She was standing in front of me after my keynote at DynamicsCon, the annual conference for some of the most technically sharp, analytically rigorous professionals in the Microsoft ecosystem. The audience’s energy was surprisingly palpable.
And yet there she was. Tears running down her face. Searching for words that wouldn’t come. She finally stammered, “I NEEDED to hear that!” I wrapped her in a bear hug, and then I cried.
I’ve been speaking professionally for years. I know when something lands. But I had never seen a room respond like that one did.
So what was different?
Same topic. Same speaker. Completely different result.
Here’s what changed.
I stopped talking about confidence. I started talking about Refusal.
For a long time, my keynote lived in the same zip code as every other talk about impostor syndrome. The symptoms. The research. The reassurance. And while it helped people, it was treating the wrong problem.
Because confidence isn’t the problem.
Refusal is.
Refusal is what happens when a fully capable, fully qualified person chooses, usually without realizing it, not to act. Not to speak. Not to step forward. It looks like hesitation. It looks like needing one more certification, one more data point, one more round of preparation before finally raising their hand.
It’s not a feeling. It’s a behavior. And behavior can be changed.
When I reframed the entire talk around that single idea and built a tight aerospace throughline to hold it all together, something shifted in the room. I could feel it.
The jet engine moment.
In the speech, I told the story of the day I climbed inside an F-404 turbofan engine.
I was a young engineer at NASA. Small. Terrified. Feeling completely out of my depth. But I was the only one who could fit inside the engine to do what needed to be done. So I went in anyway.
I did the work, and 10 minutes later, crawled out. And I was a different person.
That story isn’t about me. It’s about every person in that audience who has a task in front of them that feels impossible, who is standing at the opening of their own engine, trying to decide whether to climb in.
Paired with the DOT exercise (you have to see it to understand it!), where every person in the room makes their unique value visible and undeniable, and the MTM Method, a real-time protocol for the exact moment Refusal shows up, the room didn’t just learn something. They experienced something.
That’s why she was crying.
What this means for your event.
If you’re a meeting planner or conference decision-maker reading this, here’s the straight talk:
Your attendees have already heard the confidence message. They’ve nodded along. They’ve felt temporarily inspired. And then they’ve gone back to their desks and done the same thing they always do.
What they haven’t had is a performance system. Something precise. Something repeatable. Something that works in the moment, not after the feeling passes.
That’s what The Propulsion Principle™ delivers.
And if the woman at DynamicsCon is any indication, it doesn’t just change how people think.
It changes how they breathe.
It changes how they think.
It changes what they do.
It changes the trajectory of your organization.
If you want that for your audience, let’s talk.