Two Diagnoses and a Career Change
The keynote. Perseverance and adaptation told straight, by someone who is still doing it rather than remembering it.
Any audience, any scale
The 45 minutes they'll still be talking about.
Steve Pointon is a BACP-registered counsellor, a two-time cancer survivor, and a former frontline manager of 200-plus people. Put him in front of a room of Specsavers colleagues and he says the thing everyone in it has been avoiding.
Email Steve
or call 07827 666554
Headspace, wecare and your mental health first aiders give people somewhere to go. Steve is the reason they go.
You have more provision than most retailers your size, and none of this replaces any of it. Steve works one layer up: in the room, on the day, saying out loud the thing that makes someone finally open the app they downloaded in January.
Your own profession already measured this.
In 2025, a University of Bradford study led by Neil Retallic, your head of professional development, surveyed 1,303 UK optometrists.
- 0%
- reported moderate-to-severe psychological distress
- 0%
- of those in distress had never accessed professional support
The second figure is where Steve does his work. Getting someone to walk through a door they already know about is a different skill from installing the door.
Retallic, N. et al., Elevated levels of mental health issues among optometrists in the United Kingdom, Ophthalmic & Physiological Optics, August 2025.
What he does with 45 minutes.
Four talks, each shaped on a call beforehand around who is actually in the room. He is not a motivational speaker and not an academic, which are the two things most event organisers are trying to avoid.
The Conversation You’ve Been Avoiding
What to say when someone on your team is visibly struggling, why saying nothing feels safer than it is, and what happens after you speak.
Store partners, managers, team leaders
Leading Through Loss
A colleague dies. A customer of twenty years stops coming in. Someone returns from a bereavement and the whole team goes quiet around them.
Managers and HR
Well Enough to Do the Job
Burnout, compassion fatigue, and the weight of delivering bad news to patients, from someone who has sat on the receiving end of that conversation twice.
Clinical audiences
Keynote (45–60 min) · Breakout or workshop · Panel contribution or chairing · Virtual and hybrid · Half or full day for smaller cohorts
“I am a grown man, and what he has to say and how he says it can't fail to inspire and motivate you. I will never forget it.”
Steve Pointon BSc (Hons) MBACP
Steve retrained as a counsellor during the hardest years of his life: two cancer diagnoses, a career upended, and a decision to build something useful out of both. He talks about resilience because he has had to do it.
Before counselling he spent years as a senior manager in the security industry, running public-facing operations with teams of over 200 people and a client portfolio above £4 million. He knows the difference between a wellbeing policy and a manager who can hold their team together on a bad day.
- BACP-registered counsellor
- Board member, International Kidney Cancer Coalition
- Community development officer, Action Kidney Cancer
Selected engagements
- 2026European Association of Urology, LondonPanel
- 2025IKCC Global Summit, MadridSession moderator
- 2024IKCC Global Summit, South KoreaSpeaker
- 2024WECAN Academy, BarcelonaSpeaker
- 2023ESMO Congress, MadridKeynote
- —European Oncology Nurses SocietyPatient perspective
- —Ipsen, Eisai, MSD and othersPharmaceutical
What it costs.
A keynote is
£1,500
plus travel at cost, agreed in advance.
Where a day can work harder, we quote it as a package and the cost per session comes down: a second session for a different audience, a manager workshop alongside the keynote, or a run of regional dates.
Every talk is shaped to your audience on a call beforehand. If you're working to a set budget for this event, tell Steve what it is and he'll tell you straight away what he can do.
And if it lands, there's more.
None of this is worth quoting before a first session, so treat it as the shape of a longer relationship rather than a menu.
Training
Half and full-day workshops, in person, in small groups. Built around a rota for store and area managers, or as support-office cohorts in Guernsey, Whiteley and Nottingham.
From £950
Retainers
A scheduled monthly hour with a qualified counsellor for your MHFA and Wellbeing Advocate networks, so the volunteers holding the hard conversations have somewhere to put them.
From £450 a month
When something serious happens
A sudden death, a traumatic incident in store, a restructure that puts a team under strain for months. Steve can come in for an agreed period to steady the room and support the people in it.
Scoped individually
Three steps, no procurement pain.
A 20-minute call
With Steve, not a salesperson. Your event, your audience, and what you want them to walk out with.
One session
A single talk, at one event, for one audience. Everything after that depends on how it goes.
Then we talk about scale
If it works, we look at what a wider programme across stores or support offices could look like.
Which event are you thinking of?
Send Steve the date and who's in the room and he'll come straight back to you. If you'd rather talk it through first, that works too.
Email Steve
or call 07827 666554