Approach
Michelle believes most people are not thriving because they are in any way “lacking.” Instead, we’re exhausted from adapting to systems, workplaces, relationships, and expectations that slowly disconnect us from our authentic themselves.
For more than two decades, Michelle’s work has explored what happens to human beings under chronic stress — and what helps them recover clarity, trust, voice, purpose, health, and sustainable wellbeing.
Her approach blends:
leadership scholarship
communication strategy
trauma-informed practice
mindfulness and nervous system awareness
storytelling and reflective practice
practical restructuring and accountability
healing-centered wellness approaches
But Michelle refuses to believe transformation happens through shame, hustle culture, or performative positivity. She believes meaningful change happens when people are finally given space to tell the truth about what hurts, what no longer works, and what they genuinely want their lives and leadership to become.
Whether working with executives, artists, healthcare workers, entrepreneurs, caregivers, or individuals rebuilding after burnout or toxic workplace experiences, Michelle helps humans reconnect to their own wisdom, boundaries, resilience, creativity, and capacity for meaningful change.
At the core of all her award-winning work is a simple belief:
Healing people create healthier workplaces, healthier relationships, healthier communities, and healthier lives.
The Workplace Doc™ is In.
Diagnosing what's costing your organization — and prescribing what actually works to boost revenue, rebuild trust, and build stronger, more inclusive teams.
MICHELLE COURTNEY BERRY, LONGER BIO (SHORTER BIO FOLLOWS)
Michelle Courtney Berry, named a Top 20 Most Empowering Woman in America by Womenpreneur Magazine— alongside Michelle Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg — is one of the most distinctive voices in organizational leadership today. She is a researcher who speaks from data, a storyteller who speaks from experience, and a global strategist who speaks from decades of results.
As Founder and CEO of Courtney Consulting Enterprises, LLC and creator of The Workplace Doc™, Michelle has spent over 25 years helping organizations understand what's driving burnout, disengagement, and turnover — and what actually moves the needle. Her work sits at the rare intersection of doctoral-level scholarship, C-suite consulting experience, and the kind of lived credibility that makes audiences lean forward and stay there.
Michelle has delivered over 5,000 keynotes across the U.S., U.K., Canada, Africa, and Mexico. She has spoken at SHRM, Virgin Pulse's national Thrive Summit, Mindvalley, LegalZoom, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and dozens of HR leadership gatherings, executive retreats, and women's leadership conferences. She co-moderated Vice President Biden's Cancer Moonshot Summit. She has shared stages with Maya Angelou, the Dalai Lama, and Howard Zinn. She has been featured on Good Morning America, in O Magazine, and across 200+ media outlets.
Her research is original and actionable. As a doctoral candidate in Leadership Studies at LSU Shreveport — building on a Master's in Organizational and Risk Communication from Cornell University — Michelle studies the specific leadership conditions that either grow or diminish the people inside an organization. Her findings reframe the conversation entirely: what organizations label a "people problem" is often a leadership conditions problem. And that reframe changes everything about how leaders intervene.
Michelle is the bestselling author of Keeping Calm in Chaos: How to Work Well, Live Well, and Love Abundantly — No Matter What, a certified NLP Master Coach, internationally-certified Reiki Master Teacher, nationally-trained crisis communications expert and trauma reduction professional, trained meditation teacher, and internationally-certified in critical incident stress reduction from the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation. A former elected official (Alternate Acting Mayor/Alderperson/ and Delegate for President Obama) and former Tompkins County Poet Laureate, Michelle was also a Presidential Scholar and Commencement Speaker at Binghamton University.
Clients describe her as the speaker who held a room of executives in rapt attention — and delivered, in the words of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a presentation the team was still talking about long after it ended.
SHORT BIO TO INTRODUCE MICHELLE
Michelle Courtney Berry is a bestselling author, two-time TEDx speaker, encore SXSW speaker, and doctoral scholar and health communications researcher whose work has changed how organizations understand their people. Known as The Workplace Doc™, she has delivered 5,000+ keynotes across four continents — helping leaders, teams, and institutions recognize what's actually driving burnout, disengagement, and turnover before it costs them their best people. Her original research on employee coping behaviors and leadership conditions has been accepted twice by the International Leadership Association Global Conference and informs everything she brings to the page and the stage. Cited as a Top 20 “Most Empowering Woman” by Womenpreneur Magazine, Michelle is also the creator of the Working Well, One Day at a Time® method and the Founder and CEO of Courtney Consulting Enterprises, LLC. She resides in New York State with her family and their kitty Ms. Judy.