Tima Deryan
Senior leaders are asked to hold their nerve in conditions where the data is thin, the consequences are real, and the team is watching. Composure under that kind of pressure is rarely taught. It is built through repeated exposure to environments where the cost of poor decisions cannot be hedged.
Tima Deryan is a Lebanese mountaineer, polar skier, and mindset coach who works with leaders and teams on composure, goal-setting, and decision-making under high-stakes uncertainty.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Tima Deryan
- A first-person account of summiting Everest in one of the deadliest seasons on the mountain, used as concrete material for how leaders prepare for, recover from, and execute under conditions where mistakes cost lives.
- A track record of physical first-ever achievements, including Everest, the Seven Summits, the South Pole, and Ojos del Salado, that gives weight to her arguments on goal-setting and persistence beyond the usual motivational register.
- A working coaching practice, not a one-off speaking circuit; she runs Mountain Gipsy as an ongoing platform, which means content is sharpened by repeated client work rather than rehearsed from a single book.
- A founder track record alongside the mountaineering, including the sustainable fashion brand Feministiya and earlier ventures, which gives her credibility on women’s leadership and entrepreneurship topics where bureaus often field speakers with only one of those two profiles.
Biography highlights
- First Lebanese woman and youngest Arab to summit Mount Everest, 22 May 2019, age 26.
- First Lebanese woman to ski the last degree to the South Pole, December 2022.
- Completed the Seven Summits; first Arab woman to summit Ojos del Salado, the world’s highest active volcano.
- Founder and CEO of Mountain Gipsy; founder of Feministiya, a sustainability-focused fashion brand.
- Author of Curly Adventures: Mount Everest, a children’s book on her ascent.
- Certified mindset coach with a corporate keynote client list spanning multinationals across consumer goods, energy, and pharmaceuticals.
Biography
The 2019 Everest season was one of the deadliest on record. On 22 May, Tima Deryan reached the summit at 7:21 am, becoming the first Lebanese woman and the youngest Arab to do so. The technical and psychological work that produced that morning is what she now teaches.
Deryan has since added the South Pole, the Seven Summits, and Ojos del Salado to a sustained record of high-altitude objectives. She is pursuing the Explorer Grand Slam, a list completed by fewer than 75 people globally and by only 15 women. The achievements matter for the keynote because the lessons are drawn from environments where decisions cannot be undone, not from a metaphor.
Outside the mountains, she runs Mountain Gipsy as a coaching and speaking platform and founded Feministiya, a sustainable fashion brand focused on women’s rights and gender equality. That second track gives her substantive material on entrepreneurship and women’s leadership rather than the borrowed credibility some adventure speakers rely on. She is also a best-selling author of Curly Adventures: Mount Everest, a children’s book recounting her climb.
Her corporate work includes keynotes and workshops for Procter & Gamble, Merck, Ford, Adidas, Henkel, Swarovski, Shell, and ADNOC. The repeated booking pattern across consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, and energy reflects what she is most often commissioned for: a high-stakes story used as working material on goal-setting, team dynamics, and composure under pressure.
Key speaking topics
- Goal-setting in low-margin environments
- Mindset and self-leadership under pressure
- Decision-making in high-stakes uncertainty
- Team dynamics on extended expeditions
- Women’s leadership and breaking first-ever barriers
- Entrepreneurship and sustainability
- Resilience and recovery from setback
Ideal for
- CHROs and L&D leaders commissioning a high-stakes keynote on resilience and goal-setting
- Sales and commercial leadership teams working through stretch targets
- Women’s leadership networks and ERGs inside large multinationals
- Off-site events for senior teams that need a working narrative on composure under pressure, not a generic motivational session
Audience outcomes
- A working framework for setting and pursuing objectives where failure has real cost
- A first-person account of how preparation, composure, and team trust hold up in extreme conditions
- A clearer view of what self-leadership looks like in environments without external validation
- A direct argument for persistence in goals that look unreasonable from the starting line
Talks
A first-person account of the climb and the operational discipline that produced it, applied to organisational goal-setting.
Key takeaways:
- How to break an apparently unreasonable objective into trainable steps
- How preparation translates into composure when conditions deteriorate
- How small decisions compound on a long expedition
A talk on growth mindset built from repeated exposure to physical and psychological extremes.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between motivation and trained mindset
- How to rebuild after a setback that is not your fault
- Daily practices that hold under pressure
Lessons on team performance, leadership, and decision-making drawn from expedition leadership.
Key takeaways:
- How small teams hold together in extended low-information environments
- How to assign roles when conditions change quickly
- How to maintain individual standards inside a shared objective