GREG BENNICK - KEYNOTE SPEAKER
ABOUT GREG
Who is Greg Bennick?
Team-building keynote speaker Greg Bennick helps teams focus, come together, and grow stronger through keynote presentations and trainings at conferences and association meetings worldwide.
Greg Bennick knows about focus, though reading about his life, you wouldn’t know that. He is a best-selling author, a keynote thought leader, a noted rare coin expert, a TEDx speaker and speaking coach, a humanitarian philanthropist, and an influencer devoted to transforming the world by inspiring personal and social change. How's that for a resumé?
For the last three decades Greg has traveled the world studying what people want most. He's come to know that people need to matter and to feel that they are part of something meaningful. Here's a little about Greg, and ideas about how he helps organizations like yours find renewed inspiration.
Keynote Speaker
When Greg traces back his own focus and teamwork journey, he realizes that learning to juggle for the first time at twelve years old changed everything for him. It was awesome. It was amazing. And it was a metaphor. He saw that it was a juggler's ability to FOCUS and keep multiple balls aloft, amidst a world of distractions, that was key to navigating our day-to-day reality. He realized that he gained confidence and learned more with the support of those around him. Those realizations transformed his life, and reminded him that without teamwork, individuals end up adrift and lost.
Greg started thinking about what gets us back on track. The object in the air is the one that matters most. What is the object for you and your organization? What do we need to focus upon most? When we have a shared sense of meaning from what we do, and when we know that our work matters, it is like high octane fuel for teamwork.
Greg launched his career as a presenter at age thirteen (yes you read that correctly) and saw that capturing the attention of audiences brings people together. He has been known to balance a chair on his face to do just that. Just watch his promo video on the home page for proof!
Author
Greg's new book Reclaim the Moment: 7 Strategies to Build a Better Now is a tool that you can use to inspire your people. Greg trains and consults based off a model of seven strategies. This is an exploration of how to get back on track with what matters most to us and to our team.
Praise has been high for the book and the ideas in it:
“A practical guide to getting your ‘now’ back on track, while staying true to yourself. My favorite chapters dealt with creativity and cultivating a revolutionary mindset, but all seven key strategies provide significant value.”
- Adam Cheyer, co-founder of Siri
“Greg gives you seven strategies but I’m just giving you one: get his book! He’s creative, insightful, and refreshingly honest. You’re welcome.”
- Larry Wilmore, TV writer/producer
“This book is a nonstop life lesson in the business of being human. Greg has a philosopher’s mind and writes with punk rock energy. Every chapter inspires reflection, inspiration, and action.”
- Andy Hurley, drummer, Fall Out Boy
Film Producer
Currently Greg Bennick is writing the first ever biography of philosopher, cultural anthropologist, and Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Becker, who dedicated his life to understanding the complexities of life and how they relate to how we work together, accomplish our goals, and how we get along. This work has provided Greg with a far deeper understanding of team building and teamwork. Greg has been studying Becker's legacy for twenty-five years and is a recognized expert on his work.
Documentaries that Greg has written and produced have won awards since 2003 and have been screened on all seven continents. He’s brought worldwide attention to the psychology of why we behave the way we do with the award-winning film Flight From Death which explores Ernest Becker's work. Greg revealed wisdom in unlikely places with The Philosopher Kings. He connected a rural Haitian community with a film production to help bring water to a community in need with La Source. He recently examined the controversy of trophy hunting through narrating On the Wild Side, and documenting the team work and creative journey of five friends pursuing their shared rock music dream on tour with Holding These Moments.
He was recently featured in an NPR/KUOW produced podcast about Seattle’s infamous law, the “Teen Dance Ordinance,” which prevented access to the arts in Seattle over decades for generations of people. Greg literally co-wrote the law in the City of Seattle that replaced it!
More cool things Greg has helped create...
Greg is the founder and Executive Director of One Hundred For Haiti, an international humanitarian initiative focused on rural Haiti, and rooted in development, listening, and community. The core concept driving One Hundred For Haiti is to focus on people, and to prioritize the idea that people receiving humanitarian support be the ones defining the conditions of that support.
This concept of personal empowerment motivates all of their work. One Hundred For Haiti puts new roofs on houses in the northwest of Haiti, provides internet for every school in an entire region of the country, helps farmers plant crops, sends dozens of youth to school who otherwise couldn’t afford it, and makes sure water is clean and safe to drink. The organization has a track record of thirteen years of successes. One Hundred For Haiti teaches important and ongoing lessons to all involved about focus and dedication, listening and leadership, and tenacity and endurance.
In the summer of 2020, Greg co-founded the Portland Mutual Aid Network with two friends. Today, this is a group of dozens of active volunteers, working in teams, who distribute food, essential products, and survival supplies to unsheltered individuals in Portland Oregon. The group has distributed well over ten thousand meals and massive amounts of donated supplies. When we are part of a strong community, we feel the power of teamwork and interactivity. When we help others create a stronger sense of personal value through providing organizational models and basic survival needs, we provide an essential foundation from which all growth is possible.
The Legacy Project seeks to understand healing and reconciliation. Founded in 2006 by Greg and his brilliant friend history teacher/scholar Dave Whitson, students have been led on travel-study missions to Poland, South Africa, Rwanda, and other countries struggling to reconcile legacies of intensity from the past. With the participation in country of government officials, activists, scholars, and prominent historical figures, The Legacy Project works to promote an international dialogue about overcoming the past, achieving justice, and understanding reconciliation.
Greg founded the World Leaders Project which brought him to Guyana to discuss the relationship between fear and violence with President Bharrat Jagdeo. He wanted to understand how deeper insight into that relationship can lead to a more peaceful world. Imagining that speaking with world leaders face-to-face was possible, and then writing directly to each of them until a meeting was arranged, meant a lesson learned in saying yes before we say no (and idea featured in Greg's book).
These humanitarian and philanthropic efforts emerge from hoping to discover new levels of connection and shared meaning when we focus on a goal. There has never been a better time to expand our sense of human connectedness through teamwork, and then reminding people that they matter.