Motivation and Inspiration
Speakers who help audiences reconnect with purpose, resilience and the conviction to act on what matters
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James Whittle
Most workforces have been told to be resilient so often the word has lost meaning. What leaders actually need is people who can keep making decisions when the conditions are bad, the plan has failed, and nobody is coming to help. That capability is taught badly, if at all.
Why organisations work with James Whittle
A first-person account of decision-making after 54 days of unsupported ocean rowing, three days on the wall of El Capitan, and a world-first Patagonia triathlon, drawn on directly rather than borrowed from research.
A deliberate “started from zero” frame that lands with workforces who are tired of being shown ex-special-forces or Olympic-medallist case studies and find them remote.
A track record of repeat work with Nike, Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Heineken and Airbnb, which gives buyers reassurance that the material survives a senior corporate audience.
A second business, Dose, built around translating expedition lessons into ongoing workplace wellbeing programmes for clients including BNY Mellon and IBM, so the keynote sits inside a wider intervention rather than a one-off appearance.
A speaking partnership with Tom Caulfield that allows two-handed delivery, useful for offsites and team experiences where a single-voice keynote would not hold the room.
Biography highlights
Co-founder, The Tempest Two, the speaking and adventure partnership with Tom Caulfield.
Co-founder, Dose, a workplace wellbeing company working with Nike, BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb.
Rowed the Atlantic unsupported, Canary Islands to Barbados, 3,000 miles in 54 days, with no prior rowing experience.
World-first ultra-triathlon across Patagonia: 1,600km cycle, 65km mountain run, 100km stand-up paddleboard descent of the La Leona River.
Climbed El Capitan in Yosemite, encountering Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell on the wall.
Speaking client list includes Google, Nike, Airbnb, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Heineken, Red Bull and Vodafone.
Biography
The honest version of resilience is not a poster on an office wall. It is what someone does on day forty of an Atlantic crossing when the water-maker has failed and the next port is still two weeks away. That is the territory The Tempest Two have spent the better part of a decade walking into on purpose.
The duo, James Whittle and Tom Caulfield, started with no rowing experience and crossed 3,000 miles of ocean in 54 days. They followed it with a world-first ultra-triathlon in Patagonia and three days on the granite face of El Capitan. The pattern is deliberate: pick a discipline neither of them has practised, give themselves enough runway to learn it, and put the result in front of a corporate audience as material on how ordinary people make hard decisions under load.
That positioning is what gives the work its commercial weight. Most adventure speakers come from a military or elite-sport background that audiences quietly discount as unreachable. The Tempest Two reject that framing on principle, which is why their keynote travels into rooms at Nike, Google, Microsoft, JP Morgan and Heineken without losing the audience halfway through.
Whittle’s second business, Dose, takes the same lessons and converts them into structured workplace wellbeing programmes for clients including BNY Mellon, IBM and Airbnb. The keynote is the front door; the operating model behind it is closer to a sustained intervention on team energy and recovery than a one-time motivational booking.
Key speaking topics
Resilience under sustained pressure
Decision-making in degraded conditions
Team performance on long-duration projects
Risk and the comfort zone
Wellbeing as a performance variable
Adventure-led leadership development
Ideal for
HR and people leaders running offsites focused on team energy and recovery
Sales and commercial leadership conferences where the brief is grit and momentum, not strategy content
Programme leads on long-duration transformations who need to address fatigue head-on
Senior all-hands events that need a non-corporate voice to shift the register
Audience outcomes
A concrete picture of how a small team makes decisions when the original plan has stopped working
A vocabulary for resilience that does not collapse into platitude
A reset on the difference between high-effort discomfort and actual risk
A reason to look at recovery and energy management as a leadership concern, not a personal one
Perri Shakes-Drayton
Setback inside a senior team is rarely the dramatic event. It is the long, unglamorous middle: the months after the plan failed, when the people who once led with confidence have to rebuild judgement, composure and credibility from a lower base. Most leadership programmes prepare executives for performance. Few prepare them for recovery.
Why organisations work with Perri Shakes-Drayton
She offers a first-person account of returning to elite performance four years after a career-altering injury, useful to leaders managing teams through prolonged recovery rather than single-event setbacks.
Her story is grounded in a verifiable competitive record at the highest level: 4x400m relay silver at the 2017 World Championships in London, on the same track where the 2013 injury happened.
She speaks credibly about the difference between motivation and discipline, drawing on a coaching relationship and a return-to-sport pathway, not generic mindset language.
The narrative arc is unusually clean for buyers programming a values or culture moment: ranked second in the world, injury, surgery, four-year absence, return at the top level. Specific, dated, evidenced.
Biography highlights
2013 European Indoor Champion in the 400m, and gold medallist in the 4x400m relay at the same championships in Gothenburg.
2012 World Indoor 4x400m relay gold medallist; 2017 World Championships 4x400m relay silver medallist in London.
Personal best of 53.67 seconds in the 400m hurdles, the second-fastest by a British woman, behind only Sally Gunnell.
Four-time British Athletics Champion in the 400m hurdles (2008, 2011, 2012, 2013).
BSc Sports Science, Brunel University. Nike-sponsored athlete since 2005. Member of Victoria Park Harriers and Tower Hamlets Athletics Club.
Founder of Train with PSD, a London-based fitness initiative running outdoor sessions at venues including The Shard and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Biography
The 2013 World Championship 400m hurdles final in Moscow ended at the first hurdle. Perri Shakes-Drayton, ranked second in the world that season with a personal best of 53.67 seconds, landed awkwardly and ruptured the ligaments and cartilage in her left knee. She finished seventh. The surgeon’s instruction afterwards was direct: no more hurdles.
What followed was not a comeback story in the conventional sense. It was four years of surgery, rehabilitation, relearning movement, and rebuilding a competitive base in a different event. She returned to the 400m flat, made the Great Britain relay squad for the 2017 World Championships in London, and ran on the team that took silver in front of a home crowd on the track where her injury had happened.
The athletic record is verifiable and serious. European Indoor Champion in the 400m in 2013. Gold in the 4x400m relay at the same championships and at the 2012 World Indoors. Four-time British Athletics Champion over 400m hurdles. Second-fastest British woman in history over the distance behind Sally Gunnell, the Olympic and world champion. A Nike-sponsored athlete since 2005, trained out of Victoria Park Harriers in east London, BSc in Sports Science from Brunel.
For senior audiences, the value of her account lies in the part most resilience speakers skip: the middle. The years between the injury and the return, where progress is invisible and the question of whether to continue gets asked repeatedly. That is the conversation she is credible on, and the one most leadership programmes are not equipped to host.
Key speaking topics
Resilience and recovery after career-altering setback
Self-leadership and discipline under sustained pressure
Goal-setting and the practical content of long-term focus
Mental health and athlete wellbeing
Team dynamics in high-performance environments
Diversity and representation in elite sport
Ideal for
Senior leadership teams and offsites focused on resilience, recovery and decision-making after a setback
HR, talent and wellbeing leads programming culture and mental health moments
Employee networks, ERGs and diversity events seeking a credible elite-sport voice
Conference openers and after-dinner audiences where the brief is story-led rather than thesis-led
Audience outcomes
A first-hand reference point for what sustained recovery looks like over years, not weeks
A working distinction between motivation and discipline that audiences can use the next day
A concrete example of returning to a top level after a four-year absence, useful as a benchmark for teams under pressure
A reset on what is realistic to ask of people coming back from professional or personal disruption
Paula Radcliffe
Senior leaders are expected to hold their nerve when a single decision is watched in public and the next opportunity is years away. Most playbooks describe how to lead through change. Very few address what it takes to stay composed when the failure has already happened, the world has seen it, and the work is to get back to the start line. That is a leadership problem most organisations recognise but rarely train for.
Why organisations work with Paula Radcliffe
Sixteen years as the women’s marathon world record holder, a span that covers an entire generation of competitors and is unusual in any endurance event.
A direct, first-person account of recovering from the most public failure in her career, the 2004 Athens Olympic marathon, and returning to win the New York Marathon four months later and the World Championship the following year.
Continuing technical authority on the sport through her BBC commentary role and her seat on the World Athletics Athletics Integrity Unit, which keeps her current with the system she once competed inside.
A practical perspective on competing with a chronic condition, asthma, that translates well to executive audiences thinking about health, capacity and long-horizon performance.
Biography highlights
Held the women’s marathon world record at 2:15:25 from 2003 to 2019.
Three-time London Marathon champion (2002, 2003, 2005) and three-time New York Marathon champion (2004, 2007, 2008).
2005 World Marathon champion, Helsinki. Two-time World Cross Country champion. Two-time World Half Marathon champion.
BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2002. MBE 2002, OBE 2026, both for services to sport.
BBC athletics commentator and member of the World Athletics Athletics Integrity Unit.
UN Environment Programme Advocate for Clean Air. Author of “Paula: My Story So Far” (Simon and Schuster, 2004).
Biography
The 2003 London Marathon women’s world record stood at 2:15:25 for sixteen years. Paula Radcliffe set it. No other woman beat it until 2019. For a generation of elite distance runners that mark defined what the sport thought possible.
The interesting story for a business audience is not the record. It is what happened the year after. The 2004 Athens Olympic marathon ended with Radcliffe sitting on the kerb in front of a global television audience, unable to continue. Four months later she won the New York Marathon. The following August she won the World Marathon Championship in Helsinki. The recovery is the content, not the breakdown.
She has stayed inside the sport since retiring as a competitor. She commentates on athletics for the BBC, including the Olympic Games and the London Marathon, and sits on the World Athletics Athletics Integrity Unit, which adjudicates anti-doping and eligibility cases. She is a UN Environment Programme Advocate for Clean Air, a role rooted in her own diagnosis of exercise-induced asthma as a teenager.
The credentials are unambiguous. MBE in 2002, OBE in the 2026 New Year Honours, BBC Sports Personality of the Year, a first-class degree in modern languages from Loughborough University in 1996 where the running track now carries her name. The autobiography “Paula: My Story So Far” was published by Simon and Schuster in 2004. What a senior buyer is hiring, though, is a specific account of composure under pressure that almost no other speaker can offer at the same level of demonstrable evidence.
Key speaking topics
Performance under sustained pressure
Recovery after public failure
Long-horizon goal setting
Composure and decision-making in high-stakes moments
Competing with a chronic health condition
Integrity and accountability in elite systems
Women in elite sport
Ideal for
Leadership offsites focused on resilience, composure and recovery, particularly for executive teams facing a visible setback or restructure.
Sales and commercial kick-offs where the brief is sustained performance across a multi-year cycle rather than a single-quarter push.
Health, wellbeing and human performance conferences for HR and people leaders.
After-dinner and main-stage moments at sports, charity and corporate hospitality events where the brief is a credible elite-performance voice.
Audience outcomes
A first-person account of recovering from a high-visibility failure and the practical work that recovery required.
A concrete sense of what sixteen years of sustained elite performance looks like from the inside, including the planning horizons it depends on.
A useful frame for thinking about health, energy and capacity as commercial inputs, not personal extras.
A more grounded view of integrity in performance systems, drawn from her work on the World Athletics Athletics Integrity Unit.
Toby Makoyawo
Pressure performance is treated as a soft skill in most organisations, until a senior leader faces a moment that exposes how little they have practised it. The same composure that wins a 100m final is the composure that lets a manager carry a team through a results call, a restructure, or a public mistake. Most leadership development programmes do not get near how that capacity is actually built.
Why organisations work with Toby Makoyawo
A current elite athlete competing at the front edge of NCAA Division I sprinting, not a retired professional reflecting on a finished career. The pressure he describes is the pressure he is still operating inside.
A European U20 100m title and a Boston University school record at 10.12 seconds give him a specific credibility on the question of preparation, execution, and recovery in events decided by hundredths of a second.
Combines elite competition with a full undergraduate degree at Boston University, which lets him speak credibly to early-career and graduate audiences about workload, discipline, and time as a finite resource.
A diaspora background, born in Florida to Nigerian parents and raised in West London, that lets him speak naturally on inclusion and identity without the topic feeling bolted on.
Biography highlights
European U20 Champion, 100m, 2021, in a personal-best 10.25 seconds
Boston University 100m and 60m school record holder, fastest sprinter in BU programme history
NCAA Division I Second Team All-American
British Olympic Trials 200m finalist at age 19
UK National Champion, U20 age category, 2021
Reading for an undergraduate degree at Boston University while competing at NCAA Division I level
Biography
Most sprint finals are decided in the first thirty metres and a leader’s first thirty seconds of a hard meeting are not that different. The capacity to be composed under public scrutiny is a trained capacity, and Toby Makoyawo trains it for a living. He is the fastest sprinter in Boston University’s history and a European U20 100m champion who is still in the middle of the work, not at the end of it.
The substance of his story is preparation rather than highlights. A 10.25 second European junior title in 2021, a 10.12 second school record at the Texas Relays in 2022, and an All-American placing in NCAA Division I sit on top of a daily routine that includes coursework, training cycles, and the management of expectation that any 23-year-old at the front of a sport has to learn quickly.
The route through is also distinctive. Born in Florida to Nigerian parents, raised in West London, and recruited into the American collegiate athletics system, he has had to learn how to perform inside three different cultural contexts. The relevance to a corporate audience is direct: graduate intake, early-career talent, and inclusion programmes all benefit from a speaker who can describe identity and high performance as the same conversation, not two separate ones.
What he offers a room is not a finished career narrative. It is a current account of how an elite competitor manages the gap between training intent and competition reality, week after week, in a discipline where the margin of error is measured in hundredths of a second.
Key speaking topics
Performance under public pressure
Goal-setting and long-horizon planning
Identity, inclusion, and elite performance
Discipline and time management
Mental health in competitive environments
Resilience after setback
Ideal for
Graduate intake and early-career talent programmes
Diversity, inclusion, and belonging audiences inside large employers
Sales and high-performance teams operating to public targets
Sports, education, and youth-facing organisations
Audience outcomes
A working sense of how elite athletes prepare for moments measured in hundredths of a second
Practical language for goal-setting, time discipline, and recovery from setback
A first-person account of identity and high performance as a single conversation, not a parallel one
Renewed engagement from younger and early-career audiences who recognise the speaker’s age, register, and trajectory
Maisie Summers-Newton
Most organisations talk about resilience as a value. Few build it as a practice that holds up when the result is binary, the timeline is fixed, and the room is full. Leaders looking for credible voices on composure under pressure usually find either theory or generalised motivational content. The gap is people who have repeatedly performed at the highest level, under public scrutiny, while carrying a story of visible difference that audiences also need to hear.
Why organisations work with Maisie Summers-Newton
A defended Paralympic title is a rare proof of consistency. She won double gold at Tokyo 2020, then did it again at Paris 2024 in the same two events, three years later.
Her 200m individual medley SM6 world record, 2:56.68, was set under maximum pressure at her first Paralympic Games. That is the kind of result organisations want to understand when they talk about delivering at the moment that counts.
She speaks credibly on disability and visible difference from a position of public authority, not advocacy alone. The MBE was awarded for services to swimming, and her platform on achondroplasia and language reaches audiences that DEI presentations rarely do.
She runs a parallel career as a primary school teacher. That dual life gives her something most elite athletes do not have on a stage: a working perspective on time, attention, and what consistent performance looks like outside the pool.
Biography highlights
Paralympic gold medallist in the 200m individual medley SM6 and 100m breaststroke SB6 at Tokyo 2020, defended both at Paris 2024.
World record holder in the SM6 200m individual medley (2:56.68, Tokyo 2020).
MBE for services to swimming, 2022 New Year Honours.
Gold medallist, Commonwealth Games Birmingham 2022, 100m breaststroke SB6.
Multiple World Para Swimming Championship golds across 2019, 2022 and 2023.
Graduate of the University of Northampton; works as a primary school teacher alongside elite competition.
Biography
Defending a Paralympic title is harder than winning the first one. The race is the same length, but everything around it has changed: expectation, public attention, and the slow accumulation of three years of training against people who have studied your last performance. Maisie Summers-Newton did it twice at Paris 2024, retaining her 200m individual medley SM6 and 100m breaststroke SB6 titles from Tokyo 2020.
The Tokyo wins were already remarkable. She set a world record of 2:56.68 in the 200m medley on her Paralympic debut, having broken her first world record at 15. The Paris defences happened with a different kind of pressure on her shoulders, the kind that asks whether the first set of results were a moment or a method. The answer turned out to be a method.
Her platform is broader than the medal table. She was appointed MBE in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to swimming, and has used her public position to speak directly about achondroplasia, language and how visible difference is treated in everyday settings. She graduated from the University of Northampton and works as a primary school teacher, a working life that sits unusually close to the audiences she addresses.
What organisations get from her is rarely framed as theory. It is a working account of what it takes to perform when the result is binary and public, and an honest perspective on inclusion from someone who lives it rather than presents on it.
Key speaking topics
Composure and performance under pressure
Defending success and sustaining high performance
Goal setting in long-cycle, high-stakes environments
Resilience through setback and injury
Disability inclusion and lived experience
Language, visibility and difference at work
Team dynamics in elite environments
Ideal for
Senior leadership and high-performance teams preparing for a defining year or event
HR, DEI and ERG audiences focused on substantive disability inclusion rather than awareness alone
Sales, commercial and delivery teams working to a binary, deadline-driven target
Conferences and internal events seeking a credible voice on resilience supported by named results
Audience outcomes
A concrete picture of what consistency under pressure looks like over a multi-year cycle, not a single performance.
A first-person account of disability inclusion that audiences can take back into team conversations.
A clearer sense of how elite preparation translates into routine choices about time, attention and recovery.
A more honest reading of what resilience requires when results are public and binary.
Laura Muir
Senior leaders are asked to deliver in conditions where the margin for error is small and the audience is permanent. They need composure that holds across cycles, not motivation that lasts a quarter. The hard question is how to plan, train, and recover so that performance is repeatable when stakes are highest.
Why organisations work with Laura Muir
A medal record across three Olympic cycles (Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020 silver, Paris 2024 fifth with a Scottish record) that demonstrates sustained performance rather than a single peak moment.
The only British athlete to win five European Indoor Championship golds, evidence of a planning and preparation system that produces results year after year.
Lived experience of running a parallel high-stakes track: completed her veterinary medicine degree at Glasgow while training at world-class level, a story of capacity management rather than balance.
Direct access to the methods behind composure in finals where the British record, an Olympic medal, and global attention are decided inside four minutes.
Biography highlights
Olympic 1500m silver medallist, Tokyo 2020, in a British record 3:54.50.
Two-time outdoor European 1500m champion (Berlin 2018, Munich 2022) and 2022 World Championships 1500m bronze medallist.
Five European Indoor Championship gold medals, a British record, including a 1500m and 3000m double in Glasgow 2019.
2022 Commonwealth Games 1500m gold and 800m bronze for Team Scotland.
Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, University of Glasgow, graduated 2018.
MBE for services to athletics, 2019 New Year Honours.
Biography
The 1500 metres is decided in just under four minutes. There is no second leg, no team-mate to hand off to, and no plausible recovery from a poor tactical call inside the final lap. The athletes who medal repeatedly at that distance are the ones who have built a system that holds when the stakes are at their highest.
Laura Muir has medalled at three Olympic cycles in that event, including silver at Tokyo 2020 in a British record of 3:54.50 and a fifth-place Scottish record in the Paris 2024 final. She holds five European Indoor Championship gold medals, the most of any British athlete, and is a two-time outdoor European champion. The 2022 World Championships in Eugene added a bronze, and the same year brought Commonwealth Games gold in the 1500m and bronze over 800m.
That run of results comes from a planning culture more than from inspiration. The same period covered her veterinary medicine degree at the University of Glasgow, completed in 2018, and an MBE for services to athletics the following year. The discipline she describes when talking about competition is the discipline she used to run two careers in parallel.
For senior audiences, the relevant content is not the medals themselves but the operating method behind them: how a small team builds a season around a single race, how composure is rehearsed rather than summoned, and how recovery from a disappointing championship becomes the input to the next cycle’s plan.
Key speaking topics
Performance under pressure
Goal setting and long-range planning
Resilience and recovery from setback
Composure in high-stakes moments
Capacity management across parallel commitments
Team and coach relationships in individual sport
Motivation and discipline over a long career
Ideal for
Senior leaders and executive teams under sustained performance scrutiny
Sales, trading, and commercial functions where individual high-stakes moments determine results
Talent and learning leaders designing development programmes for high-potential staff
Conference audiences at annual kickoffs, partner meetings, and recognition events
Audience outcomes
A working picture of how elite performers plan and rehearse for moments that last minutes but define a year.
Specific methods for managing composure when the audience and the cost of error are both large.
A credible account of how to sustain output across multiple cycles, not a single peak.
A clear view of what capacity management looks like when two demanding tracks are being run at once.
Kadeena Cox
Senior teams talk about resilience as a value, then under-invest in what it actually requires when conditions break. The gap is rarely visible in good years. It surfaces when a leader has to make decisions while the operating environment, the team’s confidence, or their own capacity is changing faster than the plan accounts for.
Why organisations work with Kadeena Cox
A first-hand account of rebuilding performance from zero after a stroke and an MS diagnosis at 23, then competing at world-record level across two different Paralympic sports.
Substantive content on inclusion in elite environments, drawn from founding and running the KC Academy in partnership with the Rapha Foundation and SportsAid.
A track record that is publicly verifiable at the highest level of British sport: golds at Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020, and Paris 2024, plus OBE in 2022.
Direct experience of the daily decision-making required when a body and a schedule cannot be relied on, which translates cleanly into leadership audiences operating under sustained uncertainty.
Biography highlights
Five-time Paralympic gold medallist (Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020, Paris 2024) in athletics and cycling
First British Paralympian since 1984 to win golds in two different sports at the same Games
OBE for services to athletics and cycling (2022); MBE (2017)
Founder of the KC Academy, in partnership with the Rapha Foundation and SportsAid
Winner, BBC Celebrity MasterChef Series 16 (2021)
World record holder, C4 500m time trial
Biography
The Rio 2016 Paralympics produced an outcome no British athlete had achieved in 32 years. Kadeena Cox won gold in two different sports at the same Games, in T38 400m athletics and C4-5 500m cycling, two years after a stroke and a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis at the age of 23. The cycling time was faster than any able-bodied Team GB rider had produced at an Olympic or Paralympic Games.
Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 added further golds, including a world record in the C4 500m time trial and a team sprint title alongside Jaco van Gass and Jody Cundy. The arc matters less for the medal count than for what it required operationally: training programmes built around a condition that does not behave predictably, and a competitive schedule that had to absorb that reality without losing edge.
In 2021 Cox founded the KC Academy, which works with SportsAid and is supported by the Rapha Foundation to identify and fund cyclists from ethnically diverse backgrounds entering the British high-performance pathway. She is the only Black British cyclist to have won Olympic or Paralympic gold, and the Academy is her response to the structural reasons that statistic exists. Her speaking work draws on both strands: the discipline of competing when the body is unreliable, and the institutional work of changing who gets to be in the room at elite level.
She was appointed OBE in 2022 for services to athletics and cycling, having received the MBE in 2017.
Key speaking topics
Resilience and recovery after diagnosis
Composure and decision-making under physical and competitive pressure
Inclusion as a high-performance capability
Building structures for underrepresented talent
Mental health and sustained performance
Adapting goals when conditions change
Ideal for
Leadership offsites and conferences focused on resilience, change, or sustained performance under pressure
DEI, talent and culture leads working on inclusion in high-performance settings
Employee resource groups, particularly disability, race, and wellbeing networks
Internal events marking transitions, restructures, or recovery moments
Audience outcomes
A concrete sense of what resilience looks like as a daily operational practice, not a value statement
A reframed view of inclusion as a performance lever, grounded in the KC Academy’s specific work
Honest language for talking about mental health and physical limits inside high-pressure teams
Renewed confidence in setting ambitious goals when the operating environment is unstable
Jodie Burrage
Senior leaders ask people to perform through repeated setbacks, then provide little language for how that is actually done. The gap between resilience as a value on a slide and resilience as a daily decision is where careers, teams and recovery programmes quietly fall apart. Audiences need someone who has held that ground in public, with consequences attached.
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
Annabell Fuller
Senior performers are expected to hold their composure when the result is visible, the margin is small, and the recovery window is short. Most leadership development still treats this as a soft skill rather than a trained capability. The cost is felt in poor decisions made under load, not in the absence of resilience workshops.
Why organisations work with Annabell Fuller
A live competitor’s account of decision-making under public pressure, drawn from major championship cuts at Carnoustie and a top-three finish at a USD 5 million LET event, not retrospective reflection from a retired career.
Specific, sport-grounded language for what self-leadership looks like in the seconds before a high-stakes call, useful for leaders briefing teams on composure rather than wellbeing.
A credible voice on the gap between physical preparation and competitive output, drawn from CrossFit-led conditioning work integrated into a professional golf schedule.
A generational perspective on performing in public view at twenty-three, relevant to organisations thinking about early-career talent expected to operate under scrutiny.
Biography highlights
Ladies European Tour professional since 2024; tied 5th at LET Q-School to earn her card.
3rd place at the PIF Saudi Ladies International 2025, a USD 5 million LET event.
Made the cut at the 2021 AIG Women’s Open at Carnoustie as one of only three amateurs that year.
Three-time Curtis Cup player for Great Britain and Ireland (2018, 2021, 2022).
Two-time European Ladies’ Team Championship gold medallist for England (2021, 2022).
2020 English Women’s Open Amateur Stroke Play Champion; University of Florida NCAA golfer 2020 to 2023.
Biography
A senior team will commit hundreds of hours of training to a decision that takes two seconds to execute in public. The question of what holds a performer together in that window is rarely treated as a discipline. Annabell Fuller has spent her career inside it.
Fuller earned her Ladies European Tour card at Q-School in December 2023 with a tied-5th finish, then spent her rookie 2024 season learning to convert preparation into tour-level scoring. Her strongest result so far, third place at the PIF Saudi Ladies International in 2025, came at a USD 5 million LET event where the field included most of the tour’s established names.
The amateur record behind her is the credential most useful to a board audience. She made the cut at the 2021 Women’s British Open at Carnoustie as one of only three amateurs, won the English Women’s Open Amateur Stroke Play Championship in 2020, and represented Great Britain and Ireland three times in the Curtis Cup. At the University of Florida she won the Florida Gator Invitational and reached the world’s top 25 in the amateur rankings.
What sits underneath those results, and what she speaks about, is the conditioning behind composure: how a competitor builds a decision process that survives the moment a tournament tightens. The talks lean on CrossFit-integrated physical preparation, public accountability at twenty-three, and the specific discipline of recovering from a poor shot quickly enough to compete on the next one.
Key speaking topics
Composure and decision-making under public pressure
Self-leadership in elite competition
Physical preparation and performance conditioning
Resilience after setback
Team performance in individual sport
Early-career performance under scrutiny
Ideal for
Sales leadership conferences focused on quota delivery under pressure
Early-career and high-potential talent programmes inside large organisations
Executive offsites built around composure and decision-making rather than strategy
Employee networks and ERG events on women in performance environments
Audience outcomes
A working language for what composure under pressure actually involves, drawn from competition rather than coaching theory.
A clearer picture of how physical conditioning links to mental performance in a demanding role.
Specific examples of recovering from public setbacks fast enough to perform on the next attempt.
A credible account of operating under public scrutiny at the start of a career.
Georgia-Mae Fenton
Senior performers stall under the weight of repeated public scrutiny. The expectation to deliver a clean execution at the highest level, then return four years later and deliver it again, is one of the harder demands organisations make of their people. Most leadership training has nothing useful to say about it.
Why organisations work with Georgia-Mae Fenton
She has won the same individual event at consecutive Commonwealth Games, four years apart, the first gymnast in the discipline to do so. That is direct experience of defending a peak, which is harder than reaching one.
Her team’s World Championship silver in Liverpool in 2022 was the best result by a British women’s artistic gymnastics team in the history of the World Championships. She can speak credibly to what changes inside a high-performing group at the moment the standard moves.
She made her Olympic debut at Paris 2024 in her mid-twenties after several years of being the established figure in the squad. The arc is later than most assume, and that is the substance of her recovery and persistence material.
East London based, comfortable in school, community and corporate audiences without changing register. Useful for organisations that want a high-profile athlete who reads the room.
Biography highlights
Commonwealth Games gold, uneven bars and team, Birmingham 2022.
Commonwealth Games gold, uneven bars, Gold Coast 2018.
World Championships silver, team, Liverpool 2022, with Great Britain.
Team GB women’s artistic gymnastics, Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Trained from age five at South Essex Gymnastics Club; competes for Great Britain and England.
Represented by Forte Model Management alongside her competitive career.
Biography
The uneven bars demand absolute composure inside an eight-second routine where one missed catch ends the competition. Georgia-Mae Fenton has stood on the top of the Commonwealth podium for that event twice, four years apart, in Gold Coast and Birmingham. That is a rare thing in any sport: holding a championship standard across a full Olympic cycle of injury risk, selection politics and shifting code requirements.
The Liverpool World Championships in 2022 was the broader inflection point. Fenton was part of the five-woman Great Britain team that took silver, the strongest result a British women’s artistic gymnastics team has ever produced at a World Championship. That medal also booked the team’s quota place for Paris 2024.
At Paris she made her Olympic debut as one of the more experienced figures in a young Team GB quintet that finished fourth, edged off the podium by Brazil in the final rotation. The arc from junior British champion at fifteen, to Commonwealth gold at seventeen, to Olympian at twenty-three, is the substance she draws on when she speaks about persistence and re-entry after long stretches of work with no obvious return.
She works with corporate, school and community audiences from her base in East London. The material is grounded in what she has actually done: holding a routine when it counts, going back to the same event a second time after winning it once, and recovering form after the years when the medals do not come.
Key speaking topics
Composure under high-stakes performance pressure
Defending a peak across long performance cycles
Recovery and re-entry after setback
Discipline and goal-setting in elite sport
Team dynamics inside a high-performing squad
Mental health and stress management for young performers
Role models and visibility in women’s sport
Ideal for
Corporate audiences in sectors with high-pressure delivery cycles (sales, trading, professional services)
HR and talent leaders programming on resilience, wellbeing and early-career performance
Schools, universities and youth-facing organisations focused on aspiration and persistence
Women’s networks and ERGs commissioning speakers on visibility in sport
Audience outcomes
A concrete view of what composure looks like inside an eight-second performance window, told by someone who has executed it on the world stage
The mechanics of preparing to defend a title, which is different in kind from preparing to win one
Honest material on the years when the medals do not come and the work continues
A grounded perspective on managing public expectation as a young woman in elite sport
Jade Jones
Senior leaders ask their teams to perform when the stakes are highest and the margins thinnest, then ask them to do it again the next quarter and the one after that. The discipline that produces a single peak is not the discipline that produces repeated peaks across years of changing conditions. Most organisations underestimate what it costs the people who deliver it.
Why organisations work with Jade Jones
She is the only athlete to have won Olympic taekwondo gold for Britain, and she did it twice, at 19 and at 23, against the world’s best Korean and Chinese fighters in their own sport.
She speaks from a 13-year competitive career at the top of a sport with no margin for off-days, which gives weight when she talks about pressure, preparation, and the psychology of repeat performance.
Her trajectory through Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 first-round exits, then a complete sport change to professional boxing at 31, gives her a credible vocabulary on setback and reinvention that most decorated athletes do not have.
Awarded both an MBE and an OBE by the Crown for services to taekwondo and sport, recognition that signals public-record stature rather than bureau framing.
Biography highlights
Olympic gold medallist, women’s 57 kg taekwondo: London 2012 and Rio 2016.
World Champion, 57 kg, Manchester 2019. Three-time European Champion (2016, 2018, 2021). Two-time European Games champion (2015, 2023).
Ten career gold medals across World Taekwondo Grand Prix events between 2014 and 2023.
MBE (2013) and OBE (2020) for services to taekwondo and sport.
Twice named BBC Wales Sports Personality of the Year (2012, 2016); Flint Pavilion Leisure Centre renamed in her honour.
Professional boxing debut, 7 March 2026, Misfits Duel 2 in Derby; second-round knockout victory over Egypt Criss.
Biography
Team GB had never won an Olympic taekwondo medal of any colour when Jones walked into the ExCeL arena for the women’s 57 kg final at London 2012. She walked out at 19 as Team GB’s first taekwondo Olympic champion and the youngest member of that Games’ British gold cohort. Four years later in Rio, she defended the title against Spain’s Eva Calvo, beating her 16-7 to become the only British fighter ever to win two Olympic taekwondo golds.
The two-Games haul is the headline. The career underneath it is the substance. She won her first World Championship in Manchester in 2019 against the defending champion. She holds three European titles and two European Games titles. She collected ten World Grand Prix golds across nearly a decade of competition, the kind of record that requires a person to be peaking on demand at three or four major events a year for most of their twenties.
That record also includes the two losses that matter. First-round exits at Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024, after a year of training in her own garage during the pandemic and a second cycle as the marked favourite. The recovery vocabulary she uses on stage is not borrowed; it is what she did to keep competing after each of them.
In March 2025 she retired from taekwondo and signed with former professional boxer Stephen Smith to train for a boxing career. Her stated target is to become a world champion in two sports. She made her professional debut at Misfits Duel 2 in Derby on 7 March 2026 and won by second-round knockout. The point for a corporate audience is the willingness to start again from the bottom of a different sport at 31 after one of the most decorated careers in British combat sport.
Key speaking topics
Performance under pressure at elite level
Repeat peak performance across a long career
Recovery and reinvention after public setback
Mental health in high-stakes environments
Long-term goal setting and focus
Women in sport and underrepresented disciplines
Career transition and starting again
Ideal for
Sales, trading and leadership teams whose performance is measured event by event
Senior leadership offsites focused on resilience, succession, and renewal after a hard year
Company-wide kickoffs and recognition events looking for credible Olympic-calibre proof of what discipline produces
Diversity, women’s networks and ERG events where a high-profile woman in a male-dominated combat sport adds substance
Audience outcomes
A concrete sense of what daily discipline looks like over a decade of competitive peaks
A working definition of pressure that comes from inside an Olympic final, not a metaphor
Permission to treat setback as an operational fact rather than a personal failing
A first-hand account of changing direction late, told by someone doing it now in public
Adam Gemili
Senior leaders ask their teams to perform under extreme scrutiny, then watch composure unravel in the moments that matter. The behaviour that holds a team together when expectations are public, the result is binary, and the margin is fractions of a second is rarely written down. It is taught by people who have lived inside that environment and stayed performing across more than a decade.
Why organisations work with Adam Gemili
A world title earned by a four-man relay quartet, not an individual final, gives him direct material on how teams hold technique together when one mistake ends the race.
Fourteen years at the top of British sprinting, including European 200m gold and an Olympic 200m final, evidence a long performance arc rather than a single peak moment.
His current role as sprint coach at Chelsea FC academy means his content on performance habits is being actively tested against developing professional athletes, not retold from memory.
He is the first British man to run sub-10 in the 100m and sub-20 in the 200m, a credential that opens corporate audiences and supports the discipline-and-marginal-gains content many performance speakers claim without proof.
Biography highlights
World Champion, men’s 4x100m relay, IAAF World Championships London 2017 (37.47, national and European record).
European Champion, 200m, 2014; three-time European Champion in the 4x100m relay.
Olympic 200m finalist, Rio 2016, finishing fourth.
First British male sprinter to run sub-10 seconds in the 100m and sub-20 seconds in the 200m.
Sprint and speed coach, Chelsea FC academy, from 2026.
Degree in Sports & Exercise Science with Human Biology.
Biography
The Great Britain men’s 4x100m team had spent years carrying the memory of a botched handover at London 2012. Five years later, in the same stadium, they ran 37.47 seconds and beat the United States to the world title. Gemili ran the second leg.
That race is the strongest single anchor in his speaking material. It is also the most accurate frame for what he offers a corporate room: a story about four people executing a technical task in front of 60,000 spectators, where the result depends on the handover as much as the speed.
His individual record runs in parallel. European 200m champion in 2014, Olympic finalist in Rio in 2016, fourth at the 2019 World Championships in Doha as the highest-placed European. He is the first British man to run sub-10 in the 100m and sub-20 in the 200m, a credential that signals range across both events rather than a single specialism.
In March 2026 he retired from elite athletics and returned to Chelsea FC, where he had spent seven years as a youth player before switching codes, this time as a sprint and speed coach for the academy. The crossover gives his content on performance, recovery, and team behaviour a current operational anchor, not just a competitive past.
Key speaking topics
High-performance teams under pressure
Composure and execution in high-stakes moments
Resilience after setback and injury
Goal-setting and the long performance arc
Mental health in elite environments
Diversity and representation in sport
Coaching and developing young talent
Ideal for
Sales and commercial leadership conferences focused on performance behaviours
Employee engagement, kick-off and town hall events where a corporate audience benefits from a non-corporate voice
HR and people leaders programming content on resilience and mental health for high-pressure teams
After-dinner and awards programmes wanting a credible British sporting figure rather than a generic motivational slot
Audience outcomes
A specific account of how a four-person team won a world title where any single error ends the race
A working definition of composure under public scrutiny, drawn from someone who lived it across major championships
Honest material on setback, injury, and competitive disappointment from a fourteen-year career, not a highlight reel
A credible, recent perspective on coaching and developing young athletes inside a Premier League academy