Steve Peters
Senior leaders make their worst decisions when their emotional brain is in charge and they cannot tell. The cost shows up as snap reactions in board meetings, avoidable conflict on executive teams, and quiet attrition from people who never recover from a single high-pressure period. Most corporate wellbeing programmes do not address this; they manage the symptoms after the damage is done.
Steve Peters is a consultant psychiatrist whose Chimp Model gives leaders and teams a clinically grounded way to manage the emotional mind under pressure.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Steve Peters
- A clinical psychiatrist’s model of how the mind actually behaves under stress, not a coaching framework borrowed from adjacent fields.
- The Chimp Model has been pressure-tested with British Cycling, Sky ProCycling, Liverpool FC and more than twenty Olympic and national sports programmes, where the cost of a wrong decision is immediate and public.
- Author of The Chimp Paradox, with over 1.4 million copies sold, plus three further books extending the model into resilience, child development and daily practice.
- Equips leaders with a shared vocabulary for emotional regulation that travels into the executive team and downward through the organisation, not a one-off motivational hit.
- Senior academic standing at Sheffield Medical School and Expert Advisor status with the World Anti-Doping Agency anchor the work in formal medicine and ethics, not pop psychology.
Biography highlights
- Consultant psychiatrist and CEO of Chimp Management Ltd.
- Undergraduate Dean and Senior Clinical Lecturer, Sheffield University Medical School, since 1994.
- Former Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist, Rampton High Security Hospital.
- Author of The Chimp Paradox (Vermilion, 2012), My Hidden Chimp, The Silent Guides and A Path Through the Jungle.
- Consultant to British Cycling, Sky ProCycling, Liverpool FC, GB Taekwondo, England Rugby, England Football, British Swimming and UK Track and Field.
- Expert Advisor to the World Anti-Doping Agency; long-serving examination panellist for the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Biography
The most expensive moments in a leader’s career are the ones where the emotional brain takes over and the rational mind catches up too late. The reaction in the meeting, the email sent at midnight, the call made under fatigue. These are not character flaws. They are predictable outputs of how the human mind is structured.
Steve Peters spent more than two decades as a consultant psychiatrist before that observation became a model. His Chimp Model, set out in The Chimp Paradox, separates the emotional system of the brain from the rational one and gives people a working vocabulary for managing the gap between them. The book has sold more than 1.4 million copies and remains a fixture on UK self-development lists more than a decade after publication.
The model earned its reputation in elite sport. Peters worked with British Cycling through its dominant Olympic period, with Sky ProCycling at the top of professional road racing, and with Liverpool FC, GB Taekwondo, England Rugby and England Football. Athletes including Sir Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton, Ronnie O’Sullivan and Adam Peaty have credited him by name. The point is not the celebrity roster. It is that the model has been used in environments where a single emotional misfire is captured on camera and replayed millions of times.
His standing in the formal medical world gives the work a different weight from most performance content. Peters is Undergraduate Dean and Senior Clinical Lecturer at Sheffield University Medical School, was Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist at Rampton High Security Hospital, and serves as an Expert Advisor to the World Anti-Doping Agency. Leaders come away with something rare in this category: a clinically anchored model of their own mind that they can still use the morning after the keynote.
Key speaking topics
- Mind management and the Chimp Model
- Emotional regulation under pressure
- Resilience and psychological robustness
- High performance under scrutiny
- Self-leadership for senior executives
- Mental health in the workplace
- Team dynamics and interpersonal conflict
Ideal for
- CEOs, executive committees and boards facing high-stakes decision-making cycles
- CHROs and Heads of Talent commissioning substantive wellbeing and resilience programmes
- Leadership development directors building executive presence in newly senior leaders
- Sales, trading and operating teams whose performance is shaped by composure under pressure
Audience outcomes
- A working model of how the emotional mind behaves under pressure, in a vocabulary that survives Monday morning
- A method for separating impulsive reactions from considered decisions in the moment
- Specific tools for managing fear, conflict, fatigue and post-event recovery
- A shared organisational language that makes mental performance discussable rather than private
- Confidence that the content is grounded in clinical psychiatry, not motivational reframing