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You'd expect someone with a name like Bear Grylls to be as hard as nails. And sure enough, the speaker at this London Business Forum event was as tough as they come. In 1998, he became the youngest Briton to climb Everest, just two years after breaking his back in a parachuting accident with the SAS.

He has since completed a series of risky stunts for charity, including an Atlantic crossing by rigid inflatable boat. He has also presented several television series, the most recent of which was Born Survivor, a guide to extreme bush-craft that saw him tearing chunks of flesh from a dead zebra with his teeth and drinking his own urine.

To reiterate, he's a hard man. However, during this event at the British Library Conference Centre, that's not how he came across. In a surprisingly moving speech, he described his many moments of fear and self-doubt; his overwhelming love for his parents and children; and the importance of his faith. Indeed, he spent much of the time looking embarrassed, pointing the toes of his right foot into the stage and pivoting his heel, like a coy schoolgirl.

"Inspiring" is the best way to describe his story. At the age of eight, he was given a photograph of Mount Everest by his father, and resolved to climb it. But at the age of 22, this seemed an impossible dream. The failed parachute jump - a practice manoeuvre over North Africa - had snapped his spine his three places, and doctors were not sure he would ever walk, let alone climb, again. Stuck in a military rehabilitation centre, he dismissed the idea of climbing Everest as "something childish, and something I'd now lost". But over the following 12 months, as he regained his strength and confidence, it became the focus of his recovery.

"I sort of felt, 'Life's given me a second chance,'" he recalled. "The doctors said I'd been under a millimetre from cutting my spinal cord." Soon, he learned how to walk again. And if that were possible, he reasoned, then surely he could learn to climb again too. "I was just determined to find a way, however hard or long that way was, of trying to make this dream of Everest a reality."

For most people, a near-death experience would reduce their appetite for risk. But for Grylls it only reinforced his sense of invulnerability. Even now, he seemed to relish our discomfort as he rattled off the mountain's chilling vital statistics. Height: 29,035 feet above sea-level. Mortalities: 200 of the world's top mountaineers. "It's a mountain so big that it has enough gravitational pull to create its own weather patterns," he said, "Yet it's the size of a small coffee table on the very summit." And for 340 days a year, that summit gets pounded by the freezing, 200mph winds of the jet-stream. "It's really these winds hitting the top 5,000 feet of Everest that makes this mountain so lethal," he explained.

At the time of Grylls' attempt to climb Everest, the mountain was killing one in six climbers. "I'd read the statistic so many times, but I don't think I really understood it," he admitted. "I was maybe a bit more naive [to] some of the realities of what can... go wrong very quickly at these sort of altitudes."

His team spent over three months on the mountain, setting up the base camps they would need to make an attempt on the summit, in temperatures that ranged from +80°C by day to -55°C by night. "The reason you're up there so long is because of this process of slowly ascending the mountain," he explained. "You build up the route as high as you can before resting, then come all the way back down to base camp, get more supplies and then go up again, but this time a little bit higher." This process is essential for both physical and logistical preparation, he said, but it's demoralising too. "They actually say you climb Everest about seven or eight times over, just in this process of going up and coming back down."

While Grylls' team acclimatised, four climbers on other expeditions died on the mountain, all of them in different accidents that were "outside of human control". And with each piece of tragic news, Grylls felt more vulnerable, knowing there was a chance he could encounter a problem at random that he would be powerless to control. "In those sorts of conditions, when things begin to turn, it's so hard to get in and reverse that process," he said wistfully. But it wasn't until he arrived on the South Summit, just 400 feet from glory, that he started to get really scared.

"Above 26,000 ft, you enter the 'Death Zone'," he explained, where the body begins to shut down and eat its own muscle and bone. It was here that he came across Rob Hall, a New Zealander who, the previous year, had made a tragic satellite call to his wife to say goodbye after running out of oxygen. The body was almost perfectly preserved. Grylls recalled "his hair blowing about, as if you could nudge him, and he'd stand and climb with us. And it sounds strange, but I desperately needed something that would give me strength up here, and he was such a hero of mine. But that wasn't going to happen, and I just remember this huge sense of panic coming over me in a way I hadn't felt before."

To make matters worse, he still faced two major obstacles:

1. The most exposed ridge in the world, an icy knife blade next to a vertical drop of 11,000 feet. Here, Grylls and his climbing partner were "desperately hyperventilating," but by holding hands and encouraging one another they were able to make progress at the rate of about three or four paces a minute. "It kind of feels like you've been asked to climb this mountain of waist-deep treacle while giving someone a piggy-back at the same time as having a pair football socks stuffed in your mouth," he said. "You're sucking in this stuff, but nothing's filling your lungs."
2. The Hilary Step, a 40 ft vertical ice wall, something that Grylls could climb easily at sea-level, but that took him about 50 minutes to conquer here, with "no strength and nothing working". There was such a short distance left to climb that Grylls swore he would "do it on his belly if he had to," and that was how it proved. Once he had hauled himself over the lip of the wall, he had to lie down in the waist-deep snow to recover. Then, when he cleared the snow away from his goggles and looked up, he realised he was just a short stroll from "the roof of the world".

The final 200 feet - nothing more than a gentle slope - was an agonising trial. "However many of these pathetic shuffles you take, this flipping place never gets any closer," he recalled. "And I just remember crying and crying inside my mask... the big part of me that, ever since that hospital, had never really believed I'd be able to be right here, right now, was being silenced."

Ultimately, Grylls said, what enabled him to reach the summit was his friendship with the other members of the team. "My experience with good teamwork, whether it's with the special forces or on high mountains, is that it boils down to this: being able to be a friend to people when it matters," he said. "Because our team was so small - just four of us in total, in such close quarters - there was no room for charades. You had to be honest with one another, and you had to trust one another. And... I feel very strongly that I don't stand here on my own."

Equally important to him personally, he said, was the act of prayer. "Life is so fast, and people don't often touch on this," he said. "But for me, when I was cold, and I was scared, and I was on my own, it meant the world to me to be able to pray. And I always say this a little bit awkwardly, but I say it because, for me, my Christian faith has always been a real backbone and a strength to me."

One personal quality, he concluded, was also vital on Everest, just as it is in business. Successful people, he observed, often aren't the most brilliant, "they're often just ordinary people, but they're always going that little bit extra, in their work, in their ambitions, in their relationships... They give more when most give up."