Mitch Wallis

We’ve all been there. Someone we care about opens up, and we have no idea what to say. The team-mate who goes quiet. The customer who breaks down on the phone. The friend who texts at 11pm. The partner who’s not OK. The colleague who’s holding something heavy.

These moments don’t care what your job title is – they show up in 1:1s, in classrooms, in living rooms, in call centres, at school gates, at family dinners. And almost no one has ever been taught what to actually do in them.

Real Conversations® is a behavioural framework grounded in clinical psychology that teaches the technology of human connection. It moves people from helpless to helpful, from panic to confidence, from fixing to connecting – in every relationship that matters.

This is the keynote your audience talks about on the way out, because it applies to every single area of their life. This session is for you if you’ve ever cared about someone and didn’t know what to say.

Audience walks away with:

• The ELSA-B™ framework for emotionally charged conversations
• A behavioural shift they can apply in their next real conversation – at work or at home
• Shared language that travels through the organisation, the team, and the family

Best suited for:

All-staff conferences and town halls, full-organisation calendar moments (R U OK? Day, World Mental Health Day, International Men’s Day, World Day for Safety and Health at Work, Men’s Health Week, Mental Health Awareness Month), industry conferences with mixed audiences, association events, leadership offsites, lunch-and- learns, wellbeing and safety month seminars, professional learning days.

Most organisations don’t have an empathy problem. They have a capability gap. Managers are promoted for technical skill and held accountable for emotional outcomes they’ve never been trained for. They sit between “I care about my team” and “I have no idea what to say right now.”

That gap shows up in restructures, performance conversations, quiet quitters, and burnt-out high performers – and it costs organisations far more than the awareness campaign that tried to fix it.

This keynote gives leaders a practical operating system for emotionally complex conversations. The result: earlier intervention, reduced people risk, and leadership that scales trust under pressure.

This session is for you if your managers are great with strategy and frozen by emotion.

Audience walks away with:

• The ELSA-B™ framework for high- stakes leadership conversations
• Behavioural language leaders can use in their next 1:1
• A clear shift in how to respond when a team member isn’t OK

Best suited for:

Leadership conferences, L&D programs, pre-restructure briefings, executive offsites, retention and engagement initiatives, capability strategy days.

Your frontline staff didn’t sign up to be therapists. But every week, they become one. The customer who breaks down on the phone. The client who overshares. The patient whose grief lands in someone’s lap. The complaint that’s really a cry for help.

Most customer-facing professionals are exposed to high emotional load without ever being trained for it-and the cost of getting those moments wrong is hidden in your attrition data, your NPS scores, and your psychosocial risk register. T

his keynote equips customer-facing teams with the language and structure to respond with empathy, clarity, and clean boundaries -without sliding into over-involvement that drains them, or under-involvement that fractures the relationship.

The result is a workforce that feels purposeful rather than depleted, and customers who feel met rather than processed. This session is for you if your people care too much and don’t know where the line is.

Audience walks away with:

• The ELSA-B™ framework adapted for customer-facing moments
• Language to use in the next hard customer interaction
• Clean boundaries that protect both the customer and the staff member

Best suited for:

Sales summits, customer experience conferences, high-emotional-load industries (banking, insurance, healthcare, hospitality, real estate, financial advice, legal), frontline training days, vicarious – trauma prevention initiatives, reward-based sessions.

Workplace mental health isn’t deteriorating because organisations don’t care. It’s deteriorating because they’re intervening at the wrong level.

Awareness programs, EAP campaigns, and one-off resilience training haven’t moved the dial. The reason: psychological safety is being treated as a program rather than an operating condition.

Manager behaviour-not posters, lanyards, or app subscriptions – is the variable that determines whether teams thrive or fracture under load. And in Australia, that variable is now regulated.

This keynote reframes workplace mental health as a risk and leadership capability issue, mapping directly to psychosocial hazard regulations and global people-risk standards. It replaces the most common organisational errors with evidence -aligned behavioural standards leaders can act on.

This session is for you if you’re tired of programs that don’t change behaviour.

Audience walks away with:

• A clearer mental model for psychosocial risk
• The manager behaviours that actually move the dial
• A defensible narrative for the board

Best suited for:

CPO / CHRO summits, WHS conferences, risk and governance events, board-level executive forums, capability strategy days, B2B educational series.