Naomi Riches MBE: How a Worcester rowing journey led to gold
Worcestershire has a special place in Naomi Riches’ story. While studying at the RNIB College in Worcester, she first took up rowing — a decision that would ultimately launch her towards international sporting success.
Losing most of her sight at the age of eight, Naomi found a new sense of purpose on the water. What began as a challenge soon became a lifelong passion, shaping her future in unexpected ways.
Now a sought-after female motivational speaker, she is a Paralympic gold medallist, multiple World Champion, and Guinness World Record holder for the fastest solo row across the English Channel. Naomi was awarded an MBE in 2013 for services to rowing.
In this exclusive interview with The Champions Speakers Agency, Naomi reflects on her journey, the lessons sport can teach businesses, and how resilience and teamwork can turn limitations into strengths.
Q: Drawing on your own journey, how can businesses harness resilience to overcome challenges?
Naomi Riches MBE: “The strength of any business, any organisation, any charity, any group of people is the people, with all their baggage, with all their history, with all their experience and all their qualifications. The strength of any organisation and business is their people, and everybody has their own story to tell.
“A lot of people – and it’s all relative – have been through a lot to get where they are. Other people, according to others’ perspectives, seem to sail through and end up where they are. But getting to know the people, getting to know their stories, getting to know what they’ve been through, what has challenged them.
“This is because if you can tap into that strength of every individual in the business, no matter where they’re from, no matter how they’re brought up – then it’s only ever going to make your business stronger. The power is in the people every single time.
“In our group of five that crossed that finish line in 2012, we didn’t look like a massively diverse group of individuals because we were all white, within a sort of 15-year age bracket. But we were really different – somebody with only two years’ rowing experience and another person in the crew with 15, different disabilities, different personalities, different ages. Some people liked pineapple on pizza, some people didn’t. We were all diverse in our own life experience up to that point.
“So, I think to overcome adversity within businesses is to tap into your people’s individual strengths, get them to work together, to understand each other, to empathise with each other, to learn how to push each other and encourage each other, to champion each other’s abilities. That’s what we did in our crew, and we made that promise to ourselves that all we needed to do was cross the finish line first.
“We were then able to hold each other accountable with everything that we did – the quality of food we were eating, the kit we turned up with, the attitude we had – because we’d made that promise to ourselves.”
Q: From your time in elite sport, which lessons do you believe are most valuable for the workplace?
Naomi Riches MBE: “One hundred days before we went to London, we met with our psychologist, William Winston – brilliant man – and Pam in the crew had discovered this Aristotle quote: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” We decided to live by that mantra: excellence is habit.
“That enabled us to challenge each other when needed – on maybe the food someone was eating or the attitude they had. It enabled us to hold each other accountable. It enabled us to praise each other when we needed it, and we had this real transparency and this real openness. That, in itself, created a huge amount of trust. So, when we were sat on the start line at London, we knew that we’d left no stone unturned.
“For me, I think a business having a purpose, with everybody understanding what their place is within that plan, is vital. Everybody will add something, whether you’re the cleaner or the CEO – you all have a part to play in that plan.
“Having a shared goal and understanding your part in that goal, how you’re going to get there, is the thing I’ve learned most from my athletic career: it’s that shared plan, shared goal – how do we all fit into that, and let’s go do it.”
Q: Whether in sport or business, how important is it to build and maintain a strong support network?
Naomi Riches MBE: “Within a sports team, you don’t just have the team that are on the water, in our case, performing, or the individual on the track performing, or the team on the hockey pitch performing – that’s not it.
“The support team is so much wider. You have all the experts, all the specialists that can provide you with the things that you need for training to get you to that race, or to get you to that track, or to get you to that pitch.
“That’s just as important in any environment, whether you’re a sole trader, single business owner, or whether you work in an organisation, a large organisation, a global organisation. Understanding who your supporters are, who can provide the skills and the support that you cannot do for yourself, is key.
“Running my own business, I have a group of people around me who provide the things that I can’t do – my printing, my graphic design, various other things like videography, and so on. The same is true in any organisation – you have different departments that can do certain things. You’ve just got to really understand what each person brings to you and how they can help you.
“That makes it sound really selfish – it’s not, because you’re going to be helping them too. You’re going to be supporting each other on the way to whatever it is you want to achieve. When our coach let us go onto the water for the final at 2012, her job was done.
“She couldn’t do anything from then on – she just had to let us go and believe and trust that everything that we’d done together over the past two or three years with her was going to be put into action when the starter said “go”.
“Understanding that network and understanding the power of the support network you have is important, no matter whether you are, as I say, a sole trader or CEO of a multinational.”
This exclusive interview with Naomi Riches MBE was conducted by Chris Tompkins of The Motivational Speakers Agency.