Motivational keynote speaker and resilience storyteller
Corporate teams, leadership conferences, healthcare organisations, creative industries, and audiences navigating change, pressure, or adversity.
Conn Bertish is an internationally awarded creative director, artist, big wave surfer, and former Fear Factor winner whose life took an extraordinary turn when he was diagnosed with a severe and extremely rare form of brain cancer. Accustomed to solving complex challenges for a living, Conn was confronted with the toughest brief of his career, one where data was scarce, outcomes uncertain, and the stakes profoundly personal.
While undergoing traditional cancer treatments including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, Conn recognised that something essential was missing from the process. He questioned where his own agency fit into the solution. Rather than remaining a passive participant, he chose to apply the same creative problem-solving mindset that had defined his professional and sporting life.
Conn began to actively engage with his diagnosis, seeking understanding, purpose, and contribution in the face of uncertainty. His journey reframed illness not only as a medical challenge but as a human one, requiring curiosity, intention, and self-leadership. By placing himself back into the centre of the solution, he transformed his experience from one of helplessness into one of ownership and meaning.
Today, Conn Bertish is a powerful motivational speaker whose story resonates across corporate, leadership, and personal development audiences. Drawing on creativity, extreme sport discipline, and lived resilience, he challenges people to rethink adversity, reclaim agency, and recognise that mindset is not a side note to performance, it is central to survival, growth, and impact.
Conn was diagnosed with a severe and extremely rare form of brain cancer. So rare in fact, that the data available for the behaviour (and the reaction to certain treatments) of the cancer was depressingly hard to find.
Whilst the traditional cancer treatments (like surgery, chemotherapy and radiation) were prescribed, Conn Bertish – Motivational Speaker felt that there was something missing.
It was as if the most important part of the solution was left out of the brief.
He could try to understand the problem and then creatively become a part of the solution.
After all, the challenge was happening in his body.
Conn’s Cancer Brief:
Conn Bertish knew how to work with tough briefs. He immediately set in motion the biggest creative project of his life.
He began the process of using his imagination to immerse himself into his bout with cancer.
He went straight to the first things he always relied on – his pen, his paper and his playful, problem solving attitude.
He began toying with cancer, studying the helpless people around him creating visual representations of what he was going through; documenting his experience with conceptual thinking and storytelling.
He used his imagination to create a drawn-series of pen-on-paper metaphors that helped him to visualize his tumour and the treatments with intent.
He then took this thinking into everyday life and the world around him.
It became a game; a daily routine.
Conn Bertish had found a playful, debunking way to interact with his cancer. See his cancer. Imagine beating his cancer.
All of a sudden, he had a role in his own survival.
Conn Bertish was able to imagine the effects that different treatments would have on the tumour cells.
After beating cancer in 2013, Conn has been urged by doctors, oncologists, neurologists and professors of science to share this way of thinking; to use his experience as a gateway for others to enter the world of his playful visual approach (dubbed Dojo Thinking).
The result is the Cancer Dojo. A digital platform and mobile application that will enable people to engage with their cancer in a new and powerful way. It is, in many medical opinions, way ahead of its time.
Its goal is to help people to unlock the powerful effects of Dojo Thinking; to alter the way in which they deal with their disease.
The app is a space where people can grow, learn and share skills and tools to boost their immune systems and actively participate in their unique bouts with cancer.
It’s a space where people can keep each other company and send each other help.
It’s a dojo, where creative people from all over the world will work alongside doctors and oncologists to find new ways to change the way we interact with the disease.
Conn has also authored a book on ‘Cancer & Creativity’ which details his adventures, creative techniques and discoveries through cancer
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