Mitch Wallis
Mental Health Expert, Emotional Wellbeing Thought Leader & Keynote Speaker
Mitch is a global mental health expert, clinical psychologist, and founder of Heart On My Sleeve, With decades of lived experience, advanced clinical training, and global speaking experience, Mitch delivers engaging keynotes and workshops on emotional wellbeing, resilience, and human connection for corporate, community, and high-performance audiences worldwide.
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Mitch Wallis is one of the world’s leading voices in applied psychology – a keynote speaker, author, and founder on a lifelong mission to change the way the world feels. His work sits at the intersection of clinical training, lived experience, and the kind of cultural relevance. His ambition is to positively impact the emotional wellbeing of one billion people by helping people build connection and resilience as a core capability.
In 2016, after nearly seven years at Microsoft in senior global roles, Mitch had a mental breakdown in Seattle that nearly ended his life. By every external measure he had made it. One inch beneath the surface, he wanted to die. That collision became the work.
He left Microsoft to devote his life to helping people overcome suffering and reimagine the healing potential of the human mind. He completed a Master’s in Clinical Psychology at Columbia University in New York. He brings more than twenty years of lived experience with anxiety, depression, and OCD, diagnosed with one of the most severe cases doctors had seen at the age of seven. That combination of clinical training and personal insight is what allows him to translate complex psychological science into practical tools that change how individuals, families, and organisations behave.
Mitch is the founder of Heart On My Sleeve, a global mental health movement that has reached millions of people by helping them drop the brave face and speak honestly about how they feel. He is also the creator of Real Conversations – an interpersonal communication framework now delivered to more than 10,000 people across four continents and trusted by Fortune 500 leaders at American Express, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, KPMG, Allianz, and hundreds more. In 2025, his book Real Conversations was named a finalist in the Australian Business Book Awards in the HR and Management category.
He has advised the United Nations on youth mental health, serves as an expert advisor to the Corporate Mental Health Alliance, and was appointed the first-ever Ambassador for the Australia and New Zealand Mental Health Association. He has been named GQ Man of Impact, Westfield Local Hero, and one of B&T’s Top 10 Social Changemakers in Australia. His work has been featured across Sky News, The Project, Huffington Post, and global wellbeing campaigns with Allianz and LinkedIn.
Mitch holds a Bachelor’s in Commerce from the University of Sydney, is accredited in Mental Health First Aid, trained as a Lifeline crisis supporter, and hosts a popular podcast featuring leading psychologists, cultural leaders, Olympians, and global change-makers. He is also involved in multiple social impact ventures including Heaps Normal, Australia’s leading non-alcoholic craft beer brand.
From people managers, to parents, Mitch’s teachings have been described as the most helpful framework for helping people through emotional pain.
At the core of his work is a simple but uncomfortable belief. Real healing, real leadership, and real connection begin when we are willing to go toward the pain, not around it.
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Topics
All keynotes start with Mitch’s story of lived experience
Taking the audience on a journey of his immense highs and lows, Mitch’s story embodies what it means to “have it all yet want to end it all”. With his uniquely relatable and strangely comforting honesty, he embodies what it means to ‘drop the brave face’ and ‘be real about how you feel’.
Most significant – Mitch story highlights the #1 thing that has helped him rebuild from rock-bottom and reach a level of immeasurable resilience and world-class high performance despite his emotional turmoil.
This young man’s quest to transform his pain into purpose by inspiring, educating and empowering 1 billion people to connect, survive & thrive is nothing short of captivating.
Focus: supporting others
Real Conversations
5 steps to Connect with Confidence
The immutable laws of a helpful conversation when supporting someone through emotional pain
Healthy relationships are the heartbeat of business. In our day-to-day interactions with colleagues at work, or with our friends and family at home, we are often faced with the confronting reality of supporting people we care about who are going through difficult times. It’s common for us to feel confused about what to say and do, overcome with fear of getting it wrong, or riddled with guilt that we might make things worse.
In this keynote, Mitch shares the core insights from his proven proprietary framework that’s been adopted + trusted by some of the biggest companies in the world to boost psychological safety and empower cultural resilience. A must-see presentation for all leaders and teams facing periods of uncertainty & high stress.
Topics and outcomes:
- The #1 insight that separates helpful/unhelpful conversations that transform relationships.
- The 5 habits of daily disconnection and how to reverse these subtle yet game changing behaviours.
- The major learning from each part of the 5-step framework ‘ELsA.B’ including:
- The hidden secret of setting up a conversation for success
- The evidence based listening technique that leads to hyper-understanding
- The key to mitigating risk in the highest stakes situations
- The coaching model that empowers people to solve their own problems
- The key to not becoming someone’s therapist, yet how to still be therapeutic
Focus: supporting self
Pretending is Painful
10 pillars to Emotional Freedom
The path to becoming unbreakable, even when you feel broken
The first step to emotional wellbeing is to feel understood. In this keynote, Mitch provides a platform for every person in the room to realise they are not alone.
This talk is designed to eradicate stigma and increase awareness & understanding of mental health, resulting in deeper appreciation for the experiences of others that might not be so well understood at present.
It provides educational soundbites that can be implemented from the instant someone leaves the room to help improve their state of mind and cultivate long lasting emotional stability.
Topics and outcomes:
- The 3 ingredients necessary to get out of the “stuck cycle” and reorientate our perspective toward growth (not surviving)
- The 4 truths about mental health that removes the “them vs. us mentality” with a clear north star to aim for in our personal lives
- 10 resilience tools that form the ultimate mental health toolkit that enables ANYONE to improve the strength of their nervous system
- The #1 call-to-action that motivates people to step forward and take charge of their internal world
