"You could have heard a pin drop as Michelle blew the audience away with her storytelling. She was the stand out of the event, everyone loved her."
Monica Rosenfeld
Founder – Global Stories that Stir Movement
TRUSTED BY.
The credibility of someone who has actually made the call.
I'd just departed Cooma for Sydney. Night flight. Solid cloud. Nothing visible out the window.
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Then lightning. A direct strike.
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Everything blacked out. Comms gone. Instruments gone. Static roaring in the headset. No visual horizon. Just black.
I didn't panic. Because I'd trained for this. Not this scenario exactly. But the mindset.
What struck me later wasn't the lightning itself. It was how little thinking there was in the moment. There wasn't time to work anything out from scratch. There were just priorities, decisions, and whatever experience I'd brought with me.
Surviving that strike wasn't luck. It was the test. Because when things get hard, we don't rise to the occasion. We fall back on our training.
My instructor once told me: you can either fly one hour a thousand times, or fly a thousand different hours. I chose the second one. Every flight before that night was a different route, a different challenge, a different decision. Not to log hours. Because life rarely gives us perfect conditions.
This isn't about aviation. It's about what it takes to perform when no one thinks you should. When the instruments are gone and the horizon has disappeared and there's nothing left but what you brought with you.
That's antifragility. And that's what I bring to your stage.
DECISION THEATRE.
Nobody taught you how to make a decision.
At school, university or in your first job, you were taught what to decide, never how, so you worked it out as you went, absorbing the stress, watching rooms full of intelligent people perform the appearance of deciding without ever actually committing.
There were meetings with lots of discussions, notes taken and everyone sounded aligned, but then nothing moved.
That's Decision Theatre, and most organisations are running it every week without realising it.
The good news is that decision-making is a skill rather than a personality trait, and like any skill it can be learned, practised and shared across an entire team so that when the pressure arrives, everyone in the room knows what to do next.
I've taught this framework to my own kids, who now make decisions with a confidence that most adults spend entire careers searching for.
Imagine what that does in a boardroom.
CALM UNDER CHAOS
Keynote · High-Performance Decisions Under Pressure.
Audiences lean in, sit back, reflect, laugh, cry, get angry and leave with a plan.
The stories from the cockpit hold up a mirror to the decisions they face every day, the emotions that come with them and the weight of getting it wrong.
Best for conferences, leadership events and team offsites.
Decision Made.
F.O.R.C.E. DECISIONS.
Workshop · A Practical Framework for Better Decisions Under Pressure.
Nobody handed you a process for making decisions under pressure.
You absorbed the stress, developed your own system and hoped it would hold when things got hard.
This workshop gives teams a shared, transparent framework that takes the weight out of deciding, turns it from something that happens to you into a skill everyone in the room can use, and works the day after you run it.
Decision Made.
Media & Speaking Highlights
