How to Choose a Mental Health Speaker for Your Workplace (NZ Guide)

Every year, usually a few weeks before Mental Health Awareness Week, the same email lands in HR inboxes across New Zealand: "Should we get someone in to speak?"

It is a better question than it sounds. Done well, a single session can open conversations that were waiting years for permission. Done badly, it earns the eye roll: another mandated wellness hour, ticked and forgotten. Having delivered these sessions for organisations from PwC to Sport New Zealand, and having built reminder.co.nz for the teams that cannot bring a speaker in, I have seen both outcomes up close. The difference is rarely the speaker's talent. It is the choosing, the setup, and the follow-through.

Here is the honest version of how to get it right.

Step 1: Start with your audience, not the speaker

Before you look at a single speaker profile, ask two questions.

Who is actually in the room? Engineers and nurses and salespeople carry different pressures, different scepticism, and different language. A session that lands with a leadership team can sail straight past a workshop floor.

What kind of message will land best with them? Some rooms need warmth and story. Some need evidence before they will lower their arms. Some need humour to relax enough to listen. If you have engagement survey data, you already know more about this than you think.

Step 2: Decide what job the session is doing

"Mental health session" covers at least five different jobs. Pick one deliberately:

• Awareness. Naming the reality of mental distress, reducing stigma, and making it discussable. The classic Mental Health Awareness Week brief.
• Peer-to-peer support. Equipping people to notice signs in each other and have the first conversation. Closer to training than keynote.
• A clinical lens. Understanding conditions, symptoms and pathways to help, delivered by or with clinicians.
• Proactive prevention. Building mental fitness: the capacities that protect well-being before problems arrive. This is my home ground.
• An inspiring story. Lived experience of adversity and recovery, told by someone who has stood in the dark and come back.

None of these is better than the others. But a speaker brilliant at one job can be wrong for another, and most disappointing sessions are simply a mismatch between the job and the person.

Step 3: Choose the speaker to match

Once the job is clear, the options sort themselves.

If you want prevention with substance, this is what I do: holistic, research-informed guidance wrapped in storytelling, live interaction and humour, built on the neuroscience of the predictive brain. Learning how the nervous system generates signals, and how to regulate them with state-shifting tools, is transformative for many people because it suddenly gives them a language for the feeling of stress. From there we work through proven tools for mental well-being: fact-checking the predictive brain, finding mental clarity, and managing the body budget and energy resources. Sessions include a live heart-rate variability demonstration and a post-session pack of interactive resources.

The easiest way to judge any speaker, me included, is to watch them at work. Here I am investigating a question at the heart of workplace mental health: what burnout actually is.

If you want a well-known name and a powerful story, New Zealand is rich in them: Sir John Kirwan, Mike King, Jazz Thornton, Jehan Casinader, Dr Lucy Hone and Julia Grace among others, most bookable through the major speaker bureaus. Their advocacy has moved this country's conversation, and for a pure awareness or inspiration brief they are excellent.

One firm rule, whoever you choose: your speaker should be pure inspiration, properly clinical, or clearly research-informed. Mental health is not the topic for wild opinions delivered confidently. Ask what their material is based on. A good speaker will love the question.

And one strong recommendation: favour a holistic approach over the purely clinical or purely inspirational. The goal of any session is that people leave with something practical they can use immediately. If there is nothing tangible to take away, chances are nobody will remember it well.

Step 4: Set the session up to land

This is the part organisers underestimate, and it is where the eye roll is born or prevented.

Communicate with care before the day. People should arrive curious, not conscripted. Explain what the session is, what it is not, and what is in it for them personally, not just for the organisation.

Ask the speaker for a short pre-session video. Sixty seconds of "here is who I am and what we will explore" transforms the room's starting temperature. It also gives the speaker a feel for who will be there. I am always happy to do this, and any good speaker will be.

Brief the speaker properly. Share what your engagement surveys are saying, any genuine concerns, and how your internal support works, including your EAP if you have one. A skilled speaker weaves that context in without ever naming anyone, and can connect the dots to support channels so that anyone who needs help knows exactly where the door is.

Step 5: Follow through, and let it ripple

A session with no follow-up is a firework: bright, brief, gone. Make sure people leave with a resource pack they can return to. This is exactly why I created reminder.co.nz: free, research-based tools and videos covering the most common challenges people face, alongside crisis numbers for anyone who needs urgent support.

Then encourage people to share the resources with those they care about. The ripple effect matters twice over. Mental well-being spreads through relationships, and sharing beyond the workplace shows your people that the organisation cares about the wider community, not just about productivity wearing a caring mask. The sceptics in your team will notice the difference. In an emergency, everyone should know the number: in New Zealand you can call or text 1737, free, any time.

Every great speaker knows that the key to success is not a round of applause. It is the ripple effect of people using the tools out in the real world, creating real change and closing the knowing-doing gap.

Mental health is not a week

It is worth saying plainly: mental health is not just a week in October. It is every minute of every day, and most of all it is how leaders behave between the awareness campaigns.

It is how leaders create psychological safety in a team. This is why my FLAME method places so much weight on belonging: belonging is the foundation of trust and psychological safety, and psychological safety is the most effective performance accelerant we know of, as Google's Project Aristotle research famously demonstrated. In a nutshell, a leader's job is to create an environment where people can contribute without fear, and where there is a real sense of purpose. That is also why I believe every leader should be able to tell a great story about where we are, where we have come from, where we are going, and why.

Purpose runs deeper than strategy decks. One of my favourite books on this is Johann Hari's Lost Connections, which examines depression and poor mental well-being and lands on clear guidance about core values, including auditing the junk values we pick up along the way. It always reminds me of Nietzsche's line, made famous again by Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning: "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." Frankl's book remains one of the most relevant things ever written about how humans survive, and how they come to thrive.

The bigger picture: many factors, many doorways

I often connect these sessions to Hauora and Te Whare Tapa Whā, Sir Mason Durie's model of health as a wharenui with four walls: taha tinana (physical), taha hinengaro (mental and emotional), taha whānau (family and social) and taha wairua (spiritual). My own FLAME framework covers kindred territory: belonging, purpose, agility, mindset and vitality.

The shared insight is the one that matters: just as mental distress usually results from multiple factors, so does mental well-being. Nobody has to fix everything at once. A small shift in any one dimension, better sleep, one honest conversation, a reconnection with purpose, can change someone's whole experience of life. Choose a speaker who leaves people believing that, and holding a tool or two to act on it, and your session will have done its job long after the applause.

If prevention-first sounds like your brief, here is everything about my mental health keynote, including how sessions work for Mental Health Awareness Week (12 to 18 October). And if this year the budget only stretches to resources, take reminder.co.nz with my compliments. That is what it is for.