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Neal O’Farrell

In-Person Fee Range:
$5,001 - $7,500
Fee Details
Traveling from:
Ohio

Why Book

  • Neal is the nation’s Number 1 Consumer Security Advocate and a nationally respected expert who has been fighting cybercrime and identity theft around the world for thirty years.
  • Neal is a captivating, entertaining, and enlightening speaker and storyteller, and with a special and very unique take on mental wellness, brain health, and stress management.

Biography

Neal O’Farrell is an award-winning and veteran cybersecurity and privacy expert who has figured out how an understanding of the neuroscience of trust can be used to improve leadership and management, brand and reputation, marketing and sales performance, customer acquisition and retention, and even personal and career development.

Neal’s path to this point was winding, to say the least. All he ever wanted was to be Ireland’s most famous dressmaker, and be the third generation to take over a famous Irish fashion business whose clients included a who’s who of the world’s rich and famous – from Coco Chanel and Yves St. Laurent, to the Duchess of Westminster and the Queen of Siam.

Instead he became one of the world’s most dangerous codemakers, at least in the eyes of the NSA, and leader of a disruptive privacy project that threatened to bring the NSA’s global electronic surveillance networks (codename Echelon) to a grinding halt. The story is chronicled in his upcoming book The Man from Intrepid.

Today Neal uses his nearly 40 years of global experience in cybersecurity and privacy to teach meaningful and relevant lessons about trust, leadership, and even personal and brand development.

He has spoken on all kinds of topics to all kinds of audiences – as a keynote for the Institute of Management Accountants annual conference in Las Vegas, to the growth in surveillance capitalism at, ironically, the headquarters of Facebook in Menlo Park California.

In 2009 Neal founded the non-profit Identity Theft Council and has won multiple awards for his work in fraud prevention and victim support. He currently leads Foster Warriors, another non-profit with a goal to help America’s 400,000 foster kids and teens pursue studies and careers in the field of cybersecurity.

Neal is an avid adventurer. At the age of 17 he ran away from home, hitchhiking his way across Europe and ending up in Casablanca Morocco. In the true spirit of the Irish immigrant, he came to America by boat, delivering a sailing yacht from France to the Caribbean, via North Africa, in the middle of Winter.

A lover of old movies (he was a Humphrey Bogart fan since the age of 10, hence his interest in Casablanca), Neal’s grand uncle made Maureen O’Hara’s first movie ever, in 1934, and his cousin Michelle Dockery played Lady Mary Crawley in the hit TV series Downton Abbey.

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Programs

Get A Grip

What can an award-winning cybersecurity veteran teach you about mental wellness, brain health, and stress elimination? How about how it took him just five minutes to figure out how to tame 50 years of mental illnesses, and 30 years of chronic stress that eventually led to complete burnout and a close call with suicide.

OVERVIEW

After decades of untreated mental illness and chronic stress finally put an end to Neal’s forty-year cybersecurity career, the first thing he did was to reject his doctor’s advice of therapy and medications.

Rather than form a dependence on the obvious, instead Neal embarked on a much different journey. He wanted to find out how the brain really worked, what made some people mentally ill and others mentally well. That enquiry led to a three-year investigation into the mind and the brain, the foundation of mental illness and wellness, and how the brain manages things like happiness, joy, optimism, memory, love, and everything we think, feel, and are.

Not only did he dig deep into the science behind all the therapies for brain health, from mindfulness and breathing, to sweet potatoes and cow hugging, he also started trying these therapies on himself to see if they actually worked and if they would help him get a grip on his own demons.

****ing Stress

How I tamed my chronic and nearly deadly stress through a mixture of mindfulness, breathing, and some hacking skills I’d learned from a lifetime in cybersecurity.

After nearly thirty years of chronic stress, I had assumed it was unavoidable, inevitable. Until it nearly killed me. My stress came from a mixture of untreated mental illnesses that I struggled with for nearly 50 years; the incredible physical and psychological burden they inflicted; and the additional stress of trying to hide those illnesses so that they didn’t derail my reputation in an equally stressful career of cybersecurity. A career where we all thought that one failure, one serious security or data breach, could be a reputation killer and career-ender.

It turns out in the end the thing that nearly ended it all was the stress. Which also turned out to be all completely imaginary, in every way all in my head. If only I’d known that 30 years previously, how different my life might have been.

In this presentation, I’ll share some very open, candid, and personal insights about stress – from my own personal experiences, from speaking to hundreds of others who have struggled with chronic stress and burnout, and from the dozens of mental health professionals I’ve spoken with.

I’ll share what I learned about the mind, brain, and body connections of stress; how stress works – physically, biologically, psychologically, and chemically; and how doctors and neuroscientists believe we can tame and even completely eliminate stress.

And I’ll reveal what I discovered when I tried these techniques on myself, and especially when I approached my own stress from a cyber risk management perspective.

Fake it 'Til You Make It – the importance of self-belief in career growth.
Just Trust Us – the importance of trust in business and brand growth.
Cybersecurity, Privacy, and Identity theft.
Consumer Behavior.
Using Social Media to Build Customer Trust.

NEED MORE IDEAS?

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Speak with our experienced Program Consultants.

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NEED MORE IDEAS?

We are here to help.
Speak with our experienced Program Consultants.

Call us or Live Chat Below

NEED MORE IDEAS?

We are here to help.
Speak with our experienced Program Consultants.

Call us or Live Chat Below

NEED MORE IDEAS?

We are here to help.
Speak with our experienced Program Consultants.

Call us or Live Chat Below

NEED MORE IDEAS?

We are here to help.
Speak with our experienced Program Consultants.

Call us or Live Chat Below

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