Stress, Burnout & Resilience Keynote Speaker

A Speaker Who
Lived the Story.

In 2011 I was a police officer on a night shift in Swindon when I was called to a domestic incident. The suspect pulled a gun from under the sofa, and I was shot at six times while I stood between him and his partner, with their newborn baby asleep upstairs. I still dragged him out of the house in handcuffs, and apart from the assault that had brought us there, nobody was hurt. Those few minutes led to the National Bravery Award I later received at 10 Downing Street.

I walked away without a physical wound, which meant that for a long time I told myself, and everyone around me, that I was fine. I was not fine. The sleepless nights, the constant scanning of every room, the short temper with the people I loved and the fog that settled over my work were all signs of what I would later be diagnosed with: PTSD. What struck me most was how ordinary I looked from the outside. My colleagues saw someone turning up and doing the job, while inside, most of my capacity was being spent simply holding everything together.

That experience taught me something many organisations still miss. Every employee arrives at work carrying something, whether that is trauma, anxiety, a sick parent, money worries or the slow build of stress that nobody has named. Their brain treats those concerns as threats, and a brain under threat has very little left for anything new. When a business asks its people to take on more, absorb another change or hit a higher target, it is asking them to find capacity that is already being used up somewhere it cannot see.

This is why I built the CNW Framework (Capacity, Need, Want) and the SLAP Technique. They help leaders recognise when someone is running on empty, and they give managers a practical way to support people before stress turns into burnout, sickness absence or resignation. My caveman angle is simple: our brains have barely changed in forty thousand years, and once you understand how that ancient wiring responds to pressure, you can build teams that cope with more because they are carrying less in silence.

I speak because I was the person who looked fine. I want to help your organisation spot that person sooner.