Exceptional, experiential, and customized empathic, compassionate, and trauma-informed leadership development programs for leaders, people managers, and HR professionals to empower people managers and leaders with the skills and practices needed to compassionately transform their own trauma-driven emotional challenges, outdated beliefs, and maladaptive behaviors as well as those of the people they manage and lead.
Build leaders with the emotional and somatic intelligence to foster increased team aliveness and open up possibilities for human-centric culture change, organizational growth, and collective success.
Key Benefits Of Our Empathic & Trauma-Informed Leadership Courses
Understand The Basics Of Trauma, Brain Science & Interpersonal Neurobiology
Learn key concepts of trauma-informed leadership; understand the fundamentals of how stress, overwhelm, and adverse experiences impact the brain and body; and integrate basic principles for trauma-informed support, management, and leadership
Switch On Self-Awareness & Expand Empathy & Compassion
Understand how past adverse experiences impact present performance, communication, and team effectiveness—increasing the empathy and compassion of leaders and people managers as well as their capacity to make sense of seemingly senseless and destructive behaviors in self and others
Unlock the Foundations Of Trusting & Reciprocal Relationships
Understand how to work with strong emotions and challenging interpersonal behaviors to move towards more truth, transparency, trust, caring, and reciprocity—and cultivate a sense of belonging, supportiveness, and in-it-togetherness
Learn Trauma-Informed Leadership Practices
Explore fun and simple yet powerful and proven cognitive and somatic practices that can support personal nervous system mastery (emotional regulation, stability under pressure etc.) as well as help lead and manage others in a trauma-sensitive way
Hold Safe & Brave Spaces For Personal & Team Development
Experience first-hand some of the key ingredients for holding brave & safe spaces for individuals to share challenging experiences in ways that feel supportive for them—and that are appropriate for professional workplaces
Develop Trauma-Informed Team Effectiveness & Culture Change Pathways
Co-create a concrete roadmap to move towards high-performing yet human-centric teams and leadership cultures—with actionable next steps for team development, designing a better future of work, and culture-change initiatives
“Amazing, amazing feedback from our leaders.”
VP HR, Intel
The Lead Facilitator On Empathic & Compassionate Leadership Development Training

Alison McAulay: Leadership Practioner & Trauma-Informed Therapist
Alison McAulay is a groundbreaking transformational leadership development theorist and practitioner, executive coach, and trauma-based therapist.
A former Team USA elite gymnast, professional dancer, and choreographer in Los Angeles and San Francisco; she has a BA in Performing Arts and advanced training in trauma-informed therapies, including Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, ACT, Attachment Theory, EMDR, and Kundalini Yoga. With this wealth of knowledge and experience transforming hearts and minds, she has spent many years working with her Switch On Leadership co-founder to unfold the Self-to-System™ leadership curriculum.
Alison’s mission is to re-humanize businesses—and their teams and cultures—by expanding the consciousness, compassion, creativity, and capabilities of senior leaders and the team members they lead. McAulay is the co-founder and Chief Transformation Officer of the leadership consultancy Switch On Leadership.
“Alison McAulay is like a gentle scalpel: both challenging and nurturing me to transform—and go way beyond what I thought I could do.”
Corporate Exec
Our Experience In Leadership Development
100,000+ leaders developed
220+ leadership development programs for major corporations and institutions
100+ takeaway tools developed
10+ leadership toolkits produced
























“The most useful leadership program I’ve been on. And I’ve been on a lot in 30 years.”
COO, Syngenta
Extraordinary Leadership Development Programs With
Exquisite Design & Expert Facilitation
When you partner with us, your program will be designed and facilitated by seasoned transformation catalysts with decades of experience inspiring, coaching, leading, and holding space for executives to change. We all walk the talk as leaders in our own fields and enterprises.
We work in transparent and trusted collaboration with our clients to design and deliver exceptional leadership journeys that fit your specific cohort, history, dynamics, industry, culture, strategy, and ambitions.
Leadership Programs Customized To Fit Your Unique Strategy, Culture & Industry
Design that embraces, speaks to, and dances with the mood music of the organization, the hidden rules in the culture, the self-talk and stories in the cohort, and the emotions in the room to weave together every engagement and interaction to forge a compelling and coherent leadership development journey and accompanying narrative arc.
Leadership Programs With Innovation, Originality & Business Impact At The Core
Design that makes the most out of each interaction and associated time, reputation, and budget costs—from high-touch, in-person workshops to online check-ins and circles to messaging app activations—to avoid awkward mistakes and costly wastage and
Leadership Programs That Deliver Desired Skills For Boards, Line Mangers & HR
Design that aims to serve different leadership styles and types—aiming to achieve a *perfect* balance of ideas, networking, processing time, relaxation, discussion, innovation, and activities—while meeting the needs of the leaders themselves, what the strategy demands, what employees would like, and what in-house HR business partners and OD/L&D experts have identified.
Leadership Programs That Deliver Both Immediate Traction & Long-Term Value Creation
Design that focuses first on building excitement, engagement, and traction within the demanding realities your leaders are working with—their lived context—and then crafting a developmental journey that meets them where they are at and then takes them considerably higher with powerful and relevant content and experiences.
Leadership Programs That Strengthen Both The Inner & Outer Games Of Leadership To Win The Future
Design that aims to expand both the consciousness and competence of leaders so they can meet the VUCA world head-on with the inner resources and outer networks to cope with uncertainty and co-create with complexity to win the future.
Leadership Programs That Win Over Hearts & Minds To Drive Behavior Change
Facilitation by seasoned transformation experts who work hard to make every participant feel welcome, wanted, valued, seen, and truly heard, no matter their leadership style or personality type—and ensure that everyone listens, learns, and collaborates as much as speaks, discusses, and socializes.
Leadership Programs That Build Trust For Business Transformation & Team Effectiveness
Facilitation that rapidly wins hearts & minds to begin the process of group alchemy and quickly builds safety, trust, belonging, and a sense of "in-it-togetherness—which then radically increases the probabilities of extraordinary developmental breakthroughs occurring in individuals and groups.
Leadership Programs That Rewire Mindsets, Restore Emotional Connection & Renew Energy & Commitment
Facilitation that wins hearts and minds, building coherence in how leaders think and sense-make together as a cohort and culture and cultivating resonance in how they feel, connect, and relate to each other, leading to sustained high-performance and increased adaptability long after the program has completed.
Leadership Programs That Invite Leaders To Lean In, Step Up & Break Through To The Next Level
Facilitation that inspires and challenges people to lean in and step up by shifting them from observing and receiving to creating and contributing—while elegantly preventing strong personalities from hijacking the process and/or squandering precious time.
Leadership Programs That Upgrade How Leaders Feel, Think, Act, Interact, Influence, Communicate, Innovate & Collaborate
Facilitation that has mastered how to transform the mindsets, emotional states, moods, and behaviors of individual leaders and leadership teams based on our original theory of human development, Bio-Transformation, which seeks to change leaders as fast as humanly possible.
Our Game-Changing Leadership
Curriculum, Interventions & Theory
Most leadership programs fail to deliver the results promised—because they are locked in an outdated training model that fails to deliver transformed leaders or concrete business impact.
With our origins in strategy and innovation consulting, training in behavioral and brain science, and years of experience, we have innovated a genuinely pioneering approach to maximize your leadership development investment by changing leaders as fast as humanly possible.
Coherent & Comprehensive
Self-To-System™ Leadership Curriculum
Over 25 years, we have researched, evolved, tested, and codified a coherent and cohesive "Self-to-System" leadership development curriculum that starts with how to change oneself and ends with how to transform systems. Our curriculum enables leaders to master the inner and outer games of leadership.
State-Of-The-Art Transformative Interventions
Alongside the curriculum, we developed a number of innovative interventions for unlocking and sustaining exceptional leadership. These range from peer-to-peer coaching that builds trust and traction to truly transformative experiences that can break persistent habits and unfold rapid change.
A Science-Backed Theory Of Change
Our curriculum and interventions have been built upon our own original theory of human development, Bio-Transformation. We developed this methodology to transform, as quickly as humanly possible, how leaders feel, think, act, interact, relate, innovate, and communicate by working with, not against, human biology and culture.
“It’s hard to explain how different I feel.”
Vice-President, Fortune 500
See What Our Customized & Experiential Leadership Development Programs Look & Feel Like
“Powerful. Glad to see the focus on real transformation!”
COO, HSBC
Customize Your Program Around Your Choice Of These Empathic, Trauma-Informed & Human-Centric Leadership Capabilities
Our trauma-informed leadership programs can be customized to build some or all of these specific capabilities from across our cohesive and coherent Self-to-System™ leadership curriculum:
Develop Emotional & Interoceptive Intelligence & Agility
- Understand the role and dynamics of emotions and somatic sensations in leadership effectiveness
- Explore anxious and destabilizing emotions and somatic sensations rather than repress, suppress, numb, or act out
- Track how anxious and destabilizing emotions and bodily sensations change and translate them into words for sharing
- Regulate emotions and bodily sensations, particularly when feeling upset, overwhelmed, or shut down
- Transform anxious and destabilizing emotions and somatic sensations into energizing and stabilizing emotions and somatic sensation
Leverage Trauma-Informed Conscious Leadership
- Understand the impact of, and the importance of transforming, difficult emotions and memories in leadership effectiveness
- Accept difficult emotions and memories, potentially from traumatic experiences, and seek peer and professional support when appropriate
- Engage with tools and practices that can help to process and release difficult emotions and memories
- Engage with tools and practices that can help to transform and heal difficult emotions and memories to unlock stored-up energy, aliveness, and potency that is blocked by trauma
- Consciously cultivate more self-acceptance, self-compassion, and self-forgiveness to accelerate the journey of grieving, healing, and becoming more whole
Master Resilience & Sustained High Performance
- Understand the role and dynamics of physical, psychological, and existential stress and resilience in leadership effectiveness
- Build robustness to bounce back quickly from challenges, crises, disappointments, and frustrations
- Spot early physical and psychological signals of overwhelm and course correct through self-care
- Identify what most impacts personal resilience and utilize recovery practices to reduce overwhelm, exhaustion, and stress
- Proactively build physical, psychological, and existential resilience to unlock sustained high performance
Harness Presence, Attunement & Empathy
- Understand the role and dynamics of presence, attunement, and empathy in leadership effectiveness
- Be fully present and available with others without judgment, criticism, cynicism, biases, or projections
- Attune to the states and needs of others in an open-hearted and open-minded ‘neutral’ state
- Have empathy for the feelings, needs, perspectives, and behaviors of others
- Be vulnerable, authentic, and genuine with all, avoiding pretense, power plays, and status games and course correcting when not
Cultivate Team Receptivity, Trust & Reciprocity
- Understand the role and dynamics of receptivity and reciprocity in leadership effectiveness
- Freely invite and receive coaching on sabotaging behaviors, limiting beliefs, blindspots, and biases
- Take on, and look to leverage, both critical and appreciative feedback without taking it personally
- Be receptive to the needs of others yet also assertive to ensure own needs are met
- Seek to make relationships reciprocal, with a fair balance of give and take and send and receive
Foster Belonging & Psychological Safety
- Understand the dynamics of belonging and psychological safety in leadership effectiveness
- Foster a positive team climate that allows learning even in challenging times, not taking mistakes or poor performance personally
- Cultivate psychological safety so others can contribute their ideas and insights free of aggression, dishonesty, and manipulation
- Share successes with others while protecting them from pressure from above
- Nurture a sense of team belonging without people feeling obligated to act in a certain way
Alison McAulay’s Article About Trauma-Informed Leadership
Why Businesses Need Trauma-Informed Leadership
Trauma from the past can block positive and creative work environments in the present, reducing an organization’s capacity to survive and thrive in the future. Leaders can help change that dynamic.
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