Inspirational Speaking

Gold Medal Mindset: Olympic Lessons for Business Success

Sarah Ayton is an experienced and engaging inspirational speaker who has helped a range of corporate organisations and individuals achieve success. Using vivid stories and insightful lessons from her distinguished career at the top of sailing, Sarah provides a fresh perspective on fundamental business issues. She offers 5 captivating talks that tell her incredible story and share her successful approach to sustained performance – perfect for after-dinner speaking, corporate events, and seminars.

Discover your Inner Athlete: The best version of you

The success of any business rests on its people. Maximising the productivity, ability, and motivation of individuals and teams drives the performance of any organisation. In pursuit of this goal, calling upon the “Inner Athlete” residing within us is key.

In this talk, Sarah examines the mindset and mental techniques she has adopted over her career to reach the pinnacle of sport. Using clear and engaging examples, Sarah equips business professionals with the skills to be more solution-focused, better orientate their goals, and develop strong mental resilience.

Learning Objectives

Learn how to employ mental toughness to combat adversity
Understand when to change things, seek advice or approach a problem from a different angle
Learn how to be accountable for your own progression and the power of positive thinking
Visualise what success looks like.

Build a Winning Team

Teams form the backbone of organisations. Business goals are more easily achieved through effective team building and management. By fostering efficient communication and cohesiveness, transforming leadership, and encouraging individuality, winning teams emerge.

Sarah understands what it takes to build a winning team. By reflecting on her successful 2008 Olympic campaign, Sarah explores the team dynamics and styles of leadership that she has found to be powerful. She discusses the importance of having a clearly defined vision and values, and offers an actionable approach to review performance, recognise individual contributions, and stimulate a productive team environment.

Learning Objectives

Building the foundations, being creative in your approach
Being the leader that inspires and motivates your team
Create an environment that allows individuals to thrive
The importance of continually reviewing against the end goals

Head out the boat - Navigating challenges with courage and clarity.

To win races, you must be able to “get your head out of the boat” to see the bigger picture – to evaluate the weather, course position, and the actions of competitors to better formulate a winning strategy. To do so, the team has to have the boat set up correctly, and be able to quickly and easily adapt to changes in external factors. The same applies to business strategic management. Establishing key fundamentals facilitates the time and space required to look beyond the organisation, and to reposition its strategy in response to challenges.

Sarah uses this analogy to convey critical approaches for the smooth sailing of a business. She covers how to constructively utilise a team’s skill set, define clear roles and responsibilities, and prioritise key tasks. This talk offers sound methods to leave emotions out of the decision-making process and navigate obstacles that may arise.

Learning Objectives

Understanding the difference between strategy and tactics
Learn how to ‘control the controllables’
Get the basics right & delegate to allow you to respond to external factors

Fight or Flight: Thriving Under Pressure

Businesses, like sailors, often find themselves in high-stake situations. Market turbulence, consumer preference changes, and competitor behaviour can all result in periods of elevated pressure. Understanding how to overcome these situations is greatly advantageous.

In this talk, Sarah recounts her final race at the Olympics – a “who beats who” situation against the Dutch team for the gold. Careful preparation, controlling the controllables, and proper execution led her to victory. She describes ways to remain disciplined and prevent distractions from hindering performance in high-pressure scenarios.

Learning Objectives

The importance of having tried and tested processes and routines
How to identify your ‘super strengths’ and those of your team mates
Understand your environment and how to prioritise what’s important to win

Fit for Gold: Achieving Consistent Performance

Achieving any substantial, meaningful goal is a relentless task. For Sarah and her team, each Olympic campaign constituted a thoroughly demanding four-year journey requiring unwavering focus and dedication. Likewise, business goals can be long-term and monumental in scope, and so understanding how best to structure the approach is essential.

“Fit for Gold” encapsulates what it takes to arrive at the summit of a discipline. Sarah details how dissecting the ultimate goal into its constituent parts, establishing clear and measurable objectives, and prioritising appropriately resulted in her team remaining unbeaten throughout the 2008 Beijing campaign. She talks about continually searching more marginal gains and improvement opportunities, as well as guarding against burnout through strategic rest and recovery.

Learning Objectives

Understanding how looking after your team is fundamental to performance
Be reminded to reward success and manage mediocrity
Recognising when you’re in a development phase or performance phase
Learn how to ‘train like you race and race like you train’

"Sarah Ayton was an outstanding guest speaker at our event series last year. She really engaged with clients, and they left inspired by her story and her determination. She was a joy to work with and we at the Watches of Switzerland Group would certainly recommend her for any type of event where you'd like your guests to leave feeling uplifted and inspired.”

Watches of Switzerland

"Just a note to say a great big thank you for your help in organising the session today with Sarah … and also to Sarah for such an engaging session. It was wonderful to hear Sarah’s story and also her key learns, insights and practical tools she shared to help us maintain our levels of resilience. Lots of great links into the world of work, which was terrific for us from our wellbeing perspective.”

Lorna
Head of HR | Edrington

"Sarah delivered a really inspiring keynote for our global conference. She shared her amazing experiences, challenges and learnings in high-level sport, seamlessly integrating these, and directly addressing, the business leadership challenges we had shared beforehand. Our audience was captivated throughout the session and the feedback from our entire group was extremely positive. Sarah was a joy to work with and I would highly recommend her.”

Louise Johnson
Global CEO Fuse

Inspirational Speaking