Jodie Burrage

Why organisations work with Jodie Burrage

• She speaks from inside the experience of considering whether to walk away, then choosing not to. That is a different conversation from generic motivational content, and audiences feel the difference.
• Her examples are dated, specific and verifiable: a top-five win over Paula Badosa, a Wimbledon main-draw debut victory, an all-British WTA final, and a near full ankle ligament rupture in training that cost her a Grand Slam season.
• She covers mental health from the position of someone who broke down in a training session in 2024 and went back the next day. The credibility on pressure and stress comes from the record, not from a wellness framework.
• She is a current player, not a retired figurehead. The recovery story is live, which makes the material useful to teams facing their own in-flight setbacks rather than retrospective.

Biography highlights

• Career-high WTA singles ranking of world No. 85, reached in September 2023
• Reached the 2023 Nottingham Open final, the first all-British WTA final since 1977
• WTA Tour doubles champion at the 2023 Transylvania Open with Jil Teichmann
• First Grand Slam main-draw singles win at Wimbledon 2023 against Caty McNally
• Top-five career win over Paula Badosa at the 2022 Eastbourne International
• Represented Great Britain in the Billie Jean King Cup including the 2026 qualifier against Australia in Melbourne

Biography

Three ankle surgeries before the age of twenty would have ended most playing careers. Burrage came back from them, broke into the world top 100 in 2023, and reached an all-British WTA final at Nottingham against Katie Boulter, the first of its kind since 1977. The same year she recorded her first Grand Slam main-draw singles win at Wimbledon against Caty McNally and lifted a WTA Tour doubles title in Cluj-Napoca with Jil Teichmann.

The 2024 season is the part of the story audiences tend to remember. Wrist surgery in February was followed, just as she was returning, by a near full rupture of her ATFL ankle ligament in a training session with Boulter. She missed the French Open, the grass-court season and Wimbledon. She has since said publicly that she considered retirement during that recovery and broke down mid-session asking how much fight she had left.

The material she brings to corporate audiences is built on that ground. The career-high ranking of No. 85, the top-five win over Paula Badosa at Eastbourne in 2022, and her Billie Jean King Cup appearances for Great Britain through to the 2026 qualifier against Australia all sit inside a record of repeated injury and return. She talks about pressure, public accountability and the daily decision to keep going as someone still actively making that decision on the WTA Tour.

For leaders who have to ask teams to perform through restructure, setback or sustained uncertainty, the value is the realism. Burrage does not present resilience as a state. She describes it as a series of small choices made on bad days, with the scoreboard public the following week.

Key speaking topics

• Self-leadership under pressure
• Resilience and recovery from setback
• Mental health in high-performance environments
• Goal setting and personal accountability
• Performing in the public eye
• Team environments and individual responsibility

Ideal for

• Sales, trading and other performance-measured teams operating under public or visible scorecards
• HR, talent and L&D leaders building wellbeing and mental health content with credibility beyond the wellness sector
• Leaders running organisations through restructure, layoffs or sustained operational pressure
• Early-career and high-potential audiences facing first encounters with public failure

Audience outcomes

• A concrete account of how a current professional athlete makes the decision to continue after setback, rather than an abstract framework
• Language for talking about mental health in performance settings without softening it into wellness
• A working definition of accountability when results are visible and the next attempt is days away
• A reference point for resilience grounded in dated, verifiable career events rather than metaphor