project, a live research experiment into the sources of meaning at work. Host of The Meaning of Work podcast, with hundreds of interviews from interns to chief executives. MBA and Master’s in Sustainable Leadership from MGSM Sydney; Engineering degree from the University of Edinburgh; Master’s in Research underway at Macquarie University. Twenty years of consulting work with leadership teams across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. Biography Most organisations have stopped believing their own engagement data. Scores hold steady, but discretionary effort drains away, and the standard interventions of values workshops, recognition platforms and mission refreshes no longer change behaviour. The interesting question is no longer whether people are engaged. It is what they are committing to, and why. Ross Reekie has spent two decades inside that question. He founded Rise Consulting in Sydney to work with leadership teams on meaningful work and workplace culture, building on twenty years of consulting across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. His academic base sits alongside the practice: an Engineering degree from the University of Edinburgh, an MBA and a Master’s in Sustainable Leadership from MGSM Sydney, and Master’s research at Macquarie University on what makes work matter. The Fun Jobs Project is what sets the work apart. After burning out as the meaningful-work expert who had lost meaning in his own work, Reekie ran a live experiment on himself, taking roles from ski instructor to stand-up comedian to opera extra to test where engagement actually comes from. The output is a model of meaning that starts with a playful, exploratory mindset rather than with mission statements, and that treats curiosity and connection as performance inputs. He brings the same material to TEDx stages at Monash and Glasgow Caledonian, to the Urban Future Global Conference, and to private leadership rooms. His keynote runs as a live, interactive session rather than a talk, with props and audience experiments built in. For a senior people or transformation leader trying to revive a tired culture, he gives them a research-grounded argument they can hand to an operating board. Key speaking topics Meaningful work and workplace culture Employee engagement and the social contract of work Purpose and authenticity in leadership Burnout and recovery in senior teams Belonging and team connection Fear as a performance blocker Playful curiosity as a leadership capability Ideal for CHROs and chief people officers rebuilding engagement after a period of flat scores or fatigued change programmes Heads of culture and internal communications launching or refreshing a purpose narrative Leadership teams and executive offsites looking for a working session rather than a talk Conference organisers in the future-of-work, employee experience, and urban or civic-leadership space Audience outcomes A research-grounded view of why meaning at work is a performance question, not a wellbeing question A clear distinction between engagement programmes that move behaviour and those that do not Specific language for the mindset shifts that produce more discretionary commitment at work Practical prompts for leaders to test on their own teams before changing anything organisation-wide A felt experience of a working session, not a lecture, that participants can replicate in their own offsites

Why organisations work with James Peach Twenty years of senior in-house brand work at Innocent, Coca-Cola, Uber and Vinted, including running a 120-person team across 18 countries through Vinted’s first profit milestone. He speaks from the operator’s seat, not the consultant’s chair. The Growth Project, his own framework, replaces the generic growth-mindset language most leadership programmes default to with a behavioural model built around how teams actually break and recover. A solo unsupported world cycle of 41,000km across 38 countries gives him a working laboratory for sustained performance under pressure that most performance speakers do not have. The expedition material is evidence, not metaphor. Active ambassadorship for CALM and visible mental health advocacy mean he can speak honestly about burnout and recovery without slipping into the wellness-industry register that senior audiences reject. Equally credible on brand and marketing strategy when the brief calls for it, drawing on direct accountability for some of the most-watched consumer brands of the last two decades. Biography highlights Former Global Brand Director, Vinted, leading a team of 120 across 18 countries during the platform’s path to first profit Former Head of Brand & Campaigns UKI, Uber, and former UK Senior Brand Manager, Innocent Drinks Career experience also includes Coca-Cola, alongside founder mentoring from seed to scale-up Founder of The Growth Project, a proprietary framework on resilience, performance and team growth Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; Ambassador for CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably Cycled 41,000km solo and unsupported around the world over two years, across 38 countries; completed the UK’s first full-country triathlon spanning its length, width and height Biography Most senior teams are not short of strategy. They are short of the human bandwidth to execute it after three years of restructure, cost programmes and AI-driven redesign. Resilience, in that context, is not a wellness benefit. It is whether your leadership bench can still make sharp decisions on a Friday afternoon in month thirty of permanent change. That is the working problem James Peach addresses. Twenty years inside Innocent, Coca-Cola, Uber and Vinted, including a Global Brand Director role at Vinted leading 120 people across 18 countries through the platform’s first profit milestone, gave him a direct view of how brand-led businesses hold together when growth flattens and pressure builds. The Growth Project, his own framework, sits on that experience. The expedition record is the second source. Two years cycling 41,000km solo and unsupported across 38 countries, hikes across South and Central America and Scandinavia, and the first full-length, full-width, full-height triathlon of the United Kingdom are not anecdotes in his talks. They are case material on sustained performance, recovery cycles, and decision quality when conditions degrade. His Royal Geographical Society fellowship sits behind that work. The third strand is his ambassadorship for CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably. It lets him speak about burnout, recovery and mental health in operator language, with the credibility of someone who has done the corporate hours and the physical extremes, and stayed honest about both. Key speaking topics Resilience and performance under sustained pressure Team and culture leadership through change Brand-led business growth and reinvention Mental health, burnout and recovery in senior leadership Lessons from extreme endurance applied to commercial teams High-performance team behaviours Building cultures that compound growth Ideal for CHROs, transformation leads and senior HR teams running multi-year change programmes CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding marketing functions for relevance and growth Executive teams entering a profitability or efficiency phase after a long growth cycle Leadership offsites and senior all-hands focused on team performance and wellbeing Audience outcomes A working definition of resilience that holds up in operating reviews, not only in HR comms A concrete read on what changes inside a high-performing team when pressure becomes constant Specific behaviours leaders can name and reinforce to stop quiet attrition and burnout in senior layers Honest language for talking about mental health with senior people without defaulting to wellness cliches A renewed argument for why brand and culture are operating assets, drawn from inside Innocent, Uber and Vinted

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 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 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 Mike Bushell Twenty years of live national television experience on BBC Breakfast, which translates directly into the composure conferences and awards need from the person holding the room. A recognisable face from one of the UK’s largest morning audiences and a 2019 Strictly Come Dancing series, which adds warmth and recognition to internal events and client-facing nights. A genuine interactive format, Sport or Spoof, that he runs with corporate audiences using sports drawn from his on-air library, giving organisations a built-in entertainment slot rather than a generic keynote. An on-record body of work on activity, participation and trying-the-untried that lends a credible voice to wellbeing, engagement and active-lifestyle programmes inside organisations. Reporting experience from Olympics, Paralympics and multiple World Cups, which gives him native fluency on stage with athletes, sports federations and sponsorship audiences. Biography highlights Longest-serving sports presenter in BBC Breakfast history, joined the programme in 2006. Has personally tried and profiled more than 550 sports on BBC One, from Quidditch and shin-kicking to Kabaddi with the Indian national team at the Asian Games in Doha. Held a Guinness World Record for travelling across water in an inflatable ball, set for Sport Relief in 2012. Contestant on Strictly Come Dancing series 17 in 2019, partnered with Katya Jones. Has reported on the Olympics, Paralympics, Commonwealth Games and football, rugby and cricket World Cups. Author of Bushell’s Best Bits (2013), drawn from his sports-discovery slot. Career began at BBC Radio Solent in 1990, with earlier reporting roles at the Derby Evening Telegraph and the Windsor and Slough Observer. Biography Live sports presentation on BBC Breakfast is one of the more exposed jobs in UK broadcasting. The presenter takes the chair every Saturday morning, on national television, with no second take. Mike Bushell has held that chair longer than anyone in the programme’s history, joining BBC Breakfast in 2006 after starting his career at BBC Radio Solent in 1990. The on-air work is built around a simple proposition: every week, try a sport. The list now runs past 550 and includes shin-kicking, worm charming, Quidditch, swamp soccer, Rush hockey and Kabaddi with the Indian team at the Asian Games in Doha. The book that came out of it, Bushell’s Best Bits, was published in 2013. The format is the source of the interactive Sport or Spoof game he runs with corporate audiences. The wider reporting CV covers Olympics, Paralympics, Commonwealth Games and football, rugby and cricket World Cups. In 2019 he was a contestant on series 17 of Strictly Come Dancing with Katya Jones, which is the credit most internal-event audiences recognise on sight. For organisations, the offer is straightforward. Bushell hosts conferences, moderates panels, runs awards nights and gives after-dinner talks. When the brief calls for it, he also speaks on activity, participation and getting people off the sofa, drawn directly from the on-air body of work. Key speaking topics Event hosting and conference moderation Awards night presenting Active lifestyles and sports participation Workplace wellbeing through movement Resilience and trying the unfamiliar Sports broadcasting and the Olympic and World Cup beat Interactive audience formats including Sport or Spoof Ideal for Internal conferences, sales kick-offs and all-hands looking for a recognisable host Awards nights and sponsor evenings in sport, media and consumer sectors Wellbeing, HR and people-team programmes built around activity and participation Charity galas, fundraising dinners and sports federation events Audience outcomes A programme run cleanly from the front of the room, with live moments handled without losing the audience A shared moment of entertainment through the Sport or Spoof format, tuned to the audience in the room A direct, lived case for getting more active and the corporate-wellbeing argument that follows Behind-the-scenes anecdotes from Strictly, the Olympics, World Cups and 550 sports on national television