Turning Challenges into Opportunities - keynote
Adversity and challenges - maintaining a resilient mindset under pressure
Sometimes we choose our challenges, sometimes our challenges choose us. What we decide to do about them is what counts. Deciding to be a competitor, a realist and a collaborator offers your people a chance of maintaining a resilient mindset under pressure. Mark Pollock’s keynote on adversity and challenges uses the power of active decision making to deal with challenges, regardless of where they come from, to help your people become more resilient.
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Unbroken by blindness in 1998, Mark became an adventure athlete competing in ultra-endurance races across deserts, mountains, and the polar ice caps including being the first blind person to race to the South Pole. He also won silver and bronze medals for rowing at the Commonwealth Games and set up an international motivational speaking business.
In 2010, a fall from a second story window nearly killed him. Mark broke his back and the damage to his spinal cord left him paralysed. Now he is on a new expedition, this time to cure paralysis in our lifetime by exploring the intersection where humans and technology collide.
Chairman of Collaborative Cures and founder of the global running series Run in the Dark, Mark was selected by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader, served on the Global Futures Council on Human Enhancement and as a UBS Global Visionary. He is on the Board of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation (USA) and is a Wings for Life Ambassador (Europe).
Author of ‘Making It Happen’, Mark is the subject of the acclaimed documentaries' Blind Man Walking ’and ‘Unbreakable – The Mark Pollock Story’. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and also from Queens University Belfast. Furthermore, he holds a diploma in Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century from Harvard University, degrees from Trinity College Dublin and UCD Smurfit Graduate Business School.
Everything Paula does is about harnessing the collective power of teams so that we achieve more together than we ever could on our own. As CEO of Strive Management, Paula manages the global operations for Mark Pollock’s professional speaking business, as well as Run in the Dark, a global running series with 25,000 participants in 50 cities worldwide.
As Executive Director of Collaborative Cures, Paula plays a key role in the charity’s mission to bring people together to cure paralysis in our lifetime. She is also a non-executive director on the Boards of Hockey Ireland.
Prior to joining Strive Management, Paula spent 4 years as a strategic communications specialist working on national and international projects in Department of the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister). She started her career producing TV and radio documentaries broadcast in Ireland and USA.