Built From Broken

A true story about fear, rock bottom, and what becomes possible on the other side of both.

Dan Powell looks like a success story from the outside — and he is. VP of Technology. Financially secure. Three decades of showing up to the gym before the sun comes up. A marriage that changed everything.

What the résumé doesn't show is the other story. The years of numbing something that success couldn't touch. The night that scared him sober. The phone call that split his life into before and after. The long, unglamorous work of becoming someone different — without blowing up his career, his reputation, or his life to do it.

Resilience, mental health, and the kind of transformation that actually maps to real life.

This isn't a rock-bottom story dressed up for a corporate stage. It's a senior executive — still working, still leading, still showing up — talking honestly about the gap between external success and internal peace, and what it took to close it. Dan's healthcare and pharmacy background gives him standing in rooms where those topics carry real weight: mental health awareness events, recovery-adjacent conferences, HR and wellness initiatives, and leadership offsites where the closing keynote needs to land somewhere deeper than tactics. Audiences leave with something they didn't expect from a leadership speaker: a real story that gave them permission to be honest about their own.

BEST FIT FOR

• Mental health awareness and wellness events
• Healthcare, pharmacy, and behavioral health conferences
• Corporate offsites and leadership events needing a resilience-themed keynote
• Addiction treatment and recovery industry conferences
• HR and people-leader audiences focused on workplace culture and employee wellbeing

Format: 45–60 min keynote | available for half-day and full-day events and workshops

The full, unguarded version. For rooms where a real story told without pretense is exactly what's needed.

Dan gave a version of this talk to a room full of teenagers at a church summer camp. He called it one of the most powerful and filling nights of his life. Not because it went perfectly — but because the room felt it. The honesty landed. And something changed, in both directions.

For faith-based audiences, the talk goes further and stays longer in the harder places — the loss, the fear, the night he prayed for one more morning, and what happened when that prayer was answered. This isn't a polished corporate keynote with the rough edges smoothed out. It's the real thing, shaped for a room that's ready for it.

Dan speaks to churches, youth camps, men's ministries, recovery groups, and faith-based conferences. Every engagement is a conversation first — because the right talk for your room depends on who's in it.

BEST FIT FOR

• Church services, conferences, and special events
• Youth camps and student ministry events
• Men's ministries and recovery groups
• Faith-based conferences and community events

Format: 30–60 min | honorarium-based | every engagement starts with a conversation

"The best things in life often come wrapped in fear."