Hi, I’m Margie!
(Hard 'G' - like Margarita, not Marjorie.)
Nothing lights me up more than helping people grow into the fullest force for good they’re capable of being.
Off stage, I’m a wife, mum of four, amateur barista, and an intrepid traveller who has dragged her family on enough adventures to qualify for hazard pay.
If you want the journey that shaped all that, keep scrolling.
Recognized & trusted
Keynote Speaker
Executive coach & Leadership advisor of organizations globally
Bestselling Author
Of six books, including The Courage Gap and Stop Playing Safe
Pracademic, PhD
A PhD drawing on research in human behavior, adult development, and decision making with real world experience.
Featured in Media
On leadership, workplace, wellbeing, and the choices shaping how we live and lead today.
Former Senior Partner, Korn Ferry
Advised boards and C-suites on CEO succession at the world’s largest companies
It all started on a dairy farm
I grew up on a small dairy farm in rural Victoria, Australia - big sister of seven kids, hand-me-down clothes, a long way from anywhere.
Money was scarce, but my parents instilled a belief that underpins every truly wealthy life: it's not what we have, but what we do with it that serves a cause beyond ourselves, that makes life truly rich.
But that farm - and learning to ride a 'unruly horse' we won in a ruff - taught me an early lesson about decision-making I still lean on:
Growth and comfort can't ride the same horse.
When drought forced dad to sell our dairy herd, I asked him how we'd get money now...
"We trust the good Lord will provide," he said, reassuring himself as much as me.
It didn't dissolve my fear, but it planted a truth I'd only understand years later:
Living from faith rather than fear doesn't dissolve our problems, but it transforms our relationship to them.
Beyond the bush
At eighteen, I became the first in my extended family to go to university, and after graduating I worked two jobs, sorting corn by day and pouring beer by night, to fund solo backpacking adventures that took me across the Sahara, into Palestinian refugee camps, and swimming with piranhas in the Amazon. Those years taught me that we're more alike than we are different, and that:
Our unfaced fears and unquestioned beliefs hem us into a restricted circle of our fullest potential.
Life has been anything but linear...
As newlyweds, Andrew and I said yes to three years in Papua New Guinea, at the time considered the most dangerous country in the world outside a war zone. One night, an armed robber thrust a loaded gun into my forehead. Ten days later, I lost my first baby mid-term. Out of that heartbreak, one thing crystallized:
I would not be defined by what happened to me. I would be defined by what I chose to do with it.
I went back to study psychology, then coaching, to understand why we sabotage our own success and how to keep choosing forward when the ground gives way.
Four kids & zero network. Starting over…
The next decade brought four homes, three countries, and four children in five years.
I launched my coaching practice in Dallas with a newborn on my hip and close to zero network, giving my very first talk at my kids' preschool.
Then, feeling wholly unqualified but deeply convicted, I wrote Find Your Courage, and that book opened doors to CNN, the Today Show, and Forbes.
Along the way, we summited Mt. Kilimanjaro with four teenagers. (They've yet to thank me.)
The low notes
I lost my brother Peter to schizophrenia, watched my brother Frank rebuild his life with paraplegia, and more recently lost my mum to the fog of dementia.
Many tears have been cried and much hard-won wisdom gained along the way:
What breaks our heart is also what enlarges it. The fullest life is lived beyond the middle octave.
A front row seat
In the years that followed, I finished my PhD, wrote more books, and became a Senior Partner at Korn Ferry, with a front-row seat to how executives make decisions when the stakes are highest. It galvanized my conviction:
Leaders who haven't confronted their deepest fears are governed by them - making every decision less sound, and everyone else less secure.
Leaving Korn Ferry was its own brave choice. Staying meant betraying the deeper call on my life.
Which brings me to now
Today I speak, write, coach, and advise leaders, from Google to US Special Operations.
I teach with Duke Exec Ed, advise Chiefs of Staff in the US Congress, and support Afghan and Iranian women whose courage utterly humbles me.
My latest book, The Courage Gap, rests on one premise:
Closing the gap between what we're capable of and what we actually do is the greatest lever we have for solving our hardest problems - one decision at a time.
Braver choices. Better world.That's my calling.
As a girl, I couldn't have imagined the life I get to live today. Am I always brave? Nope. But that tug of war between the deeply meaningful life and the safer, easier one is the same tension every leader, at every level, moves through every day, which means my story is yours too.
If I can support you, or the team or organization you serve, to make braver choices, I'd be honored.
