- London, UK
Charlie Walker Keynote Speaker
- Cycled, skied, kayaked and walked over 50,000 miles through 70 countries
- Four-time recipient of the Transglobe Expedition Trust's "Mad but Marvellous" grant
- Guest on "The Joe Rogan Experience podcast"
Charlie Walker's Biography
Charlie Walker is an adventurer, writer and motivational speaker. His many daring journeys have provided him with countless experiences with which to communicate his key themes of ambition, perseverance and positivity. In 2022 Charlie spent two months trekking along the surface of frozen rivers and over Arctic sea ice in northeast Russia in order to visit remote-living groups of indigenous Siberians. The journey involved camping in temperatures as low as -50ºC and began just before Putin launched his war in Ukraine. After the invasion began – with an atmosphere of heightened political tension – the expedition culminated in a four-week stint in prison on spurious charges of photographing sensitive military sites.
Charlie’s longest expedition was a 4-year bicycle journey reaching the furthest cape in each of Europe, Asia and Africa. On this journey he traversed 60 countries, confronting extremes of weather, remoteness and physical exhaustion. Next Charlie completed a world-first 8,000km triathlon traversing the entire Europe-Asia border. This expedition was an investigation into the concept of man-made borders and spanned from the midwinter snowfields of the Arctic tundra to the Bosphorus in Istanbul via the scorched Kazakh steppe in high summer.
In 2014 Charlie descended the Lulua, a little-known tributary of the Congo River, in a leaky dugout canoe. This journey into effectively uncharted territory of the DRC was beset by rapids, waterfalls, hippos, crocodiles and violent bouts of malaria and typhoid fever.
Charlie has also walked 1,000 miles solo across the Gobi desert, trekked 600 miles across Mongolia with a semi-feral pony and a stray dog he found in the forest, and traversed Papua New Guinea by foot and paddle reaching little-known communities living among some of the world’s least accessible jungle.
Charlie is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a four-time recipient of the Transglobe Expedition Trust ‘Mad but Marvellous’ award. He has written two books and his work has featured in a range of publications including The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and Geographical magazine, as well as BBC Radio 4 and the World Service.
Charlie Walker's Speaking Topics
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• Strength Through Adversity:
How overcoming self-imposed problems is the best preparation for the challenges we don't choose but are forced to face.
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• The "Doorstep Mile":
How the first steps of any undertaking (getting out your door) are always the hardest. The importance of overcoming inertia and simply setting things in motion, then navigating obstacles as they arise. Whatever you're planning, set a start date and stick to it. "Someday" isn't an actual date in the calendar.
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• Lessons from Failure:
How failure is - by definition - more formative than success and is a crucial phase of the journey towards succeeding.
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• Embracing the Audacity of Ambition:
How thinking big and aiming high are the best use of one's time and efforts. Small goals can only lead to small gains.
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• Cultivating positive mental health:
How I coped in the hard times (deadly blizzards, extreme loneliness, and a Siberian prison cell) and how that informed my awareness of mental hygiene in the good times.
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• Managing Risk:
How to develop a sense of acceptable levels of risk, and how that level can shift and create greater opportunity as experience grows.
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• The "Zoom Lens of Perspective":
How to balance the macro view vs the micro view, and choosing when to re-focus so you can see the woods as well as the trees.
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• Resilience:
How to build tenacity in one's day to day existence that can then be applied when the chips are down.
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