Victoria Humphries

‘The acquisition of real-world wisdom is attained through lived experiences in the real world... it is not necessarily found in the pages of books.’

Victoria Humphries is a polar adventurer, three times Guinness World Record holder, mountain climber, marathon runner, author, Bath based businesswoman and a ‘normal’ person. She prides herself on being just your average woman who happens to believe that Anything is Possible if you put your mind to it. Life is full of challenges, and we always have a choice – step forward or run away, be overcome by the enormity of it or be brave and step into it. What’s the worst that can happen? Just give it a go! 

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 -40^oC, 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 to create talks and workshops that are both inspirational and relatable to the challenges of the modern day workplace. She is known for avoiding corporate jargon and simply using her real life experiences to inspire and motivate. She focuses on helping your workforce to recognise that they live in a ‘non-linear’ world; 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.

Recently she has been Managing Director of an EdTech business. Victoria is Chair of Governors of a school in Gibraltar and on the Board of Trustees of a UK based group of schools.  She now works with businesses and schools around the world, across a range of sectors, giving keynote speeches and running cultural change & resilience workshops.

Outcomes

Depending on what clients would like her session to focus on, delegates will leave:

1. Feeling inspired and believing that they can achieve anything both individually and together
2. With an increased self-awareness which will better equip them to respond to the challenges of leadership and business
3. Thinking differently; challenging themselves to be curious, to take opportunities and to break challenges into bite size chunks
4. With an increased understanding of resilience and of how their lived experiences can be transferred to the workplace environment

Why book Victoria for a talk?

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.