Co-leading the work that won Monash the WHO Global Healthy Workplace Award

Monash University set out to do something most large institutions don’t attempt: build wellbeing and high-performance capability into the foundations of how the university operated.

That meant going beyond standalone wellbeing programs. It meant integrating evidence-based mindfulness, performance, and leadership tools into the core curriculum, embedding them in staff development, and making them available at scale. The goal was to lift performance, support wellbeing, and build a healthier institution.

I joined the team helping lead this work and stayed for over a decade.

Across that period, I co-led the development and delivery of performance, wellbeing, and leadership programs reaching over 2,000 staff each year. The work spanned several connected areas.

Curriculum integration. Working with the team, we embedded mindfulness, wellbeing, and high-performance programs into the university’s core curriculum. The work reached 10,000+ students each year across faculties as diverse as medicine, law, business, engineering, and the sciences. Each delivery was tailored for the specific discipline and the cognitive demands of that field.

Staff programs. I designed and delivered performance, wellbeing, and leadership programs for staff, ranging from early-career academics through to senior university leaders. Programs covered focus and attention, sustainable performance, leadership effectiveness, and the psychological foundations of high performance.

Online courses. I designed online mindfulness courses that have now been completed by over 500,000 learners globally. Two of those courses have been recognised by Class Central as among the ‘Best Online Courses of All Time.’

Research and policy contribution. Throughout this period, I conducted research, contributed to staff training, mentored other practitioners, and helped influence national workplace wellbeing initiatives and academic policy.

The work succeeded because of how it was designed.

It was rigorous. Programs were grounded in evidence-based research from cognitive psychology, behavioural science, and contemplative neuroscience. The content stood up to academic scrutiny.

It was practical. Even with rigorous foundations, the work was always built around what people could actually use. Tools were practical, applied, and immediately useful for the demands of academic and professional work.

It was tailored. The same body of research was applied to law students, medical students, engineering staff, senior academic leaders, and front-line professional staff. Each context required translation. Tailoring was the difference between content that landed and content that didn’t.

It was sustained. This wasn’t a one-off intervention. It was a 10+ year body of work that developed and refined over time, building institutional capability rather than running short-term campaigns.

These principles are the same ones I now apply to leadership development in commercial contexts.

Monash represents something I’ve now done at institutional scale: building leadership and wellbeing capability across thousands of people, sustained over more than a decade, with internationally recognised outcomes.

The same principles, the same body of research, and the same approach to translation now sit behind every workshop, program, and coaching engagement I deliver. The scale is different in commercial contexts. The depth of the work isn’t.

If you’re building leadership capability in your organisation and want it to actually hold, the discovery call is the best place to start.