Daniel Costa Gil's biography
- Resilience specialist who has experienced multiple personal tragedies
- High-performance coach working in professional football for over a decade
- Empowers organisations to thrive in the face of adversity, change, and loss
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.
Daniel's showreel and videos
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.
Resilient Leadership When Everything Is Changing
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.
The Anatomy Of A High Performer
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.
Why Resilience Is Your Most Valuable Asset Today
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.
Why we recommend booking Daniel
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.
Check Daniel's availability
Trusted by Atlassian Williams Formula 1 Racing, GTR (Govia Thameslink Railway), theMakings, MicDrop, StoryCast
It goes without saying that Daniel's story is truly impactful and inspiring, However, it’s disingenuous to say this is where the focus should lie. His commitment to using his experience to meaningfully engage with the audience around their own challenges is what makes him stand out. His meticulous dedication to high-level presentation skills, combined with grounding his story in psychological theory is clear, prompting the whole group to evaluate their own understanding of how to overcome adversity, no matter the scale. These factors together made our session with him a truly memorable experience and left a meaningful impact on everyone in the team.
Chris Treece
Atlassian Williams Formula 1 Racing
Daniel was the keynote speaker at the opening session of Rail Wellbeing Live, a free online event for everyone in the rail industry which engaged 12k people in 2026. The opening session was a live event broadcast from the UK’s busiest train station London Liverpool Street, with the additional challenge of some unexpected station announcements. Daniel delivered a hugely impactful and moving keynote on resilience that resonated with so many viewers and will have a lasting impact. He later joined the panel discussion continuing to provide sage advice in response to audience questions, delivering them with clarity and decency. Daniel was nothing short of excellent and I’m so pleased that he played such an impactful part of our wellbeing event.
Ruth Busby OBE
GTR (Govia Thameslink Railway)
It’s rare to come across a speaker that completely changes the way you think and feel about a topic. Daniel is one of them. His keynotes are nothing short of extraordinary; they’re as heart warming as they are heart breaking and they leave every audience with more ambition, resilience and hope.
