Lauren Steadman
Senior teams know that the next stretch will not look like the last one. The harder problem is keeping people sharp when the rules of their work change mid-cycle, the targets keep moving, and the playbook that earned them their seat no longer fits. What organisations need is a way to talk about reinvention that does not collapse into platitudes about grit.
Lauren Steadman is a five-time Paralympian, three-time World Paratriathlon Champion and MBE who helps organisations think clearly about performance, reinvention and resilience under sustained pressure.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Lauren Steadman
- She has reinvented her elite career twice, from Paralympic swimmer to gold-medal paratriathlete, which gives her a precise vocabulary for what changing disciplines actually costs and what it returns.
- She speaks with the authority of medals at three consecutive Paralympic Games and competition across five, not a single peak moment, so the resilience argument is built on sustained output across sixteen years.
- Her Master’s in Business and Management from Portsmouth means she translates training-floor language into the operating language of strategy, KPIs and talent, rather than leaving the audience to do the work.
- Mainstream broadcast credibility from Strictly Come Dancing and SAS: Who Dares Wins makes her instantly recognisable to a mixed corporate audience without diluting the seriousness of the sporting record.
- An MBE for services to triathlon and a body of charity work through her wellness brand Sizu give the wellbeing material a real foundation rather than a borrowed one.
Biography highlights
- Five-time Paralympian: Beijing 2008 and London 2012 in swimming; Rio 2016 silver, Tokyo 2020 gold and Paris 2024 bronze in paratriathlon.
- Three-time World Paratriathlon Champion (Edmonton 2014, Chicago 2015, Gold Coast 2018) and eight-time European Champion.
- Appointed MBE in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to triathlon.
- BSc (Hons) Psychology and MSc Business and Management, University of Portsmouth.
- Strictly Come Dancing 2018 semi-finalist and joint winner of Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins.
- Co-founder of Sizu, a wellness apparel brand whose proceeds support mental health and children’s charities.
Biography
Most elite athletes peak in one sport. Lauren Steadman has done it in two, taking podium finishes as a Paralympic swimmer at Beijing 2008 and London 2012 before switching disciplines and going on to win paratriathlon medals at Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024. Five Paralympic Games across sixteen years is the rare kind of record that lets a speaker talk about reinvention from the inside.
The intellectual frame she brings to that record matters as much as the medals. A first-class psychology degree and an MSc in Business and Management from the University of Portsmouth give her a working language for how organisations actually run. She is not borrowing business metaphors. She is using a vocabulary she has studied and tested.
Her TV work, a Strictly Come Dancing semi-final with AJ Pritchard and a joint win on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, has put her in front of audiences far beyond sport. The result is a speaker who is recognisable to a generalist boardroom and credible to a high-performance one. An MBE in the 2022 New Year Honours sits alongside her co-founding of Sizu, a wellness brand that channels proceeds into mental health and children’s charities.
The argument for booking her is straightforward. When the question is how a team holds its standards through a change of discipline, three Paralympic cycles of medal-winning evidence is a sharper answer than most.
Key speaking topics
- Performance and reinvention through career change
- Resilience under sustained pressure
- Mindset and preparation in elite environments
- Mental health and athlete wellbeing
- Goal setting across long horizons
- Adapting standards when the discipline changes
- Women in high-performance careers
Ideal for
- Leadership offsites and senior conferences focused on change and reinvention
- Sales kick-offs and performance events where sustained output is the brief
- Talent and people functions running wellbeing or resilience programmes
- Graduate, early-career and women-in-business audiences
Audience outcomes
- A clearer working definition of what resilience looks like across years, not weeks.
- Specific reference points for how to hold standards through a change of role or discipline.
- A grounded view on the relationship between mental health and high performance.
- Confidence that reinvention is a process with named stages, not a personality trait.
- Language that connects elite preparation to the everyday rhythm of corporate work.