Before the stage, there was a door.

For most of his adult life Brian's office was the open door of an airplane at altitude. He started jumping young, and quickly became the person other jumpers asked about the part nobody could see: what the parachute was actually doing, and who we want to be when we are flying it.

That question turned into a career. He designed hundreds of new parachutes, built them, flew them as a test pilot, and taught thousands of people how to fly them safely. His designs are still in the air all over the world. The teaching never stopped.

Along the way he learned the thing that this whole site is about: fear does not completely go away with experience. It gets quieter, and it gets useful, if you know how to hold it and learn what it wants from us.

Then the fall that should have ended everything. At what could have been the peak of his skydiving career, Brian was forced to trade his parachute for a wheelchair. Brian tells that story on stage, and he tells it passionately, so it is not retold here. What matters is what came after: a long recovery, a body that had to be taught to trust itself again, and a question that could not be answered with more skill. What do you do with fear when you can't walk away from it?

Following his physical and psychological recovery, Brian set a new goal, to become one of the best in the world.

Competition came naturally to someone obsessed with optimization. Brian competed at the highest level of the sport, and won an X-Games title doing it.

He will tell you the medal was never the point. The point was learning what it takes to perform on demand, in front of people, to bring your highest self into the spotlight. That lesson is in every keynote he gives.

The search for optimal performance sent Brian into Contemplative Psychology: the study of attention, of the breath, of how a mind tends to behave under threat, and what can be done about it. Eight years of study at the undergraduate and graduate school level were followed by many years of independent research.

This intensive exploration gave words to things he had been doing at the door for years without words. This work made key human principles comprehensible and applicable to people who would never stand in that door in the sky, which turned out to be almost everyone.

Transcending Fear was written not just for skydivers, but for Humanity. Pilots, Special Forces Personnel, surgeons, salespeople, parents and a surprising number of musicians wrote to say the same thing: this book is not just about a sport, it is about my life.

Three more books followed, each a step further from the sky and closer to the kitchen table. The newest, LIFT, is the one Brian hands to people in the middle of the hardest seasons of life.

Today the work happens in rooms: conference halls, boardrooms, Zoom windows, and trails in the forest. The subject is always the same one, fear and what to do with it, and why.

One of the most passionate and well-spoken orators you will ever witness, Brian Germain brings to us a message that the world deeply needs to hear, in a time we need to hear it: Our ultimate journey is from Fear to Love, and the methods of resurrecting courage amidst a terrifying world are the skill he avidly wishes to share.