Amy Purdy
Organisations ask people to keep performing while the ground underneath them keeps moving. Restructures, market shocks, personal setbacks, health events: the leaders who hold a team together through these are rare, and the skill is almost never taught. The question for a senior team is practical. What does resilience actually look like as a discipline, and how do you build it into the people you rely on.
Amy Purdy is a three-time Paralympic medallist, New York Times bestselling author and keynote speaker who helps organisations think about resilience as a working practice rather than a mindset slogan.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Amy Purdy
- She offers a first-hand account of performance under permanent constraint that senior leaders recognise as substantive, not motivational filler.
- She has changed the rules of her own sport: co-founded Adaptive Action Sports in 2005 and was central to adding Para snowboarding to the 2014 Paralympic programme, a concrete example of building a category where none existed.
- Her book “On My Own Two Feet” (William Morrow, 2014) sits on New York Times bestseller shelves and gives her argument a durable reference point buyers can hand to executives before or after a session.
- She holds audiences that include mainstream corporate, healthcare, and sport: Dancing with the Stars finalist, TED speaker, Toyota Super Bowl commercial subject, which means she is legible to wide leadership groups.
- Her content translates directly to questions boards are actually asking: how to keep teams performing through sustained uncertainty, and how to lead when the original plan is no longer available.
Biography highlights
- Three-time Paralympic medallist in Para snowboarding: bronze, Sochi 2014; silver and bronze, PyeongChang 2018.
- Co-founder, Adaptive Action Sports (2005), a 501(c)(3) based at Copper Mountain, Colorado.
- Author, “On My Own Two Feet: From Losing My Legs to Learning the Dance of Life” (William Morrow, 2014), New York Times bestseller.
- TED speaker, “Living Beyond Limits” (TEDxOrangeCoast, published on TED.com).
- Finalist, ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, Season 18 (2014); contestant, CBS’s The Amazing Race (2012).
- Featured in a Toyota Super Bowl commercial and on Oprah Winfrey’s The Life You Want Tour.
Biography
At nineteen, a case of bacterial meningitis took Amy Purdy’s legs below the knee, her spleen, and the function of both kidneys. A transplanted kidney from her father kept her alive. Within two years she was back on a snowboard. Within a decade she was on the Paralympic podium.
The athletic record is specific. Three Paralympic medals across two Games: bronze at Sochi in 2014 and silver and bronze at PyeongChang in 2018, all in snowboard disciplines she helped argue into existence. In 2005, with Daniel Gale, she co-founded Adaptive Action Sports, the organisation that did much of the quiet work to get Para snowboarding onto the 2014 Paralympic programme. Changing the rules of a sport is a rarer credential than winning inside them.
The communication record sits alongside the athletic one. “On My Own Two Feet,” published by William Morrow in 2014 and co-written with Michelle Burford, became a New York Times bestseller and remains her primary reference text. The TEDxOrangeCoast talk “Living Beyond Limits” travelled from conference room to the main TED library. A finalist run on Dancing with the Stars, a Toyota Super Bowl commercial and a place on Oprah Winfrey’s The Life You Want Tour followed, each adding a different audience to her reach.
What she offers a corporate room is narrower and more useful than the biography suggests. Her argument is about operating when the original plan has been cancelled: recovering quickly, finding the next move, keeping a team moving while the ground is still shifting. It is a working account of constraint. For leaders building organisations that have to hold together through uncertainty, that is a reference worth hearing directly.
Key speaking topics
- Resilience as a working practice
- Leading through setback and reinvention
- Performance under constraint
- Purpose and reinvention after disruption
- Category creation and changing the rules of a system
- High performance in endurance and sport
Ideal for
- Senior leadership offsites and CEO forums focused on resilience, reinvention, and leading through sustained uncertainty.
- Healthcare, life sciences and patient-facing organisations where the lived-experience dimension carries commercial and cultural weight.
- Sales kick-offs and all-hands moments that need a serious anchor point rather than generic motivation.
- Diversity, inclusion and talent events where disability, advocacy, and category creation are part of the conversation.
Audience outcomes
- A sharper working definition of resilience that leaders can apply to their own teams, not just admire in others.
- A concrete model for operating when the original plan has been removed and a new one has to be built under time pressure.
- A reference example of building a category (a sport, a product, a business line) where none previously existed.
- Renewed clarity about the relationship between personal setback and professional performance, useful for high-stakes leadership transitions.
- Language and framing senior leaders can reuse with their own people after the session ends.
Talks
Purdy’s primary keynote: a first-person account of losing both legs at nineteen, returning to competitive snowboarding, and what that journey taught her about performing under constraint.
Key takeaways:
- Resilience is a practice built through decisions under pressure, not a trait.
- The plan you start with is rarely the plan that gets you to the outcome.
- Reinvention is a skill organisations can develop deliberately, in people and in systems.