Kate Brassington

Kate Brassington is a Coaching Psychologist, published researcher, and doctoral scholar whose work sits at the intersection of trauma-informed practice, human performance, and what the body knows under pressure.

She speaks from a position that is rare in this field: genuine authority built from the inside out. Commissioned from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst as one of the first women to complete the Common Commissioning Course on equal terms, her first posting saw her in command of fifty soldiers. During her Army years, resilience was not a metaphor. Her understanding of what high performance actually costs, and what it requires beneath the level of technique and mindset, comes from having lived it before she ever studied it.

Now a doctoral researcher, professional coach, and speaker,  Kate addresses the gap that most resilience and performance programmes leave untouched: the difference between what people know they should do under pressure, and what they actually do. Between insight and change. Between capability and the patterns that get in the way of it.

The research is clear that most resilience training works at the level of conscious thought, while the patterns that derail high performers live somewhere older and faster. Kate explains this in plain language, with precision and without jargon, and gives audiences a genuinely different understanding of why capable, motivated, self-aware people keep hitting the same wall — and what actually shifts it.

She has spoken at the BPS Complex Trauma Conference, corporate diversity conferences, and leadership events across multiple sectors. Her audiences have included leaders in law, medicine, defence, finance, international institutions and the public sector.

She is warm, rigorous, and carries these difficult topics with lightness, ease, and fun.

TALK TOPICS:

Kate speaks on the following themes, tailored to your audience and event:

When capable people hit a wall — what trauma-informed practice tells us about performance, patterns and change The flagship talk. Why insight alone isn’t enough, what the research says about resilience training, and what actually needs to happen for genuine change to become possible. Suitable for leadership conferences, L&D events, and senior professional audiences.

The body under pressure — what your nervous system knows that your training doesn’t reach A practical, evidence-based exploration of how threat response works, why high-functioning people are not immune to it, and what organisations can do to create conditions where people can genuinely perform rather than merely cope.

Trauma-informed leadership — what it actually means and why it matters now Trauma is not what most people think it is. It is not confined to clinical populations, and it does not announce itself. This talk reframes trauma-informed practice as a leadership competency rather than a welfare issue, with practical implications for culture, retention, and performance.

Return to work and the cost of capability — supporting high performers through transition For HR, L&D and leadership audiences. Drawing on Kate’s corporate programme work and doctoral research, this talk addresses what organisations consistently miss when supporting capable people through significant transitions.