Robyn Benincasa

About

World Champion Adventure Racer, San Diego Firefighter, and 2014 CNN Hero Inductee
Expert on upgrading teamwork to “human synergy”
Founder of Project Athena- helping survivors of traumatic injuries lead adventurous lives
Past clients include: Allstate, Exxon Mobil, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Nestle

About Robyn Benincasa - Firefighter, CNN Hero and Motivational Adventure Racer:

Robyn Benincasa - NYT best-selling author of How Winning Works: 8 Essential Leadership Lessons from the Toughest Teams on Earth and World Champion Adventure Racer - accepts full blame for inspiring people to do insane things like climb Mount Kilimanjaro, run their first triathlon, start their own adventure racing teams, or start their own businesses. This is, after all, who she is and what she does: Robyn Benincasa inspires people to do amazing things. Her unforgettable presentations have taught countless high-performance leaders all over the world about Building World Class Teams and the followership skills necessary for dynamic role shifting and true teamwork.

Benincasa has made an art form of extreme performance by competing and winning at the highest levels of sport and business. Revered as one of California's Fittest Women, she spent her youth competing at the state and national level in gymnastics, diving, cross country, and judo, in which she became a national champion. Soon after earning a Marketing degree from Arizona State University, Robyn started at the top in a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company where she earned the prestigious Rookie of the Year award.

While consistently achieving top sales in her day job, Robyn completed six Ironman races, with two podium finishes. Then the adventure race bug bit.

In her 15-year career as a professional adventure racer, Robyn Benincasa has competed in close to 40 expedition-length events - gnarly, multiday, multisport killers such as Primal Quest and Eco-Challenge. She has biked through jungles in Borneo, climbed Himalayan giants in Nepal, trekked across lava fields in Fiji, rafted rapids in Chile - and racked up multiple world championship titles along the way. In her spare time, Robyn, is a full-time firefighter in San Diego, on the nation's first all-female crew.

NBC, ABC, CNN, ESPN, USA Network, Discovery Channel, Outdoor Life Network, PBS and FOX have all featured Robyn and her amazing accomplishments. Add to those network credits editorials in Fast Company, Sport Illustrated, Vogue, Corporate & Incentive Travel, The New York Times, Outside, and Harper's Bazaar.

Benincasa launched World Class Teams and its sister company Flashover Seminars to bring her unique and inspiring perspective on teamwork to the corporate world via keynotes, seminars and teambuilding programs. Starbucks, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Aramark, Honda/Acura, Tony Robbins, Allianz, Wal-Mart, Timberland, Napster, AT&T and Earthlink rely on Robyn's Extreme Performance: Why Winners Win, High Performance Leadership and her signature program The 8 Essential Elements of Human Synergy.

Robyn Benincasa founded the Project Athena Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping women who've endured medical setbacks achieve their athletic dreams - whether it means climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or running a local 10K. The goal? To encourage survivors not just to survive - but to thrive in the wake of their diagnoses.

Topics

What Robyn Benincasa Talks About:

Building World Class Teams: The 8 Essential Elements of Human Synergy
What do the world’s most successful teams have in common? The ability to upgrade their “teamwork” to human synergy!

If your goal is to increase performance by inspiring your team to adapt, overcome, and win as ONE, this keynote is the perfect message to set the tone for your event.

Robyn Benincasa takes your team on a fast-paced multimedia adventure which visually and viscerally imparts the attitude and mindset that allows groups of ordinary people to accomplish truly extraordinary feats together… especially when the stakes are high, the goals are audacious, and constant change is the only thing your team can count on (aside from one another!).

During her “8 Essential Elements of Human Synergy” keynote, this World Champion Adventure Racer, CNN Hero and San Diego Firefighter has attendees buzzing with inspired ideas about how to raise their team to the next level (against all odds), both personally and professionally. And your team will take home simple and easily applied skills that allow them to create human synergy with all of the teammates in their lives.

There is an old proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” The epic, entertaining and meaningful stories and videos shared in Robyn’s “Building World Class Teams” keynote leaves your team with a deep understanding: with true human synergy they will go farther AND faster in pursuit of their goals!

The 8 essential elements of human synergy:

Total commitment
Empathy and awareness
Adversity management
Mutual respect
‘We’ thinking
Ownership of the project
Relinquishment of ego
Kinetic leadership

Why Winners Win
Inspired by a Fast Company magazine article entitled ‘Extreme Teamwork’, which featured Robyn’s team of World Champion adventure athletes as well as “winners” from all walks of life, Robyn’s ‘Why Winners Win’ keynote outlines the common traits, attitudes and mindset of the world’s most consistently high performing leaders in their eternal pursuit of world class results.

The ‘Best of the Best’ experience times of great challenge and change just like everyone else. But with characteristic courage, luck (opportunity + preparation), adversity management skills, and a keen ability to create synergy with their colleagues, winners possess the ability to continually motivate and inspire themselves and those around them to the top of the podium in any endeavor.

The icing on the cake of the ‘Why Winners Win’ keynote? Attendees will experience the thrill of peak performance and exceptional leadership through Robyn’s incredible stories and breathtaking video footage of extreme teams in action. They will leave energized and empowered to create consistent world-class results in every aspect of their lives!

Inspired Leadership – Driving Greatness by Creating a Culture of Champions
How do you inspire others to think and act with a World Champion’s mindset? What are the secrets to inspiring your team members to WANT to be great? In this power-packed keynote, Robyn will teach you how to build and retain high-performing teams that are not only motivated to succeed as individuals but are truly inspired to cross your organization’s most challenging finish lines and take their teammates with them.

Robyn’s interactive presentation will help your leaders:

Transform team members into team *builders* who achieve consistent peak performance
Demonstrate title-less leadership: a counter-intuitive approach to capitalizing on the strengths of all teammates in order to exceed goals
Create inspiration plans: the means by which you build deep engagement to your organization’s goals by genuinely inspiring versus simply motivating

Leading through Change
Change is the only thing that stays the same. It is our response to that change that dictates our success.

How do the world’s most consistently high performing leaders ALWAYS find a way to get their teammates to the finish line and achieve their goals against all odds? Are they lucky, blessed or immune to setbacks? Nope. Great leaders experience times of great turbulence, challenge and change in every aspect of their lives–but it is their attitude and mindset that carries them and their teammates to greater heights in the FACE of that change.

Leading through Change means being ruled by the hope of success versus the fear of failure, embracing setbacks as a chance to learn and excel, and never letting the pursuit of perfection hinder progress. In her Leading through Change keynote, Robyn shares incredible stories and videos from the worlds of Adventure Racing and Firefighting – that illustrate how great leaders succeed against all odds and triumph in the face of adversity.

Robyn’s stories and meaningful messages will not only entertain and amaze…your attendees will walk away with some easily applied leadership skills that will help them shatter the norm, see challenges versus roadblocks, and inspire their teammates to once again see a future full of possibilities…

Stay SAFER: How Great Leaders Inspire “Commitment” versus “Compliance”
In her “why bad accidents happen to good people” safety keynote, Robyn Benincasa takes your team on a compelling and unforgettable multimedia adventure, including video footage and analysis of preventable disasters and thrilling safety success stories from the worlds of adventure sports and firefighting. This World Champion Adventure Racer, San Diego Firefighter, and New York Times Best Selling Author offers unique, simple, yet extremely effective tools for inspiring the people that we work with and work for to be SAFER every day!

Why do bad accidents happen to good people? According to research, it’s as simple as ABCD:

A – Attitude: not me, not this time, not my place, not my job
B – Background and preparation
C – Circumstances (preventable or non-preventable? Hint: 80% are preventable!)
D – Decisions

How do we inspire people to be SAFER?:

S – Synergy: seeing one another as TEAMMATES vs. simply colleagues. We are better…together!
A – Adapt – situational awareness, focus on what it takes to “win” when it comes to safety/survival versus “not lose”
F – Follow your R’s! Rules, roles, regulations and routine procedures restore order to extraordinary circumstances
E – Educate and Engage: move your teammates from compliance (because they’ll be caught) to commitment (because they CARE)
R – Respect the risk/benefit ratio of your actions, and respect yourself, your teammates and your family to DWR (Do What’s Right)

Attendees will go home feeling truly inspired and empowered to keep themselves and their teammates safe because they ‘want’ to, not because they ‘have’ to. And they will leave with the desire to be a hero to their new teammates–not just the kind of hero that rushes into danger to save them, but the kind of hero that KEEPS them from endangering themselves and others. With a SAFER mindset, we ensure that the most important goal of all is achieved at the end of the day…everyone goes home.