Chris Bailey

Speaking topics

Presentations listed below include in-person and virtual keynotes, as well as workshops, fireside chats, and other presentation formats.

• How to Calm Your Mind

  Chris Bailey had to face a period of burnout and anxiety before he learned a critical lesson: that the path to greater resilience, reduced anxiety, and greater productivity runs directly through calm. In fact, in an anxious world, investing in calm can be considered the best “life hack” around.

  Through speaking with experts from around the world and digging into the research, Bailey discovered that drawing on calm to overcome burnout and anxiety helps build a deeper, more expansive reservoir of energy to draw from throughout the day. More remarkably, the pursuit of calm leads us to become more engaged, focused, and deliberate — while making us more productive and satisfied with our lives.

  Drawing from his own struggles and experiments, Bailey’s story-driven, science-backed talk guides audiences through practical ways to find calm in an anxious world. A few topics covered include:

  • How investing in calm saves us time by letting us work more deliberately under pressure.
  • What burnout is and how to break down the six factors that cause it.
  • How to use the power of calm in everyday situations, including during presentations, difficult conversations, and negotiations.
  • How we can use the science of “savouring” to sharpen our focus and see meaning behind what we do.
  • How the neurochemical dopamine is a primary enemy of calm — and productivity — but can be tamed through a “dopamine fast”.

• How to Get Your Brain to Focus

  We’ve never been so busy while accomplishing so little, and we’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with a lack of stimulation and distraction. Yet the research is clear — the state of our attention determines the state of our lives. In other words, if our attention is constantly overwhelmed, so are we.

  Drawing from the latest neuroscientific research, as well as his bestselling book Hyperfocus and his latest TED talk, Chris Bailey’s story-driven, science-backed talk equips audiences with practical, immediately implementable takeaways. This includes how to:

  • Manage their attention to work with greater intention.
  • Prioritize and determine their most important tasks.
  • Tame distractions ahead of time to focus more deeply.
  • Train their mind to become resilient to distraction.
  • Take advantage of the dot-connecting powers of their brain to work with greater creativity.
  • Use mind wandering to generate more ideas.
  • Think more strategically, automatically.

  This presentation runs 60 minutes, including Q&A, with strategies customized to be most helpful to your audience.

• Custom Talk: A Fresh Approach to Productivity

  Over the last decade, Chris Bailey has researched and experimented with pretty much every productivity tactic under the sun to separate what works from what doesn’t. Drawing from this research and his collection of peculiar productivity experiments — like working 90-hour weeks, using his smartphone for only an hour a day, and meditating for 35 hours a week — Chris will transform how you and your audience think about productivity.

  In his quest for optimal productivity, Bailey has honed-in on a couple dozen strategies that actually help us to get more done, feel more in control of our workload, and become more intentional and less responsive. After learning about the needs of your team, Bailey will identify which of these research-backed tactics will best help your group. This could include how to:

  • Prioritize what’s important every day, week, month, and year — including when things go wrong.
  • Calculate your peak productivity periods to automatically become more productive and creative.
  • Overcome procrastination, one of our largest time-wasters.
  • Modify our external environment to be more conducive to focus.
  • Train your brain to become more resilient against distraction in the first place.

  This presentation runs 60 minutes, including Q&A, with strategies customized to be most helpful to your audience.

• Half-Day Productivity Workshop: Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy

  This interactive, half-day productivity workshop will help your team manage their time, attention, and energy — the three core ingredients of productivity.

  The workshop weaves powerful personal and team productivity tactics with helpful exercises to get more done and includes the occasional fun anecdote from Chris Bailey’s books, Hyperfocus and The Productivity Project. This workshop is perfect for busy teams who have little time to think about productivity.

  The workshop runs four hours and is designed to accommodate as many or as few people as you like — the sessions work equally well for groups of executives, managers, and individual contributors. Bailey will customize the workshop for your audience.

  In addition to helping your team identify the tasks they should prioritize in their work (so they can work smarter), this intensive will help attendees eliminate distractions, simplify their work, and develop their ability to hyperfocus — all while becoming less busy, tired, and stressed out.

  Workshop attendees will receive a booklet to guide them through the exercises, as well as a printable PDF take-away, so their newly learned productivity tactics actually stick.

  To become as productive as possible, it’s critical that we not only effectively manage our time, but our attention and energy, too. This workshop will help you — and your team — accomplish just that.

  This workshop is also available as a 3-part webinar.