Laurence Halsted

Laurence Halsted is a two-time British Olympic fencer and high-performance specialist who transforms how athletes and organisations approach resilience, wellbeing and sustainable success. A multiple European medallist who competed at London 2012 and Rio 2016, he now serves as Performance Director for the Danish Fencing Federation and leads mentoring programmes at The True Athlete Project. His 2021 book, Becoming A True Athlete, introduces a pioneering philosophy that challenges traditional performance thinking. Through his work as a performance consultant and coach across sport and business, Laurence equips teams and individuals with practical tools to achieve exceptional results whilst thriving personally, proving that mindful, compassionate approaches deliver both greater fulfilment and higher performance.

After representing Great Britain at two Olympic Games and winning four European Championship medals, Laurence Halsted stepped away from the piste to pursue a question that had shaped his final competitive years: how can athletes perform at their peak whilst genuinely thriving as people? Since 2017, he has served as Performance Director for the Danish Fencing Federation, transforming that curiosity into a practical framework that challenges conventional wisdom about resilience, achievement and wellbeing. His journey from London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympian to architect of a new performance philosophy reflects both personal experience and professional conviction that sustainable success requires a fundamentally different approach.

Laurence's credibility stems from two decades immersed in elite sport, first as a competitor who experienced the pressures and contradictions of high-performance culture firsthand, then as a leader responsible for developing others within that same system. His work with the Danish Fencing Federation has provided the testing ground for integrating mindfulness and compassion into performance environments traditionally dominated by more punishing models. Simultaneously, as head of mentoring at The True Athlete Project, a UK-based non-profit organisation, he developed and now oversees programmes that pair aspiring athletes with experienced mentors for transformative year-long partnerships. This dual perspective, leading a national federation whilst championing athlete-centred development, has given him rare insight into what truly enables people to flourish under pressure. In 2021, he distilled these ideas into his book, Becoming A True Athlete: A Practical Philosophy For Flourishing Through Sport, which articulates a vision of athletic life that extends far beyond medals to embrace deeper fulfilment and purpose. Holding senior practitioner accreditations in coaching and mentoring, Laurence combines lived experience with professional rigour.

Audiences working with Laurence discover that mindful, compassionate approaches to performance are neither soft alternatives nor compromises, but pathways to results that traditional methods struggle to deliver sustainably. Through his consulting and coaching work across sport and business, he equips teams and individuals with actionable tools for building genuine resilience, the kind rooted in self-awareness and psychological flexibility rather than mere toughness. His sessions move beyond theory to address the practical realities of maintaining wellbeing whilst pursuing ambitious goals, helping organisations create cultures where people can excel without burning out. Whether speaking to corporate leaders navigating change, sports organisations rethinking their development models, or individuals seeking to perform under pressure, Laurence offers evidence from the field that redefining success to include human flourishing produces not only healthier people but also better, more enduring outcomes.