Available to book
Daniel Costa Gil
Empower your leaders to adapt and evolve under pressure with Daniel Costa Gil, resilience specialist and high-performance coach. Daniel equips organisations facing disruption and uncertainty with evidence-based mental toughness tools. His strategies help teams become truly unbreakable, developed through his experience of immense personal adversity, 15 years of academic research, and elite athlete coaching.
Daniel Costa Gil is a resilience specialist and high-performance coach who helps individuals and teams face adversity with clarity and strength.
Aged just seven, Daniel survived a lethal injection, and by the age of 29 he had lost both his parents and three brothers to suicide, murder, and cancer. Rather than being defined by what happened to him, he devoted his life to understanding how human beings adapt, lead, and evolve under extraordinary pressure.
Daniel holds a Master's degree focused on mental toughness, resilience, and self-efficacy in elite footballers. He spent a decade coaching inside professional football across South Africa and the UK where he worked with athletes and teams navigating high-stakes performance environments. His academic rigour combines with real-world coaching experience to create frameworks that translate across industries.
Daniel's work addresses the specific challenges leaders face today: AI disruption, technological transformation, constant uncertainty, and unrelenting performance demands. He helps organisations build genuine resilience rather than surface-level coping strategies, showing teams how to reframe pressure as a catalyst for growth and teaching them to operate effectively when stakes are highest.
Daniel's methods are grounded in both research and the lived proof that people can emerge from crises stronger and more focused than before. Audiences learn practical techniques for maintaining performance under stress, strategies for leading through uncertainty, and a fundamentally different relationship with change.
Book Daniel to give your team a fresh perspective on pressure, change, and what it truly means to be unbreakable.
Topics, sessions and talks
Daniel Costa Gil shares his extraordinary journey of surviving unimaginable loss by his late twenties, redefining what resilience really means in leadership and organisational contexts. This keynote emphasises integrating individual's lived experiences, reclaiming meaning, and fostering the kind of resilience that compounds over time. Attendees will gain a transformative understanding of pressure, recovery, and sustainable high performance, and leave with the certainty that their most challenging moments can become their greatest strengths.
Daniel Costa Gil addresses the evolving conversation around mental health in leadership, highlighting the costly stigma of vulnerability that leads to burnout and talent loss. Drawing from his personal experiences with loss and trauma, he offers a unique perspective that encourages leaders to embrace their humanity. Attendees will learn how to foster psychological safety within their organisations and gain practical, evidence-based tools to navigate the mental challenges of modern leadership, ultimately transforming internal dialogues.
In a rapidly changing world, where 84% of C-suite leaders acknowledge the accelerating pace of change, stability has become the essential leadership skill, surpassing strategy. Daniel Costa Gil shares his personal journey through catastrophic loss and elite performance environments, providing leaders with a practical framework to navigate uncertainty. Attendees will learn how to process change without paralysis, rebuild team trust amidst uncertainty, and transform disruption into a competitive advantage, making it invaluable for teams facing restructures or market volatility.
In this talk, Daniel Costa Gil discusses how high performance is not a personality trait but a set of psychological conditions that can be developed. Drawing from his experience in professional football and his Master's research on mental toughness, he explores what differentiates those who excel under pressure from those who falter. Attendees will learn how identity influences responses, the role of self-efficacy in outcomes, and how effective teams foster a culture of high performance.
Daniel Costa Gil highlights that the primary challenge organisations face today is not AI itself, but the humans managing it. As AI transforms industries, success hinges on leaders and teams developing psychological resilience, emotional intelligence, and stability amidst change. Drawing from recent research on AI anxiety and human adaptability, Daniel shares his personal journey of reinvention and provides insights on creating the human infrastructure essential for effective AI transformation. Attendees will learn how to empower their teams for success in an evolving landscape.
Daniel's experience of multiple personal tragedies combined with his 15 years of academic study, including a Masters thesis in mental toughness, and a decade coaching in professional sport, give him a unqiue perspective when addressing performance under pressure. His frameworks translate directly to leadership teams navigating constant organisational change, particularly where resilience needs to move beyond surface-level interventions into genuine behavioural shift.
Testimonials
often considered together
Josh Connolly
Mental Health
Workplace Wellbeing
Stress Management
Ronan Harrington
Resilience
Mental Health
Men's Health
Jonny Huntington
Resilience
Adversity
Growth Mindset
frequently asked questions
Something we've not covered here?
To book Daniel Costa Gil, email daniel.costa.gil@getapeptalk.com or call PepTalk on +44 20 3835 2929 (UK) or +1 737 888 5112 (US), and one of our speaker agents will contact you within hours to confirm Daniel's availability and speaking fee. If you can, please include your budget upfront – it helps us fast-track your request. It’s also helpful to know the date, format (virtual or in-person), location, and about your audience.
Daniel Costa Gil structures his sessions around a personal narrative framework, drawing on documented biographical events — including surviving a lethal injection at age seven and losing five family members to suicide, murder, and cancer by his late twenties — to ground research-based concepts in lived proof. He translates this narrative into practical frameworks, informed by his Master's-level research into mental toughness, resilience, and self-efficacy in elite athletes, which he developed over a decade coaching in professional football across South Africa and the UK.
Daniel Costa Gil speaks on resilience in leadership, mental health and psychological safety, and navigating uncertainty and organisational change. He holds a Master's degree focused on mental toughness, resilience, and self-efficacy, and spent a decade coaching inside professional football across South Africa and the UK.
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Three to six months ahead is comfortable for most events, and 12 months is better for large conferences, peak-season dates or one specific in-demand speaker. Shorter timelines are workable, and PepTalk regularly fills last-minute and replacement bookings within days. Availability is the constraint, so get in touch as soon as you have a date.
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