Travels from London, United Kingdom
Chris Baréz-Brown's speaking fee falls within range: $25,000 to $30,000
Creativity and innovation guru, Chris Baréz-Brown helps leaders and other professionals make better decisions by feeling more. The best-selling author and founder of the creative leadership consultancy Upping Your Elvis is driving a worldwide campaign to get people to live more conscious, creative, and fulfilling lives. His most recent project Wake-Up! – a book, app, and workshop – has energized thousands of people, teaching them how to tap into their subconscious and reconnect with their inner genius through a series of easy-to-do exercises and experiments.
For the first part of his life, Baréz-Brown made most of his decisions analytically and had a conventionally successful career. He got good grades, served in the military, and ran one of the hottest brands in Europe, Carling Black Label. Under his leadership, the famed beer company experienced growth, increased profits, and won “brand of the year.” Despite his accomplishments, Baréz-Brown didn’t feel happy; he felt like he was leading someone else’s life. After months of mental wrestling, he followed his gut, resigned, and boarded a plane to a journey of self-discovery.
Flash forward several years later, and Baréz-Brown is one of the most in-demand speakers, workshop facilitators, and consultants on creativity and innovation, acclaimed for his interactive and effective methods for getting people to think differently. His repeat clients include Nike, Unilever, Diageo and MediaCom.
Baréz-Brown has published four no-nonsense guides to making every day count:
and his newest book:
He is a monthly columnist for GQ and British Airway’s Business Life magazine.
Chris Baréz-Brown is a master of transformation. He’s fascinated by people and what makes them tick. By teaching folk how to think differently, he makes their lives and businesses more energetic and technicolour in hue.
He is the founder of Upping Your Elvis, helping businesses become more human, energetic and creative through workshops, talks and events. Based in the UK, in London and Dorset.
Brands such as Nike, Coca-Cola, Diageo, Unilever, Roche and WPP come back time and again as his results produce tangible returns on investment. The impact of his work with Unilever was recently featured in the Harvard Business Review.
Chris’s life mission is people (with a side line in guitar playing!). This ethos, combined with a wealth of experience in innovation and leadership across the world, means Chris’ talks are memorable, interactive and human.
A talk delivered by Chris is, well, quite simply, like no other you will have experienced before.
Through humour, charisma and expertise, Chris brings out the potential in everybody and people leave not just inspired and energized, but thinking a little differently about the world: Equipped with tangible skills to deliver immediate change to their work and their lives.
Chris has spoken at TEDx, inspirational ideas festival The Do Lectures and the world’s largest leadership event Leadercast, where he also had the honour of interviewing Apples’ co-founder Steve Wozniak live on stage.
With four bestselling books under his belt: How to Have Kick-Ass ideas, Shine: How to survive and thrive at work, Free: Love your work, love your life, and Wake Up! Escaping a Life on Autopilot, and as the founder of social enterprise Talk It Out, Chris’s work has featured in media such as The Guardian, The Sunday Times and Fast Company, and he writes monthly columns for GQ magazine, The Huffington Post and British Airways’ Business Life magazine.
The Guardian recently summed up Chris’s style as ‘a long haired twinkly eyed cross between Richard Branson and a wizard’, which paints the most accurate picture: A dynamic business change-maker with a magical hippy vibe.
Chris Baréz-Brown explains how our conscious brain - that voice we hear in our head - can only do so much for us. "If any of you are going, 'I don't have voices in my head,' well, that's the voice," he notes, emphasizing that while this part of our brain excels at analysis and logic, just 5 to 15% of our processing actually occurs on a conscious level. On the other hand, our subconscious is capable of recording and retaining every experience we've ever had - the biggest source of stimulus we have.
The key then, Baréz proposes, to making better decisions and producing more creative work hinges on our ability to tap into our emotional intuitional side - a competency he believes anyone can develop and strengthen. He demonstrates how visualization and trying new things in your projects and life can help you learn faster and shift you from the comfort of auto-pilot to a "brighter technicolor life."
"I think if you experiment every day," Baréz attests, "and you get that little kick where you stop to say - 'Actually, where am I? What should I be doing? What is important to me now?' - I think we'll lead better lives."
Most people will tell you that the most important decisions they’ve made in life were made 80% with their heart and 20% with their head. However, when it comes to business decisions, those numbers get reversed right away. Creativity and innovation speaker Chris Baréz-Brown helps companies drive innovation by getting people out of their heads and into their hearts. Merging science and human experience, the best-selling author and “business beatnik” offers simple tools to jolt audiences off the drudgery of autopilot, drive their creativity, and reconnect with what matters most to them.
UP YOUR ELVIS! • How to be a more creative, energetic and dangerous leader, making work more human and fun whilst driving bottom-line results... • Create the conditions for your organisation to be more energetic and creative every day. • Enhance your own personal creativity
GET YOUR ENERGY RIGHT TO GET YOUR EXTRAORDINARY ON • How to make every day more easy and impactful by getting your energy working for you… • Explore how to power-up and deploy your energy against the things that are most important to you, in work and life…
MAKE CHANGE YOUR BITCH! • Learn how to embrace change and make it a fun and fruitful ride that delivers impact for your business… • Create the conditions for you and your organisation to experiment effortlessly and delivering real change that you own, control and thrive on…
INNOVATION THE HUMAN WAY • Learn the behaviours and simple strategies for driving innovation every day… • How to take the creative leaps that get juices flowing and ideas bursting out.
MAKE YOUR TEAM ROCK! • How to lock-in the behaviours that makes teams tight and get them ready to take on the world and win… • An energetic team re-boot creating focus whilst making work feel more fun..!
SPEAKING.COM: What do you want people to learn/take away from your presentations?
BAREZ-BROWN: I want people to take away tangible skills that they can put into action straight away to make their lives that bit better. I aim to make my talks interactive and human to keep people energised so that the experience will be memorable. Usually there are some laughs, sparks of inspiration, and maybe people make a few new friends to keep playing with. If it’s not entertaining, I have failed them!
SPEAKING.COM: What kind of special prep work do you do prior to an event? How do you prepare for your speaking engagements?
BAREZ-BROWN: I keep it very simple: sleep, water and space to connect to the moment.
SPEAKING.COM: Have you had any particularly memorable speaking engagements / unusual situations arise while on the road?
BAREZ-BROWN: I do love situations that are a bit crazy! Interviewing Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak live in front of 10 thousand folk and 120 thousand on telecast, was brilliant fun. I love all my speaking engagements, though…just give me some people to play with and the magic always comes.
SPEAKING.COM: What types of audiences would most benefit from your message?
BAREZ-BROWN: Those who want to explore pushing out from the norms, to grow themselves and their business, whilst having some fun! Life is too short for work to be hard and dull. We all want it to be extraordinary and that’s the message regardless of sector, function or seniority. Context will change, delivery will flex but key messages resonate with all.
SPEAKING.COM: Which of your keynote speaking topics are your favorites and why?
BAREZ-BROWN: “Creativity the Elvis Way” and “How to Wake Up! and Escape Autopilot” – they are both core to my beliefs and have been my personal mission for the last 20 years. They are what I use to change business for the better.
SPEAKING.COM: What inspired you to start doing speaking engagements?
BAREZ-BROWN: It wasn’t a burning desire that came from within. Rather, I was asked to speak, I was flattered, and luckily, I loved every minute of it!
SPEAKING.COM: How do you keep your audience engaged and actively listening during your keynotes? Do you use case studies, personal stories and/or in your speeches?
BAREZ-BROWN: Personal stories, however small, always seem to be the best way to keep the audience engaged. I mix this up with interactive exercises, challenges, anecdotes and giggles. I don’t let up!
SPEAKING.COM: What are some of the successes you’ve helped clients achieve?
BAREZ-BROWN: For me, often the smallest successes are the best, when people get a breakthrough moment in transforming their lives.
Big numbers are good too! My work has turned a company around from decline to the fastest growing FTSE500 in 2 years. I also added $1bn extra value to the sale price of a company through our work.
A few years ago I coached a leader who had 150 staff. As a result, 2 days later he had 16000. He hates me!
So much big talk about transformation… Chris actually delivers it. Time and again. Part art, part gift, part crazy man. He works his magic every time!” – Maria Eitel, Founder and President of the Nike Foundation
“Chris Baréz-Browns’ interactive, energetic and playful style works every time at every level. What he demonstrates is a totally human approach to living our lives, inspiring teams to think differently and creating great impact, who wouldn’t want that?” – Derek Kent, Chief Marketing Officer, Canadian Olympic Committee
“Chris Baréz-Brown is a modern day prophet. He has a gift…an uncanny ability to inspire change agents in my organization. Everything he touches turns to gold and shines ever so brightly. He is our Elvis.” – Keith Wilmot, The Coca-Cola Company
“Apart from the very insightful content and great techniques I thought the delivery was the best I’ve ever seen – very human and hilarious (and I have high comedy standards” – Olivia Diamond, Commercial Programme Manager, Diageo
“Chris leads the most amazing, inspiring, and life-changing events. They’ve had a profound impact on my life and on my work. He has the uncanny ability to help individuals and companies change – change for the better, more profitable, more joyful. He is a born-entertainer, a natural, he always know what is needed. Working with him has changed my life.” – Jeff Semenchuk, Chief Innovation Officer Hyatt Hotels Corporation
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WAKE UP! BOOK & APP Wake Up! is a series of human, playful experiments designed to help us escape autopilot and live a more conscious, connected and extraordinary life.
Learn why we are all on autopilot, what it does to your conscious mind and how to find balance, energy and positivity in all that you do. The journey unfolds into a series of playful yet impactful experiments all developed to help you break free from autopilot and discover your own personal plan to lead a more connected and engaged life.
FREE! LOVE YOUR WORK, LOVE YOUR LIFE. Life and work are intrinsically linked. If we want to live an extraordinary life, we have to make our work equally extraordinary.
When your work resonates with purpose, you jump out of bed every morning, excited by the possibilities the day holds for you. Everything else in your life seems to have a glow about it, and you exude much more personal shine. This book is designed to help you feel like that every day. To help you make your work, work for you. To feel truly free.
SHINE: HOW TO SURVIVE AND THRIVE AT WORK.
Chris Baréz-Brown’s exhilarating guide to loving your work, and living your working life to the full.
We all have good days and bad days at work. Some days you feel bullet proof. People listen to you, your meetings run like clockwork, and you keep having new ideas. Other days are like wading through quick sand. You can’t get anything done, and when the printer runs out of toner (again) you want to quit. Wouldn’t it be great if you were always on top of your game? If every day began knowing that you can only win? SHINE will show you how.
HOW TO HAVE KICK-ASS IDEAS Practical and inspirational ways to help you kick-start your creativity, identify what you want and then make it happen.
A playful and mind-expanding book by the training guru who spent ten years at ?What If!, the world’s largest innovation consultancy, who will help you to unlock your creative juices and grow in new directions. Stuck in a rut, bored, dissatisfied, uninspired? Feel like it’s Groundhog Day? Got a problem you don’t know how to solve? But what if you knew exactly what you wanted and could make it happen, right now? To get there, you need creativity – YOU NEED SOME KICK-ASS IDEAS!
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