Catriona Le May Doan

Every organization faces the same challenge: How do you stay at the top when competitors are watching your every move? How do you embrace change when it threatens everything you’ve built? And how do you inspire your team to push past self-imposed limits when the pressure is highest?

Catriona LeMay Doan knows what it takes to perform under extreme pressure. As the first Canadian ever to defend an individual Olympic gold medal, she’s experienced both devastating failure and record-breaking success.

But her most valuable insights come from the 12 million minutes between those defining moments—the daily decisions, the strategic pivots, and the team dynamics that separated last place from Olympic gold.

In this engaging presentation, Catriona brings her Olympic medals into your room (yes, attendees hold Olympic gold during her talk!) while sharing practical frameworks your team can apply immediately.

She inspires and equips your people with strategies for embracing disruptive change, maintaining excellence when you’re already successful, and building the courage to stand out when blending in feels safer.

Organizations leave with a renewed sense of what’s possible when limits are removed and teams align around a common purpose.

Key Sample Takeaways

• Remove artificial limits – Identify where your organization is setting boundaries based on past experience rather than future potential, and develop strategies to push beyond them
• Master strategic change – Learn how to get ahead of industry disruption rather than react to it, using the framework that helped Canada dominate when new technology threatened to upend an entire sport
• Stay on top when you’re already winning – Understand why doing the same things that made you successful will actually move you backward, and discover how to evolve while maintaining your competitive edge
• Build courage in your culture – Create an environment where people choose to stand out and pursue excellence rather than blend into the safety of the crowd
• Define success as the journey – Shift from outcome-obsessed thinking to process-focused excellence, recognizing that consistent daily execution matters more than isolated moments of achievement
• The “why” check-in framework – Implement regular strategic reflection before crisis forces it, ensuring your team stays connected to purpose and passionate about the work
• Make every detail count – Recognize that competitive advantage often comes from the small things your competitors overlook, and develop systems to address them
• Lead through extreme pressure – Apply proven techniques for performance when stakes are highest and there’s no room for error

Changing situations means changing expectations – and mounting pressures to meet those expectations, both from within and from the outside world. Dealing with pressure and the fear of failure (and fear of success) is a reality for so many. Catriona will share with you, and help you learn from her own experience, as someone who dealt with changing expectations in the public eye.

Sport is important not only for the physical health benefits, but we are in a mental-health crisis,”  Le May Doan says. “We’re actually in a health crisis in every way, physical and mental and also social. …It’s important it is to be a part of a community, to feel that sense of belonging. Sport can break down barriers, and it can help you feel like you’re part of a community and help you feel whole, and help you feel healthier.

What does it mean to be the first person to accomplish something? When no one has ever been in the same situation as you before? Quite simply, a lot of responsibility. As the only Canadian to defend a gold medal at any Olympic games, Catriona will tell you about the stresses, tell you how you can help pave the way for others to follow like a true leader.

Catriona Le May Doan can tell you about being an Olympic Champion Speed Skater and an Olympic broadcaster, about being tirelessly involved with her beloved community and those in it, about being a spokesperson for the SpinaBifida and Hydrocephalus Association of Canada, Right to Play and Ontario’s Lakefield Oval Project, and, most importantly, about being a woman and mother. Women are constantly pulled in many different directions. Find out how balance of work, life, and motherhood is possible while working towards your own goals.