Motivation and Inspiration

Why organisations work with Caroline Elliott Crisis decision-making earned in real avalanche rescues. Caroline has been on the team making the call when a four-year-old was buried under two metres of snow and the survival window was eighteen minutes. A rare set of named technical credentials inside a closed European emergency system: the only British woman fully qualified across French ski patrol rescue disciplines, the first British woman in a French Fire and Rescue mountain SAR dog handler unit, and a graduate of ENSA Chamonix. Direct experience of multi-agency coordination when none of the agencies have worked together before. Most leadership audiences understand the problem in theory; few have heard it explained by someone who has run it. Practical content on psychological safety and team performance, drawn from environments where the cost of getting it wrong is measured in survival rates. A track record of operating across language and cultural barriers inside a male-led emergency profession in France, told without standard motivational packaging. Biography highlights Only British woman to hold the full pisteur secouriste 2ème degré qualification, including avalanche bombing, NivoMétéo snow weather forecasting and avalanche dog handling. Graduate of École Nationale de Ski et d’Alpinisme (ENSA), Chamonix, 2011. First British woman to enter a French Fire and Rescue specialist mountain Search and Rescue dog handler unit (CGSR 64, Pyrénées-Atlantiques). Author of Fjord’s Mountain Mission (2021), the children’s snow safety book endorsed by the International Ski Federation (FIS). French edition published by Catherine Destivelle’s Les Éditions du Mont Blanc; the book is available in four languages. Holds the artificier qualification with ANENA (Association Nationale pour l’Étude de la Neige et des Avalanches) and the NivoMétéo qualification with Météo France. Founder of FjordSAR. Works as an international keynote speaker, snow safety educator, and risk management consultant for wintersports accidents. Represented at the Fédération Internationale des Patrouilles de Ski (FIPS) Conference, Riksgrenzen, 2024. Biography An avalanche call gives a rescue team about eighteen minutes. After that, survival rates collapse. Caroline Elliott has spent her professional life inside that window, working as a fully qualified pisteur secouriste in France and as an avalanche search and rescue dog handler with a specialist French Fire and Rescue mountain unit. That career is unusual on multiple counts. Caroline is the only British woman fully qualified across the French ski patrol rescue system, graduating from the École Nationale de Ski et d’Alpinisme (ENSA) in Chamonix in 2011. Alongside the patrol qualification, she holds artificier accreditation with ANENA, the French authority on controlled avalanche blasting, and NivoMétéo accreditation with Météo France. She was also the first British woman to enter a specialist French Fire and Rescue mountain SAR dog handler unit. What this profession teaches, and what makes it useful in a corporate setting, is the operating reality of high-stakes environments. Teams making the decisions are often working with incomplete information and across services that have never worked together. Communication has to be clear in two languages. Trust between strangers has to be operational before the rescue starts. For corporate audiences, Caroline translates those operating conditions into team performance terms, particularly composure under pressure and the communication discipline that holds when conditions deteriorate. Her illustrations come straight from the work. An early-morning controlled blast above a sleeping resort. A family rescue where the four-year-old came up alive after two hours under two metres of snow. A multi-agency operation where command authority had to be established in real time. Key speaking topics Leadership in high-pressure environments Crisis communication under stress Risk management and decision-making under uncertainty Multi-agency coordination in crisis Resilience in hazardous environments Psychological safety in high-stakes teams Women in male-led professional cultures Ideal for Leadership and operational teams in industries where decisions carry real risk, particularly emergency services, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, defence and insurance. Organisations preparing teams for restructuring, multi-agency programmes, or environments where cross-silo coordination has to work the first time it is tested. All-staff and conference audiences at events on resilience, crisis leadership, and team performance under pressure. Women-in-leadership programmes inside male-led professional cultures. Audience outcomes A specific picture of how decisions actually get made when time pressure is genuine, drawn from named operational scenarios rather than case study reconstructions. Concrete tests for whether their own team’s communication and coordination would hold when conditions deteriorate. A view of psychological safety as an operational variable, grounded in environments where it functions or fails in real time. Renewed energy and a different reference point for what “high pressure” actually means in their own work.

Why organisations work with The Tempest Two A two-handed delivery rooted in shared, verifiable experience. Most resilience content is told solo. The duo dynamic, including dialogue and disagreement on stage, lands as conversation rather than lecture. The Atlantic row, Patagonia ultra-triathlon and El Capitan ascent are all self-funded, self-organised expeditions started without the relevant skills. The lesson on agency is structurally different from a story told by a former soldier or elite athlete. Operating discipline behind the talks. Through Dose, the same lessons are productised into workplace programmes for clients such as Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb, so a keynote can sit inside a wider engagement rather than ending at the closing slide. Tonal range commercial buyers actually want. The act works on a sales kick-off stage, an EMEA marketing conference or an internal wellbeing day without code-switching, which is rare in the adventure-speaker field. Biography highlights 3,000-mile unaided ocean row from the Canary Islands to Barbados, completed in 54 days, with no prior rowing or sailing experience. World-first ultra-triathlon across Patagonia in 2017: 1,600km cycle, 65km Huemul Circuit run, 100km stand-up paddleboard descent of the La Leona river. Winter ascent of Mont Blanc and El Capitan summit in Yosemite, the latter on roughly 18 months of climbing experience. Co-founders of Dose, a workplace wellbeing company working with Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb among others. Keynote clients include Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Heineken, Vodafone, Red Bull, Dropbox, Tesco, Waitrose & Partners, NatWest and Gymshark. Hosts of The Tempest Two Pod on adventure, mindset and performance. Biography Two friends in marketing jobs decided to row the Atlantic. Neither had sat in a rowing boat. Fifty-four days after leaving the Canary Islands, James Whittle and Tom Caulfield reached Barbados, having met the first hurricane to form in the Atlantic in fifty years on the way. The story matters because the starting point was ordinary, which is the point of every keynote that has followed. What came next was a deliberate run of self-organised expeditions: a winter ascent of Mont Blanc, a climb of El Capitan, a London-to-Sahara motorbike ride, and a self-styled world-first ultra-triathlon across Patagonia stitching together a 1,600km cycle, the 65km Huemul Circuit and a 100km paddleboard descent of the La Leona river. None were undertaken with the relevant elite credentials beforehand. That gap, between what they could obviously do and what they did anyway, became the working material. In 2018 they built Dose, a workplace wellbeing and performance company, around the same idea. Resilience and growth mindset are taught not as motivational concepts but as practices for teams under load. Clients include Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb. The keynote and the operating business reinforce each other; an event can lead to a programme rather than a one-off morale lift. The act sits in a specific commercial niche. It is not pure adventure inspiration, and it is not corporate consulting in disguise. It is a two-person performance for the part of an organisation that has heard the resilience message before and stopped listening, told by two people who keep proving the premise on themselves. Key speaking topics Growth mindset Resilience under pressure Team performance and trust Operating outside the comfort zone Embracing risk and failure Courage-based leadership Workplace wellbeing and engagement Ideal for CHROs and heads of employee engagement designing resilience and wellbeing programmes that need a credible opening moment. Sales, marketing and commercial leadership running annual kick-offs that need energy without slipping into hype. Culture and L&D leads looking for keynote content that can be extended into team workshops rather than ending at applause. Founder-led and high-growth companies whose teams are carrying sustained pressure and need a shared language for it. Audience outcomes A working definition of growth mindset that survives contact with a hard week back in the office. Specific habits the duo use to prepare for, push through and recover from extended pressure, transferable to a team context. A reframing of failure and risk that gives more junior staff permission to act with higher agency. A shared reference point across a team that lasts beyond the event, often picked up by Dose programming where it follows.

Why organisations work with Ruth Gotian Her research base is unusual in the leadership field: in-person interviews with named peak performers including Anthony Fauci, Nobel laureate Mike Brown, former NASA Chief Astronaut Peggy Whitson, and Steve Kerr, not aggregated case studies pulled from secondary sources. Thinkers50 named her the #1 emerging management thinker in the world in 2021, placed her on the Coaches50 list in 2024, and shortlisted her in 2025 for the Coaching and Mentoring Award, one of eight thought leaders globally. Few executive development voices hold all three. For 29 years inside Weill Cornell Medicine, most recently as Chief Learning Officer, she built and ran the mentoring infrastructure her frameworks describe. The work is operational, not theoretical. Her four-attribute model from The Success Factor (intrinsic motivation, perseverance, strong foundation, constant informal learning) gives leadership teams a shared, testable language for what they are actually selecting and promoting for. Her mentoring work is structural, including how to recognise toxic mentorship and where to find mentors outside the obvious channels, which is what large organisations actually struggle with when formal programmes stall. Biography highlights Faculty member at Teachers College, Columbia University, teaching graduate-level courses on high achievement based on her research. Previously Chief Learning Officer and Associate Professor of Education in Anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine, over a 29-year career. Author of The Success Factor (Kogan Page, 2022), co-author of The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring with Andy Lopata (Pearson/FT, 2024), and co-author of Mentoring in Healthcare with Vineet Chopra and Sanjay Saint (2025). Thinkers50 Radar Award, 2021 (#1 emerging management thinker); Coaches50, 2024; shortlisted for the Coaching and Mentoring Award, 2025 (top eight globally). Cited as a leadership expert by The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and NBC News; named a top mentor by Nature, The Wall Street Journal, and Columbia University. Contributing author at Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Psychology Today, and Fast Company; LinkedIn Top Voice in Mentoring, 2023. Semi-finalist for the Forbes 50 Over 50 list. Biography The four attributes that distinguish Nobel laureates, astronauts, Olympic champions, and world-class CEOs are not the ones senior leaders typically optimise for. Intrinsic motivation, perseverance, a strong foundation, and constant informal learning, all running at once. That is the central finding behind The Success Factor, the book that put Ruth Gotian on the Thinkers50 Radar in 2021 as the world’s #1 emerging management thinker. The research is what gives the work its weight. The book is built on direct interviews with named figures, including Anthony Fauci, Nobel laureate Mike Brown, former NASA Chief Astronaut Peggy Whitson, Build-A-Bear founder Maxine Clark, and Steve Kerr. The conclusions are not extrapolated from secondary case studies, which is the standard pattern in the success and performance category. For 29 years inside Weill Cornell Medicine, most recently as Chief Learning Officer and Associate Professor of Education in Anesthesiology, she built and ran the institution’s mentoring infrastructure. That operational base is what separates her advice on building mentoring capability from the lighter material in the field. The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring, co-authored with Andy Lopata, is the practical companion volume; Mentoring in Healthcare, co-authored with Vineet Chopra and Sanjay Saint, extends the work into the sector that taught her the discipline. She now sits on the faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she earned her doctorate in adult learning and leadership, teaching graduate-level courses on high achievement built on the same research. She writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Psychology Today, and Fast Company, and was named a LinkedIn Top Voice in Mentoring in 2023. Nature, The Wall Street Journal, and Columbia University have each named her among the top mentors in the world; The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and NBC News have called on her as a leadership expert. The 2025 Thinkers50 Coaching and Mentoring Award shortlist placed her among eight thought leaders globally on the discipline she has spent her career inside. Key speaking topics High performance and the science of extreme success Mentorship as a leadership discipline Executive coaching and senior talent development Authentic professional networks Leadership behaviours of Nobel laureates, astronauts, and Olympic champions Retention of high performers Organisational learning and chief learning officer practice Ideal for CHROs and Chief Learning Officers building leadership and mentoring capability Boards and executive committees thinking through succession and senior talent retention Partner-track and director-level cohorts inside professional services and healthcare Women’s leadership and executive development programmes inside large enterprises Audience outcomes A defined model for what high performance actually consists of, usable inside promotion and selection conversations A practical method for spotting and avoiding toxic mentorship inside formal programmes Concrete language for how senior leaders can develop people, not just deliver results A clearer view of how peak performers maintain momentum after early success Specific examples drawn from named Nobel laureates, astronauts, and CEOs that audiences can cite the next day

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

Why organisations work with Edvard Moser He gives an audience the rarest credential in the field, a Nobel Prize in medicine, attached to a discovery they can picture in one image: the brain runs an internal positioning system, built from grid cells he and May-Britt Moser identified in 2005. When DeepMind trained a neural network to navigate, it spontaneously reproduced the grid cells he discovered. That makes him a credible voice on the question every leadership team now faces: how close are machines to the way real intelligence actually works? His lab is still publishing frontier results, including a 2025 paper in Science on how the brain carves a continuous stream of experience into separate memories. A decade after the prize, the work is still moving. The brain circuits he mapped, in the entorhinal cortex, are the first to break down in Alzheimer’s disease. For audiences in health, pharma, and longevity, his work sits at the origin of one of medicine’s hardest problems. Biography highlights Shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, with May-Britt Moser and John O’Keefe, for discovering the brain’s positioning system. Discovered grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex in 2005, the finding that defined the prize. Founding Director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at NTNU, and co-founder of four Norwegian Centres of Excellence. Foreign member of the Royal Society, and of the US National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. His discovery was independently echoed by AI: a DeepMind network trained to navigate reproduced grid-like representations, published in Nature in 2018. His lab continues to publish in Science and Nature, with a 2025 paper on how the brain organises memory. Biography In 2018, a neural network built at DeepMind taught itself to find its way through a virtual space. No one had told it how. To solve the problem, it spontaneously produced the same hexagonal firing patterns that Edvard Moser had found in the brains of rats thirteen years earlier. The machine had reinvented the grid cell. Those grid cells are the reason Moser shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Working with May-Britt Moser, he identified neurons in the entorhinal cortex that fire in a regular grid as an animal moves, giving the brain an internal coordinate system. Together with the place cells found earlier by John O’Keefe, they form what is often called the brain’s GPS. The discovery opened a wider programme. Moser’s lab at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, which he founded and directs at NTNU, now studies how the brain encodes space, time, and memory together. A 2025 paper in Science showed how it slices a continuous stream of experience into discrete events we can later recall. The same entorhinal circuits are the first to fail in Alzheimer’s disease, which gives the work a direct line to one of medicine’s hardest problems. Moser’s path was not the obvious one. He grew up on the west coast of Norway, took a first degree in psychology, and built his research from a standing start at a young university in Trondheim. From there he founded four national Centres of Excellence, the Kavli Institute among them, and was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society and the US National Academies of Sciences and Medicine. The brain is still the only system that has produced general intelligence, and he works on the actual cells that do it. Key speaking topics The brain’s positioning system Memory and how it forms Biological and artificial intelligence The neuroscience of space and time Grid cells and spatial navigation The brain in health and in Alzheimer’s disease The path to a Nobel Prize Ideal for AI, data science, and R&D teams curious about the biological intelligence their models are reaching toward Healthcare, pharmaceutical, and longevity organisations working on memory, ageing, and Alzheimer’s Innovation and technology audiences interested in how the brain’s intelligence compares with the artificial kind Flagship conferences and leadership summits seeking a Nobel laureate a non-specialist audience can follow Audience outcomes A clear, jargon-free picture of how the brain represents space, time, and memory A grounded sense of how far artificial intelligence still sits from biological intelligence, and where the two genuinely meet Why Alzheimer’s disease takes hold in the brain’s navigation circuits, decades before the first symptoms A first-hand account of how a Nobel-winning discovery actually unfolded

Why organisations work with James Haskell He is a genuine household name. Seventy-seven England caps, a British & Irish Lions tour, I’m a Celebrity, and one of the UK’s biggest sports podcasts mean the audience turns up before he has said a word. One booking flexes across formats, from after-dinner and awards hosting to in-conversation events with his Good, The Bad & The Rugby co-host Alex Payne. An event is not tied to a single register. His mental-health credibility is the real thing. He has worked with a sports psychologist since the age of 19 and co-founded the player-welfare campaign Progressive Rugby, so the serious content lands as lived rather than scripted. He can make a room laugh and then make it listen. The touring stories and the honesty about anxiety and lost identity come from the same person, on the same night. Biography highlights 77 caps for England, the third-highest tally by an England flanker, behind Lawrence Dallaglio and Joe Worsley. Toured New Zealand with the British & Irish Lions. Premiership and Heineken Cup winner with Wasps, with further spells in France, Japan, and New Zealand. Man of the Series in England’s 3-0 win in Australia, and part of the 2016 Six Nations Grand Slam side. Co-host of The Good, The Bad & The Rugby, among the UK’s most-listened-to sports podcasts. Sunday Times bestselling author of What A Flanker, with further books across memoir, fitness, and personal growth. Co-founder of Progressive Rugby, the campaign group pressing World Rugby to act on concussion and player welfare. Biography On the Saturday, he was James Haskell, England rugby player. By the Monday after he announced his retirement, by his own account, he no longer knew who James Haskell was. He has likened the loss to pulling the pin from a grenade and waiting for it to detonate. That candour is the part organisations tend not to expect. Behind the loud public figure is someone who has seen a sports psychologist since the age of 19. He talks about confidence, anxiety, and the pressures of a decorated career without varnish. The rugby record gives him standing to talk about pressure. He won 77 caps for England, toured New Zealand with the British & Irish Lions, and won Premiership and European titles before playing in France, Japan, and New Zealand. He was Man of the Series in England’s 3-0 win in Australia in 2016. Since 2019 he has built a second career with more reach than most playing ones. He co-hosts The Good, The Bad & The Rugby, one of the UK’s biggest sports podcasts, and wrote the Sunday Times bestseller What A Flanker. He also co-founded Progressive Rugby, the group pressing World Rugby to act on concussion and player welfare. Key speaking topics Mental health and emotional wellbeing Performing under pressure Resilience and reinvention Identity and life after elite sport High-performance team environments The toll of social media on wellbeing Ideal for Awards ceremonies, gala dinners, and client-entertainment evenings that need a host or after-dinner name with broad public recognition. Conferences that want a session on pressure, mental health, and life after a defining role, delivered with humour rather than as a lecture. CHROs and wellbeing leads building a mental-health programme that needs a credible male voice to open the conversation. Sales kick-offs and team events that want entertainment with a real message about performing under pressure. Audience outcomes Permission to talk about mental health, from someone a high-performance and often sceptical audience will actually listen to. A blunt account of how elite performers hide anxiety and pressure, and the price they pay for it. A sharper read on why people struggle when a defining role ends, where the problem is usually lost identity, not the change itself. An evening they remember, because the serious points land while the room is still laughing.

Why organisations work with Ben McBean He turns disability inclusion from a compliance topic into a human conversation audiences keep having after the session ends. His recovery from catastrophic injury gives mental health and resilience messaging a weight that consultants and clinicians cannot replicate. As presenter of ITVX’s “For Crown and Country,” he has a documented public-facing body of work on race and the British Armed Forces, which makes him credible for DEI briefs that demand more than personal story. He has spoken to Chelsea FC, Lloyds Bank, JP Morgan, Ernst & Young, Vodafone, and Citigroup, so he reads corporate rooms with the same ease he reads public ones. He is comfortable with young audiences, employee resource groups, and senior leadership sessions, which lets a single booking do work across an organisation. Biography highlights Former Royal Marine, 40 Commando, medically discharged in 2010 after an IED injury in Helmand Province. Overcoming Adversity winner at The Sun Military Awards 2009 for becoming the first double amputee to finish the London Marathon. Outstanding Global Achievement Award at Britain’s Best Award 2008, presented by the Prime Minister. Rotary Young Citizen Award, 2012. Presenter, “For Crown and Country,” ITVX Fresh Cuts, 2023. Corporate client list includes Chelsea FC, Lloyds Bank, JP Morgan, Ernst & Young, Vodafone, and Citigroup. Biography An IED exploded near Kajaki Dam, Helmand Province, on 28 February 2008. Ben McBean lost his left arm and right leg and was flown home on the same aircraft as Prince Harry, who later called him the “real hero” of that flight. He was twenty years old. A year later he finished the London Marathon in six hours and twenty minutes, the first double amputee to complete the course. He did it again the following year, faster. The Sun Military Awards recognised him for Overcoming Adversity in December 2009. What McBean does for organisations now grew out of what happened after the marathons. He spent years speaking in schools, at veterans’ events, and inside companies that were trying to make inclusion and mental health feel real rather than performative. In 2023 ITVX asked him to present “For Crown and Country,” a Fresh Cuts documentary on the contribution of Black British servicemen and women, which extended his platform from personal testimony into commissioned social history. Corporate audiences at Chelsea FC, Lloyds Bank, JP Morgan, Ernst & Young, Vodafone, and Citigroup have booked him for the same reason. A policy document can tell a workforce that difference is welcome. A room full of people who have just listened to McBean walks out knowing what that looks like when it is tested. Key speaking topics Disability inclusion in the workplace Mental health and recovery from trauma Resilience after catastrophic setback Diversity, equity and inclusion Veterans’ experience and reintegration Race and representation in institutional settings Ideal for DEI leads, CHROs, and employee resource group sponsors designing inclusion programming with real behavioural reach. Wellbeing and mental health leads running Mental Health Awareness Week, wellbeing conferences, or post-crisis staff events. Learning and development teams building resilience content for managers and frontline staff. Armed Forces charities, veterans’ networks, and public sector employers convening on race, service, and belonging. Audience outcomes A sharper read on how disability and difference are actually experienced inside a team, not how policy says they should be. Permission to talk about mental health and recovery in direct language, without workplace euphemism. A human reference point audiences return to when their own setback, illness, or loss arrives. Renewed conviction that inclusion is a behaviour practised in meetings, not a statement published on an intranet.

Why organisations work with Karenjeet Kaur Bains She holds a Guinness World Record (42 bodyweight squats in a minute, set against a male equivalent of 34) and a Commonwealth gold, which gives her claims about pressure and preparation a weight that motivational speakers without competitive credentials cannot match. She is the first British Sikh woman to represent Great Britain at the European and World powerlifting championships, which makes her a credible voice on what representation actually costs and produces inside an institution. She qualified as an ACA Chartered Accountant and spent six years in audit at KPMG, so she speaks to professional services and corporate audiences in their own language rather than from outside it. She combines a primetime BBC platform as Athena on Gladiators with a serious athletic and professional record, which lands with employee networks, ERGs, and graduate populations in a way a single-track speaker rarely does. Biography highlights Commonwealth Powerlifting Champion; first British Sikh woman to represent Great Britain at European and World championships. Guinness World Record holder, most bodyweight squats by a woman in one minute (42 reps, 2022). ACA Chartered Accountant; six years at KPMG in audit before moving into charity finance. Athena on the BBC One reboot of Gladiators, broadcast on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. British Powerlifting Athlete of the Year, 2023 and 2024. Listed keynote speaker at the ICAEW Annual Conference. Biography Powerlifting is one of the smallest, most demographically narrow sports in Britain. The first British Sikh woman to represent Great Britain at the European and World championships is also a Commonwealth gold medallist and a Guinness World Record holder. That combination is what Karenjeet Kaur Bains brings into a room. Her route to elite strength sport ran through, not around, a professional services career. She qualified as an ACA Chartered Accountant, spent six years at KPMG in audit, and trained for international competition in the hours either side of a working day. The Guinness record (42 bodyweight squats in a minute, against a male equivalent of 34) was set in two weeks of preparation while she held a full-time charity finance role. Her account of how high performers actually structure their lives is grounded, not theoretical. Since 2024 she has appeared as Athena on the BBC One reboot of Gladiators, which has put her in front of a household audience without softening the technical seriousness of her sport. ICAEW lists her as a keynote speaker at its Annual Conference, and she has been recognised as British Powerlifting Athlete of the Year in 2023 and 2024. For HR, DEI and employee engagement leaders, the value is specific. She speaks to what it takes for someone visibly different to stay, perform, and be seen inside institutions that did not previously include her, and what employers, networks and managers can usefully do about it. Key speaking topics Representation and identity in elite environments Performance under pressure and recovery from injury South Asian women in sport and professional life Breaking cultural and gender stereotypes Resilience and the psychology of high performance Inclusive culture in professional services Ideal for CHROs, DEI leads, and employee network sponsors planning Heritage Month, IWD, or culture moments. Professional services firms briefing graduate, qualified-accountant, and women’s network audiences. Leadership and high-performance offsites looking for a credentialled athlete voice over a generic motivational one. Audience outcomes A grounded picture of what visible representation costs and produces inside an institution. A practical sense of how high performers structure preparation, recovery, and the routine work around a peak. Language for ERGs and managers on how to support employees who are first or only in their roles. A reframing of “strength”, physical and professional, that audiences can use in their own teams.

Why organisations work with Lee Rubin He gives leadership teams a named, repeatable framework, the Five Cs (competitors, common goal, communication, chemistry, consistency), so culture work stops being a slogan and becomes a checklist a manager can run on Monday. He has lived both sides of the room: captain of a Big Ten football programme and 16+ years as an HR executive inside Fortune 500 environments including Johnson & Johnson, Sony, and JP Morgan. Audiences hear locker-room stories backed by enterprise people-strategy experience. He addresses the specific failure mode senior leaders see most often, talented individuals who do not function as a team, rather than the generic topic of “culture”. His delivery converts. Bureau and client materials consistently book him for sales kickoffs, leadership offsites, and all-hands events where the goal is alignment before execution, not abstract inspiration. Biography highlights Captain and three-year starting free safety, Penn State Nittany Lions football. 1994 Florida Citrus Bowl Defensive MVP; All-Big Ten Conference selection; Honorable Mention All-American. 16+ years as a Human Resources executive serving Fortune 500 corporations. Author of WIN: Simple Insights to Help You Win the Game of Life and a companion edition for student-athletes. Signature keynote “5 Components of Extraordinary Teams” delivered to clients including Johnson & Johnson, Sony, and JP Morgan. TEDx presenter on team performance. Bachelor’s degree in Speech Communications with a Business minor, Penn State University. Biography A football captain learns something a corporate org chart rarely teaches. Talent is not the constraint. The constraint is whether eleven people, eleven directors, eleven engineers, share a goal clearly enough that they can adjust to each other in real time. Lee Rubin spent three years as a starting free safety at Penn State, captained the team, and earned 1994 Florida Citrus Bowl Defensive MVP honours. He then spent 16 years inside Fortune 500 HR functions watching the same dynamic play out in conference rooms. Out of that two-track career came the Five Cs: competitors, common goal, communication, chemistry, consistency. It is the spine of his signature keynote, “5 Components of Extraordinary Teams,” and it gives leaders a working vocabulary for diagnosing why a capable group is not performing as a team. Each component is concrete enough to be acted on the next week, not abstract enough to be ignored. His client list runs from Johnson & Johnson, Sony, and JP Morgan to college athletic departments and professional sports organisations. The range matters. The same framework that helps an enterprise sales team align around a quarterly goal helps a coaching staff align around a season. Buyers booking Rubin are typically wrestling with a specific symptom, post-merger silos, a stalled transformation, a high-turnover quarter, and want a session that produces shared language, not a closing high. He is also the author of WIN: Simple Insights to Help You Win the Game of Life, with a parallel edition written for student-athletes. The books extend the keynote argument: that the habits of high-performing teams, accountability, clarity of role, mutual respect, are the same habits that produce high-performing individuals. Key speaking topics Team performance and the Five Cs framework Building championship culture inside corporate teams Communication and chemistry under pressure Leadership lessons from elite athletics Employee engagement and buy-in Peak performance for individuals and teams Ideal for CHROs and senior HR leaders running culture, engagement, or post-merger integration work Sales leaders preparing kickoffs where alignment matters more than tactics Heads of transformation rebuilding teams after restructuring College and professional sports organisations investing in leadership development Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary, the Five Cs, that managers can use the next day to diagnose team friction Specific tactics for converting individual talent into collective output Renewed clarity on the difference between a group of strong performers and a functioning team Practical communication habits that hold up when a team is under pressure

Why organisations work with Lucy Shepherd She has actually led teams through conditions where decisions carry physical consequence: a 50-day, 400km first-recorded crossing of Guyana’s Kanuku Mountains with an Indigenous Macushi and Wapishana team, captured in Channel 4’s Secret Amazon: Into the Wild. Her credentials sit inside the institutions that historically define exploration: Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society at 23, co-opted council member of the Scientific Exploration Society, with a Penguin Michael Joseph book, Into the Wild, that documents the thinking behind the expedition. She speaks credibly to mixed-team leadership in cultures and conditions she does not control, a closer analogy for senior leaders running global teams than the usual sports or military comparisons. She brings a current, on-camera profile, rather than a single-event story repeated for years. Each new expedition and broadcast updates the material she draws on. Biography highlights Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, appointed at age 23. Co-opted council member of the Scientific Exploration Society. Led the first recorded east-to-west traverse of Guyana’s Kanuku Mountains, a 50-day, 400km expedition with an all-Indigenous team. Author of Into the Wild, published by Penguin Michael Joseph. Star and self-shooting subject of Channel 4’s Secret Amazon: Into the Wild, a two-part series that aired in 2024. Described by The Times as «the most hardcore member of the new generation of British adventurers». Biography The first recorded east-to-west crossing of Guyana’s Kanuku Mountains took 50 days and roughly 400 kilometres on foot. Lucy Shepherd led it in 2021 with an Indigenous Macushi and Wapishana team, navigating jungle, river and uncharted terrain on outdated maps. Channel 4 turned the expedition into Secret Amazon: Into the Wild, broadcast in 2024. Shepherd’s credentials read like an older era of exploration. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society at 23 and co-opted onto the council of the Scientific Exploration Society, the bodies that have historically vetted serious British expedition work. The Times has called her «the most hardcore member of the new generation of British adventurers,» a line that travels because it is uncharacteristically literal about what she does. The keynote material draws on a decade of leading and joining expeditions across Arctic plateaus, high mountains, deep jungle and desert. The themes that recur are practical: composure when conditions degrade, trust built across cultural and language boundaries, decisions made on incomplete information, and the discipline of carrying on when the plan no longer applies. Her Penguin Michael Joseph book, Into the Wild, sets out the thinking behind those decisions in long form. Senior audiences tend to find the analogy useful because the field she works in is unforgiving in ways business rarely is. The leadership questions translate without softening, and the speaker bringing them has carried the consequences personally. Key speaking topics Expedition leadership in extreme environments Decision-making under physical and psychological pressure Leading mixed and cross-cultural teams Risk, preparation and the limits of planning Wilderness, biodiversity and environmental stewardship Resilience drawn from expedition fieldwork Ideal for Senior leadership offsites and partner conferences seeking a substantive keynote on judgment under pressure Teams coming through restructure, sustained change, or operational shock who need a renewed sense of composure and trust Sustainability, ESG and conservation-themed audiences who want a credible field voice rather than a policy speaker All-hands and inspirational anchor slots where the standard sports or military keynote has worn thin Audience outcomes A grounded sense of what real decision-making under pressure looks like, told through a specific 50-day expedition rather than abstract framework. A more honest reading of risk, preparation and the point at which planning stops being useful. A practical model for building trust across a team when language, culture and authority are not stable. A renewed argument for protecting wilderness and biodiversity, made by someone who has spent time inside it.

Why organisations work with Mallory Weggemann A first-person account of high-stakes performance after catastrophic setback, drawn from four Paralympic Games across sixteen years, not a single comeback story. A specific framework, Small Steps, Big Impact, that translates incremental progress into a leadership method teams can use the next week, including how to treat setbacks as team-building inputs rather than morale costs. Credibility on adaptation through repeated injury. The 2014 arm injury required two reconstructive surgeries and reshaped her training and competition method ahead of Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020. A media and production track record beyond athletics, including an Emmy-winning NBC Sports hosting role and co-leadership of TFA Group, which lends executive register to the resilience material. Author of Limitless (Nelson Books, 2021), which gives senior audiences a published, citable source for the ideas they will hear in the room. Biography highlights Four-time Paralympian for Team USA; seven-time Paralympic medallist across London 2012, Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020, and Paris 2024. Has held 15 world records and 34 American records in Para Swimming. Author of Limitless: The Power of Hope and Resilience to Overcome Circumstance (Nelson Books, 2021), with a film adaptation in development at Morning Moon Productions. Co-Founder and Co-CEO of TFA Group, a social impact agency and production studio. Emmy Award-winning broadcast host for NBC Sports, with correspondent and host roles across the 2018, 2022, and 2024 Games. ESPY Award winner; three-time USA Swimming Disabled Swimmer of the Year. Biography In January 2008, an epidural injection administered for back pain left an eighteen-year-old competitive swimmer paralysed from the waist down. Three months later, she was back in the pool. Inside two years, she had broken eight world records. The story matters not because it is dramatic, but because it set the operating pattern for everything that followed: progress measured in small, repeatable steps under conditions that would justify stopping. By the London 2012 Paralympic Games, Mallory Weggemann held fifteen world records and thirty-four American records. A 2014 arm injury required two reconstructive surgeries and forced a rebuild of her stroke and her training method. She returned to competition, medalled at the 2019 World Para Swimming Championships, and went on to win two golds and a silver at Tokyo 2020 and a further gold and silver at Paris 2024. Across four Games, the through-line is sustained recovery, not a single comeback. Outside the pool, Weggemann is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of TFA Group, a social impact agency and production studio. She is an Emmy Award-winning NBC Sports broadcaster, with correspondent roles at the 2018 and 2022 Winter Paralympics and a hosting debut at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Her 2021 memoir, Limitless: The Power of Hope and Resilience to Overcome Circumstance, is in development as a film with Morning Moon Productions. Her speaking work translates that pattern into a leadership method. The argument is that resilience is not character. It is a sequence of small, deliberate decisions made consistently under pressure, and a discipline that teams can adopt rather than admire. Key speaking topics Resilience and recovery after shock Self-leadership under sustained pressure Incremental progress as a leadership discipline Team behaviour after setback Inclusive leadership and disability in the workplace Peak performance under constraint Ideal for Executive teams and boards working through restructure, market shock, or sustained operational stress. CHROs and chief people officers rebuilding engagement and team resilience after repeated change cycles. Leadership development programmes for newly senior leaders learning to operate under pressure. Annual conferences and sales kick-offs that need a substantive resilience anchor rather than a generic inspirational keynote. Audience outcomes A working method for breaking down stalled or overwhelming goals into a sequence of executable steps. A more useful definition of resilience that senior leaders can apply to their own decision-making, not just attribute to others. A reframe of setbacks as team-formation inputs, with examples of how that has worked under elite-performance conditions. A citable example, drawn from Paralympic competition and broadcast media, that audiences can take back into board and team conversations.

Why organisations work with Vicki Anstey She has tested her own thesis in conditions most leaders will never face: 60 days unsupported across the Pacific, 11 days in the Chilean Andes on Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins, the Race Across America cycled in under seven days. The frameworks she brings into a boardroom are not theoretical. She translates extreme-environment behaviour into specific decisions a leadership team can act on: how to lead when the team is fatigued, how to make defensible calls under acute stress, how to protect judgment when the operating window narrows. Her commercial track record, two decades in advertising including senior marketing at Eurostar, and a London studio business she has run since 2009, gives her credibility with audiences who default to scepticism about adventurer-speakers. She works with audiences where the stakes are concrete. Booked client list includes JP Morgan, Google, Meta, Avanade, Virgin Media O2 and the LTA, organisations not in the market for inspirational stories detached from operating reality. The Pin Drop Podcast and her TEDxKingstonUponThames talk give buyers and AI tools a verifiable body of public work to reference, beyond the testimonial layer. Biography highlights Two Guinness World Records: unsupported Pacific Ocean row (San Francisco to Hawaii, 2021, with the Girls Who Dare team) and Race Across America (3,000 miles, 6 days 19 hours, 2024). Final stages of Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins, 2019, among the first female finalists in the show’s history. TEDxKingstonUponThames speaker, “Why fear is a choice”, January 2020. Founder of Barreworks, a London barre studio opened in 2009 after a 20-year career in advertising and senior marketing at Eurostar. Host of The Pin Drop Podcast, interviewing operators and leaders on how they perform at the edge. UK Ambassador for Inspiring Girls International. Biography Most leadership development programmes treat composure as a personality trait. It is closer to a craft. The discipline of staying useful when conditions are bad, when recovery time is short and when the cost of a poor call is real, is teachable, but only by people who have been tested by something harder than a workshop. Vicki Anstey arrived at that argument through a long detour. Two decades in advertising, including a senior marketing role at Eurostar, taught her how high-functioning teams hold together under commercial pressure. Founding Barreworks in London during the 2009 recession taught her how an operator behaves when the business is the only safety net. The endurance work came later and is the evidence base she now draws on with leadership audiences. Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins in 2019, the Pacific Ocean rowed unsupported with the Girls Who Dare team in 2021, the Race Across America cycled in under seven days in 2024. Two Guinness World Records, each set in conditions where the failure mode is not embarrassment but injury or worse. What she does with that material in a corporate room is the work. She breaks down how high-performing teams handle fear, fatigue and disagreement under load, how individuals protect their judgment when the operating window narrows, and what separates the people who keep functioning at the edge from those who freeze. Her TEDxKingstonUponThames talk and The Pin Drop Podcast extend the same argument for buyers who want to see the thinking before they book. Key speaking topics Self-leadership under sustained pressure High-performance team behaviours in extreme environments Psychological safety and trust under load Fear, decision-making and the cost of hesitation Resilience as a trainable capability Female leadership and performance Ideal for C-suite and senior leadership teams entering periods of acute pressure: restructuring, integration, crisis response, major commercial bets. Sales, trading and front-line client teams whose performance is gated on composure under repeated rejection or volatility. Leadership development programmes for high-potential managers stepping into roles where the stress profile changes faster than the skill set. Audiences where the brief calls for credibility with sceptical senior operators, not generic motivation. Audience outcomes A working model of how composure is built and lost, with named behaviours leaders can practise rather than aspire to. Specific tactics for protecting decision quality when teams are fatigued or fearful. A concrete view of what high-performing teams do differently when conditions deteriorate. An honest account of failure, recovery and the actual cost of operating at the edge, drawn from named expeditions rather than generic anecdote.