Anna Wardley

Anna Wardley is a record-setting endurance swimmer, award-winning changemaker and international keynote and TEDx speaker. She helps organisations build resilience, navigate challenges and create psychologically safe workplaces.

Through inspiring and down-to-earth storytelling, Anna shares practical tools for dealing with uncertainty and change, building resilience and reframing adversity. She helps leaders and teams identify and use their inner compass to tackle even the most challenging of headwinds to fuel both personal and organisational growth.

Anna brings together lived experience of overcoming personal adversity, the insight of a mission-driven social entrepreneur and compelling stories of extreme performance in hostile environments.

Anna’s keynote themes include:

How to draw on inner strength and maximise potential

• Face challenges like an endurance athlete: Build resilience and a positive mindset
• Reframe failure: What we can learn from our unsuccessful attempts
• Overcome fear: How to transcend your self-doubt and smash your goals

Embracing cycles of change for a better future

• Navigate transitions with compassion and courage
• The power of a ‘good ending’
• Turn the tide: Using adversity to fuel growth and positive change

 Building a culture of care that supports healthy minds

• How focusing on wellbeing unlocks potential and performance
• Start vital conversations about mental health safely
• Create healthy routines to face tough times with purpose

Anna experienced profound adversity during childhood, including her dad’s death by suicide when she was nine years old, a loss that shaped her sense of self growing up. In her mid-twenties she circumnavigated the globe in the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, a decision that marked the start of a personal transformation towards self-empowerment. Reporting for the BBC whilst on board, she shared the highs and lows of life at sea with a global audience.

After teaching herself front crawl in her thirties, Anna has logged some of the world’s toughest endurance swims including a 102km solo circumnavigation of the Isle of Wight, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Catalina Channel in California and the World Ice Swimming Championships in sub-zero temperatures.

Along the way she has raised a six-figure sum for charity and earned awards including Inspirational Woman of the Year. As well as setting her own records, Anna loves helping others reach their potential and coaches swimmers internationally to achieve their own feats of endurance.

Out of the water, Anna has worked as an international economics correspondent, founded an award-winning social enterprise and run her own communications consultancy.

As a Churchill Fellow, Anna conducted international research into best practice for supporting children bereaved by suicide. In 2022 she was recognised as a Shackleton Leader and in 2023 was named on the WISE100 list of the UK’s leading female social entrepreneurs.

Anna is also a humanist funeral celebrant and writer, contributing to Finding Light in the Darkness (2024) and the anthology Born in Lockdown (2021) about becoming a mum in the pandemic.

“Anna is an inspiring person who has incredible willpower. She really is quite extraordinary. It’s rare to meet a person who is so focused, so driven and so able.”  Dame Ellen MacArthur

“Anna has amazing inner strength and determination.”   Davina McCall, British television presenter

“I was so inspired by Anna’s talk and found it, like the rest of the audience, quite riveting. People didn’t stop talking about her for months afterwards.”  Pfizer UK

“Anna’s message that anything is possible if you set your mind on it has a powerful impact. She is an inspiring role model and delivers with passion, energy and humour.”  National Citizen Service

“Anna immerses her audience and inspires with her passion. She keeps everyone enthralled with her story of sacrifice, pain, determination and the thrill of success.”  Seven Seas Club, Whitehall

“It’s not often that you will meet such an inspirational and driven person. I was drawn in by Anna’s entertaining delivery and strength of character…and the power of the human spirit to overcome obstacles and achieve what many would consider the unachievable.”  St Vincent’s Housing Association

“Anna is crazy, determined but a joyful character. The challenge of getting in the water and swimming is second nature to her and she will not give up. She’s quite remarkable.”   CEO Clipper Ventures PLC

“Anna is a truly unique, inspirational and determined character who proves that you can achieve anything if you put your mind and body to it.”

St Helen and St Katharine School, UK

TEDx – https://youtu.be/E-TJTDZn6_Q?si=8u2qvjhC9vtILANI

Anna’s Showreel – https://youtu.be/xEecUkJjNVk