On a Mission to Transform Leadership

June 12, 2026 Staff Reporter

This weeks PBA Change Maker is Amanda Anderson. Amanda is a leadership speaker and behavioural patterns specialist who helps leaders navigate the hidden impact of pressure, burnout, and trauma on performance, decision-making, and workplace culture. Drawing from her own experience of adversity and recovery, Amanda works with organisations across healthcare, corporate, and community sectors to make visible the behavioural patterns that quietly undermine leadership and team effectiveness.

Having worked across advertising, sales leadership, executive advisory, and global mental health initiatives, Amanda brings a unique perspective to the challenges leaders face under pressure. Her work focuses on helping individuals and organisations recognise how emotional load and self-protective patterns influence behaviour, and how to create environments where people can perform sustainably without losing themselves in the process.

Amanda has delivered keynotes and workshops for organisations including L’Occitane, Commonwealth Bank, Macquarie Bank, KPMG Asia, 3M, and Park Hyatt, and has been recognised by Microsoft Global as one of the Top 10 Speakers to Follow in 2025.

Describe your career trajectory and how you got to your current position

The turning point in my career came from a ‘penny-drop’ moment during a walk around my neighbourhood on my Christmas staycation.

I was feeling disenfranchised with my work at the time and taking a moment to think about my life and how I ended up building a life that no longer felt aligned.

I started thinking about the question people always ask when thinking about changing their life: “What would you do if you won the lottery?”

But that question never sat right with me. Firstly, the odds are something like 1 in 17 million. And even if you did win, travelling the world on a superyacht with all my friends isn’t necessarily a guarantee of happiness. Might come close though!

So I asked myself something a little more confronting:

If my GP called me right now and said my blood test results had come back and I had a year left to live, what would that mean to me?

Funny thing is, I didn’t feel panic.

I felt fury!!!!!!! I was angry!

Because in that moment, I realised I had spent years building my life around the roles and decisions I thought I needed to do - tied to security, stability, and career trajectory - rather than what I actually felt drawn to and wanted to do.

And everything just lined up.

I recognised in that instant, that my entire life had already been gearing me up for this... adversity, resilience, faith in myself, patterns, playing small, people overriding themselves.

This wasn’t theory for me. It was observation built over years of watching how high capability gets filtered out of people long before it becomes visible. I wasn’t starting something new - I was finally paying attention to what had always been there.

It was obvious. I needed to become a speaker and make this visible for others!

Before finding what felt like my natural lane as a speaker, my career moved across multiple industries - Leo Burnett advertising, national sales manager at 3M, a property advisory role working closely with the CEO.

On the surface, they looked different. In reality, they were all variations of the same thing: working with people, managing behaviour, and reading what sits underneath performance.

I then had a mini-stroke in 2018, which impacted my cognition (word retrieval, memory, comprehension, logical processing) and moved into L’Occitane as a receptionist while rebuilding my confidence and capacity through neuroplasticity, specialist support, and my own self-led recovery.

What was originally a step back became a rebuilding phase. Over time, I moved into becoming the L’Occitane Global Mental Health Project Lead and Australia’s Mental Health Ambassador.

And that’s where something became undeniable.

I had always been observing the same pattern in people - high capability, but self-override under pressure. People not lacking ability, but filtering it out of themselves long before anyone else sees it.

At the time, I hadn’t realised I had spent years studying the exact pattern I now work with.

What drives you to do the work that you do?

The time between the signal (oh my god, there is chocolate!) and the thought that says yes (that’s it, I’m eating it!) or no (I promised myself I’d be healthy this week) is around 200–300 milliseconds.

That is the space where people often override themselves i.e. they feel something, register it, and then edit it before it becomes action.

I see it across corporate environments, leadership teams, and high-pressure situations. The setting changes, but the pattern doesn’t.

People over-function. People-please. Self-silence. Become hyper-independent. Minimise themselves. Aim for perfection.

And over time, what started as a strategy becomes identity.

“I’m the strong one.”

“I’m just fast.”

“I don’t mind working late.”

“That’s just what’s required here.”

“I wouldn’t speak up - that’s just not who I am.”

But it isn’t identity.

It’s behaviours that got rewarded long enough to become invisible.

Speed gets rewarded. Reliability gets rewarded. Staying late gets rewarded. Being easy gets rewarded. Not taking up space gets rewarded.

In workplaces, that looks like trust, promotion, praise, more responsibility, being seen as dependable or “low maintenance.”

In life, it looks like approval, stability, reduced conflict, being needed.

So people learn what gets them belonging - and they stay there.

Until the rest of them disappears from their own lives.

And so what drives me is simple:

I help people recognise when they are playing small and reducing themselves in order to belong and choose differently.

This is rarely about capability. It’s about adaptation that has gone unchallenged for long enough to feel normal.

See, people are carrying something completely unique - their childhood, their education, their lived experience, their personality, their perspective, their values, their character.

Like a fingerprint, no one else can replicate that combination.

But most people edit it down just to fit in. (Safe over visible. Familiar over expressed. Blending in over standing out.)

Not because they lack capability - but because it feels safer to not be fully seen.

I’ve been in both places. I can tell you this without hesitation... living unedited feels way better!

There’s more recognition. More trust. More opportunity. More leadership. More respect.

Everything people think they’re protecting by staying small is usually what they end up gaining when they stop.

What drives me is helping people catch that earlier.

Not after it becomes identity.

The work is to catch it in the moment it happens.

Because if you can see that override - that “no... but yes” moment - you can change it.

And when you change it, you don’t need to reinvent yourself.

You just stop leaving yourself behind.

And you come back to what was already there.

If you could go back in time, what advice would you give yourself at the start of your career?

You’ll get rewarded early for the efficient version of you. The reliable one. The one that makes things easier for everyone else without realising what it costs you.

And if you’re not careful, that becomes the only version people ever see... and eventually, the only version you assume you are.

That’s not the full picture.

Workplaces often reward what’s predictable and easy to manage, not what’s different or deeply original. So the sharper edges of your thinking get sanded down in exchange for being easier to place.

Your real value isn’t in how well you blend into a role. It’s in what only you notice, only you question, only you would say the way you say it.

No one else carries your exact perspective.

What feels obvious to you is often the very thing others are missing.

So speak earlier.

Even when it feels uncomfortable.

(Especially when it feels uncomfortable.)

People keep refining themselves to fit better, when what they’re actually meant to do is become more precise about what’s already uniquely theirs.

What part of you only exists through you?

And are you letting it show up often enough to matter?

What are you currently watching, reading, or listening to?

Man’s Search for Meaning because apparently I like starting the day with perspective that requires a bit of emotional endurance!

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself because I’m interested in what actually runs the background of a person (thoughts, emotions, patterns) and whether people can interrupt the automatic loop they’ve been living in long enough to build something different on purpose.

NLP Workbook by Richard Bandler because I know that language and thought are doing more than describing reality - they’re shaping it.

And Ted Lasso because after all that existential excavation and nervous system reconstruction, I still need a warm reminder that excessive kindness and optimism works wonders for the soul.