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Resilience, commitment, teamwork. That’s how ordinary people achieve extraordinary successes.
How can a businesswoman and mom outperform the U.S. Navy Seals? Here’s how: through grit, determination, and resilience. With two decades of executive experience in the highly competitive fitness industry, and a triumphant finish in the world’s most grueling endurance challenge, Yvonne Camus shows us how the principles of teamwork, diversity, and perseverance create high-performance success—even in the most unlikely conditions.
Yvonne Camus was the sole female member on the first rookie team to ever complete the Eco-Challenge: the world championship of adventure racing conceived by Survivor’s Mark Burnett. The single mom and senior executive trained obsessively for an expedition that, up until then, even the U.S. Navy Seals hadn’t been able to complete. Their odds of finishing were placed at a disheartening zero, but that didn’t stop Yvonne and her team from rising to the challenge.
Punchy, deeply moving, and often quite funny, Yvonne draws on her experience of training, preparation, and execution to illustrate the value of perseverance. In the process, she helps us realize the potential for grit and greatness in ourselves, in our co-workers, and in our entire organization. Her talks help us understand how we can recreate high-performance outcomes, even when the odds are stacked against us.
Yvonne served as the COO of SPINCO, Canada’s largest indoor cycling brand, where she handled day-to-day operational management and implements enterprise-wide procedures. Previously, she was COO of the fitness club World Health, where she oversaw more than 600 employees, and World Health’s sister companies, Orange Theory Fitness and Fresh Fit Foods.
Defined by preeminent psychologist Angela Duckworth as the “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,” the concept of grit has become a focal point in our culture. Doctors, researchers, teachers, parents, leaders, and organizations are all desperately trying to understand this characteristic, which appears tightly correlated with success. But what is even more imperative than understanding grit, is putting it into practice.
While the research around grit is fascinating, few of us truly know what it means to be gritty. Yvonne Camus is one of the few, and one of the very best. A single mom, a senior executive, and a successful competitor in the grueling adventure race known as the Eco-Challenge, Yvonne has proven herself as a paragon of strength, courage, and determination. In this talk, she shares the most important characteristics of grit, and how to cultivate them. Relentless practice is certainly part of the equation—Yvonne put in hours and hours of excruciating, backbreaking preparation for the Eco Challenge—but more than that, it’s about an ability to confront the possibility of failure head-on. Yvonne and her team had non-existent odds of finishing the race, but they pushed through to the very end. With humility and grace, Yvonne shows us not only how she developed the physical endurance necessary to compete, but the emotional resilience needed to survive—and one of the qualities of grit that allows us to dare greatly.
“We can’t do it alone, and thank goodness we don’t have to,” says Yvonne Camus. The only thing that got her through the world’s toughest 24-hour/day, 300-mile adventure race, was the power of the people who supported and worked alongside her. In this inspiring talk, the athlete and COO discusses how her team prepared for the inevitable hardships they were going to face along the way. It was one of the most powerful, and most effective, conversations they had throughout the entire journey. Together, they came up with a bulletproof strategy for success. By committing to an all-hands-on-deck mentality, the group created an equal, shared sense of ownership; where each person felt a sense of responsibility, without the weight of the entire operation on their shoulders.
Yvonne takes these insights outside of the jungle, revealing the leadership, execution, and team-building that allowed four ordinary people to reach an extraordinary, unprecedented team finish—beating even the U.S. Navy Seals. She leaves us with a deep understanding of how to build a solutions-focused organization, underpinned by a collaborative approach to problem-solving and a willingness to work together.
During the Eco-Challenge, teams from around the world race 24-hours a day, covering over 300 miles, to cross the finish line. It is the world’s ultimate expedition. Originally conceived by Survivor’s Mark Burnett in the 1990s, the rules remain the same to this day: the only way to win the challenge is with your entire team still standing. If you lose a player to injury, exhaustion, or disagreement, the entire squad is eliminated.
Yvonne Camus is the only woman on the first ever rookie team to complete the challenge. So, how did this team—with their odds placed at zero—triumph in the face of adversity? In this motivational talk, Yvonne takes us into the world of Eco-Challenge, sharing the stress, fatigue, adventure, athleticism, and teamwork that she experienced on her road to victory. She teaches us how we can apply those survival lessons to our own life, cultivating a sense of grit, determination, and ambition necessary for achieving our dreams.
When we’re feeling physically and emotionally exhausted, we become unable to live and work at our full potential. How can we navigate workplace pressures, stress, and the noise of living in a digitally connected world? An athlete and COO, Yvonne Camus is uniquely experienced in high-performance living. In this talk, she shares lessons for how we can avoid burnout, pursue health, and optimize our success in a way that’s sustainable over the course of the long-term. She combines her knowledge on nutrition, exercise, relaxation, and mindset with the lessons she learned from competing in the Eco-Challenge (the punishing 12-day adventure race conceived by Mark Burnett) to show us how we, too, can live a high performance life.
