From naysayers to advocates: How adventurer wins support for the 'impossible'

Australian adventurer and motivational speaker Justin Jones is an expert in discomfort and adversity.

Starting in November 2007, he spent 62 days in a sea kayak with friend and fellow adventurer James Castrission paddling from Australia to New Zealand to achieve the first-ever unassisted and unsupported kayak crossing of the Tasman Sea.

In 2012, the pair trekked unsupported from the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole. And back.

Video of them huddled inside the kayak at night, while two sharks circle and beat against the hull is enough to make you feel uncomfortable.

“There were a couple of other occasions where we had sharks come up to us when we're out paddling and when your hand's skimming over the surface of the water and there's a fin that's a foot and a half sticking out of the water, you feel more tense than you do when you're sheltering in the back of that cabin," Jones says speaking to HRD from the safety of his home in Hobart.

The sought-after keynote speaker will share lessons on how discomfort can lead to growth, resilience, and why collaboration is better than competition, at the HRD National HR Summit New Zealand on 19 November 2025 at The Cloud, Auckland. 

To secure your place, register now.

_{A shark circles the sea kayak during the paddle across the Tasman Sea. Picture: Supplied} 

Lessons from the edge

Jones believes his experiences can help HR leaders navigate their own challenging situations.

“We're talking about operating under severe duress, high-stress situations and how you maximize yourself [to get] the most out of yourself and out of your team," he said of his experiences.

“I think in terms of team dynamics there's a lot there around how you manage yourself, how you manage your strengths, your weaknesses in combination with your team to actually achieve an outcome that seems on surface level impossible and so I think there's a lot of lessons that I draw out from my experiences."

Jones wants to help people build resilience - self-resilience, process resilience and team resilience.

Getting buy-in and embracing the naysayers

While Jones and Castrission were alone with the sharks in the Tasman Sea, the expedition would not have happened without a support team of experts - all of whom had to be convinced to come on board with the idea.

He says most people's initial response, including his own, was “it’s impossible”.

Even after the pair spent 18 months proving to themselves it could be done, most people told them they were crazy.

Jones said his approach was to ignore “90%” of the naysayers, not out of blind faith in the idea but because the negative responses were not based on any expertise or knowledge of what it would take to be successful.

“It's the 10% of naysayers that say 'no you can't', but have that background experience, that you're interested in, they're the ones you want to work with,” he said.

And work they did - and in the process of addressing the concerns and rsisk about the hazardous journey, turned the doubters into advocates.

“So by converting them, was actually how we formed our team that spanned right across the world.”

Calculated risks

Looking at the images on Jones’ website of him sledding across vast snowy landscapes and sweating in remote deserts, it would be easy to assume he is a risk-taking, adrenaline junkie, but Jones says that’s far from the reality of his highly planned travels.

“There's no point trying to think up your response to situations once you're actually out on an expedition or where you're implementing a business project or roll out of a new product, whatever it is you need to try and think as much as you can possibly before those eventualities and those scenarios and situations come into place,” he said.

“We came up with every single scenario we thought could possibly happen and then we kind of threw that into a risk matrix so that the probability and the severity of so we could work out the ones that were really important we had to deal with,” he said.

_{Jones during the Antarctic expedition. Picture: Supplied}

Good stress

“A lot of people look at stress as a real negative thing, ‘I don't want to be stressed out, I want to have my life as easy as possible’,” Jones said.

“I think that we have to be really conscious of actually embracing hard times and embracing stress but realising that there's different forms and I think physical stress and mental stress are absolutely brilliant things to have. I think that they actually help you grow, whereas emotional stress, not so much.

“I think you do need to willingly embrace discomfort because ultimately that provides resilience, and resilience is what gets you through change and uncertainty.

“I think a lot of people think that 'I am only capable of so much' when in reality we have so much more capability than we give ourselves credit for and that's why I think … when you're on the outer edge and being uncomfortable, it's where you're actually growing."

Justin Jones will be a speaker at the HRD National HR Summit New Zealand on 19 November 2025 at the Cloud, Auckland. To secure your place, register now.