Speaking
Selima Sfar speaks on what stops people who are not short of ability. She reached the WTA Top 100 as the first Arab woman to do it, and spent 16 years working with approaches that helped and never fully resolved what was underneath. What resolved it took less than a year.
The argument, in fullExpertise and positioning · in her own words
The target is primarily high performers and high-performance environments: executives, leaders, entrepreneurs, athletes and organizations operating under significant pressure.
I position myself as an expert in elite performance and the psychology behind it, bringing a perspective on areas that remain largely unexplored: the unconscious mechanisms that shape performance, the power of difficult emotions, and particularly the fear of winning.
What makes this approach distinctive is the combination of a career that began at eight and 18 years on the WTA tour with a new framework for understanding what can unconsciously stand between talent and greatness, across any field where exceptional performance is required.
Selima Sfar
What stops people who have already proved they are capable.
Every performance system addresses the fear of failure. None addresses what happens at the moment of imminent success. Selima takes an audience through the collapse of a match she had won, the mechanism underneath it, and how the same structure appears in a senior team as a ceiling with no visible cause.
For: leadership summits · executive programmes · sports federations · institutional and academic audiences
The prohibition, and who it falls on hardest.
Nobody is born reluctant to win. The instruction is taught early: do not take up too much space, do not draw attention, do not want too visibly. Selima argues that this belief is taught earliest, sometimes most explicitly to girls, and that by the time it reaches an elite career, it is no longer an instruction. It has become a structure. She speaks as the first Arab woman in history to reach the WTA Top 100, and about what it cost her to get there.
For: women's leadership forums · International Women's Day · gender and policy institutes · professional networks
Emotions as an elite advantage, not an obstacle.
Anger, jealousy, fear and the desire to dominate are treated in most performance cultures as things to suppress. Selima argues the opposite: that the competitor who can use the darker emotions holds an advantage over the one who cannot, and that suppression costs more than expression. From a career at the highest level of world tennis, and from 16 years spent studying why elite performers unconsciously stand between themselves and their own greatness.
For: elite performance summits · sports federations · sales and trading floors · leadership programmes
Spirit does not exist outside the material world. It lives within it.
Selima's own worldview, the property she created and registered. It holds that Spirit is aliveness, and that it is found by fully inhabiting life rather than by escaping it: in work, in ambition, in money, in beauty, in pleasure, in a drink shared with friends on a rooftop. That becoming fully yourself is not a matter of refinement but of courage, because freedom has always cost the approval of the crowd. The best version of ourselves is the freest version of ourselves.
Its opposite is asceticism: the belief that to be worthy, we should want less. Less success. Less pleasure. Less money. Less recognition. And this belief does not exist only in religion or culture. It appears in sport, in personal and professional life, and in the way many of us were taught that wanting too much somehow makes us less deserving.
Sexy Spirituality speaks with unusual directness to audiences who have already mastered the material world and have only ever been offered the kind of spirituality that asks them to renounce it, one that was never designed for the lives they actually live and chose.
For: leadership retreats · founder and entrepreneur gatherings · cultural and academic institutions · women's forums · athlete organisations
The talk changes with the room. The argument does not.
What people say
Listening to Selima is a very different experience from listening to a traditional motivational speaker. She doesn’t simply inspire you: she challenges the way you see yourself and the world around you. She speaks with authenticity, vulnerability and strength.
Fabrice SantoroFormer ATP World No. 17 · Davis Cup champion
Selima is the kind of speaker who stays with you long after she leaves the stage. Her words are powerful and deeply touching, but what struck me most was her ability to make you look at things you thought you understood from a completely different perspective.
Malek JaziriFormer ATP World No. 42 · Olympian
There were moments that were deeply moving, others that were surprising, and several that made me think: I have never looked at it that way before. She has a rare ability to combine depth with simplicity, emotion with intelligence. What she brings is not another version of what we already hear everywhere.
Amina Bouzguenda ZeghalUniversité Paris Dauphine-PSL Tunis
Selima doesn’t just inspire: she shifts something in you. Her worldview on Sexy Spirituality and the fear of winning is genuinely innovative. Listening to her feels like a veil lifting: truths you somehow felt but couldn’t see become obvious.
Farah MamiFormer Chair, YPO Tunisia
She had the courage to lift the veil on realities that far too many women face, to make her voice heard when everything conspires to silence those of her sisters in tears, to open the way so that others might in turn bear witness. […] Selima Sfar’s courage is infinitely greater than any her detractors of the day will ever attain, devotees as they are of stupid remarks and vile thoughts.
Elyès JouiniInstitut Universitaire de France · Université Paris Dauphine-PSLPublished in Kapitalis, 31 August 2023. Translated from the French.
beIN SPORTS · LACOSTE · UNIVERSITÉ PARIS DAUPHINE-PSL
Tennis analyst and commentator, beIN SPORTS · Global Brand Ambassador, Lacoste · Facilitator, The Management Code, Université Paris Dauphine-PSL Tunis · Co-founder, Unus Mundus · Co-founder, Le Club de Gammarth
The verified recordKeynotes for corporate summits, women’s forums and leadership conferences worldwide.
In Arabic, English or French.