Annie Vernon

Associate Consultant

Annie is a Speaker and Coach with real-life experience of teamwork and human performance under pressure.

An Olympic silver medallist and two-time World Champion rower, Annie’s success was always founded on a methodical and holistic analysis of her barriers to improvement coupled with a focus on empowering her team-mates. Athletes should be placed in the context of who they are as human beings, and what motivates them, rather than concentrating simply on their performance.

Annie became a World Champion for the first time in 2007 and this set the scene for an assault on the Beijing Olympics in 2008, where their crew of four attempted to become the first British women’s rowing team to win Olympic gold. Leading until the final hundred metres of their final, they were overhauled by the Chinese crew to finish second. Their tears and grief on the podium were beamed by television cameras back to the UK and led to some tough questions when they returned – how can you be so dissatisfied and ungrateful with an Olympic silver medal?

The devastation of failing to achieve what the team were capable of forced Annie to re-examine her values, her goals, and her approach. She returned to elite sport for the London Olympiad with a newfound motivation of creating a perfect team performance. Annie’s aim was to use every possible strategy to be part of a team that punched far above its weight: was robust, resilient, and effective.

Following Beijing, Annie put this to the test and after a narrow second place in the 2009 World Championships, all the pieces came together the following year when she was crowned World Champion for the second time with a stunning race.

Holding an NLP Diploma, Annie is a confident and experienced communicator and presents her perspective in an engaging manner. She focuses on the areas where the skills required to reach the top in elite sport overlap with those required to succeed in business. From teamwork to goal setting, resilience, change management, and delivering under pressure, she is able to share her experience of how people are motivated, how they respond to stress, success and failure, what makes teams succeed and how to create a high performance culture at work.

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