Callum Lea Speaker | Teen Speakers & Enterprise & Creative & Sports & Careers & New Speakers & Well-being & Mental Health & Happiness

Callum Lea

Founder & CEO of Mental Health Charity, Sporting Wellness.

Callum founded Sporting Wellness in 2020, aged 19, as a result of his experiences as an aspiring professional cricketer.

After suffering mental health issues as a result of sporting setbacks, Callum realised the limited access to professional mental healthcare in the UK for athletes. In 2020, he founded Sporting Wellness, offering private mental healthcare to competitive athletes across all sports. Now aged 23 and the charity into its fourth year, Sporting Wellness has supported nearly 2,000 athletes across 115 sports, from Premier League footballers to school athletes, striving to make mental healthcare equally accessible for all UK sportspeople. He enjoys challenges and has climbed Lions Head mountain several times in Cape Town, and he did the Yorkshire 3 Peaks challenge. The Yorkshire 3 Peaks was gruelling - about 28 miles of constant up-hill in the pouring rain!

Despite numerous obstacles that threatened the existence of the charity, Sporting Wellness has gained a strong social media presence, with 50,000 followers and support from prominent figures like Paul Scholes, Dame Kelly Holmes, and Lawrence Dallaglio. They're also a government partner through DCMS, working on mental health campaigns, and Callum advocates for a proactive and preventative mindset towards mental health, even being invited to meet Prime Ministers and senior government ministers to discuss the work of his charity and the direction of the wider mental health sector.

Callum enjoys public speaking, particularly on mental health and entrepreneurship. He relates well to students, offering relatable talks covering the whole mental health spectrum, sharing his personal struggles and giving insights on how you don't have to be an expert to support your own mental health and the well-being of others.

Within entrepreneurship, he provides practical advice for starting businesses or charities and is passionate about encouraging students to believe they can take matters into their own hands and create the change they want to see. Callum believes every young person should consider entrepreneurship, especially for social impact and he's eager to discuss this often-underappreciated topic in school curriculam.

Testimonials from Teachers

"Callum gave a really good talk and we will definitely have him back at school, so thank you for putting us in touch with him!

He engaged with the girls really well – there were just under 50 of them, all Year 12s. It was really good for them to have someone much closer to their age than their parents or teachers talking to them about mental health, because he was really relatable. He spoke very confidently and had good slides.

He started the talk with some background on him and his business, which was very interesting – we actually think, for the age group that we had, that we would have liked more on how/why he started his business and the challenges he has faced along the way. We asked him some questions about this at the end of his talk and the girls seemed particularly interested in that – I think because he started it up when he was about the same age as they are now. Hannah and I were chatting to him at the end and he said that he tailors his talk differently to different groups. He said this particularly in the context of giving his talks a more sporting focus, but I think he would do a really good job of giving a focussed ‘start-up’/’running a charity’ talk too.

We had left it very much up to him to focus his talk on what he wanted to present, around mental health and supporting friends in particular, and he gave really good insights and advice to the girls. Hannah and I both agreed that the talk he gave up would work really well for a younger age group – we thought Year 9. He wasn’t talking down to our Year 12s in any way, but they have actually experienced so many mental health challenges between them already before the age of 16/17 that a lot of what he spoke about they already know. It was a really good reminder for them though, particularly as they are all starting to get a bit stressed about the Sixth Form workload building up at the moment!

We will definitely be recommending Callum to our Head of PSHE as a great speaker to come in and talk to the Year 9s about mental health and how to look after yourself and your friends. In the Sixth Form we would also have him back, but to give more of a ‘setting up your own business and facing challenges’ talk. We have also recommended him to our Director of Sport, as we have a Sports Scholar programme who often have outside speakers."

– Amy Hatchwell, Head of Sixth Form, Sutton High School