Keynote Speaker · Calgary, AB · Available Worldwide
She Will Move
Your Room.
Nicole Zeller doesn’t deliver polished platitudes about resilience. She delivers the real thing — built across three decades of beating a progressive disease, raising millions, and refusing to live diluted. Your audience will leave differently than they arrived.
Response within 48 hours
$3.5M
Raised for Cystic
Fibrosis Research
110K+
Views on CrossFit HQ’s
“Fighting for Breath”
2
University of Calgary
Degrees, incl. 4.0 GPA
25%
Lung function. Still
completed the CrossFit Open.
The Proof
Fighting for Breath
In 2017, filmmaker Laura O’Grady documented five weeks of Nicole’s life as she completed the CrossFit Open, despite having approximately 25% lung function, placing near last, and never once considering stopping.
CrossFit HQ shared the documentary. 110,000 people watched. What they saw wasn’t an athlete performing for a camera. They saw what it actually looks like to refuse to let a disease write your ending.
That is what Nicole brings to your stage.
▶
Fighting for Breath
directed by Laura O’Grady | Telus TV | 2017
Featured on CrossFit HQ · 110,000+ views · Doc Seaman Individual Philanthropist Award, 2014
Signature Talks
Each talk is customized to your audience and event. Nicole speaks across corporate, healthcare, philanthropy, and women’s leadership contexts.
Resilience · Keynote · 45–60 min · Healthcare
0.00122% — What Rare Teaches You About Survival
Only 100,000 people worldwide share Nicole’s diagnosis. She is one of them — still existing, still building, still refusing the script the disease tried to write. This talk dismantles the comfortable mythology of resilience and replaces it with something far more useful: a set of specific, unglamorous choices made under real pressure. Audiences leave with a recalibrated relationship to limitation and a vocabulary for what persistence actually requires.
Leadership · Keynote · 45–75 min · Corporate
Built to Last — The Architecture of Impact-Driven Leadership
Nicole opened a CrossFit gym and built a foundation that raised $3.5 million, had a research lab named in her honour, and earned 2 university degrees — the last one at 53, with a 4.0 GPA. This is not a talk about hustle. It’s a talk about what happens when you build with purpose so clear that other people’s doubt becomes irrelevant. For leaders who want to move from performing impact to creating it.
Philanthropy · Keynote · 45–60 min · Nonprofit
Turning Passion Into a Research Lab — The Summit Foundation Story
A deep-dive into how one woman channelled personal urgency into $3.5 million for cystic fibrosis research and a named laboratory at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine. This is a practical and personal account of what it takes to turn a cause into a movement — including what failed, what was harder than expected, and what the money actually bought. Built for nonprofit boards, fundraising teams, and donors who want to understand impact from the inside.
Women’s Leadership · Keynote · 45–60 min · Women’s Events
Without Apology — On Refusing to Live Diluted
The version of yourself that stays quiet, plays smaller, and hedges every instinct to keep the peace — that version has a cost. Nicole spent years calculating it. This talk is for women who are done with the math. Unflinching, funny, and built on lived experience rather than conjecture, it explores what it actually takes to stop performing capability and start inhabiting it. Designed for women’s leadership conferences, Gen-X audiences, and anyone who has been called too much.
Working With Nicole
What to Expect
Customized, Not Canned
Every engagement begins with a conversation about your audience, your event’s theme, and what you need the room to feel at the end. The talk is built from there, not pulled from a catalogue.
No Green Room Diva
Nicole is the easiest person on your logistics team’s call sheet. She arrives prepared, asks good questions, and leaves your audience — not her own brand — as the priority. She has done this enough times to know the difference.
The Real Thing
The stories are not polished into palatability. The lessons are not wrapped in reassurance. Nicole’s value to a room is that she tells the truth about hard things with enough wit and precision that people actually want to hear it
Ready to Book
Let’s Put Her On Your Stage.
Available for keynotes, panels, corporate events, healthcare conferences, philanthropy galas, and women’s leadership summits. Calgary-based. Available across Canada and internationally.
Stay fierce. The world will adjust.