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Neil Edge is a UK-based leadership mental performance speaker, ultra-endurance athlete, and high-performance coach who works with emerging and senior leaders to help them prevent burnout, lead through personal adversity, and improve cognitive performance in high-demand environments.
Alongside his speaking work, Neil coaches’ professional triathletes in high-performance mental skills, supporting execution, composure, and decision-making under extreme physical and cognitive load. His coaching work at the elite end of sport directly informs the frameworks he brings into leadership environments.
Neil’s work is grounded in lived experience and applied science. In addition to performing and competing as an ultra-endurance athlete, he has navigated a significant period of personal adversity, including a cancer diagnosis and intensive chemotherapy. Rather than stepping away from performance, he applied the same mental frameworks he teaches to continue competing, coaching, and speaking throughout treatment.
In his keynotes, Neil translates lessons from elite sport, neuroscience, and real-world adversity into practical, evidence-based strategies leaders can apply immediately. His sessions focus on how cognitive overload builds, why traditional resilience advice often fails under sustained pressure, and how leaders can protect decision-making quality, energy, and mental clarity as demands escalate.
Audiences leave with a clear understanding of how to reduce hidden cognitive strain, prevent burnout before it becomes visible, and maintain performance through uncertainty, change, and personal challenge. Neil’s style is direct, grounded, and highly practical, making his sessions particularly effective for emerging and senior leadership teams operating in fast-moving, high-responsibility environments.
Preparing Leaders for Life’s Toughest Challenges
This keynote focuses on proactive preparation for personal and professional adversity. Drawing on Neil’s experience living with cancer while maintaining performance, he explains why adversity hits harder when leaders have not prepared mentally in advance.
Leaders learn how to build psychological readiness before challenges arise, how to stabilise decision-making during emotionally charged periods, and how to lead effectively while navigating personal difficulty. This is not motivational storytelling, but practical preparation.
Ideal for: Leadership development programmes, change initiatives, executive audiences
How Leaders Prevent Burnout
Burnout does not appear suddenly. It builds quietly through unmanaged cognitive load, constant decision-making, and a lack of true recovery. In this keynote, Neil explains how burnout develops from a brain-based perspective and why traditional wellbeing approaches often miss the mark.
Leaders are given practical tools to reduce cognitive overload, protect mental performance, and build resilience that holds when pressure increases. The emphasis is on prevention, not recovery after the damage is done.
Ideal for: Senior leadership teams, wellbeing initiatives, HR and L&D programmes
Ultra-Endurance Meets Leadership
This keynote draws direct parallels between elite endurance sport and senior leadership performance. Neil shows how high performers misinterpret effort, fatigue, and pressure, leading to unnecessary cognitive drain and inconsistent decision-making.
Leaders learn how to manage mental energy across long time horizons, maintain clarity when demands stack, and avoid common performance traps that emerge during sustained intensity. The focus is practical, science-backed, and immediately applicable to leadership roles.
Ideal for: Leadership teams, offsites, performance-driven organisations
Neil delivered a powerful keynote at our Arctic15 Startup Conference in Helsinki, speaking to startup entrepreneurs about the importance of preparing for adversity. He was exceptionally well-prepared, professional throughout, and truly resonated with our audience. The feedback from attendees was overwhelmingly positive. Highly recommended.
This morning at the Mercedes-Benz Breakfast Club launch, we had the absolute pleasure of hearing Neil Edge speak — and what a morning it was. Raw, real, and ridiculously inspiring, Neil delivered value from the very first moment. We walked away with mindset shifts, actionable strategies, and a fresh dose of motivation. It wasn’t just a talk; it was an experience.
