Dr Lauren Burns OAM
Naturopath, Nutritionist, Olympic Gold Medalist, High Performance & Wellbeing Expert
An Olympic Gold Medalist and expert in high performance and wellbeing, Lauren Burns draws on her elite sporting career, PhD research, and personal insights to deliver powerful, evidence-based keynotes and workshops that inspire individuals and teams to elevate their potential, achieve balance, and thrive both personally and professionally.
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Dr Lauren Burns OAM is a celebrated Olympic Gold Medalist, best-selling author, and one of Australia’s most sought-after speakers, with over 25 years’ experience inspiring audiences to reach their full potential. She made sporting history by winning the first Olympic gold medal for Taekwondo at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, joining an elite group of Australian women to achieve individual Olympic gold. Her journey required immense discipline, commitment, perseverance, and teamwork—qualities she brings to her presentations.
Lauren’s keynote presentations, workshops, and masterclasses focus on Elevating Potential—providing practical, evidence-based strategies to bring structure, balance, and energy into lives, careers, and businesses. With a PhD in Athlete Lifestyle and Mindset, Lauren combines humour, down-to-earth storytelling, and actionable tips to motivate audiences to take positive, transformative action. Her doctoral research, recognised with the RMIT Vice Chancellor’s Prize for Research Impact, informs her work with the Australian Institute of Sport, including the Gold Medal Ready program and ongoing research initiatives.
A best-selling author of Fighting Spirit and Food from a Loving Home, Lauren also designs nutritional programs, provides executive coaching, and integrates her nine core elements of the Circle of Lifestyle into fully tailored presentations. Her unique ability to inspire, captivate, and provide practical tools for high-performance living sets her apart as a leading voice in wellbeing, mindset, and personal excellence.
Topics
Elevating Potential
In this tailored keynote, audiences will learn about:
- Transforming Lauren’s Olympic and life experiences into practical life strategies
- Lauren’s ‘Cycle of Lifestyle’ and how this impacts performance, mindset, relationships, and overall well-being
- Practical strategies to bring structure, balance and energy
- The importance of interpersonal relationships for well-being, stress management, and peak performance.
- Audience participation through taekwondo moves, concluding with one person breaking a board on stage.
LEAP – Lifestyles of Elite Athletic Performers
- Learn from the world’s best athletes and gain insights from Lauren’s PhD research
- Discover the lifestyle and mindset factors that contribute to the success of Olympic and World Champion-winning athletes
- Explore psychological attributes such as intrinsic motivation, resilience, realistic optimism, self-regulation, and a thirst for knowledge that define elite performers
- Elevate potential by adopting the mindset and habits of successful athletes into daily life
Values and planning – The Key to Understanding Individuals Behaviour, Decisions and Attitudes
- The benefits of understanding your personal values are well recognised. Personal values are deeply held beliefs and principles that guide individuals’ behaviour, decisions, and attitudes.
- Lauren guides participants through the process of identifying their own personal values, what they need to add into their life to support their values, and what they need to change to reflect these values
- Using your values-based decision making has positive impacts on health & well-being, decision making and goal setting, work satisfaction and engagement
- Effective planning is key to both well-being and high-performance. Lauren empowers participants with strategies for short, medium and long-term planning – where they leave equipped with knowledge and recourses to continue incorporating planning into their life.
Workshops
Active Taekwondo Workshop
Make your event memorable – all participants break boards! An excellent way to kick-off or wrap-up a conference – with high energy and sense of achievement and purpose.
Lauren conveys key messages relating to self-belief, mental imagery, and incorporates the ancient practices of the martial art taekwondo, to cultivate the indomitable spirit.
The boards are a metaphor for Action, Commitment and Breakthrough.
Workshop include:
- Simple, high energy taekwondo moves
- Focus on fun, teamwork, practical skills and key messages
- All participants breaking boards
- Signing of participants’ boards as take-home memento
Mood Food Workshop – How Food Impacts our Energy, Mood & Mental Health
Lauren is a degree qualified Naturopath and Nutritionist and has always been passionate about complementary medicine and wholefoods.
She studied naturopathy alongside training for the Olympic Games and incorporated many principles and naturopathic teachings into her training and diet regime which she attributes to her success at the Games. Her cookbook Food from a Loving Home is a collection of her favourite recipes. Continuing her passion for food as medicine, Lauren has lectured Medicinal Food Science at Endeavour College
Focusing on the scientific link between food and mood, and Lauren’s take-home message of ‘Eat the Rainbow’, this presentation is fun and engaging. Participants learn life skills and knowledge they can incorporate directly into their own lives and kitchens.
