Frequently asked questions
Everything organisers, coaching clients and media ask before they get in touch. If your question isn’t here, the contact page is one click away.
Courageous, human-centred leadership — backed by neuroscience. Signature keynotes include First Comes Courage, The Leadership Brain, Leadership Is an Attitude (Not a Title) and Regulate to Lead, plus topics on culture, psychological safety, women in leadership and leading in the AI era. Every keynote can be tailored to your audience and outcomes.
Keynotes, half-day and full-day workshops, team facilitation, executive coaching, high-energy 1–2 hour virtual masterclasses, and conference MC / hosting. Most bookings end up tailored — tell us the outcome you want and we’ll shape the format around it.
Yes. Sonia delivers virtual keynotes and masterclasses designed for the screen — interactive and energetic, not a webinar with slides. Hybrid formats work too.
Sonia is based in Brisbane, Australia, and speaks Australia-wide and internationally — she has delivered keynotes across 10 countries and counting.
As early as you can — popular dates, especially conference season, book out months ahead. If your date is close, enquire anyway: the availability check takes a day, not a week.
First, an availability check. Once you confirm, three things arrive fast and fuss-free: a booking form so everyone stays aligned on dates, venue and scope; a contract; and a 50% deposit invoice to lock in the date. Then we schedule a briefing call to tailor every moment to your audience.
Fees vary with format, duration and location, so we quote per event. The enquiry form includes an optional budget range — including “not yet confirmed” — and we’ll always give you a straight answer on what’s possible for your budget.
Always. Every keynote and workshop is shaped to your audience, industry and outcomes in the briefing call — no off-the-shelf decks. Sonia has worked across construction, government, health and aged care, education, financial services and retail, so your world won’t be new to her.
Coaching is by application, not checkout — Sonia keeps her practice deliberately small. Apply on the coaching page; if it looks like a fit, you’ll have a no-obligation chemistry conversation before anything is agreed. Engagements typically run six or twelve months.
Yes — TV, radio, podcast and print, in person from Brisbane or remote. Media enquiries are answered the same business day, and deadline requests come first. Headshots, bios and story angles are on the media page.
Most professional keynote speakers in Australia sit somewhere between $5,000 and $30,000+. The range comes down to experience, reputation, format and how much tailoring the event needs — a 45-minute keynote is priced differently to a full-day workshop interstate.
Sonia quotes per event rather than publishing a rate card, because almost every booking ends up shaped around the outcome. The enquiry form has an optional budget range, including “not yet confirmed,” and you’ll get a straight answer on what’s possible.
Not a presentation. The thing you’re buying is what leaders do differently on Monday.
A keynote earns its fee when it changes how people make decisions under pressure, how they run the difficult conversations they’ve been avoiding, and how they hold their teams together through change. If the event ends and nothing shifts, the cheapest speaker was still too expensive.
There isn’t one — there’s only the right speaker for your audience and your outcome.
What separates the good ones is consistent: real leadership experience rather than borrowed theory, a clear point of view they’ll defend, the ability to read a room of 30 or 3,000, and a focus on behaviour change rather than a temporary lift in mood.
Sonia’s work sits at the intersection of neuroscience, emotional intelligence and 30+ years of leading and coaching. Her position is that leadership rarely fails in strategy — it fails in moments.
Five things, in our experience:
Ask for it to be measured. Sonia is comfortable with pre- and post-event pulse questions, and for longer engagements, capability measures tracked over the program. Applause is not a result.
A structured, confidential thinking partnership for people carrying decisions that affect other people. It’s not therapy and it’s not mentoring — Sonia won’t tell you what she would have done. The work is on your judgement, your regulation under pressure, your influence and the behaviours that are quietly costing you.
CEOs and executives, leaders stepping into a bigger role, high-potential leaders being built for succession, and whole leadership teams. It’s most useful at transition points — new role, new scale, new level of scrutiny.
Clients most often report clearer decisions, steadier responses under pressure, harder conversations happening sooner, stronger influence with peers and boards, and a noticeable drop in the exhaustion that comes from managing everything alone.
Typically six or twelve months. Shorter than six rarely gives behaviour change time to stick.
Yes. Where an organisation is funding the coaching, themes and progress can be shared with a sponsor by agreement — the content of sessions is not.
Through LeadershipHQ: courageous leadership, The Leadership Brain (neuroscience of leadership), emerging and young leaders, women in leadership, executive leadership, and culture and psychological safety programs — plus shorter workshops and masterclasses.
Programs run in-house for a single organisation, or as public programs for leaders coming in from different workplaces.
Yes, and most are. Off-the-shelf leadership training is the reason leadership training has a bad name.
Leadership quality is one of the strongest predictors of engagement, retention and discretionary effort in an organisation — which is where performance comes from.
The catch is embedding. A two-day program with no follow-through changes very little. Programs are designed with reinforcement built in — leader-led rituals, manager involvement and 90-day plans — so the capability stays after the facilitator leaves.
Yes. Train-the-trainer is available for organisations that want the program to keep running at scale without external cost.
The study of what’s actually happening in the brain when people lead and are led — how threat, stress, uncertainty and status affect decision-making, emotional regulation and behaviour.
It matters because most leadership failures aren’t knowledge failures. Leaders know they should stay calm and listen. Under threat, the brain makes that genuinely harder.
Because it turns “be more self-aware” into something you can actually practise. Understanding how the brain responds to pressure gives leaders a way to regulate themselves before they respond, and to build the conditions — clarity, fairness, certainty where possible — where their people can think properly.
Fair question, and worth asking of anyone using the word. Sonia draws on established research in threat response, emotional regulation and social cognition, and translates it into practice. No brain-type quizzes, no left-brain/right-brain.
A leadership expert, keynote speaker and executive coach, and the founder of LeadershipHQ. She has 30+ years in leadership — in HR and executive roles across Australia and Asia before building LeadershipHQ in 2008 — and now works with organisations globally on courageous, human leadership.
She’s also the author of Leadership Attitude, Just Rock It! and First Comes Courage.
Courage, neuroscience and human leadership — and for saying the thing in the room that everyone is thinking. Her work centres on how leaders behave in real moments: under pressure, in conflict, in change, and when nobody is watching.
She’s led, and she’s failed, and she talks about both. LeadershipHQ was built after roughly 40 job rejections as a sole parent — which is also why the work is practical rather than aspirational.
The other difference is range: keynote, program, coach. Organisations that want a keynote to turn into capability don’t have to go and find someone else to do it.
Organisations across construction, engineering, government, infrastructure, health and aged care, education, financial services and retail — including Cross River Rail, Seymour Whyte, Griffith University, Port of Brisbane, Hall Chadwick and Pacific National.
Yes — keynotes delivered across 10 countries and counting, plus virtual delivery into any time zone that will have her.
Courage, self-regulation, and the ability to build trust faster than the environment erodes it. The technical part of leadership has never been the hard part.
By getting honest feedback on your impact, then practising the pause between stimulus and response. Self-awareness improves when someone tells you the truth and you don’t punish them for it.
Because almost every organisational problem that becomes expensive started as a conversation someone avoided. Courage is what makes standards, values and accountability real rather than laminated.
Decide what behaviour you actually want, make leaders model it, and hold the senior people to it hardest. Culture is set by the worst behaviour leadership is willing to tolerate.
Judgement in ambiguity, emotional intelligence, adaptability, and the ability to lead people alongside AI without outsourcing the human parts of the job. The more automated the work becomes, the more the leadership has to be human.
Ask us directly — a real person answers within one business day.
