Sue Mitchell
Raise Resilience And Achieve Effective Outcomes To Complex Challenges In A Fast Changing World Without Stress And Conflict. Harness The Power Of Inner Sustainability, Systems Awareness And Adaptable Leadership.
- Raise resilience and performance in the face of complex dynamic challenges without stress, burnout or conflict.
- Harness deep systemic levers for effective outcomes and strategic responses to change, uncertainty and other complex challenges.
- Author of “The Authority Guide to Engaging your People”, an executive & leadership coach, an equine shiatsu practitioner and former evolutionary ecologist and expedition leader.
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Sue Mitchell's 2025 biography
About Dr Sue Mitchell
Dr Sue Mitchell is a former evolutionary ecologist and expedition leader who speaks on inner sustainability, systems awareness and adaptable leadership for high resilience and high performance with high wellbeing. She is author of “The Authority Guide to Engaging your People”, an executive and leadership coach, and a practitioner of equine shiatsu. Sue brings a unique blend of science, leadership and coaching to her virtual and in-the-room engagements with a focus on insightful keynotes and interactive think-tank sessions and masterclasses. Her unique perspective combines a spirit of adventure with the rigor of scientific thought and the value of emotional and sensory perception.
Diverse audiences engage with Sue’s story-based keynote message: Recognising your human reactions to complex challenges gives you the power to take control of your mindset, make wiser choices and set yourself up for success both now and in future.
“As a scientist, I was trained to take the person out of everything, to focus on the science and the task to get properly objective results. However, over the years, I’ve come to realise that no matter what discipline or sector you work in, you can only be your best and inspire high performance (for yourself and others) when you put the person into everything. I help you do this through a mindset approach to inner sustainability, self-leadership and leading others that gives you tools to raise wellbeing, engagement AND performance.”
Harness the power of inner sustainability, systems awareness and adaptable leadership to raise resilience and achieve effective outcomes to complex challenges in a fast changing world without stress and conflict.
When is Sue’s approach relevant? When your organisation, team or people are facing complex challenges such as:
- Change and uncertainty, whether instigated internally such as through organisational growth or restructure, or by external factors such as political, pandemic, geographic or climate risks.
- Lack of focus or lack of clarity that often results in divergent strategy and actions with reduced performance.
- Lack of collaboration – teams, departments or functions operating in persistent silos.
- Diminishing budgets and a ‘need to do more with less’
- High levels of stress, overwhelm or burnout
- Lack of engagement
Sue’s keynotes, think-tank sessions and masterclasses can support managers and leaders throughout the organisation to enhance their strategic resilience skills and enhance workforce preparedness to navigate complex challenges. Leadership plays a pivotal role in building resilience, including embracing diverse perspectives for balanced decision making, scenario planning for fast decision making on adapting plans to changing situations, and developing high performing teams that can thrive under pressure through enhanced trust, psychological safety, mental strength and autonomy.
Sue’s mindset approach combined with compassionate leadership and systemic frameworks gives you practical tools and strategies to adapt to complex challenges while remaining true to your core purpose with high resilience, engagement and performance.
- gain clarity of purpose and focus
- be flexible, adaptable and comfortable with complex challenges such as uncertainty and change
- enhance team performance
- enhance resilience – reduce or prevent stress, overwhelm and burnout
- enhance collaboration – reduce conflict and silos
- enhance engagement
- enhance wellbeing for individuals, teams and organisations
The outcomes of raising engagement and wellbeing are higher staff retention, productivity and prosperity and less stress and absenteeism (Research by Gallup and others).
In her talks, Sue draws on her unique experience including leading expeditions to remote parts of the world, sailing across the South Pacific Ocean, scuba diving and training scuba instructors, working with horses as an equine shiatsu practitioner, growing up in Africa, a multi-cultural working experience including her scientific research career that included a post-doc at Edinburgh University and a fellowship at a Max Planck Institute in Germany, as well as running a self-catering business and her leadership consultancy.
Sue has over 20 years’ experience as a trainer, speaker and coach and her practical approach is supported by academic ability and diverse knowledge. She is qualified in Executive and Corporate Coaching and several psychometric assessments including Emotional Intelligence EQ-i2, Mental Strength MTQ Plus, Leadership Styles ILM72 and others. As a Fellow of the Professional Speaking Association of UK and Ireland (PSA UK&I), Sue has earned recognition for her expertise and community service. Sue was the PSA UK&I Regional President Scotland for 2019-2020. Sue has volunteered on boards and committees including PSA UK&I, the Association for Coaching (AC), Women in Banking and Finance (WIBF) Edinburgh Branch, Moorfoot Community Council (including terms as Chair and as Treasurer) and the British Sub Aqua Club.
Her academic qualifications include a PhD in Evolutionary Ecology and Masters in Marine Environmental Conservation. Her research included postdoctoral Fellowships at a Max Planck Institute and Edinburgh University on understanding systemic interactions involving genetics and environment.
CPD Accredited Speaker
Dr Sue Mitchell is an accredited CPD Speaker with CPDSO. When relevant to organisers, delegates can receive CPD certificates for attending her talks. There is no additional fee for this benefit.
Author
When relevant to organisers, delegates may receive a signed copy of Sue’s book “The Authority Guide to Engaging your People”.
Sue’s latest books
Articles and podcasts
Sue Mitchell's 2025 talks & topics
Navigating Change And Uncertainty: Adaptable Leadership For Complex Challenges.
Recognising your human reactions to change and uncertainty gives you the power to take control of your mindset, choose the way you are showing up and set yourself up for success to navigate change and uncertainty. This highly interactive keynote introduces Sue’s PEP framework to sail through change and uncertainty and bring people together with the courage and optimism to persevere towards your core purpose and goals. Mindset tools to remain purposeful while being flexible and adaptable to situations for are illustrated through the lens of a small yacht sailing across the South Pacific Ocean to New Zealand.
The accompanying masterclass and think tank options explore your challenges with powerful systems awareness tools to strategically navigate complex, dynamic and rapidly changing situations.
Key attributes for individuals and organisations to thrive successfully and be resilient in the face of accelerating change and uncertainty are clarity of purpose, focus and adaptability, combined with high engagement. In addition, the ability to maintain optimism, courage and perseverance in the face of challenges helps to avoid overwhelm and stress and instead take effective action. When situations change rapidly, you need to be able to rapidly make decisions and switch plans to adapt to prevailing conditions. Critically, you need to bring everyone with you through the turbulence and stormy waters, when it seems you take one step forwards and several backwards as you ‘tack into the headwinds of challenge, change and uncertainty’ and they can’t see that you are still making consistent progress towards your goals without being blown off course.
Dolphins, Sharks, & Jellyfish: Why Don’t We Always Make Wise Decisions In The Face Of Risk And Challenge?
The choices we make determine our present and future outcomes. In an ideal world, we would always recognise all the available options and make the wisest choice for a positive outcome both now and in future. Yet very often, we don’t do that. Our choices, our actions, might ‘put out this fire’ as we deal with the immediate challenge, but sow the seeds for the next fire and we end up in a cycle of continual firefighting. What if our foresight was as clear as our hindsight?
In this keynote (and related masterclasses and think tank sessions) explore how our unconscious mental models influence our interpretation of situations and drive our decision making in ways that we often don’t notice in the moment.
Join Sue on a 36foot yacht sailing 900 miles from Australia to New Caledonia in the South Pacific and the calamities that befall them on their journey. Take part in choosing what to do – will you make wiser decisions than the team on the boat? See how your mindset and mental models shape your decision making in powerful ways that you often don’t notice in the moment. Gain insights to how you can make wiser decisions and see the options that not only get you through the immediate situation but also set you up for success further along.
Changing your mental model and becoming aware of the wider system is an extremely powerful way you can recognise more options in the face of a challenge, make wiser choices, become an influential and compassionate leader, achieve aspirations for yourself, your team and your organisation and shape your future.
Mental models are the strongest levers for change in any system that involves people. This is a powerful resource for organisations that are facing a wide range of challenges – such as ‘do more with less’, navigating change and uncertainty, implementing organisational growth or restructuring, raising team performance, enhancing collaboration, reducing silos, reducing workforce burnout and stress, enhancing resilience, and so on.
Draw on systems awareness tools to understand how we can leverage mental models and systems structures to enhance our ability to recognise the choices, find the opportunities in complex challenges and take actions that deliver desired outcomes and set you up for success both now and in future.
Harness The Paradoxical Power Of Diversity For High Performance, High Engagement, And High Wellbeing.
How do you benefit from the positive effects of diversity on teams such as better decision making and higher performance and avoid the negative impacts of diversity? While much evidence exists demonstrating that organisations with more diverse leadership teams perform better on a wide range of KPIs, the lived experience of many boards and teams is the opposite – more conflict, friction, lack of decision making or lack of action on decisions passed, and a regret for making the changes to who you include in the team. The paradoxical power of diversity lies in the diversity of thought, past experience, knowledge, values and more that contribute each individual person’s mental models that shape differing opinions and perspectives on a situation. This paradoxical power is also the source of conflict when the team lacks the structures, knowledge and culture to truly listen to and value differing perspectives, leading to conflict, silos, ‘them and us’, distrust, stress and poor team performance.
This interactive event explores the challenges experienced by the majority as well as minority groups within a diverse team, including the discomfort of change and unintended threats to core motivators. Gain systems awareness and mindset tools to harness the power in diverse perspectives without creating conflict.
Outcomes
Improve working relationships. Strengthen team performance. Reduce misunderstanding, conflict and stress. Improve decision making and strategy. Embrace diversity.
The Power Of Positive
This fun, highly interactive masterclass gives your managers the essential ingredients to create the positive environment and ‘can-do’ culture for working successfully together and to create high performing teams themselves. It is ideal when your people could do with a burst of positive energy to revitalise a project or manage changes.
Working in pairs, small groups and as a whole team, we look at ways to build positive thinking and emotions into everyday life at work, making it easier to work more effectively together and raising wellbeing and engagement.
Evidence from neuroscience shows that feeling positive, and especially safe, unstressed and unthreatened, opens up access to the higher reasoning cognitive part of brain which leads to more creative thinking, inspiration, new ideas, solution finding, problem solving, focus and improved social interaction, all of which support higher performance at work. When you feel negative or stressed, your brain literally shuts down access to the cognitive areas of the brain, resulting in poor focus, feelings of overwhelm, interpersonal conflicts, inability to listen to different perspectives and poor decision making, all of which have a negative impact on performance and productivity.