Former Team GB volleyball player Chris Gregory on what competing on the world stage taught him about pressure

Chris Gregory knows what high performance looks like from the inside.

As a former Team GB volleyball player, eight-time international medallist and five-time British champion, he built his career in environments where preparation, recovery and mindset were not optional extras, but part of the standard.

That is what gives this interview weight. Gregory now speaks and works at the intersection of performance, health and resilience, drawing clear links between elite sport and the pressures people face in business and everyday life.

It is the kind of grounded perspective you want from an Olympic speaker: practical, tested and built on experience rather than theory alone.

In this exclusive interview with the High Performance Speakers Agency, Chris Gregory reflects on what competing on the world stage taught him about discomfort, growth and resilience, why so many people still fall into fixed ways of thinking, and what business leaders can still learn from the discipline of professional sport.

Q1. At elite level, pressure can expose both strengths and weaknesses very quickly. What did competing on the world stage teach you about mindset, resilience and the role discomfort plays in growth?

Chris Gregory: “Competing on the world stage, ultimately, you’re exposed.

“So you’re exposed to a lot of pressure and, as an athlete, you understand that pressure is a privilege because that level of discomfort that comes with either a sink or swim, or fight or flight, moment teaches you a lot about yourself.

“You either fight and you have grit, determination, and that’s drawn out of you, or you get a chance to reflect when things didn’t go so well, and that allows for growth as well.

“So, it taught me a lot about comfort zone and that if you want to grow, you need to expand your thresholds of where you’re comfortable and be willing to get uncomfortable.”

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Q2. Your idea of the ‘Mindset Behind Your Mission’ centres on how people approach progress and potential. What does that phrase mean to you, and why is it so important for long-term success?

Chris Gregory: “The mindset behind your mission delves into the growth versus fixed mindset approaches to things.

“And we need to try and get out of this fixed mindset approach to problems, to the way that we look at the world, to the way that we look at each other and each other’s capabilities and so on.

“So, to achieve higher levels of growth and fulfilment, it’s about digging more into that growth mindset and that’s to do with things like praising effort rather than talent, but also understanding what your goals are and reverse engineering those, and having good mentors and leaders in place to help facilitate more of a growth mindset culture.

“And that growth mindset will allow your employees, your staff, your teams, your leaders, even, to flourish, to develop, and to achieve higher levels of fulfilment in and outside of work.

“We take a deep dive into the growth versus fixed mindset approaches and how we draw growth mindset out.”

Q3. Professional sport often demands a level of preparation and personal discipline that many workplaces struggle to replicate. What are the biggest lessons from elite sport that business leaders still tend to overlook?

Chris Gregory: “I think some of the biggest lessons from performance sport revolve around preparation.

“Athletes prepare themselves well for training, for performance, turning up to a certain standard every day. And as an athlete, there’s a huge cost if you don’t do that. You’re going to fail, you’re going to lose, you’re not going to get very far.

“But in the workplace, to a point, you can often get away with it. But you make things an uphill battle.

“So there’s an individual element to this, and there’s a team and company culture element to this. And on an individual level, it’s about focusing on things like your recovery, your stress management, so that you’re able to turn up and deliver to a high standard.

“If you don’t do that, not only will you suffer and not get the most from yourself and get the best performance from yourself professionally, but your team and the people around you will pick up on that as well. So it seeps into the wider team.

“Focusing on yourself and your own standards first as a leader, as a member of staff, as a team player, and that’s going to help with the overall wider company culture as well.”

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Q4. When people hear you speak, you are aiming to do more than motivate them in the moment. What do you most hope audiences take away from your talks once they leave the room?

Chris Gregory: “I hope they take away a range of things. A lot of inspiration, I hope. I hope they find a lot of engagement in it and they find it quite galvanising.

“I do like to be quite motivational, inspirational, quite positive, but also very true and realistic with the problems and the issues and the mentality that I see consistently day to day.

“So, I hope it’s really impactful, and I hope it’s also very practical as well. So, looking at real science, real scientific solutions to things, practical solutions that you can apply in the real world. Educational, inspirational, galvanising, energising, all those things.”

This exclusive interview with Chris Gregory was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.

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