Toppræstation speakers

Why organisations work with Jeff Grout Operator-grade leadership content. He ran Robert Half UK as Managing Director through a period in which the business grew from 12 staff to over 360, which gives his account of leadership and recruitment a grounding that most speakers on the same topic cannot offer. Inside access to an elite sporting campaign. As business manager to Sir Clive Woodward from 2002 to 2006, he saw England’s 2003 Rugby World Cup preparation and performance culture from the inside, which translates into specific examples rather than generic sporting analogies. One of the senior interviewers on the UK circuit. His public interview work includes Lord Sugar, Sir Richard Branson, Sir Dave Brailsford, Charles Handy, Sir Terence Conran, Sir Steve Redgrave, Dame Stella Rimington and Greg Dyke, and he is regularly booked as conference chair where a board-level audience needs a senior host. Eight books on leadership, performance and recruitment, including What Do Leaders Really Do? (Capstone, 2007) and The Adventure Capitalists. The work is published, not just performed on the stage. A repeat client list that includes Amazon, BT, British Airways, HSBC, Barclays, LinkedIn, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Harrods and UK Sport. Biography highlights Former UK Managing Director of Robert Half International, the world’s largest specialist recruitment consultancy. Built the UK business from two offices and 12 staff to £65 million turnover, 19 offices and over 360 staff during a 21-year tenure. Business Manager to Sir Clive Woodward from 2002 to 2006, spanning England’s 2003 Rugby World Cup victory and the 2005 British & Irish Lions tour. Graduate of the London School of Economics. Co-author of eight business books, including What Do Leaders Really Do? (Capstone, 2007), The Adventure Capitalists (Kogan Page), Mind Games, Recruiting Excellence and What You Need to Know About Leadership. Public interviewer of senior figures including Lord Sugar, Sir Richard Branson, Charles Handy, Sir Dave Brailsford, Sir Terence Conran, Sir Steve Redgrave, Dame Stella Rimington, Sir Stuart Rose and Greg Dyke. Collaborated with the BBC to produce an interview training video, and has delivered leadership and executive skills workshops for clients including BT, HSBC, British Airways, Virgin, Harrods, Amazon, LinkedIn, Deloitte and Ernst & Young. Biography Plenty has been written about what makes a good leader. Much less has been written about what leaders do on the day a quarter misses, or on the morning after a senior resignation. The working reality of leadership is where most senior teams need help, and where generic advice tends to fail. That working reality is the ground Jeff Grout has operated on for most of his career. He spent 21 years inside Robert Half International, the world’s largest specialist recruitment consultancy, eventually running its UK business as Managing Director until 2000. Under his leadership, the operation grew from two offices and 12 staff to a £65 million business with 19 offices and more than 360 staff. That is the grounding behind his current work with senior teams on leadership, recruitment and high-performance culture. From 2002 to 2006, he was business manager to Sir Clive Woodward, through the years surrounding England’s 2003 Rugby World Cup victory and the 2005 British & Irish Lions tour. That sustained access to an elite sporting campaign at its peak gives his work on high-performance culture a different weight. He saw the detail of how a winning environment is built and defended, up close and over time, not as a single anecdote deployed for colour. For senior buyers, he is typically booked either as a keynote speaker on leadership and high performance, or as the conference chair and interviewer who can hold a board-level room. His written work spans eight books, including What Do Leaders Really Do? and The Adventure Capitalists. His interview subjects have included Lord Sugar, Sir Richard Branson, Charles Handy, Sir Dave Brailsford, Sir Terence Conran, Dame Stella Rimington and Greg Dyke. Key speaking topics Leadership in practice Building high-performance teams Peak performance lessons from elite sport Leading change Recruitment, retention and talent strategy Executive interviewing and conference chairing The characteristics of success Ideal for Senior leadership teams who want a practical, operator-grounded account of leadership rather than an academic framework CHROs, talent directors and senior HR leaders focused on recruitment, retention and high-performance team design Conference organisers who need a senior chair or public interviewer for a board-level audience Sales leadership and high-performance culture off-sites Audience outcomes A sharper vocabulary for describing what effective leaders actually do day to day Specific examples, drawn from elite business and sporting environments, of how high-performance teams get built and held together under pressure New questions to ask about recruitment and retention, from an operator who ran a 360-person business A more confident view of the behaviours that separate consistent performers from occasional ones

Why organisations work with Jeff Salzenstein He brings a verified elite-performance credential into the executive room. ATP top 100, two NCAA team titles at Stanford, and a return to the top 100 at age 30 after two career-threatening injuries. The recovery story is not metaphor; it is the source material for the framework. The Own Your Zone of Excellence methodology is structured, not motivational. Four named pillars (rapid stress reduction, mindset shifts, emotional regulation, rest and recovery) that map onto the specific nervous-system and recovery decisions a senior leader can make inside a week. He is booked by organisations whose leaders are visibly under load: Duck Creek Technologies, U.S. Radiology Specialists, Weil Gotshal & Manges, Vistage chairs. The repeat work in private practice, healthcare, and legal services indicates the framework holds up in high-intensity professional settings. He runs Tennis Evolution, a coaching business with a 85,000-subscriber YouTube channel. He has built and scaled a teaching product, which is rare among speakers whose credibility rests on a past career. Biography highlights Former ATP top 100 singles player; career-high world No. 100 reached in June 2004, the oldest American to first crack the top 100 at that age. Two-time Stanford All-American, NCAA team champion 1995 and 1996, played No. 1 singles, team captain, coached by Dick Gould. Tennis Week magazine Rookie of the Year, 1997. Competed in the main draw of all four Grand Slams. Inducted into the Colorado Tennis Hall of Fame, 2005. Founder of Tennis Evolution, an online coaching platform with a YouTube channel exceeding 85,000 subscribers. Contributing author of “The Ultimate Success Guide” with Brian Tracy. Biography Most executive wellbeing programmes are designed for the workforce and ignore the layer under the most pressure. The leadership team gets a slide on resilience and a meditation app. The mechanics of how senior leaders actually regulate stress, recover, and stay sharp through compressed cycles rarely make it into the conversation. Salzenstein’s work starts where that conversation gives up. The credential is unusually concrete. He played No. 1 singles for Stanford under Dick Gould, captained back-to-back NCAA team championships in 1995 and 1996, and reached world No. 100 on the ATP tour. He then broke into the top 100 a second time, at 30, after two career-threatening injuries. Tennis Week named him Rookie of the Year in 1997. The Colorado Tennis Hall of Fame inducted him in 2005. The Own Your Zone of Excellence framework grew out of that arc and out of a family mental health and addiction crisis that ended his playing career. It is built around four operational pillars: rapid stress reduction, mindset shifts, emotional regulation, and rest and recovery. The content is closer to applied performance science than to motivational speaking, and it is structured so leaders can use it inside an ordinary working week. Organisations that book him tend to be in high-intensity professional settings where the executive layer is visibly under load. Duck Creek Technologies, U.S. Radiology Specialists, Weil Gotshal & Manges, Lightspeed Systems, The Mortgage Collaborative, and Vistage chairs have used him as keynote or coach. He also runs Tennis Evolution, an online coaching business with a YouTube channel of more than 85,000 subscribers, which makes him one of the few speakers in the performance space who has built and sustained a teaching product alongside his keynote work. Key speaking topics Executive resilience and burnout prevention Stress regulation and nervous system recovery Peak performance under pressure Mental and emotional health for senior leaders Mindset and focus for high-performing teams Sales team performance and pressure Culture and engagement for executive teams Ideal for CEOs and executive leadership teams running high-intensity cycles, particularly in professional services, healthcare, technology, and financial services CHROs and chief people officers building wellbeing programmes that include the senior layer, not just the broader workforce Sales leaders and revenue teams operating under sustained quota pressure Vistage chairs, peer-advisory groups, and leadership offsites focused on personal performance and recovery Audience outcomes A concrete set of practices for rapid stress reduction and nervous system regulation that senior leaders can use during the working day A vocabulary for talking about executive burnout and recovery inside the leadership team Specific techniques for reframing pressure moments without losing edge or focus A clearer sense of what rest and recovery look like at the executive level, beyond holiday and headspace apps

Why organisations work with Jenson Button A first-hand account of winning a world title with a team that did not exist eighteen months earlier, when Honda withdrew and the Brawn GP outfit was rebuilt from the wreckage. The temperament side of elite performance, drawn from 306 Grand Prix starts: how a driver and a team hold their nerve when the result is twenty seconds away and there are no second chances. A current insider voice on Formula 1 strategy and team dynamics, with active roles at Williams Racing and Sky Sports F1 that keep the perspective live, not retrospective. Credibility across disciplines: F1 World Champion, Super GT GT500 champion in Japan, and FIA World Endurance Championship Hypercar driver with Hertz Team JOTA. Biography highlights 2009 FIA Formula 1 World Drivers’ Champion with Brawn GP. 15 Grand Prix victories, 50 podiums, 8 pole positions across 18 F1 seasons with Williams, Renault, BAR, Honda, Brawn GP, and McLaren. MBE for services to motorsport, 2010 New Year Honours. Senior Advisor, Williams Racing, working with the team and its driver academy. Lead pundit and expert analyst on the Sky Sports F1 broadcast team. 2018 Super GT GT500 Series Champion (Japan); 2024 FIA World Endurance Championship Hypercar driver with Hertz Team JOTA. Author of “Life to the Limit: My Autobiography” (2017), longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2018. Biography Honda walked away from Formula 1 at the end of 2008. The team Button had been driving for had no engine, no sponsor, and no certainty it would make the grid. By March it had become Brawn GP. By November he was World Champion. The story is well known in the paddock; the lesson, less so. Button won the 2009 title because the discipline he had built across nine seasons of underperforming machinery transferred intact to a car that finally matched him. Across 18 F1 seasons and 306 Grand Prix starts, Button took 15 victories, 50 podiums, and the 2009 World Drivers’ Championship. He raced for Williams, Benetton-Renault, BAR, Honda, Brawn GP, and McLaren, partnering Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, and Rubens Barrichello. He was awarded an MBE for services to motorsport in 2010. The career did not end with F1. Button won the 2018 Super GT GT500 series in Japan, raced at the 2023 Le Mans 24 Hours with the NASCAR Garage 56 entry, and contested the FIA World Endurance Championship in 2024 with Hertz Team JOTA in a Porsche 963 Hypercar. He is Senior Advisor to Williams Racing, where he works with the team and its driver academy, and a lead expert on Sky Sports F1’s broadcast team. For organisations, the value sits in the practical content of composure under pressure: how a driver makes decisions in tenths of a second with championship implications, how a team holds together when results stop arriving, and how performance is sustained across two decades of repeated reinvention. His autobiography, “Life to the Limit”, set out the same argument in 2017: the title was won as much in the head as in the car. Key speaking topics Performance under pressure Decision-making at speed Team dynamics in elite environments Resilience across long careers Formula 1 strategy and competition Mental preparation and composure Ideal for Leadership teams facing a high-stakes execution moment, product launch, transformation milestone, or competitive deadline. Sales, performance, and operations groups where individual composure compounds into team result. After-dinner audiences at corporate hospitality, championship-night events, and senior leadership offsites. Organisations using motorsport partnerships (sponsors, suppliers, hospitality programmes) to anchor a leadership narrative. Audience outcomes A working account of how a championship-winning driver prepares for and executes under pressure. A close-quarters view of the Brawn GP turnaround as a case in team performance after structural collapse. A current read on Formula 1’s competitive dynamics, drawn from active Williams and Sky Sports roles. A clear connection between the discipline of elite sport and the discipline required to lead a senior team through a difficult cycle.

Why organisations work with Jeremy Snape He has run the experiment in public. As performance coach to Shane Warne’s Rajasthan Royals, he built the dressing-room culture that won the inaugural IPL title against far better-resourced franchises. His work sits at the join between two credentials most consultants only have one of: an England international playing career and a master’s in sport psychology, applied across Premier League football, England Rugby and South African cricket. The “Inside the Mind of Champions” podcast gives him a continuously refreshed evidence base. Guests include Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, Eddie Jones and Rahul Dravid, and the material feeds directly into his executive sessions. Through Sporting Edge, he has spent two decades translating sport psychology into corporate practice rather than telling sporting war stories with a thin business gloss on top. Biography highlights Former England international cricketer, 10 ODIs and one T20I, with a Man of the Match award on ODI debut against Zimbabwe. County career at Northamptonshire, Gloucestershire and Leicestershire; captained Leicestershire and lifted the Twenty20 Cup in 2004. Master’s degree in sport psychology, taken during the latter stage of his playing career. Performance coach to the Rajasthan Royals during their IPL title-winning campaign under Shane Warne, with subsequent roles at Delhi Daredevils, England Rugby, Premier League football clubs and the South African national cricket team. Founder and Managing Director of Sporting Edge, the performance consultancy he established in 2005. Non-Executive Director of the League Managers Association since 2013, supporting leadership development for football managers at St George’s Park. Host of the “Inside the Mind of Champions” podcast, with guests including Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, Eddie Jones, Rahul Dravid and Shane Warne. Biography The Rajasthan Royals were the cheapest-bought, lowest-rated franchise in the inaugural Indian Premier League. They won it. The performance coach embedded with that team, working alongside Shane Warne to build a culture out of nothing in a few weeks, was Jeremy Snape. That project is the cleanest illustration of what he does. Snape played 10 One Day Internationals for England and captained Leicestershire to the Twenty20 Cup, and during the back end of his playing career he took a master’s in sport psychology. The combination is unusual: a working international athlete who became a credentialed performance specialist, rather than an academic with a fan’s interest in sport. Since founding Sporting Edge in 2005, he has taken those methods into corporate work, alongside continued roles in elite sport, including Delhi Daredevils, England Rugby, Premier League football and South African cricket. In 2013 he joined the League Managers Association as a Non-Executive Director, helping design the leadership programmes that football managers take at St George’s Park. His “Inside the Mind of Champions” podcast keeps the research live. Conversations with Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola, Eddie Jones, Rahul Dravid and Shane Warne are not entertainment for him; they are the working material that feeds the frameworks he takes into boardrooms on team trust, composure under scrutiny and the unglamorous standards that separate first place from fourth. Key speaking topics High-performance culture Leadership under pressure Team trust and standards Mindset and mental resilience Performance psychology for business Talent development and succession Ideal for CEOs and executive teams entering a sustained period of pressure, scrutiny or transition Senior leadership offsites focused on team standards, trust and decision-making in stretch conditions Sales, trading and client-facing leadership groups whose performance hinges on composure under public-facing risk HR and L&D leads designing leadership development programmes for high-stakes commercial roles Audience outcomes A specific read on how elite sport builds composure and how that translates into executive decision-making under scrutiny. Concrete language for what high-performing team standards actually look like day to day, beyond the values poster on the wall. A clearer view of where individual mindset ends and where team culture has to take over. Methods for sustaining performance after a setback, drawn from named figures in elite sport who have done it publicly.

Why organisations work with Jermaine Harris A Sports Psychology MSc with Distinction sits behind the talk, so the resilience content rests on academic grounding rather than slogans. The Empowered Results Programme gives audiences a defined process to take away, not a one-off emotional lift that fades by Monday. His own near-amputation and recovery story is used as evidence for behaviour-change technique, which is why Admiral, Amazon, YouTube, and PGA EuroPro Group have brought him in. Audiences leave with usable mental tools drawn from his reading of more than 380 self-help titles, distilled by someone trained to assess what actually works. He is comfortable in front of mixed audiences from frontline staff to leadership, which makes him useful for company-wide kick-offs and sales conferences where a single speaker has to land across the room. Biography highlights BSc (Hons) and MSc (Distinction) in Sports Psychology ICF accredited Professional Coach and certified Firewalk Instructor Author of The Rut Buster and Lift Your Life! Founder of The Empowered Results Programme Corporate engagements with Admiral, Amazon, YouTube, PGA EuroPro Group, Forever Living, and Hallmark Care Homes Fundraiser and advocate for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, following his son’s diagnosis in 2015 Biography Resilience is one of the most over-claimed words in corporate wellbeing. The challenge for an HR or culture lead is to find a voice on the topic who can move beyond the language and actually shift how people behave on Monday morning. Jermaine Harris built his speaking practice around exactly that gap. His starting point was personal. A serious car accident and the threat of losing a leg ended a phase of heavy drinking and gambling. The interesting decision came next: he completed a BSc and an MSc with Distinction in Sports Psychology and used that training to study what actually changes behaviour. The Empowered Results Programme is the consolidated output of that work. Two published books, The Rut Buster and Lift Your Life!, give audiences something to take home, and an ICF coaching credential underpins the one-to-one work he runs alongside the keynotes. Admiral, Amazon, YouTube, PGA EuroPro Group, Forever Living, and Hallmark Care Homes have used him for company events where the brief is morale, motivation, and personal performance. What sets the work apart from standard motivational fare is the combination of an academic frame, a worked methodology, and a credible personal account of recovery. He also fundraises for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, a cause connected to his son’s diagnosis at four weeks old in 2015. Key speaking topics Mindset and personal performance Resilience after setback Overcoming self-imposed limits Confidence and self-belief Behaviour change and habit formation Team motivation and morale Purpose and direction at work Ideal for HR and culture leads planning company-wide kick-offs, sales conferences, and morale events Frontline and customer-service organisations where motivation directly affects performance Wellbeing and L and D leads looking for resilience content with an academic underpin Sales and revenue teams running incentive or annual meetings Audience outcomes A defined process for resetting after a personal or professional setback Specific techniques for managing self-talk, fear, and limiting belief A short list of habit changes that translate into measurable daily behaviour A renewed sense of agency over career, health, and finance decisions Energy and lift, paired with content audiences can apply the next morning

Why organisations work with Jessica Ennis-Hill Her experience of performing as the public face of a home Olympics – carrying national expectation while managing injury recovery and a multi-discipline competition – gives leaders a concrete, pressure-tested model of composure under scrutiny that no training programme replicates. As founder of Jennis, she has applied elite athletic methodology to a commercial problem – closing the gender data gap in sport and exercise science – giving her credibility in conversations about evidence-based decision-making and innovation, not just personal achievement. Her perspective on women’s health and female performance, backed by clinical collaboration with physiologist Dr Emma Ross and a funded femtech business, adds substance to DEI and wellbeing conversations that goes well beyond lived experience. She has maintained a high-profile public platform post-retirement – BBC lead analyst across four Olympic cycles, Times columnist, podcast host – which means audiences arrive with recognition and trust already established. Her career narrative – career-threatening injury before Beijing 2008, gold in London 2012, return from maternity leave to World Championship gold in 2015 – gives her a specific, sequenced story about recovery and reinvention that senior leaders find directly applicable to organisational context. Biography highlights Olympic heptathlon gold medallist, London 2012; silver medallist, Rio 2016; three-time World Heptathlon Champion; European Champion; World Indoor Pentathlon Champion Appointed DBE in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to athletics BBC Sports Personality of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award, 2017 – second woman and first British woman to receive the award Founder of Jennis, a femtech platform using CycleMapping technology developed with women’s health physiologist Dr Emma Ross; raised £1M in pre-seed funding, 2021 Regular BBC athletics analyst: Olympic Games 2020 and 2024, World Athletics Championships 2019, 2022 and 2023, Commonwealth Games 2018 and 2022 Columnist for The Times; host of Gold Minds podcast (High Performance network); author of autobiography Unbelievable Psychology graduate, University of Sheffield Named in Forbes 30 Most Influential Under 30s in Europe, 2016 Biography Jessica Ennis-Hill won Olympic heptathlon gold at London 2012 as the publicly designated face of the Games – carrying a level of expectation that few athletes at any level have been asked to manage. That she delivered one of the most complete performances in the event’s history, having missed the Beijing Games entirely through injury four years earlier, is the foundation of everything she brings to a business audience. The comeback from a career-threatening stress fracture, the return from maternity leave to win the World Championship in Beijing in 2015, and the silver medal in Rio in 2016 give her career a specific structure – repeated reinvention under constraint – that organisations find more useful than a single triumph. The discipline behind those performances: meticulous preparation, managing uncertainty, performing at the moment that matters, is the substance of her speaking work. Post-retirement, she has built a second career with genuine intellectual weight. As founder of Jennis, she identified a specific commercial and scientific gap – most sport and exercise research is conducted on male subjects, leaving women without evidence-based training guidance – and built a femtech business to address it, in clinical partnership with physiologist Dr Emma Ross and backed by institutional investment. That work sits inside a broader argument about female performance and health that she has developed as a BBC analyst, Times columnist, and podcast host. For organisations, she represents something specific: a high-performer who has tested the connection between preparation, recovery, and execution across multiple high-stakes moments, and who has since applied that understanding to build a credible entrepreneurial venture. That combination – elite athletic credential plus founder experience plus sustained media presence – is what separates her from the broader field of sports motivational speakers. Key speaking topics Peak performance under pressure Resilience and recovery from setback Leading through reinvention and uncertainty Women’s health and the gender data gap in performance science Preparation, process, and high-stakes execution Entrepreneurship and building from elite expertise Mindset and mental performance Ideal for Senior leadership teams and executive conferences seeking a performance mindset frame grounded in real-world pressure CHROs and people leadership forums addressing female talent, wellbeing, and the conditions that enable sustained high performance Organisations navigating periods of change or recovery who need a credible, non-generic narrative around reinvention Boards and C-suite audiences where public recognition and media credibility matter alongside substantive content Audience outcomes A concrete, sequenced model of how elite performers build resilience – not as a trait but as a practiced discipline – that teams can apply to their own context Greater clarity on the specific role preparation and process play in sustaining performance under public scrutiny, with direct organisational parallels An evidence-based perspective on women’s health and performance science that gives HR and people leaders new language and framing for wellbeing conversations Sharper thinking on what recovery from setback actually requires, drawn from a career defined by structured comebacks rather than uninterrupted success A founder’s account of translating elite expertise into commercial impact – relevant to innovation, entrepreneurship, and growth conversations

Why organisations work with Jia Jiang He has built one of the most-watched TED Talks on rejection, with audiences in the tens of millions, and translates the same material into structured corporate training rather than a one-off motivational set piece. His method is empirical, not theoretical. Every principle is anchored in a real, filmed encounter from his 100 Days of Rejection project, which gives sales and frontline audiences a concrete model they can copy. Wuju Learning runs structured workshops with measurable behaviours, particularly suited to commercial teams whose performance is gated by their willingness to ask. The 2019 Toastmasters Golden Gavel, awarded annually to a single keynote speaker, signals that his platform skill matches the substance, which matters when the audience is a full sales kick-off or a global all-hands. Biography highlights Bestselling author of Rejection Proof (Penguin Random House, 2015). TED speaker; talk has surpassed 10 million views across platforms. Recipient of Toastmasters International’s 2019 Golden Gavel. Founder and CEO of Wuju Learning; owner of Rejection Therapy. Keynote audiences include Google, Dell Technologies, Johnson & Johnson, Visa, Allstate, LinkedIn, and Citi. BSc Computer Science, Brigham Young University; MBA, Duke University. Biography Fear of rejection is the most common operating tax on organisational performance, and the one least often named. It shows up as the unmade pitch, the unsent email, the deal that did not close because no one asked for the order. Jia Jiang built a body of work that confronts it as a trainable skill. The work began in 2012 with a personal experiment. Jiang set out to be rejected once a day for 100 days, filmed each attempt, and published the encounters online. The series went viral. It became the basis of his TED Talk, which has since passed 10 million views across platforms, and the bestselling book Rejection Proof, published by Penguin Random House in 2015. From that material he built Wuju Learning, a training business that turns the experiment into structured workshops for sales teams, founders, and frontline employees. Audiences include Google, Dell Technologies, Johnson & Johnson, Visa, Allstate, LinkedIn, and Citi. In 2019, Toastmasters International awarded him the Golden Gavel, given to one keynote speaker each year. Jiang’s route to the work is part of its credibility. He came to the United States from Beijing at sixteen, took a computer science degree at Brigham Young University, an MBA at Duke, and was working as a marketing manager at Dell when an early start-up failed on a single investor rejection. The work that followed is built on that specific moment. Key speaking topics Rejection as a learnable skill Resilience in sales and commercial teams Behavioural courage and asking Personal effectiveness and self-leadership Discipline and sustained performance Entrepreneurial resilience after failure Ideal for Sales and revenue organisations running annual kick-offs or quota-reset events Founders, scale-up leaders, and start-up communities Learning and development functions building resilience or sales-skills curricula All-employee and frontline audiences where engagement and initiative are the underlying problem Audience outcomes A concrete method for asking more often and recovering faster from a no A reframe of rejection as data about the request, not the requester Specific tactics drawn from filmed real-world encounters, not abstract principles A shared language and reference point that teams can use back at work the next day

Why organisations work with Jill Payne A working method, not a mood-lift. Her Energy Management framework gives leaders and teams a shared language for how they move, what they focus on, and how they talk to themselves under load. Credibility with high-performance environments. She has coached the Canadian Women’s Olympic Rugby 7’s programme on mental conditioning and culture, and applies the same playbook inside companies. A book the field has rated. Be a Dime won Gold at the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in the Self-Help category, published by Figure 1 Publishing. Range across sectors that demand precision. Named corporate clients include Google, NASA, McDonald’s, Sony, PepsiCo, Boeing, and Western Union. Tools audiences keep using. Her sessions hand over named practices, the Body, Focus, Dialogue (BFD) sequence among them, that leaders can take back into their week. Biography highlights Author of Be a Dime: Unleash Your Inherent Energy and Live Life More Joyfully (Figure 1 Publishing). Gold Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, Self-Help, 2024. Master’s in Workplace Wellness / Employee Engagement & Workplace Performance; undergraduate degrees in Human Kinetics and Education. Mental Conditioning and Culture Coach to the Canadian Women’s Olympic Rugby 7’s programme. Former Team Canada athlete in Sprint Canoe and Rugby. Corporate clients include Google, NASA, McDonald’s, Sony, PepsiCo, Boeing, Western Union, NBC. Biography Most wellbeing programmes treat burnout as something to soften after the fact. Payne treats it earlier, as a question of capacity. How a leader moves through the day, what they choose to attend to, and the running dialogue they hold with themselves all sit upstream of how much pressure they can absorb before judgement slips. That logic became the Energy Management framework, now used inside organisations across North America. The method is built on three working levers, body, focus, and dialogue, which Payne treats as a single system rather than three wellness habits. Her book Be a Dime sets out the approach in long form and won Gold at the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in Self-Help, published by Figure 1 Publishing. Her credibility comes from working inside environments where the cost of poor energy is immediate. As Mental Conditioning and Culture Coach with the Canadian Women’s Olympic Rugby 7’s programme, she applied the same method she now brings to senior teams at Google, NASA, McDonald’s, Sony, PepsiCo, Boeing, and Western Union. The academic spine is a Master’s in Workplace Wellness and Employee Engagement, layered on undergraduate work in Human Kinetics and Education. For an organisation absorbing change fatigue or watching engagement scores drift, Payne gives leaders a concrete operating practice, not another wellness initiative. The work is closer to mental performance coaching than to mindfulness, and it equips senior teams to keep showing up clearly when conditions tighten. Key speaking topics Energy management and personal capacity Burnout prevention and recovery Resilience under sustained pressure High-performance team culture Mental conditioning for leaders Joy and engagement at work Workplace wellbeing strategy Ideal for CHROs, CPOs, and heads of talent rebuilding engagement after sustained change Senior leadership teams managing performance under prolonged pressure Wellbeing and learning leads moving past surface-level wellness programming High-performance functions, sales, trading floors, clinical leadership, where capacity is the constraint Audience outcomes A working vocabulary for energy as an organisational capacity, not a private wellness concern The Body, Focus, Dialogue (BFD) sequence as a practice that leaders can apply that week A clearer read on the early indicators of burnout inside their own teams Specific practices for joy and recovery that are grounded in evidence, not slogans A reframe of resilience as a daily operating habit, taught and reinforced

Why organisations work with Jill Scott A first-hand account of the dressing-room culture that produced England’s first major senior football trophy in 56 years, told by a player who was inside it across nine major tournaments. A career built in the connecting roles, not the headline ones. Scott can speak credibly to the people in any organisation whose value is hard to measure but visible the moment they leave. Mainstream reach without loss of credibility. She is recognisable from I’m A Celebrity and A League of Their Own, which makes her sessions land with audiences beyond the usual sports-keynote crowd. An honest perspective on the long arc of a career: from one of the first central FA contracts through to MBE, retirement, and a second life in business and broadcast. Biography highlights 161 senior caps and 27 goals for England across 16 years. Member of the England squad that won UEFA Women’s EURO 2022. One FA WSL title, three FA Cups and multiple Continental Cup wins with Manchester City; FA Women’s Premier League Cup and FA Women’s Cup with Everton. MBE for services to women’s football. Inducted into the National Football Museum Hall of Fame. Winner of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! 2022; team captain on Sky’s A League of Their Own. Co-owner of Boxx2Boxx Coffee, Manchester, opened in 2021. Biography England had not won a senior major football trophy in 56 years when the Lionesses lifted the EURO 2022 trophy at Wembley. Jill Scott was on the pitch in the closing minutes of that final, her ninth major tournament for her country and her last as a professional. The career behind that moment is more instructive than the moment itself. Scott played 161 times for England, signed one of the first central FA contracts offered to women, and built a club record at Everton and Manchester City that included a WSL title, three FA Cups and a string of domestic honours. She was, in the football vocabulary, a box-to-box midfielder. The role rarely makes highlight reels. It is the role that holds a team together. That is the through-line of her speaking work. Scott talks about what it takes to stay useful to a high-performing group for fifteen years: how role clarity beats reputation, how culture is set by the people who do the unglamorous work, how you keep standards when nobody is watching. She speaks from inside the dressing room, not from a coaching manual. The post-football chapter has given her a second platform. She won I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2022, captains a team on Sky’s A League of Their Own, and co-owns Boxx2Boxx Coffee in Manchester with her partner Shelly Unitt. The MBE and the National Football Museum Hall of Fame entry sit alongside that work as the formal record. Key speaking topics Team performance under pressure Culture and standards inside elite squads Role clarity and the value of connecting players Resilience across a long career Women’s sport and professional pathways Life after elite performance Ideal for Leadership and management offsites where culture and team chemistry are the agenda HR, talent and people-function audiences working on engagement and retention Conferences seeking a credible women’s-sport voice with mainstream broadcast recognition Customer or partner events that need a recognisable speaker who can hold a room without an academic frame Audience outcomes A specific account of what set the EURO 2022 squad apart from the squads that fell short before it A working definition of the connecting roles in a team and how to value them Stories from inside nine major tournaments that illustrate standards, recovery, and squad cohesion A view from a player who watched women’s football professionalise around her, and what that says about institutional change

Why organisations work with Jim Dowdall He has run safety on productions where a missed call ends a career or a life, and he can describe how those calls are made without the language losing its edge in a corporate room. He chaired the British Stunt Register, the body that governs professional stunt work in the UK, which gives him authority on how a regulated, safety-critical industry sets and enforces standards. His credit list includes Saving Private Ryan, multiple James Bond films, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and a decade as stunt coordinator for Top Gear and The Grand Tour, so the case studies are recognisable to a non-specialist audience. He combines a Parachute Regiment background, an armourer’s technical training, and a coordinator’s governance role, which gives the talk three angles on the same problem rather than a single career arc. Biography highlights Former chair of the British Stunt Register; long-standing member. Stunt coordinator and performer on more than 200 film and television titles, including Saving Private Ryan, Skyfall, Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Another Day, The World Is Not Enough, Octopussy, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Star Wars IV and V, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Stunt coordinator for Top Gear and The Grand Tour. Co-author of “Man on Fire: The Life and Other Accidents of Jim Dowdall, Stuntman” (Graham Scott, 2019), foreword by James May. Author of “Brassey’s Military Small Arms of the World” (1973), written during his early career as a film armourer. Member of BAFTA; invited to speak at Academy film seminars. Former soldier, Parachute Regiment. Biography A film set built around an explosion, a fall, or a high-speed crash is one of the most tightly governed working environments in any commercial industry. The standards are written down, the risk is priced, and the chain of command is unambiguous. Jim Dowdall has operated at the centre of that system for more than four decades. His credits run from Octopussy and The Spy Who Loved Me through Saving Private Ryan, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Star Wars original trilogy, and on to Skyfall, Die Another Day, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. He spent ten years as stunt coordinator for Top Gear and The Grand Tour. He has doubled Harrison Ford, Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan, and Timothy Dalton. The institutional weight matters as much as the credit list. Dowdall is a former chair of the British Stunt Register, the body that licenses and governs UK stunt work, and a member of BAFTA. His co-authored memoir “Man on Fire”, with a foreword by James May, sets out how high-consequence sequences are actually planned, briefed, and run, including the unglamorous detail that separates a controlled set-piece from an injury report. For a leadership audience, the value is not the anecdote. It is the structure underneath it: how a competent team agrees what an acceptable risk looks like, how it walks back from one that has been priced wrongly, and how a coordinator holds discipline when budget, talent, and time pressure all push the other way. Key speaking topics Risk management in high-consequence environments Decision-making under pressure Team coordination on complex productions Safety culture and operational discipline Leadership lessons from the film industry Performance in safety-critical settings Ideal for Operations, safety, and risk leaders in regulated or safety-critical industries Senior leadership teams looking at how their organisation handles high-stakes decisions Project, programme, and transformation leads running complex, time-pressured delivery Conferences and offsites where a credible outside-in voice on risk is wanted Audience outcomes A clearer picture of how a regulated, safety-critical industry sets and enforces standards in practice. A working model for how senior coordinators price risk, brief teams, and make stop-or-go calls under pressure. Recognisable case studies from films and television that translate cleanly into board-level questions about risk and accountability. Sharper instinct for the warning signs that precede a serious incident, drawn from a 40-year operational record.

Why organisations work with Jim Lawless He tests his own method in public and on the clock: 101 metres on one breath within eight months of learning to freedive, and a televised race ride within twelve months of first sitting on a horse. The DARE Loop gives an executive team one shared method for committing to bold decisions when certainty is low and consequence is high: Decision, Action, Result, Evaluate. The same operating language runs at four levels: the CEO and executive team, the senior leadership “Top 100”, team leaders through the INSPIRE programme, and the full workforce through the DARE Loop programme. A keynote can be the opening move in that cascade. He runs the same model in elite sport, coaching Olympic teams. He worked with Diageo Group CIO Benedetto Conversano on the transformation of the company’s legacy global IT function. Conversano calls it the most valuable offsite of his career and documents the wider programme in his forthcoming book The Braveheart CIO. He spent the first decade of his career as a City of London commercial solicitor and international legal counsel, so he holds board conversations about accountability and disciplined decision-making in a board’s own language. Biography highlights Author of Taming Tigers: Do Things You Never Thought You Could (Penguin Random House), international bestseller, translated into multiple languages; forthcoming titles The DARE Loop and DARE: to Lead. Creator of the DARE Loop, his decision and execution framework used inside boards and executive teams globally, and of the Second Strategy, the pre-taken decisions a CEO and executive team agree in order to deliver strategy through their people. First Briton to freedive past 100 metres, a national No Limits record of 101m set within eight months of starting, and a televised jockey within twelve months of first sitting on a horse. Founder of Symmetry, the advisory practice he has run since 2000, with clients including Apple, Microsoft, Diageo, Bayer, Novartis, BAE Systems, and P&G. Ranked a Global Top 10 keynote speaker on the Global Gurus list, and a member of the Forbes Coaches Council. Former City of London commercial solicitor and international legal counsel; elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2008. Biography The board signs off the plan, the operating model is redrawn, and somewhere between the steering committee and the front line the behaviour stops changing. Jim Lawless built the DARE Loop for that gap. Decision, Action, Result, Evaluate: a repeatable sequence for committing to bold decisions when certainty is low and the cost of error is high. He tests it on himself, in public. Inside twelve months of first sitting on a horse he qualified and rode as a televised jockey. Inside eight months of learning to freedive he became the first Briton past 100 metres, reaching 101m on a single breath. Taming Tigers (Penguin Random House) sets out the rules those two experiments were designed to test, and has been translated into multiple languages. Through Symmetry, the practice he has run since 2000, he advises executive teams at Apple, Microsoft, Diageo, Bayer, Novartis, and BAE Systems, and coaches Olympic teams. At Diageo he worked with Group CIO Benedetto Conversano on the transformation of a legacy global IT function. Conversano calls it the most valuable offsite of his career, and documents the wider programme in his forthcoming book The Braveheart CIO. Key speaking topics Self-leadership and composure under pressure Strategy execution in complex organisations Leading through restructure and disruption High-performance team behaviour Decision-making under uncertainty Personal and organisational resilience Behaviour change as a leadership discipline Ideal for CEOs and executive committees holding a strategy through restructure or recovery Senior leadership groups who have to model a change before the organisation will adopt it High-performance environments where standards have to be held under pressure, including elite sport HR and L&D leads building a resilience and self-leadership thread into executive development Audience outcomes The DARE Loop as a working mental model, Decision, Action, Result, Evaluate, that leaders can apply to their own decisions the same week. A bold goal chosen during the session, with a plan the individual owns. A sharper diagnosis of the behavioural point at which their strategy stops executing. A shared vocabulary for talking about fear and risk in senior conversations. A worked example, drawn from his own record attempts, of what disciplined behaviour change looks like under time pressure.

Why organisations work with JJ Birden He translates a specific professional discipline, NFL receiver preparation, into a six-step execution model that sales leaders can actually run their teams against, not a general motivation talk. He is a credible voice on long-odds performance. At 5’10” and 157 pounds across nine NFL seasons, his career itself is the case study for the content he delivers. He is built for sales kickoffs and field events. Buyers consistently book him for national sales meetings where the brief is energy plus a usable framework, not abstract leadership theory. He is the author of When Opportunity Knocks: 8 Surefire Ways to Take Advantage, which gives sales and franchise audiences a take-home structure beyond the keynote itself. Biography highlights Nine NFL seasons, 1988 to 1996, with Cleveland Browns, Kansas City Chiefs, and Atlanta Falcons; 244 career receptions, 3,441 yards, 17 touchdowns. 8th round pick in the 1988 NFL Draft, 216th overall. Member of the University of Oregon 1985 NCAA Championship Track and Field team; inducted into the University of Oregon Athletic Hall of Fame in 2010. Pac-10 long jump champion in 1988 and qualifier for the 1988 US Olympic Trials in the long jump. Author of When Opportunity Knocks: 8 Surefire Ways to Take Advantage. Keynote client list across bureau records includes Bank of America, Aflac, Hershey, Orangetheory Fitness, Arrow Electronics, Merrill Lynch, MassMutual, Pearle Vision, and O’Reilly Auto Parts. Biography The average NFL career lasts roughly three seasons. JJ Birden played nine, at 5’10” and 157 pounds, in a position where every other receiver on the field was bigger and faster on paper. That gap between physical odds and sustained output is the substance of what he now teaches. He came into the league as an 8th round pick of the Cleveland Browns in 1988, the same year he won the Pac-10 long jump title at Oregon and qualified for the US Olympic Trials. Five seasons with the Kansas City Chiefs, two with Atlanta, and a final receiving line of 244 catches for 3,441 yards and 17 touchdowns followed. What Birden built after football is a translation of receiver preparation into business execution. The six-step Beat the Coverage frame runs from reading the field through finding the gap, playing to strengths, drawing the plan, building the reps, and executing under pressure. It is a sales kickoff framework dressed in a playbook, not a motivational metaphor. He is a University of Oregon Athletic Hall of Fame inductee, author of When Opportunity Knocks: 8 Surefire Ways to Take Advantage, and a recurring keynote at national sales meetings for organisations including Aflac, Hershey, Bank of America, Orangetheory Fitness, and O’Reilly Auto Parts. Buyers book him when the brief is execution discipline and competitive intensity for a field audience. Key speaking topics Performance under pressure Individual accountability in team environments Opportunity recognition and execution Sales team motivation and discipline Resilience and long-odds performance Preparation as a competitive variable Ideal for Sales leaders running national or regional kickoff meetings Field and franchise organisations under quarterly performance pressure Leadership audiences who want execution content rather than strategy content Athletic and high-performance programmes Audience outcomes A six-step playbook (Beat the Coverage) that sales managers can apply against specific accounts and pipeline stages A sharper read on where preparation actually drives results, separate from talent and circumstance Permission to compete from a disadvantaged position without treating it as a story about disadvantage A direct frame for individual accountability inside teams that have plateaued