Thom Mayer M.D.

A crisis is the worst time to start defining your mission, vision, values, and culture—yet today, we find ourselves in a constant state of disruption that demands exactly that kind of clarity and innovation.

Few people understand this better than Dr. Thom Mayer, whose leadership in times of crisis spans more than 25 years. From the Pentagon on 9/11 to the NFL’s concussion and COVID-19 crises, Dr. Mayer hasn’t just studied crisis leadership—he’s lived it. His message is both deeply inspiring and immediately actionable, grounded in the belief that passion, purpose, and understanding your “deep joy” are the keys to leading effectively when it matters most.

Key Takeaways:

• Leadership is worthless—anyone can talk. Leading is priceless—it’s what you do, every day, with every person on your team.

• The leader you’ve been waiting for is… you.

• The answers you seek aren’t above you—they’re within and among you, in your team and your family.

• A boss thinks they’re the most important person in the room. A leader makes everyone else feel that they are.

This high-energy, humorous, and motivational keynote is packed with practical tools tailored to your organization’s needs. Dr. Mayer challenges audiences to lead not with titles, but with actions rooted in values—and to be the kind of leader who shows up when it counts.

In a world defined by relentless, often cataclysmic change, leaders at every level are grappling with how best to adapt. The ground beneath us seems to shift constantly—and traditional approaches to leadership simply aren’t keeping up.

To lead effectively in this environment requires three essential skills:

• Rethinking leadership, change, and influence from the ground up

• Acting on insights within a week—because if you wait, you won’t act at all

• Innovating yourself and your team—because the way we’re working isn’t working

Irish playwright Samuel Beckett captured this mindset perfectly:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Yet most people don’t realize: innovation doesn’t move at the speed of genius, creativity, or resources. It moves at the speed of trust.

When trust is present, teams feel safe to follow their deepest motivations, propose bold ideas, and challenge the status quo. They know their contributions—no matter how unconventional—will be respected, refined, and possibly implemented by a team that values diverse voices and shared purpose.

In this keynote, Dr. Thom Mayer shares real-world examples and actionable strategies for building trust and cultivating a culture where innovation thrives. Attendees will leave with the tools to lead change—not by force or fear—but by creating a space where people feel safe to try, fail, and ultimately, fail better.

Dr. Thom Mayer has spent his life leading through some of the most significant crises of our time—from serving as Command Physician during the Pentagon Rescue and Recovery Operation on 9/11, to acting as Incident Commander during the first U.S. bioterrorism attack. He’s also the Medical Director for the NFL Players Association and led a Team Rubicon Medical Emergency Team during the Ukraine invasion.

In this powerful keynote, Dr. Mayer presents a pragmatic yet contrarian approach to crisis leadership, filled with compelling stories and hard-won insights from the front lines. At the heart of his message is a core principle: “Making failure your fuel.”

Dr. Mayer argues that innovation and change don’t move at the speed of genius—they move at the speed of trust. And that trust is built when individuals and teams learn to embrace, learn from, and grow through failure.

Key takeaways include:

• Failure isn’t the opposite of success—it’s a critical part of it

• Using failure as motivation (with examples like Tom Brady and the NFL Draft)

• Building your “failure muscles” with 11 actionable tools

• The healing power of failure in leadership and teams

• Understanding that limits begin where vision ends

As U.S. Senator Mark Warner wrote of Dr. Mayer’s book:
“Perhaps the greatest lesson Dr. Mayer has to offer is not to be discouraged by failure, but to use it as fuel—take risks and get yourself back in the game. Leaders of all stripes can learn much from reading this book.”

Burnout affects us all, in every walk of life in which we find ourselves. And yet we have made burnout far too complicated-like life itself, it is far simpler than we have assumed. Burnout is simply the inability to feel the Deep Joy which brought us to the work we do.

How do we battle burnout? Simple-either decrease job stressors, increase adaptive capacity/resiliency, or-preferably, both simultaneously.

Rustout is where many team members find themselves, as their A Team habits begin to decline and degrade and their communication skills decline, like rusted out joints.  And moral injury occurs when those charged with enacting the “Patient First” or “Customer Service” motto are systematically and repeatedly forced to do quite the opposite, since they are caught in systems and processes which don’t support the vision.

This session note only defines burnout, resiliency, and moral injury but gives practical and actionable tools to battle burnout and restore resiliency by creating a culture of fulfillment, hardwiring flow into our daily actions, and developing personal resiliency.

The message is simple, yet powerful:

1. Every team member is a leader!

• Lead Yourself
• Lead Your Team

2. Every leader-just like the athletes in the NFL-are engaged in a

constant cycle of performance, rest, and recovery:

• Invest in Yourself
• Invest in Your Team

3. The work begins within!

Team collaboration and consciousness are the emphasis on this session, giving tools which are tried, true, and trustworthy.