Anna Hemmings

What does it really take to perform at your best and keep doing it? Anna knows. Drawing on two decades at the highest level of sport and business, including her background as an Olympian and a 6-time World Champion, including 3 consecutive victories, she bridges the gap between elite performance psychology and actionable tools to drive sustained excellence. Becoming a World Champion requires immense grit, but staying at the top, undefeated for 8 years, requires a specific mindset, habits and team culture. In this inspiring and highly engaging speech, Anna shares the exact frameworks and practical strategies needed to cultivate a true winning mindset and deliver consistent results year after year.

• The CANI Principle: Embracing the mindset of Constant and Never-Ending Improvement to ensure that even top performers continue to evolve and find the 1% gains.

• The Unified Team: Recognising that a Winning Mindset isn't a solo pursuit; it’s about the power of teamwork, getting support, and working effectively together to achieve sustained success.

• The Feedback Fuel: Why a Winning Mindset craves honest, frequent feedback as the ultimate tool for sharpening performance and building a high-performance culture.

• The Continuous Review: Creating a habit of looking honestly at both wins and losses, stripping away the emotion so the team can repeat what worked and quickly fix what didn’t.

• Embrace Change: The importance of evolving your approach and embracing change to avoid standing still, ensuring you stay relevant and effective and deliver consistent high performance.

• Bounce Forward: Developing an attitude that treats inevitable setbacks as fuel for growth, ensuring you cultivate the mindset, courage, and confidence to get back up and evolve into a stronger version of yourself.

Drawing on over a decade at the absolute peak of elite sport, Anna knows exactly what it takes to perform under intense pressure. Her sporting career was a rollercoaster of highs, lows, and immense expectations. Her ultimate test of resilience came when she was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Overcoming that profound setback to return to the world stage required a complete reframing of her mindset and habits. For the past 15 years, Anna has blended this lived experience with her extensive work as a resilience specialist and workshop facilitator for corporate teams. In this engaging speech, she shares the exact strategies needed to navigate adversity, thrive in constant pressure and rapidly changing environments, and sustain high performance over the long term. These highly effective techniques are brought to life through Anna’s inspiring personal anecdotes.

• Reframing Adversity: Developing a resilient mindset that treats setbacks as a learning opportunity, ensuring every loss or victory is used to review, learn, and improve future strategy.

• Staying Calm under Pressure: Developing the mental clarity to stay calm under pressure, to filter out distractions, stay focused, and be equipped to make great decisions when it matters most.

• Versatile Thinking: How to master versatile thinking during pressure and adversity by intentionally reframing your perspective, giving you the confidence and mental agility needed to overcome challenges and take bold actions in high-stakes situations.

• Rejection as Redirection: Adopting a mindset that views "no" not as a dead end, but as a prompt to refine the approach, enhance the strategy or try a new approach and go again.

• Controlling the Controllables: A mindset that shifts attention away from the uncontrollables and external pressures that fuel anxiety, instead channelling energy and focus into the actions, behaviours and attitude within your direct control.

• Embrace Change: Effectively lead teams through rapidly changing environments. By intentionally evolving your approach and embracing change, you ensure your team never stands still and consistently delivers under pressure.

High-performing teams aren’t born; they are built through a deliberate fusion of mindset and behaviours. Drawing on her experience of being part of World Class teams, winning world titles in both solo and doubles disciplines, combined with her experience as a team development coach to corporate teams over the last decade, Anna provides leaders with a practical, world-class framework to transform team potential into consistent, outstanding results. Anna blends inspiring anecdotes from her journey in sport and business with the science of performance, to bring you an inspiring, engaging and highly impactful speech on how to lead and build World Class teams.

• A high performance culture: what it looks like and how to embed key behaviours across teams for optimal long-term success.

• A foundation of trust: learn how to build deep trust that unites a team, transforms relationships and enables team members to communicate with greater speed and transparency.

• Collective Results: understand how to align the team and keep everyone focused on the common goal. Drive cross-functional alignment, ensuring every department collaborates toward the main goal.

• Embracing accountability: move beyond individual ownership to a culture where team members hold one another accountable to high standards of performance and behaviour, ensuring sustained excellence.

• The power of healthy conflict: discover why constructive challenge is the secret to better decision-making, allowing your team to find the best solutions through honest, rigorous debate.

• Consistent Feedback: understand the importance of honest feedback as a driver for continuous improvement and maintaining elite standards.

Anna Hemmings examines the behaviours that enable leaders to remain clear-headed and effective during uncertainty and change. Using insights from her Olympic career and coaching practice, she introduces practical strategies for handling pressure, building confidence, and creating clarity of direction. Her Resilient Leaders Elements model provides a structured approach to leading with presence, focus, and purpose when it matters most.