From Open Heart Surgery To Keynote Business Speaker & Changing Industries
In many ways, Ian Hawkins should not be with us to share his amazing story. Ian was born with congenital heart disease in the 1970s, a time when only 10% of patients were expected to reach adulthood.
Ian survived long periods in hospital, major surgery and beat the odds to get back home. While doctors promised a “normal life”, Ian decided that “normal” wasn’t for him. Success, in this case, was layered with and forged by adversity and traumatic rehabilitation which still echoes through Ian’s life.
Now a highly successful business events moderator whose work has been seen on major platforms including CBS, Reuters, and BBC World, Ian is the new coveted lead man in the frame to work with JP Morgan as their go-to moderator. Not bad for a comprehensive school boy from Essex.
It’s been an amazing journey of having to do and be more than everyone else to achieve his dreams.
But Ian, who regularly works with blue chip companies such as Natwest and Microsoft, and moderates over 50 industry-leading conferences with big events companies WBR and CDM in the US, says life was not always plain sailing. “I still find it hard,” he says, “to talk about parts of my illness. When someone else has held your heart in their hands it changes you. When you’ve faced that sort of vulnerability, it gives you a very individual strength. But it’s also driven me as an entrepreneur to make things better in life for the people and businesses I work with.”
Ian credits his ability to understand storytelling as his way out of alcoholism – he is now approaching eight years sober – and for his response to being hospitalised with COVID:
“With my medical history, I was among the most vulnerable to the COVID epidemic. On my first night in hospital, I was facing a future where I would be unable to work. My solution was to launch CVTV, a company that supports jobseekers in finding work. I built the website on my iPad, from my hospital bed when I wasn’t sure I’d be leaving it.”
CVTV is now thriving with customers from graduates to management and C-suite and Ian has made another long journey back to health.
Now asked to speak on topics including how the stories we tell ourselves affect the world, overcoming adversity and how technology changes people’s lives, Ian is a lively and quick-witted interview subject. He holds a unique and key position of influence with some of the biggest brands out there, Ian’s story really is a hero’s journey of overcoming the odds towards amazing success and gives us a firm reminder that anything is possible no matter the hand we have been dealt.
