Robyn Benincasa

Speaking topics

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

• 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 feature story entitled “Extreme Teamwork” about Robyn Benincasa’s world champion adventure racing team. Benincasa shares the secrets to extreme teamwork that allowed her team to be the most prolific and consistent world champions in the sport; lessons that can be 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. In this keynote, Benincasa shares the mindset and strategies that created their consistent breakthrough performance.

• 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 Benincasa’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 amd 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 endeavour.

  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 and preparation that drives peak performance and consistent results.

• Building World Class Teams: How to Achieve Breakthrough Performance through Collaboration, Creativity, and a Culture of One

  How do you inspire individual team members to become great teammates? What if your teams were not only driven to achieve goals with each other but for each other? The world’s most successful teams have one thing in common: human synergy, which Robyn Benincasa describes as “the magic that allows groups of ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things together.” If your goal is to take a group of successful individuals and make them successful as a team, this team-building keynote is the perfect message to set the tone for your event!

  Benincasa’s most requested keynote is based on her bestselling book, How Winning Works: 8 Essential Leadership Lessons from the Toughest Teams on Earth. Benincasa’s innovative team-building strategies offer practical tools to adapt, overcome, and win as one, against all odds.

  In this fast-paced, story-driven keynote, Benincasa takes your group on a multimedia adventure which visually and viscerally imparts the mindset that allows teams to adapt, overcome, and win as one even when the stakes are high and the only thing constant is change. Your world class team will discover that achieving at peak levels isn’t about only reaching up and trying harder as an individual, but reaching out and sharing strengths, talents, and challenges within a world class team.

  Benincasa gets attendees buzzing with inspired ideas about how to raise their team to the next level, both personally and professionally. And they’ll take home simple and easily applied skills that will cultivate deep and lasting connections in any team.

• 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 Benincasa 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, 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 Benincasa’s 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 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.

• Workshop: How Winning Works — The 8 Essential Elements of Human Synergy

  Based off her bestselling book, this interactive workshop incorporates tabletop team building activities and team bonding exercises that attendees will participate in at their tables, incorporated throughout the session.

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

  • Total commitment
  • Empathy and awareness
  • Adversity management
  • Mutual respect
  • We thinkers
  • Ownership of the project
  • Relinquishment of ego
  • 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?”.

  If time allows, Benincasa can include a “Coach the Teams” conclusion where attendees watch video footage from some of the biggest adventure race failures, and using 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 eight essential elements.