ADDICTED TO DANGER

This powerful and deeply personal keynote presentation offers a raw and insightful perspective on mental health and human resilience. Designed to inspire and engage, it takes a story driven, experiential approach to healing and personal growth. Themes include identity, adversity, addiction to intensity, the impact of early conditioning, and the deep inner work required to break patterns and build a life rooted in purpose and meaning. Through lived experience, this presentation provides grounded, relatable insights for lasting change.

Elia shares his journey as both an adventurer and a survivor, exploring the psychology of those drawn to dangerous pursuits and the immense mental strength required to overcome hardship. Through stories from his own life and from the people he has stood beside in extreme environments, he illuminates the emotional weight carried by high performers and the unseen costs of pushing limits.

From a turbulent youth to breaking a world record in powerlifting, his path has been anything but straight. As a young man in the entertainment industry, he navigated challenges around identity, self worth, and perfectionism. The very strategies that once helped him endure became both superpowers in the high mountains and the roots of an addictive relationship with achievement and risk.

He survived avalanches on Mt. Everest, broke his back in a paragliding accident, investigated fatalities on the world’s tallest peaks, assisted in recovering bodies above eight thousand meters, and rescued partners high on Everest, all while filming in some of the harshest environments on Earth. Each moment served as a mirror, revealing the internal struggles that so many people face but rarely name.

But high performance above the clouds came at a devastating cost. After summiting K2 and leading the most significant expedition of his career, his world collapsed, exposing the fractures beneath a lifetime of pushing too hard.

Throughout this journey, Elia began to recognize a deeper truth: that the stories unfolding on Everest and K2 were reflections of the stories unfolding within him. The search for answers in the high mountains mirrored the search for answers in his own life. While helping families seek closure on the world’s highest peaks, he found himself confronting long held patterns and the parts of himself that had been carrying the weight of unprocessed loss, responsibility, and longing.

In this deeply personal presentation, he interweaves stories of confronting the past, rebuilding connections with family and partners, and ultimately repairing the fractured relationship with himself. His self led healing journey took him back into nature, where profound insight helped him understand the roots of his internal struggles. Through this work, he discovered that what breaks us often points the way toward what can ultimately heal us.

He helps audiences see the transformative potential of nature, connection, community, and presence. He teaches that safety and wholeness are not found through avoidance, but through integration, awareness, and compassion.

By sharing this message of strength, healing, and hope, he helps people recognize their own patterns, while revealing the extraordinary resilience that emerges when we face hardship directly. He underscores that Addicted to Danger is not just an extreme adventure. It is a story of reclamation, identity, and meaningful growth.

He invites audiences to join him in exploring the depths of human resilience and to discover the possibility of healing, no matter how far one has fallen or how high one has climbed.