Petra Velzeboer

Cult Survivor and Mental Health Expert

Speaker fees:

In-person: £3k-£5k
Virtual: £1k-£3k

Topics:

Mental health & wellbeing
2
Health & wellbeing
2
Leadership & peak performance
2
Resilience

Keynote Speaker, TedX, HR Consultant, Psychotherapis, Cult Survivor, Mental Health Expert, CEO of PVL, Moderator and Inspirational Thought Leader, Petra brings a human experience to everything she does. Dynamic, funny and practical, audiences leave her talks changed and ready to take action.

Challenging both personal and organisational responsibility for mental health at work, her personal experience of growing up globally creates impact on virtual platforms and in places like Washington, London, Singapore, Hong Kong, Europe and South Africa.  She seamlessly dances between clinical advice and expertise for HR and Leaders to sharing her moving story of being raised in a cult and building her own resilience from rock bottom.

Invest in your employees with a dynamic and uplifting keynote on Mental Health at Work:

  • Petra highlights the business case for mental health at work with Senior Leadership, highlighting practical skills for making authentic culture change
  • She helps Human Resources understand that mental health can longer be a tick box but must be strategic and embedded in everything we do in order to help retain talent, reduce absenteeism and increase innovation in a new world of work.
  • All employees are encouraged to take personal responsibility for their mental health and supported to be the change they want to see in the world.
  • Petra has a well rounded approach to mental health and always connects the dots between a leader’s mental health and wellbeing to the employees mental health and wellbeing. These two go hand in hand.

Book Petra Velzeboer

Featured topics include

Investing in your mindset and building resilience can be challenging during times of uncertainty, this keynote will help you tackle:

  • The mental attitude necessary for evolving our approach to a new world of work
  • Investing in your mindset to sustain success
  • Creating psychologically safe culture to help people thrive
  • Retaining talent
  • Effective change management

Only focussing on mental health on awareness days is now seen as a tickbox and no longer sufficient for a post-pandemic world. Covid-19 has increased rates of poor mental health globally which means in order to evolve your workforce, this must be a key objective at all levels of the business including Senior Leadership, HR and your Mental Health Champion Networks:  This talk will:

  • Provide mental health awareness to all levels of the business
  • Highlight the benefits of a mental health plan and simplify the steps to creating one
  • Offer insight on supporting others who may be struggling with their mental health
  • Bring this strategy to life for employees, wellbeing leads and management

Stress and building resilience are big buzz words in organizations. We want our people to be able to handle what life throws at them and thank us for the opportunity! This talk provides practical tools for managing stress, avoiding burnout and developing a mindset that sustains long term success. It includes:

  • Practical tools for building resilience and developing self awareness
  • Reframing our leadership approach to one of courage and vulnerability
  • Understanding burnout and the physiological impact of long term stress
  • Intentional investment in our wellbeing

In a hybrid world, building remote culture and managing remote teams is a crucial skill to ensure talent retention and high productivity. This talk includes:

  • Leadership skills for a hybrid world
  • Building culture, trust and psychological safety
  • Practical check in exercises and questions
  • Top Tips for effective team meetings
  • Noticing poor mental health virtually – and what to do about it!

Many leaders and managers are tired, burnt out and feeling compassion fatigue! It seems the role has expanded to include emotional support, listening and making sure everyone else is ok. Well what about you?? This talk highlights the pressure leaders experience, how their mental health is more important than ever and how leading by example creates lasting culture change. Petra includes:

  • Practicing empathy is not being a pushover
  • Understand limits and boundaries – and communicate them to your team
  • Empowering employees to take personal responsibility for their wellbeing
  • Leadership skills for a new world of work
  • Expert advice on the line between performance and mental health

Petra is a dynamic host and moderator of podcasts and live events highlighting the expertise of others on the topics of personal development, leadership and mental health.

Petra’s career started in youth mental health and the education sector. Working for charities such as Catch22, Young Minds and The Mix as well as working as a parent and youth psychotherapist, she is well versed in the ever-growing challenge of poor mental health within this sector. Her story and organisational expertise, enables her to speak dynamically to:

  • Head Teacher networks who want to focus on mental health strategy
  • Teachers and staff empowering them to lead by example
  • Students who are looking for inspiration in creating a career they love no matter what challenges are in their past.

What people say

Petra certainly knows her stuff and has the ability to put it across in a no nonsense, practical and highly inspirational way. She brings the perfect balance of support and challenge to everything that she does.
We were lucky to have Petra support a number of events and it was a pleasure to work with her. A pleasure that I hope that we will be able to repeat again soon.

BP

The speech that Petra did at our annual staff meeting was invaluable. ‘Speech’ doesn’t encapsulate the true reflection of the day; it was an experience. Within the hour we were speaking openly and creating a thought-provoking dialogue about mental health, not only in the workplace, but in our personal lives too.

Macquarie Group

Similar speakers