Motivation and Inspiration

Why organisations work with Anna Hemmings A first-hand performance record with operating substance behind it. Six world titles, two Olympic Games, and twelve years running her own consultancy with named global clients. A direct, evidence-based take on resilience as a trainable capability. Her recovery from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and return to win three further world titles is the case study, not the headline. Accredited delivery on team performance through the Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team model, used in workshop and team-development formats, not just keynote. Material that translates to senior leadership audiences. Beyond the Barriers has worked with leadership teams at IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Roche, Deloitte, British Airways, and NatWest. Biography highlights Six-time Marathon Kayak World Champion, K-1 and K-2 disciplines, 1999 to 2007. Two-time Olympian for Great Britain: Sydney 2000 (K-1 500m), Beijing 2008 (K-2 500m). MBE, 2010 New Year Honours, for services to sport. Sunday Times Sports Woman of the Year, Champions Award (2005). Founder and Managing Director, Beyond the Barriers, a high-performance training consultancy. Accredited trainer in the Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team model. Biography Britain’s most successful female marathon kayaker spent more than a decade winning at the top of an endurance sport, and then spent the following decade translating what she learned into work with senior leadership teams. The athletic record is six world titles between 1999 and 2007 and two Olympic Games. The second decade is the operating substance behind her speaking work. The pivot point in her story is medical. At the peak of her career Anna Hemmings was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and told racing was unlikely to return. She came back to win three further world titles and qualify for Beijing 2008. That recovery is the working material she uses with leaders, not as inspiration but as a worked example of resilience as a set of repeatable practices. Through her consultancy, Beyond the Barriers, she works with senior leaders and teams at organisations including IBM, Unilever, Novartis, Roche, Deloitte, British Airways and NatWest. She is an accredited High Performance and Leadership Coach and an accredited trainer in the Five Behaviours of a Cohesive Team model. Her sessions move beyond keynote into masterclass and longer-form team development. What separates her from the standard athlete-speaker is the consultancy work. She is not narrating a sporting career to an audience of executives, she is bringing twelve years of applied practice with leadership teams to bear on a specific organisational question: how senior people hold their performance and judgement when the load does not let up. Key speaking topics Resilience as a leadership capability Performance under sustained pressure High-performing team development Mindset and recovery in high-stakes environments Confidence and composure in senior roles Sustained excellence and the disciplines behind it Ideal for C-suite and executive leadership teams managing prolonged operational pressure Senior leaders moving into bigger remits where composure becomes a visible variable Sales and commercial leadership audiences operating in high-stakes deal cycles HR and L&D programmes building resilience and team performance into leadership development Audience outcomes A working definition of resilience that goes beyond willpower, with practices that can be used immediately A clearer view of how senior leaders maintain judgement and composure under sustained load Specific behaviours for building trust and accountability inside leadership teams A first-hand account of recovery and return to elite performance, used as worked content rather than story Language for talking about performance under pressure with their own teams

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.

James is a multi-bestselling author whose books span sport, comedy, mindset, performance and fitness, all delivered with his trademark honesty, humour and unfiltered storytelling. Since retiring from professional rugby in 2019, James has built a hugely successful career as a podcaster, presenter, author, DJ and high-demand public speaker. He is co-host of the smash hit weekly podcast The Good, The Bad & The Rugby, one of the UK’s most popular sports shows with over 120,000 listeners per episode. He has also launched a host of other successful podcasts including What A Flanker, Couple’s Quarantine, Backrow Radio, and the comedy led Amuse Douche, collectively amassing more than 500 episodes and 500+ hours of content.

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 Danny Rensch Inside view of a bootstrapped consumer platform that reached a billion-dollar valuation with no venture capital, told by the operator who built its content, events and media strategy from the inside. Direct authorship of Chess.com’s signature commercial properties, including the Speed Chess Championship, the PRO Chess League, Titled Tuesday, and the PogChamps streamer events that opened chess to a non-chess audience. A working framework for using a 1,500-year-old game as a commercial asset: turning a niche pastime into a streaming category, an esports format, and a content engine for 40 million monthly users. Memoir-grade material on resilience and self-leadership grounded in a specific, publicly documented personal history, published by Hachette in 2025 and endorsed by Jeannette Walls and Ben Mezrich. Biography highlights Co-founder and Chief Chess Officer, Chess.com, the platform with over 225 million registered members and roughly 40 million monthly active users. International Master (FIDE) and former Arizona youngest National Master (1999); 1998 Elementary National Champion, 2000 Junior High National Champion, 2004 National High School Co-Champion. Author of Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life (Hachette Book Group, 2025), reviewed by Kirkus as “A winning memoir” with endorsements from Jeannette Walls and Ben Mezrich. Created and hosted the 2016 $40,000 GM Blitz Battle Championship featuring Magnus Carlsen, the format that became the Chess.com Speed Chess Championship. Hosted PogChamps, the streamer chess tournament credited with bringing chess to mainstream Twitch and YouTube audiences during 2020. Speaker at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference; profiled by Fortune in 2025 on the Chess.com growth story. Biography Chess.com is one of the few consumer platforms of its scale that never took venture capital. Over fifteen years, the company grew from a small bootstrapped operation into a service with more than 225 million registered members, around 40 million monthly active users, and a valuation above one billion dollars by 2023. Danny Rensch co-founded the company in 2009 and built its content, events and media operations. The competitive layer of the business is his work. He created and hosted the 2016 $40,000 GM Blitz Battle Championship featuring Magnus Carlsen, the format that grew into the Speed Chess Championship. He hosted the first PogChamps in 2020, the streamer tournament that pulled a non-chess audience onto the platform and re-cast a 1,500-year-old game as a streaming category. The PRO Chess League and Titled Tuesday sit in the same portfolio. Before the company, there was a player. Rensch is a FIDE International Master and a former scholastic champion: Elementary National Champion in 1998, Arizona’s youngest National Master in 1999, Junior High National Champion in 2000, and National High School Co-Champion in 2004, the year he earned his first IM norm. His memoir, Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life, was published by Hachette in 2025 and describes a childhood inside the Church of Immortal Consciousness, an Arizona cult, and chess as the route out. Kirkus called it “A winning memoir.” The commercial argument and the personal argument reinforce each other. A board considering how a niche product becomes a global consumer category, or a leadership team studying the discipline required to operate without external capital for fifteen years, will find specific operating material in the Chess.com story. A management audience working on resilience and decision-making under pressure has, in the same speaker, a primary source. Key speaking topics Bootstrapped consumer platform growth Building category-defining digital products Content, community and commercial events strategy Lessons from chess for business strategy and decision-making Resilience and self-leadership through adversity Streaming, esports and the modernisation of legacy categories Ideal for CEOs and founders of consumer platforms, marketplaces and subscription businesses CMOs, CCOs and heads of content building community-led growth Boards and leadership teams of bootstrapped or founder-led companies Conferences on entrepreneurship, scale-up leadership, sports business and digital media Audience outcomes A concrete view of how a bootstrapped consumer platform compounds product, content and events decisions over fifteen years. Operating examples of turning a legacy category into a streaming-first business, drawn from the Speed Chess Championship and PogChamps. A working language for applying chess concepts (anticipation, calculated risk, pattern recognition) to commercial strategy without metaphor inflation. A grounded perspective on resilience, decision-making and personal recovery, sourced from a published memoir rather than generic motivational material.

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 Tommy Caulfield Stories with receipts. The Atlantic crossing, the Patagonia ultra triathlon, and the El Capitan climb are documented adventures, not platform anecdotes, which gives the resilience material an evidence base most motivational keynotes do not have. The “ordinary person” frame. Caulfield was a content marketer with no endurance background before any of this. That makes the material legible to a non-elite audience in a way that ex-military and Olympic speakers often are not. A specific intellectual hook in High Agency. The signature talk reframes resilience as ownership and decisive action under ambiguity, which gives people teams a more useful organising idea than “be resilient.” A corporate client list that signals fit. Repeat work with Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Airbnb, Nike, Dropbox, BNY Mellon, and Gymshark indicates the content travels across sectors and seniority levels. Biography highlights Co-founder of The Tempest Two with James Whittle, the speaking and adventure partnership formed after their 2015 Atlantic crossing. Rowed 3,000 miles across the Atlantic unaided in 54 days, from the Canary Islands to Barbados, with no prior rowing experience. Completed a world-first ultra triathlon in Patagonia: 1,600km cycle, 65km mountain run, and a 100km stand-up paddleboard descent of the La Leona river between Lakes Viedma and Argentino. Climbed El Capitan in Yosemite with 36 months’ climbing experience. Co-founder of Dose, a workplace wellbeing company whose clients have included Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM, and Airbnb. Host of The Tempest Two Pod, a podcast on adventure mindset. Corporate keynote clients include Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Dropbox, Heineken, Gymshark, and Rapid7. Biography Most resilience content fails the room within five minutes. The audience has heard the abstract version. They have done the workshop. What they have not heard is someone who can describe what changes in the head when a 7-metre rowing boat capsizes 1,500 miles from land in a hurricane, and then say something useful about Monday morning. That is the slot Tommy Caulfield fills. He and James Whittle, who together form The Tempest Two, rowed 3,000 miles unaided across the Atlantic in 2015 with no prior rowing experience. They followed it with a world-first ultra triathlon across Patagonia in 2017: a 1,600km cycle, a 65km mountain run, and a 100km stand-up paddleboard descent of the La Leona river. They climbed El Capitan in 2019 with three years of climbing experience between them. The keynote work draws on those expeditions, but the proposition is structural rather than anecdotal. The signature talk, High Agency, treats ownership and decisive action under ambiguity as a learnable workplace skill, not a personality trait. It is built for audiences who are tired of being told to be resilient and want a more specific mental model. The corporate adoption supports the case. Caulfield has delivered repeat keynotes for Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Airbnb, Nike, Dropbox, BNY Mellon, Gymshark, and Heineken, and co-founded the workplace wellbeing company Dose, which has worked with Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM, and Airbnb. The “ordinary person” framing is the differentiator: no elite athletic background, no military service, no academic credential. The credibility lives in the expeditions themselves and the room responses they produce. Key speaking topics Resilience and performance under pressure High agency and ownership at work Growth mindset Team performance in adversity Adventure mindset and behaviour change Decision-making under uncertainty Ideal for People and culture leaders looking for resilience and mindset content that lands with a mid-career audience. Sales, customer, and high-pressure operating teams running annual kick-offs or away-days. HR and L&D teams designing wellbeing or performance programmes that need a credible external opener. Conference programmes wanting an adventure-led keynote with a corporate client track record rather than a pure inspirational slot. Audience outcomes A working definition of high agency that an audience can apply to their own decisions, not a generic call to be more resilient. A felt sense of what mindset under prolonged pressure actually looks like, drawn from documented expeditions rather than abstract examples. Specific habits and decision routines used to keep moving through setbacks, capsizes, and prolonged adversity. A reset of what “ordinary” people are capable of when the frame shifts from experience to ownership.

Why organisations work with James Whittle A first-person account of decision-making after 54 days of unsupported ocean rowing, three days on the wall of El Capitan, and a world-first Patagonia triathlon, drawn on directly rather than borrowed from research. A deliberate “started from zero” frame that lands with workforces who are tired of being shown ex-special-forces or Olympic-medallist case studies and find them remote. A track record of repeat work with Nike, Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Heineken and Airbnb, which gives buyers reassurance that the material survives a senior corporate audience. A second business, Dose, built around translating expedition lessons into ongoing workplace wellbeing programmes for clients including BNY Mellon and IBM, so the keynote sits inside a wider intervention rather than a one-off appearance. A speaking partnership with Tom Caulfield that allows two-handed delivery, useful for offsites and team experiences where a single-voice keynote would not hold the room. Biography highlights Co-founder, The Tempest Two, the speaking and adventure partnership with Tom Caulfield. Co-founder, Dose, a workplace wellbeing company working with Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb. Rowed the Atlantic unsupported, Canary Islands to Barbados, 3,000 miles in 54 days, with no prior rowing experience. World-first ultra-triathlon across Patagonia: 1,600km cycle, 65km mountain run, 100km stand-up paddleboard descent of the La Leona River. Climbed El Capitan in Yosemite, encountering Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell on the wall. Speaking client list includes Google, Nike, Airbnb, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Heineken, Red Bull and Vodafone. Biography The honest version of resilience is not a poster on an office wall. It is what someone does on day forty of an Atlantic crossing when the water-maker has failed and the next port is still two weeks away. That is the territory The Tempest Two have spent the better part of a decade walking into on purpose. The duo, James Whittle and Tom Caulfield, started with no rowing experience and crossed 3,000 miles of ocean in 54 days. They followed it with a world-first ultra-triathlon in Patagonia and three days on the granite face of El Capitan. The pattern is deliberate: pick a discipline neither of them has practised, give themselves enough runway to learn it, and put the result in front of a corporate audience as material on how ordinary people make hard decisions under load. That positioning is what gives the work its commercial weight. Most adventure speakers come from a military or elite-sport background that audiences quietly discount as unreachable. The Tempest Two reject that framing on principle, which is why their keynote travels into rooms at Nike, Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan and Heineken without losing the audience halfway through. Whittle’s second business, Dose, takes the same lessons and converts them into structured workplace wellbeing programmes for clients including BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb. The keynote is the front door; the operating model behind it is closer to a sustained intervention on team energy and recovery than a one-time motivational booking. Key speaking topics Resilience under sustained pressure Decision-making in degraded conditions Team performance on long-duration projects Risk and the comfort zone Wellbeing as a performance variable Adventure-led leadership development Ideal for HR and people leaders running offsites focused on team energy and recovery Sales and commercial leadership conferences where the brief is grit and momentum, not strategy content Programme leads on long-duration transformations who need to address fatigue head-on Senior all-hands events that need a non-corporate voice to shift the register Audience outcomes A concrete picture of how a small team makes decisions when the original plan has stopped working A vocabulary for resilience that does not collapse into platitude A reset on the difference between high-effort discomfort and actual risk A reason to look at recovery and energy management as a leadership concern, not a personal one