Victoria Humphries

Victoria Humphries’s Background

In 1997 Victoria, along with her mother Sue, became part of the first all-female expedition to the North Pole. Along the way they experienced temperatures of -40oC, constantly shifting ice and at one point they both fell into the Arctic Ocean finding themselves in a life or death situation. The expedition tested their resilience, their ability to cope with a constantly changing environment and most of all, their courage.

Victoria is unusual in that she combines stories from her various adventures and challenges with her extensive commercial experience. Therefore creating a talk that is both inspirational and relatable to the challenges of the modern day workplace. She is known for avoiding corporate jargon and simply use her real life experiences to inspire and motivate. She focuses on helping your workforce to recognise that they live in a ‘non-linear’ world. That is one where there will be constant change, they will fall over, they will need to change direction and there will be many times where they don’t know all the answers. She explains how resilience is not about being strong but about learning to pick yourself back up again and keep going.

When not accepting challenges and generally being a little bit bonkers she has spent 25 years working in the education sector as a teacher, governor, Managing Director of an EdTech, consultant and trainer. She now works with businesses around the world, across a range of sectors, giving keynote speeches and running resilience workshops; encouraging delegates to use their lived experiences to build their ‘resilience toolbox’.

Why book Victoria?

Victoria’s talks have messages around overcoming adversity, leadership & teamwork and resilience along with encouraging curiosity, empowerment and a sense of perspective when things are tough; most importantly the talk is also full of humour and inspiration. She uses stories from her North Pole trip and other challenges to spread a message about how anyone can overcome their fears and how anyone can achieve anything – it’s all about taking one step at a time, being curious and saying yes! Her talks are deliberately jargon free and fairly informal so as to put the audience at ease and allow them to really soak up the messages that she is giving.