Michael Mellen immediately engages your audience. He is relatable, warm, and interactive, creating a dialogue with the audience that builds trust. He will tailor the topic to the unique needs of your organization or event in a way that is authentic and inclusive. Attendees walk away feeling validated and inspired, with specific action steps to move their own and/or the organization’s growth and goals forward.
While Michael will customize topics based on event, audience, needs, and objectives, typical topics include:
A Space for Possibility (signature talk) Imagine. Create. Dream. Vision. The ideal. Our brains are wired for possibility, but our world is structured for achieving specific goals on a set path. Michael challenges leaders, team members, and organizations to imagine a space in which possibility exists, even within the current structure of an organization. To get there, Michael shares six practical, powerful, and fun tools that make up the CREATE framework for possibility. Create a space in which each person, each leader, each team member is encouraged towards what’s possible in work and in life.
A Space for Leadership Which coach, teacher, family member, friend, or boss brought or brings out the best in you? Who motivated you, provided vision for you and your team, and supported you in navigating inevitable conflict and obstacles? How do you want to show up as a leader? What does it mean to lead at any level of an organization, wherever you are in life? Michael challenges participants to expand their notion of powerful leadership and their understanding of who leads. Along with reframing how you experience and understand leadership, he also provides specific, concrete steps audience members can take to shift how they show up as leaders. This talk makes space for anyone willing to step into their visionary leadership, to bring others with them, and to show up in a way that sees the humanity of the team and the magic of bringing out the best in others.
A Space for Understanding In our world, we must work with people who view our world, our governments, and our values in very different ways than we do. In politics, at work, within our communities, and even within our families, we have stopped working with people who see things differently from us. When we begin with understanding, we begin to develop relationships and begin to see the other not as enemy but as potential collaborator. Together, we work to create space that allows us to step forward with appreciation for our differences. Michael provides the space, the challenge, and the steps to take towards committing to and getting started with this work.
A Space for Magic Have you ever experienced the magic of someone’s skill with a room of people, with a child, in diagnosing an illness, teaching a subject, recognizing a lie, motivating a team, creating art, or identifying a new powerful strategy? We experience the capacity to generate relationship, meaning, and creation as magic. And in so many ways, it is magic, but, like Merlin or Hermione, much of our magic is developed through learning and practice. How are you going to develop YOUR magic? Each of us has potential. Michael creates the space for participants to identify their magic and begin to tap into the capacity for magical relationship, meaning, and creation.