Robyn Benincasa | World Champion Adventure Racer and Retired Firefighter, Keynote Speaker

Robyn Benincasa

World Champion Adventure Racer and Retired Firefighter, Keynote Speaker

Robyn Benincasa
Biography

When the challenges are steep and the competition fierce, Robyn Benincasa provides the tools individuals and organizations need to cross their most challenging finish lines.

As a two-time World Champion Adventure racer, San Diego Firefighter, and CNN Hero, Robyn knows a thing or two about creating Human Synergy, or as she puts it, “That magic that allows ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things together.”

Through harrowing experiences in places like the jungles of Borneo and the Himalayan peaks, Robyn has studied the good, the bad, and the not-so-pretty of Extreme Teamwork. Her refreshing and unique techniques build and foster impactful, inspired teams that succeed against all odds and turn setbacks into comebacks.

Robyn was named one of 2020s World’s Top 50 Keynote Speakers (Real Leaders Magazine), the #1 Female Speaker for Meetings.net, and is one of the Top 10 Speakers featured by Harvard Business Review. She has motivated countless leaders and teams for Fortune 500 companies, including IBM, Starbucks, Walmart, Boeing, Johnson & Johnson, HubSpot, Intel, and more. Her game-changing keynotes inspire us to grab life with one hand, our teammates with the other and create that special magic that makes each of us stronger together than we could ever be alone.

Robyn Benincasa
Featured Videos

Current: Adapt Overcome and Win as ONE!

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Adapt Overcome and Win as ONE!
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Robyn Benincasa
Featured Keynote Programs

How Winning Works
The 8 Essential Elements of Human Synergy

WORKSHOP - Based off her bestselling book, this interactive workshop incorporates Tabletop Team Building* Activities & Team Bonding Exercises** that attendees will participate in at their tables, incorporated throughout the session.

Created to use ALL 8 of the Essential Elements that Robyn Benincasa utilizes as the foundation of all of her keynotes (this workshop is the only one that uses all 8 Elements), attendees will walk away with a complete understanding of how to execute leadership lessons from the toughest teams on earth:

T-Total Commitment
E-Empathy & Awareness
A-Adversity Management
M-Mutual Respect
W-We Thinkers
O-Ownership of the Project
R-Relinquishment of Ego
K-Kinetic Leadership

*The goal for each of these challenges is for everyone to get as many points as they can “as a team”. The bigger question after seeing the content is “who really IS on your team?”.

**Team Bonding Exercises like her “Life Pyramid” (sharing what our goals are, what people
would be surprised to know about us, and one peak experience).

***If time allows, Robyn can include a “Coach the Teams” conclusion; attendees will watch
video footage from some of the biggest adventure race failures, and utilizing everything they have learned, the audience will "coach" the teams. By answering compelling and interesting survey questions, they will all be able to see how the teams could have improved their leadership and teamwork using the 8 Essential Elements.

Approx. 90 - 120 mins*** (not available for virtual events)

Adapt, Overcome, and Win as One!

Get Ready to Win YOUR Most Challenging Races… Add the Inspirational Force of Leadership and Performance to Your Next Event!

If there’s one thing we can all be certain of right now, it’s that change is the only thing that’s going to stay the same. It’s our response to that change that dictates our success. So how do we as leaders inspire the kind of mindset and build the kind of teams that drive our organizations to adapt, overcome and win as ONE in the face of times of extreme challenge and change?

This unique and fast-paced multimedia keynote is inspired by a Fast Company Magazine feature story entitled “Extreme Teamwork” about Robyn’s World Champion Adventure Racing team. Robyn shares the Secrets to Extreme Teamwork that allowed her team to be the most prolific and consistent World Champions in the sport, lessons that are easily applied to the adventures in our business lives. Their team culture of innovation, visionary creativity, relentless lead building, and embracing calculated risk as a strategy for success made them one of the most exciting and successful teams in the history of adventure sports, and in Robyn’s Adapt, Overcome, and Win as One keynote, she shares the mindset and strategies that created their consistent breakthrough performance.

AND Each Virtual Keynote includes a full super experienced tech team on Robyn's end to ensure everyone's success in creating the magic! You book the event, and our team makes you look like a rockstar.

* available for virtual & in-person events

Why Winners Win
The Game Changing Mindset That Creates Next Level Success

What are the common attributes of people who make a lifelong habit of winning… and who succeed against all odds?

Drawing inspiration from Robyn’s team of World Champion adventure athletes as well as Winners from all walks of life, Why Winners Win uncovers the common traits and attitudes of the world’s most consistent high performers. The Best of the Best experience times of great challenge and change just like everyone else; but with characteristic Courage, Luck (Opportunity + Preparation), Adversity Management Skills, and a keen ability to create Synergy with their colleagues, they possess the ability to continually motivate and inspire themselves and those around them to the top of the podium in any endeavor.

This inspiring keynote addresses the following goals, dreams and themes:

• Teaching and leveraging a game-changing strategy that shifts one’s mindset from “not losing” to winning.

• Embracing times of great challenge and change as a springboard to future success.

• Empowering continuous improvement to spur change and reinvent the game.

• Capitalizing on resources and building a world-class team to achieve even bigger goals.

• Demonstrating the importance and value of G.U.T.S. (Going the Distance, Unwavering in your patience and faith, Taking Calculated Risks and Shattering the Norm).

• Solidifying how Luck is a proven formula of Opportunity + Preparation that drives peak performance and consistent results.

* available for virtual & in-person events

Inspiring Greatness Through G.R.I.T.
Creating The Passion To Pursue The Impossible

What inspires the resilience to chase challenging finish lines and achieve world class results in times of incredible challenge and change? How do we create the passion and internal drive to pursue goals that seem impossible? We create this kind of greatness in ourselves and our teammates through G.R.I.T!

G.R.I.T is that magical combination of:

GUTS
RESPECT for our teammates and the mission
INNOVATION
TEAMWORK that makes us “sticky” to our goals and dreams.

In this keynote, Robyn shares the real secret to her and her teams’ success over 20 years of leading the pack in the sport of adventure racing and as a San Diego Firefighter—their “we will find a way or make one” attitude, their love of the mission, their deep respect for one another, their ingenious solutions and white space thinking, their intensive preparation for all contingencies and conditions, and their incredible ability to not just work with each other, but FOR each other. Having the GRIT to go the distance in any endeavor isn’t just a matter of mental fortitude.

Much of our endurance and drive to succeed in those tough times when others would quit comes from our connection to something greater than ourselves, the inspiration that comes from mission driven innovation, the passion we have for our goals and the people whose lives we will touch along the way, the understanding that we are writing our life story during our most difficult challenges, and the respect for a team whose success is inextricably tied to ours.

When you leave Robyn’s Inspiring Greatness Through G.R.I.T keynote, you will have a deep understanding of how to create GRIT in your own life and in your team culture, but most importantly, you’ll be on a mission to inspire that GRIT in everyone who is lucky enough to know you—- the kind of leader every organization needs to help them climb their tallest peaks, fight their biggest fires, and cross their most challenging finish lines…

* available for virtual & in-person events

Robyn Benincasa
Featured Book

How Winning Worksby Robyn Benincasa

How Winning Works

by Robyn Benincasa

Robyn Benincasa has made an art form of extreme performance by competing and winning at the highest levels of sport and business. In her fifteen-year career as a professional adventure racer, she has biked through jungles in Borneo, climbed Himalayan giants in Nepal, trekked across lava fields in Fiji, rafted rapids in Chile--and racked up multiple world championship titles along the way. In her spare time, she is a firefighter and a sought-after keynote speaker on the subject of teamwork and leadership.

In How Winning Works, Benincasa shows you how to climb to new levels of professional and personal success. She shares the eight essential elements of teamwork, learned through her extreme adventure racing, that create synergy with all the teammates in your life, from colleagues and customers to family members and friends:

Total Commitment
Empathy and Awareness
Adversity Management
Mutual Respect
"We" Thinking
Ownership of the Project
Relinquishment of Ego
Kinetic Leadership

This field guide to success shares the same training tools and exercises that have become wildly popular in the leadership seminars Benincasa gives to corporations, including Starbucks, Deloitte Consulting, 3M, Verizon, Nestlé, Boeing and many others. Stories from her adventure racing also illustrate how winning teams interact under the world's most extreme conditions, from jungles to mountain peaks.

Whether you're trying to beat the competition to market with a new product, scale a looming mountain of deadlines or simply get your kids to clean up their rooms, the advice in this book will take you on an adventure you'll never forget, and coach you over the finish line to success.

 

Robyn Benincasa
Featured Reviews

Robyn Benincasa
Featured Articles & Resources

Adapt, Overcome & Win | Missouri River m340 Race

Robyn Benincasa is the powerhouse behind founding World Class Teams and the Project Athena Foundation. She’s also an Adventure Racer, CNN Hero and the Guinness World Record...
Read More

CNN Hero Feature: Robyn Benincasa [VIDEO]

Robyn Benincasa and her group, Project Athena, help women who have survived medical setbacks achieve an athletic goal. Biography NYT Best-Selling Author and World Champion...
Read More
Topics:   Athlete

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