Anna Hemmings MBE, OLY

Most organisations can deliver one strong year. Sustaining that level season after season is the harder problem, and it is the one that separates the best teams from the rest. Performance tends to peak and then slide back to average once the early energy fades, and few teams are built to hold the line.

Anna Hemmings helps leaders and teams achieve high performance and sustain it under pressure, drawing on a career as a six-time world champion kayaker, two-time Olympian, and high-performance coach to senior teams.

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Why organisations work with Anna Hemmings

A high-performance specialist with a six-time world champion’s record behind her. Fifteen years coaching senior teams, with a method built as much on the psychology of performance as on sport.
She has reached the top, lost it, and got back. Diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at her competitive peak and told she would not race again, she returned to win three more world titles. That comeback is how she teaches recovery as a performance strategy rather than a wellbeing exercise.
Her focus is the repeat, not the one-off peak. She works on the behaviours and culture that let teams perform at the highest level and hold it year after year, which is the question most leadership teams actually face.
Accredited delivery that runs past the keynote. As a qualified high-performance and leadership coach and an accredited Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team trainer, she takes leadership teams at IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Deloitte, and NatWest through masterclasses and team development.

Biography highlights

Six-time Marathon Kayak World Champion, including three consecutive titles from 2005 to 2007; Britain’s most successful female marathon kayaker.
Two-time Olympian for Great Britain: Sydney 2000 and Beijing 2008.
MBE, 2010 New Year Honours, for services to sport.
Founder and Managing Director of Beyond the Barriers, a high-performance consultancy she has run since 2009.
Accredited High Performance and Leadership Coach and accredited Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team trainer.
Has now spent as long developing senior leaders and teams as she spent competing, with clients including IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Deloitte, British Airways, and NatWest.

Biography

Reaching the top of a field is hard. Staying there, year after year, while the pressure becomes permanent, is harder, and it is the problem most leadership teams underestimate. It is also the one Anna Hemmings spent her sporting career solving in public.

She won six marathon kayak world titles, three of them in consecutive years, and competed at two Olympic Games. The detail that matters most came in between. Diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at her peak and told she might not race again, she came back to win three more world titles and qualify for Beijing 2008. She treats that comeback as evidence that recovery can be engineered as a performance strategy.

The second half of her career has now run longer than the first. Since 2009 she has built Beyond the Barriers into a high-performance consultancy, coaching senior leaders and teams at IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Deloitte, and NatWest. Her method pairs what works at elite level with an applied reading of human behaviour and the psychology of performance. That is why it holds up with executives who have no interest in sport.

She is an accredited high-performance and leadership coach and a Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team trainer, so her work runs from keynote into masterclass and team development. She has now spent more years coaching leaders and teams than she spent winning titles, and that is the half of the story that earns her the room.

Key speaking topics

Achieving and sustaining high performance
High-performance culture and world-class teams
Resilience and performance under pressure
Recovery and refocus as a performance strategy
Mindset for thriving under constant demand
Leadership and high-performing teams

Ideal for

Executive and leadership teams under pressure to perform at a high level and repeat it
CEOs and senior leaders who have reached a peak and need to sustain it without burning out the team
Sales and commercial leadership operating in demanding, target-driven cycles
HR and L&D leads designing high-performance and leadership development programmes

Audience outcomes

What it actually takes to reach a high level and hold it, beyond a single peak
The specific behaviours that separate the best teams from the merely good
Recovery and refocus methods they can use under pressure, treated as a performance tool, not a wellbeing add-on
A first-hand account of being written off at her peak and coming back, used as working material on how resilience is built
Language for talking about high performance and its disciplines with their own teams

Talks

Peak Performance Unleashed: Unveiling Olympian Strategies

A working talk on the practices behind sustained elite performance, translated for senior leaders.

Key takeaways:

The disciplines that produce repeatable performance, not one-off results
How elite athletes prepare mentally for high-stakes moments
Where these practices apply directly inside leadership work

Building World Class Teams

A session on the behaviours that hold high-performing teams together under pressure, drawing on the Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team model.

Key takeaways:

The behaviours that distinguish high-performing leadership teams
How trust and accountability operate in practice, not theory
Where teams typically lose performance and how to rebuild it

Resilience: Performance Under Pressure

How to sustain high performance when the demands do not let up, drawn from a career of competing and recovering at the top.

Key takeaways:

Resilience as the mindset that sustains high performance, not as bouncing back from a bad day
How to think clearly and stay focused when the pressure is constant
Recovery and refocus as a deliberate performance strategy, evidenced by her own return from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

The Resilient Leader's Toolkit

A practical session for senior leaders on holding performance, judgement and composure under sustained operational load.

Key takeaways:

A leader’s working repertoire for sustained pressure
Practices for recovery and refocus inside the working week
How resilience shows up in the team around the leader, not just the leader

Available for

Speaking Themes

Languages

English

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Testimonials

Roche Pharma India had the absolute pleasure of hosting Anna Hemmings at our annual strategy kick-off, in January 2022. Anna delivered her address with great passion and left the audience inspired. It was a pleasure dealing with Anna, she was so open to ideas and suggestions. Anna's subtle sense of humour resonated well with the audience. Her powerful personality, and her articulate way of speaking, made her keynote session extremely memorable. I would highly recommend Anna as a guest speaker for large scaled events, where the intent is to inspire and enthrall the audience. Anna's ability to understand the business context, and moderate her messaging accordingly, is a sheer delight for any client. Thank you for making such a great impact at our event!

Shivani Sharaf

Partner – Corporate Affairs and Communication, Roche India

Anna presented to Alliance Medical’s 40 top managers in Ireland in May 2022 on the topic of resilience. By highlighting the success factors which are common to both sport and business, Anna wove a compelling and thought provoking journey through her stunning sporting career and the challenges which we face in business. We were so impressed that Anna took the time to sprinkle the presentation with Alliance Medical specific examples which helped the audience relate to the topic, this was achieved by lots of preparation in the weeks before the presentation. The Q&A at the end of the talk provoked a great conversation with the entire audience feeling very comfortable to ask questions and debate the issues raised with Anna.

Malcolm Banks

Managing Director, Alliance Medical Diagnostic Imaging Ltd.

Well… where do I start? Anna is exceptional. She is the epitome of professionalism, backed by incredible content, all of which is based on evidential success… plus she communicates with both passion and sincerity. Anna clearly really cares about success for everyone and her story of resilience comes from the heart because she's been through hell and won many times over. If you are fortunate enough to cross paths with Anna, hear her speak or learn from Anna, you'll definitely be energised, inspired and will start pursuing a bigger dream.

James Vincent

UK Performance Director, ActionCOACH

Thank you very much for your fantastic talk at the ENA SHE conference. We have never had a guest speaker who has made their speech so relevant to the rest of the content of the day. Usually we just get their story and the conference attendees do not always join up the dots. We have received some excellent feedback.

Andrew Roper

Distribution System Operations Director, Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN)

Thank you to the Curiosity team for bringing us the amazing opportunity to hear Anna Hemmings MBE, . This was one of the most valuable, practical and inspirational presentations I have heard. I know it will be one of the events I watch again and again. You made it so relatable and aligned to our personal development as well as our business by sharing your amazing story while providing us with tips and takeaways we can use. There were so many ideas on how to change mind-set, how to appreciate feedback is the food for champions, how to be constantly curious and to focus on the 'how and the now'. I thank you Anna for sharing your story and touching all the 2100+ people who joined the event yesterday.

Kathleen McQuone-Elliot

Digital Lead, Dublin, Novartis

Thank you Anna for the wonderful talk, it was the perfect set up for day 3 – we all found it extremely valuable, insightful and engaging, and we received great feedback from our markets and senior leaders too!

Veronica Caselli

Global Grooming Sustainability Director, P&G

Anna’s session was without doubt the highlight of our conference this year and left even our most battle-hardened and cynical delivery engineers inspired and determined to challenge themselves to go further.

Neil Horton

Siemens Mobility

Anna was a fantastic motivational speaker. I needed the speech to be engaging, uplifting and give the team a new perspective on the challenges ahead – Anna smashed these objectives. My team haven't stopped referencing her talk and often quote her key messages in meetings, this is exactly the impact i was hoping for.

Jemma Daltrey

Nestle Health Science

We were totally blown away. Seeing how an Olympian athlete addresses the challenges we all face day to day opened everyone's minds to the power of mindset and being part of a team. I would definitely recommend Anna to any team who are looking to grow & improve performance!!

Rhian Emnanuel

Coutts Bank

Anna impressed and inspired +4000 people around the world with her amazing story and powerful messages. She is a great communicator and above all, a person who has a strong capacity to connect with people.

Mariana Ponce

The Coca Cola Company

You truly captivated the audience and inspired everyone! Your insights and techniques from your Olympic journey resonated and were incredibly relevant, valuable and applicable, thank you.

NatWest Group

Amazing story and powerful messages

The Coca-Cola Company