NEWTON CHENG
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Former Director of Health + Performance at Google
A former Google leader, world record setting powerlifter, and champion of personal resilience, Newton inspires audiences to lean into their vulnerabilities to thrive as leaders.
Newton Cheng is a husband and father, champion powerlifter, and previously served as Director of Health + Performance at Google. He models and teaches a unique performance-oriented approach to vulnerable leadership that he’s developed throughout his career. His goal is to break the stigma around mental health in the workplace and beyond so that we can achieve our most ambitious goals without sacrificing our ability to take care of ourselves and each other.
Drawing on his unique background at Google as well as his journey to becoming a world champion athlete, he has unique expertise in the intersections of health & wellbeing, and performance of individuals and teams. Despite still working as an executive at Google, Newton has openly shared about his struggles with mental health and burnout in order to model what it looks like to pierce the stigma around mental health.
Exclusively represented by BrightSight Speakers, Newton has spent his 16-year career at Google developing, launching and scaling global programs aimed at helping Googlers to thrive. Today he oversees a global portfolio of Google’s physical and digital health & wellbeing amenities. He spends much of his time exploring how Google can leverage spaces and services, community, culture and technology to support the physical, mental, social, and spiritual health of Googlers, their families, and our neighbors.
As a powerlifter, he has set multiple world, US, and California state records, and is a world and 8-time US national champion.
Newton was born and raised in Macomb, IL. He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an MBA from University of California, Berkeley.
Speech topics
Speech topics
THE OTHEr HALF OF LEADERSHIP: THE POWER OF LEADING WITH FULL HUMANITY
THE OTHEr HALF OF LEADERSHIP: THE POWER OF LEADING WITH FULL HUMANITY
You want your people performing at their best—fully committed and in it for the long haul. Psychological safety is supposed to enable that, and many organizations have invested heavily in training, campaigns, and culture initiatives around it.
The theory is right. The environment still hasn’t changed. Why?
Newton Cheng has a unique vantage point. He spent seventeen years at Google leading the company’s global wellbeing programs—yet burned out twice during that time. As a leader, he implemented psychological safety practices within his own teams and saw firsthand what worked, what didn’t, and why. He’s also a world champion powerlifter who understands what true high performance demands from the body and mind, and he was publicly honest about his struggles with mental health and burnout at a time when executives simply weren’t.
His methodology comes from that combination: practitioner, senior leader, elite performer, and survivor—not theory alone, but seventeen years of experimentation and observation.
The result is a talk where audiences don’t just listen—they practice. They leave more capable, not just inspired. Newton offers leaders what they were never taught: how to create the conditions where people actually bring their best.
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