Professor Steve Peters Talk – 9th March 2026 at 13:30, Homerton College
Steve Peters, author of the UK’s most popular self-help book, The Chimp Paradox, will speak in Cambridge (Homerton College) on 9th March 2026 at 13:30, in an event hosted jointly by Michael Coleman (Department of Clinical Neurosciences and Churchill College) and Jane Warwick (Faculty of Education). Attendance will be free and is open to all researchers, postgraduate students and administrators throughout the University. Seats are limited, however, so please register early if you are interested, and only if you are sure you can make it on the day.
Professor Peters is particularly well known for providing highly effective psychological support to many elite sportsmen and women, from Sir Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton at the 2012 London Olympics to Adam Peaty in the Paris Olympics and snooker champion Ronnie O’Sullivan. However, his simple and well-communicated model for the working of the human mind that lies behind these successes is highly transferable to all endeavours, including academic research, teaching, and administration. This talk will explain how.
This talk will also serve as a launch event for the Research Culture workshop series ‘The Resilient Researcher’. This is an opportunity to attend one or more half- to one-day workshops with a psychological skills mentor trained by Steve Peters, and specialists in the psychology of academic high performers and neurodiversity in an academic environment. For more details see the Eventbrite link above or contact Maria Martinez-Fresno (mm561@cam.ac.uk).
Research life is full of unavoidable setbacks: failed experiments, rejected grants, short-term contracts, administrative burden and difficult colleagues are just some. Together, these drive some of the most scientifically-talented and collegiate people out of research, causing lasting damage to research culture. Top-down initiatives have limited ability to change this. A key part of the answer has to be bottom-up: empowering individual researchers with the perspective and resilience needed to handle these challenges while remaining true to their values.
Contrary to traditional thinking, resilience is a learned skill. Many psychologists now view it not about pushing through hardship, ignoring negative emotions, but about validating, understanding and managing emotions, accepting what we cannot change, and choosing how to respond, channelling our limited resources into what we can influence most – our own thoughts and actions. The old approach can work temporarily but favours a ‘win at all costs’ approach, even when that cost is our workplace culture or health.
For many, this is unacceptable and we lose far too many of them from research, trapping research culture into outdated and destructive practices. The new approach to resilience is sustainable, more effective, and improves wellbeing and working relationships. Crucially, retaining more people who work this way will drive sustainable and irreversible culture change when they become the leaders of the future.
This project offers training to enhance these skills for researchers who value hard work but refuse to sacrifice community and work-life balance to achieve success. It builds on Professor Coleman’s widely-read blog Science Without Anguish, collaborating with national and international leaders in the psychology of productivity and wellbeing. It includes live events open to all University of Cambridge researchers and related administrative staff and online resources for longer-term sustainability.
These include Steve Peters (Sheffield), the elite sports psychiatrist and author of the best-selling self-help and productivity book ‘The Chimp Paradox’, Hugh Kearns (Adelaide), an expert in the psychology of academic productivity and wellbeing, and Kate Ahl, a therapist and performance coach with deep experience of academia including at the University of Cambridge.
Each will present short courses chosen from a range of topics in a University-wide questionnaire to identify key areas of demand. Options include dealing with overwhelm, uncertainty and job precarity, understanding and managing imposter syndrome, procrastination and perfectionism, neurodivergence in academia, and balancing productivity with compassion.
The project will also develop online resources based on these events to ensure sustainability for future researchers and administrators.
Posted on 12/02/2026
