Jack Burnell

Why organisations work with Jack Burnell

• He speaks from the inside of a public failure most leaders only read about: disqualified at Rio 2016 on the finish line, then open about the nightmares and depression that followed.
• He currently coaches Premier League footballers at Brentford FC on performing in the hardest sustained-pressure environment in European sport, so the material is live, not retrospective.
• He can translate the texture of elite competition, the silent weeks of preparation, the seconds in which a career-defining decision goes wrong, into language that senior teams recognise from their own work.
• His credibility is earned rather than claimed: GB’s first named Olympic quota place for the Rio open-water 10km, 2016 European silver, 2017 Abu Dhabi FINA World Cup gold.
• He is precise about what he is and is not: a performance mindset coach, not a clinical psychologist, which is the right framing for a corporate audience that wants applied insight rather than therapeutic content.

Biography highlights

• Represented Great Britain at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games in the 10km open-water marathon swim.
• Secured GB’s first named quota place for the Rio 2016 Olympic open-water event at the 2015 Kazan World Championships.
• Silver medal, 10km, 2016 European Open Water Swimming Championships.
• Gold medal, 2017 FINA Marathon Swimming World Cup, Abu Dhabi.
• Retired from competitive swimming in April 2021.
• Performance mindset coach at Brentford FC, working with first-team players on sustaining performance in the Premier League.

Biography

The Rio 2016 men’s 10km marathon swim ended for Jack Burnell with a second yellow card on the finish straight, a disqualification after what briefly looked like a fifth-place finish, and an unsuccessful appeal. He had arrived in Rio a month after winning European silver in the same event, as the first British swimmer named to Team GB for the open-water Olympic programme. What organisations rarely hear is what happens in the months afterwards. Burnell has spoken publicly about the nightmares and depression that followed, and about the specific, unpredictable triggers that brought the memory back.

He did not stop. He returned to the World Championships the following year, won a FINA World Cup gold in Abu Dhabi in 2017, and continued in elite competition until retiring in 2021 after the Doha World Cup. That arc, the public failure, the private struggle, the continued competing, is the substance of what he now takes into rooms.

Since retiring he has worked as a performance mindset coach at Brentford FC, introduced to the club by performance psychologist Tom Bates. He is careful about the label. He is not a clinical psychologist. He is a coach whose job is to help players perform in the Premier League, a sustained-pressure environment with few parallels outside elite sport. That live practice is what keeps his speaking content grounded in current work rather than past results.

For senior teams the value is specific. Burnell gives organisations a close-range account of how high performers actually cope with repeated high-stakes pressure, how failure lands when it happens in front of the world, and what recovery looks like when the next event is already on the calendar.

Key speaking topics

• Performance under sustained pressure
• Resilience and recovery after public setback
• Mental health in high-performance environments
• Decision-making in high-stakes moments
• Lessons from elite sport applied to leadership teams
• The role of performance mindset coaching in professional sport

Ideal for

• CHROs and wellbeing leads building resilience and mental-health programmes for high-pressure functions
• Senior leadership teams operating under acute, sustained scrutiny
• Founders and executive teams at inflection points who need honest language for failure and recovery
• Sales, trading, and client-facing leaders whose teams work in repeated high-stakes decision cycles

Audience outcomes

• A sharper read on how elite performers actually hold up and where they come apart
• Honest language for failure and recovery that people can use inside their own teams
• A working distinction between performance mindset coaching and clinical support, and where each belongs
• Practical reference points from Premier League football and Olympic open-water swimming that translate into everyday leadership pressure