Kate Naess
Working at the intersection of elite sport and corporate leadership, Kate brings a grounded and practical perspective to what it takes to perform in today’s high-pressure, always-on world. Her work helps leaders and teams build the mindset, emotional intelligence, and recovery capacity required to perform consistently over time.
Kate’s perspective is shaped not only by professional expertise, but by lived experience. Born with a hand difference, she first represented Australia internationally in equestrian before a life-changing personal loss led her to triathlon and ultimately the Rio Paralympic Games. Through this journey, she learned that performance is not built by pushing harder alone, but through adaptability, resilience, recovery, and the ability to navigate uncertainty.
With a background in organisational psychology and a career spanning elite sport and high-performance corporate environments, Kate has partnered with Big 4 firms, elite sporting organisations, and global businesses to build cultures where wellbeing and excellence coexist. Her work challenges the belief that high performance and wellbeing sit at opposite ends of the spectrum, showing instead that sustainable excellence depends on both.
Today, Kate is a sought-after speaker, facilitator, and author whose presentations combine evidence-based insights with powerful storytelling and practical tools. Whether speaking to executive teams, conference audiences, or emerging leaders, Kate creates conversations that challenge thinking, inspire action, and equip people to lead and perform under pressure without burning out.
HYPE Diary
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The Highest Performers I’ve Worked With Don’t Work the Longest Hours
When you picture a high performer, what comes to mind? For most people, it’s someone who’s constantly moving: answering emails late at night, taking calls during family time, announcing proudly that they’re running on four hours of sleep. The executive whose calendar has no gaps, whose phone is always in hand, who is visibly, demonstrably,…
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What One CEO Learned After Years of Running on Empty
Success has a particular way of hiding problems. The company is growing. Revenue is up. The team is performing. The CEO is on stage at industry events, picking up awards, getting tagged in congratulatory LinkedIn posts. From every external angle, things are going well. Behind that, in the actual working day, something different is happening.…
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I Thought Rest Was a Luxury Until I Learned What It Does to the Brain
Somewhere in leadership culture, busyness became a proxy for performance. Leaders started describing their schedules the way other people describe medals. “I haven’t stopped all week.” “Things are completely mad right now.” “I’ve barely had time to think.” Said with a particular combination of exhaustion and quiet pride, as though the relentlessness is both the…
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7 Habits of Leaders Who Perform Hard and Sleep Well at Night
Let’s talk about something that doesn’t get nearly enough airtime in leadership conversations: recovery. Not the concept of it — most leaders will nod along to the idea that recovery matters. The practice of it. The actual, deliberate, non-negotiable building of recovery into a working week, rather than hoping it turns up somewhere in the…
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What Executives Can Learn From How Athletes Recover
When people picture elite athletes, they think about the training — the early mornings, the discipline, the physical output. What rarely gets mentioned is that the world’s best performers spend just as much time and intention on recovery as they do on the work itself. That’s not accidental. Recovery is the whole point of the…
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From Elite Sport to Executives: The Same Game, Different Field
If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you take someone out of elite sport and drop them into the world of executives, the short answer is: nothing really changes. The longer answer is what this post is about. I spent over 20 years in high performance environments — a blend of time as an elite…
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Just Stop
The subtle art of slowing down to speed up: what high-performance sport taught me about sustainable corporate performance There’s a moment in elite sport that rarely gets spoken about. It’s not the podium. It’s not the breakthrough performance. It’s not even the comeback story. It’s the moment an athlete—highly trained, deeply driven, and operating at…
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You Are Not Tired – You Are Leaking Energy
Most of us treat exhaustion as a single problem with a single solution. But human energy flows through four distinct domains — and learning how they feed each other might be the most useful thing you ever do for yourself. ◈Mind Focus, clarity, thoughts, beliefs ◉Body Physical vitality, movement, rest ◍Emotion Feeling, connection, expression ◎Spirit…
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From Endurance to Excellence Rethinking High Performance in Leadership
For most of my life, I’ve worked in high-performance environments. As an elite athlete. Inside corporate organisations. And now alongside executives and senior leadership teams. Different arenas. Different pressures. But one strikingly consistent pattern. High performance doesn’t break because people aren’t capable. It breaks because recovery is missing from the equation. What elite sport understands…
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The Corporate Elite: High Performance the Sustainable Way
Executives and senior leaders are the corporate world’s elite athletes. Just like top performers on the field, leaders in high-stakes environments must sustain focus, energy, and clarity to perform consistently at their best. But in the rush to deliver results, many forget a crucial truth: sustainable performance depends on recovery as much as effort. Learning…