About Deborah
I came to resilience through experience before I came to it through science.
For more than 20 years, I worked in international television and documentary production, leading people and complex projects in demanding, fast-moving environments.
My career took me from filming with Sir David Attenborough in the Galapagos, to coordinating Ben Affleck's visits to Sudan and Darfur for UNHCR, working with Academy Award-winning director Davis Guggenheim during the filming of Malala Yousafzai's story, and leading productions for Shell International in London and Houston.
Behind very different projects were many of the same human challenges: managing pressure, navigating uncertainty, making good decisions, bringing people together and continuing to perform when the stakes were high.
That was where I first learned about resilience — long before I formally studied it.
I saw people perform extraordinarily well in difficult circumstances. I also saw what happens when sustained pressure, stress and fatigue begin to erode our capacity to perform.
It led me to look more deeply at the science of human performance: resilience, stress, nutrition, energy and recovery. I completed an MSc in Holistic Nutrition, worked alongside GPs in clinical practice (longevity) and later trained in resilience.
Today, those two worlds come together in my work.
I help leaders, teams and organisations create the human capacity that performance depends on. Not by removing pressure, but by understanding how we respond to it, recover from it and develop the skills to keep performing well through change and uncertainty.
My documentary background still shapes how I work. I'm curious. I ask questions. I make sense of complex information and translate science into something people can understand and actually use.
Because ultimately, resilience isn't something we know. It's something we practise.
Credentials
Certified Resilience Consultant, Resilience Institute
Registered Nutritionist (BANT & CNHC). MSc Holistic Nutrition.
Guest Lecturer, National Film and Television School and Creative Media Skills, Pinewood
Mentor, University of Oxford Crankstart Careers Mentoring Programme
Based in the UK. Working internationally. UK & New Zealand.
If you're thinking about how you or your people can perform well through sustained pressure or change, let's start a conversation.