Dr Jaz Ampaw-Farr
Most workplaces have spent years buying resilience and wellbeing content, and staff surveys still say people feel unseen. Leaders have the frameworks, the policies, and the training budget. What they do not have is a credible way to make individual humans believe their organisation actually notices them, and a language to talk about that without sounding soft.
Jaz Ampaw-Farr helps senior leaders and HR teams build cultures where people feel seen, using a human-first approach to resilience, inclusion and psychological safety drawn from thirty years in classrooms, broadcast studios and boardrooms.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jaz Ampaw-Farr
- She gives leadership teams a vocabulary for wellbeing and inclusion that lands with sceptical senior audiences, because the argument is framed through performance and culture rather than through HR policy.
- Her toolkit is specific and teachable. The Failure CV, Jazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the 10% Braver model are named devices line managers can pick up the next day.
- The credibility sits in two places that rarely combine: a trained teacher with thirty years of front-line education work, and two 2025 honorary doctorates from the University of Hull and Bishop Grosseteste University for contribution to leadership, resilience, wellbeing and diversity.
- She is a working broadcaster and writer, not a consultant performing. Co-presenter on CBBC’s Hard Spell Abbey, TEDx speaker with a talk above 140,000 views, author of “Because of You, This Is Me” with Ian Gilbert, and 2025 Diversity in Cannes Programmer’s Choice winner for the short film Re-Story Your Life.
- Buyers book her for rooms that have heard the standard resilience keynote before and did not change anything afterwards. The measurable difference is that leaders leave with a small number of named practices they are willing to try in public.
Biography highlights
- Co-writer and co-presenter, CBBC spelling series Hard Spell Abbey.
- TEDx speaker, “The Power of Everyday Heroes” (TEDxNorwichED), 140,000+ views.
- Author, “Because of You, This Is Me: The stories we tell, the stories we change and the power of everyday heroes” (Crown House Publishing, with Ian Gilbert).
- Honorary Doctor of Letters, University of Hull, 2025. Honorary Doctor of the University, Bishop Grosseteste University, 2025.
- Programmer’s Choice Award, 2025 Diversity in Cannes Film Festival, for the short film Re-Story Your Life.
- Speaker of the Year and Best Live Gig, The Speaker Awards UK, 2022. Contestant, BBC The Apprentice Series 9.
Biography
Five teachers changed the trajectory of a homeless teenager raised in foster care. Decades later, she trained as a teacher herself, and the question of what those five adults actually did, practically, at work, on ordinary days, became the spine of her professional work. That question is the reason organisations book her. It has a usable answer, and it applies inside businesses as much as inside schools.
The public platform built up from there. A TEDx talk, “The Power of Everyday Heroes”, now carries more than 140,000 views. “Because of You, This Is Me”, written with Ian Gilbert for Crown House Publishing, turned the argument into a book for educators and leaders. A stretch on BBC’s The Apprentice and co-presenting credits on CBBC’s Hard Spell Abbey gave her the broadcast fluency that makes the live keynote work in front of an impatient senior room.
The body of work is named, not generic. 10% Braver treats courage as a daily operational habit rather than a mindset. The Failure CV reframes psychological safety as something a leader practises in public. Jazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs repositions wellbeing as infrastructure for performance. In 2025, the University of Hull and Bishop Grosseteste University both conferred honorary doctorates for her contribution to leadership, resilience, wellbeing and diversity, and her short film Re-Story Your Life won the Programmer’s Choice Award at the Diversity in Cannes Film Festival.
What a senior HR or culture buyer is actually getting is a speaker who can hold a room that has already heard the standard resilience keynote, and leave it with a small number of specific things the organisation’s line managers are willing to try on Monday.
Key speaking topics
- Workplace wellbeing and psychological safety
- Inclusive leadership and belonging
- Resilience as an operational practice
- Storytelling for leaders and culture builders
- Employee engagement and human connection at work
- Personal courage and the 10% Braver model
- Culture and performance in high-pressure teams
Ideal for
- CHROs and heads of people building a culture and wellbeing agenda that has to land with a sceptical executive audience
- Leadership teams running an inclusion, belonging or psychological safety programme that has stalled at policy and needs to move into daily practice
- Education, health and public sector leadership audiences working through sustained workforce pressure
- Internal conferences where the brief is to reset the tone before a demanding year, not to deliver a technical update
Audience outcomes
- A named set of practices (Failure CV, 10% Braver, Jazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs) that line managers can use in conversations the next week.
- A sharper internal language for wellbeing and inclusion that links directly to performance and retention.
- Permission for senior leaders to be visible about uncertainty and failure in front of their teams.
- A reframing of resilience as an organisational responsibility, not a personal character test.
- A live example of storytelling used to shift a room, which leaders can study and borrow from.
Talks
A keynote on courage as a daily operational habit rather than a motivational posture, built around the Failure CV and Jazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Key takeaways:
- A working definition of courage that leaders can apply in ordinary meetings, not just in set-piece moments.
- The Failure CV as a tool for visible psychological safety.
- A named threshold (ten per cent braver) that makes the behaviour change specific and repeatable.
A keynote on what leadership actually looks like from inside the team, and how psychological safety is built and broken by small daily signals.
Key takeaways:
- A shift from leader-centred to led-centred assessment of leadership quality.
- Practical markers of psychological safety that managers can self-audit.
- How to detect and repair the everyday moments that quietly erode trust.
A keynote that challenges work-life balance framing and repositions resilience and wellbeing as shared infrastructure for high performance.
Key takeaways:
- A critique of the standard wellbeing playbook and where it fails senior teams.
- Practices that make resilience a team property rather than an individual burden.
- How to connect wellbeing work to business outcomes leaders already care about.
A keynote on narrative as a leadership instrument for connection, culture change and credibility.
Key takeaways:
- A structure for leader stories that land with busy senior audiences.
- The difference between personal disclosure and usable narrative.
- How storytelling changes the way people inside the organisation talk about the work.
A keynote on rewriting limiting personal and organisational narratives, adapted from her award-winning short film of the same name.
Key takeaways:
- How internalised stories shape individual and team behaviour.
- A method for identifying and replacing narratives that are costing performance.
- A reframe of identity as an editable asset, not a fixed inheritance.