Stef Reid
Plans break. Markets shift, structures restructure, people get hurt, and the strategy a leadership team agreed last quarter no longer describes the conditions they are operating in. Most organisations rehearse for the plan working. Far fewer have built the team-level habits that decide whether the next setback compounds or becomes the moment performance steps up.
Stef Reid is a four-time Paralympian, world champion and MBE who helps leaders and teams turn setback and disruption into sustained high performance.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Stef Reid
- A medal record, not a metaphor: triple Paralympic medallist, 2017 long jump world champion and five-time world record holder, with 18 years of evidence on what holds performance together when conditions change.
- Sharp specificity on the moment after the plan fails. Her material is built around what teams actually do in the hours and weeks after a setback, not the rhetoric of bouncing back.
- A working argument on inclusion that does not collapse into compliance language. Reid speaks about disability and difference as performance variables, drawing on her TEDxLondonWomen talk on accessible design and her public campaign that pushed Nike on single-shoe retail for amputee customers.
- Boardroom credibility built outside the speaking circuit: Vice President of British Athletics, broadcaster for Channel 4 and the BBC, MBE for services to Paralympic sport.
- Clients including BP, Sky, Bloomberg, Visa, McLaren, Barclays and Procter & Gamble, where the brief was leadership under pressure, not an inspirational set piece.
Biography highlights
- Triple Paralympic medallist (Beijing 2008, London 2012, Rio 2016) and 2017 World Para Athletics long jump champion.
- MBE, 2018 New Year Honours, for services to Paralympic sport.
- Biochemistry graduate, Queen’s University, Kingston, on a full academic scholarship.
- Vice President of British Athletics and The Leprosy Mission UK; ambassador for London Air Ambulance and British Ice Skating.
- Broadcaster across Channel 4, BBC and CBC, including the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics, the Invictus Games and the 2025 World Athletics Championships; Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Sports Host.
- TEDxLondonWomen speaker on accessible design; first British amputee to walk a London Fashion Week catwalk.
Biography
A boating accident at fifteen ended one version of Reid’s life and made the next one a question of design rather than recovery. The medical answer was amputation. The harder question, asked over the eighteen years that followed, was how to build a system, training, mindset, team, that turned a body operating under new constraints into one capable of winning at the highest level of world sport.
She did. Three Paralympic medals across Beijing, London and Rio. A world long jump title in 2017. Five world records. An MBE in 2018 for services to Paralympic sport. The proof points sit on a single shelf, but the content she now brings to senior audiences sits underneath them, in the specific habits and decisions that allowed an athlete to keep performing through injury, classification changes and the routine collapse of plans.
That material translates because organisations face the same problem in a different vocabulary. Reid works with leadership teams on the practical question of what high-performing groups actually do in the moment a strategy stops describing reality. Her talks for BP, Sky, Bloomberg, Visa, McLaren, Barclays and Procter & Gamble take the same arc, with frameworks built from elite sport science and her own career, not from generic motivational structure.
The second strand of her work is inclusion as a performance question. Her TEDxLondonWomen talk argued that accessible design serves everyone, not a category. Her public campaign pressing Nike to sell single shoes to amputee customers made the same point in retail terms. As a broadcaster for Channel 4, the BBC and CBC, and as Vice President of British Athletics, she carries that argument into rooms where DEI language has otherwise lost its edge.
Key speaking topics
- Adaptive mindset and team performance under pressure
- Resilience and recovery after setback
- High performance habits in elite sport and business
- Inclusion and disability as performance variables
- Mental health and sustained excellence
- Diversity as a competitive lever, not a compliance line
Ideal for
- Senior leadership teams entering restructure, integration or a period of sustained pressure
- DEI, talent and culture leads briefing the board on inclusion as capability rather than reporting
- High-performing commercial, sales and trading teams operating under volatility
- Sales kick-offs, leadership offsites and all-hands moments where the audience needs a credible voice on adapting when the plan stops working
Audience outcomes
- A clearer view of what a team’s actual response to setback says about its performance ceiling
- Practical habits drawn from elite-sport preparation that translate to operating decisions under pressure
- A sharper, less political vocabulary for inclusion that frames difference as a performance variable
- Renewed conviction at senior level that adaptive capacity is a leadership skill, not a personality trait
Talks
A working session on how elite performers sustain output through repeated disruption, built from Reid’s eighteen-year Paralympic career.
Key takeaways:
- How high performers separate the event from the response when a plan fails
- The role of preparation in shortening recovery time after setback
- What teams can borrow from elite-sport debrief practice
A keynote that reframes diversity as a performance lever rather than a compliance metric, anchored in lived experience of inclusion in elite sport and design.
Key takeaways:
- Why difference is a performance variable, not a category
- How leaders translate inclusion intent into operating decisions
- The cost to performance when inclusion is treated as reporting
A talk for organisations linking sustained excellence to mental health practice, drawing on the routines that hold up at world-championship level.
Key takeaways:
- The daily habits that protect performance over a long horizon
- How elite athletes manage pressure without burning out the system
- What leaders can model to their teams when stakes are high