The Confident Leader Retreat

Boost your presence and confident leadership by mastering
the secrets of body language and voice

Surfers-Paradise-Best-Beach-Gold-Coast View

As a CEO, executive or leader, you’re facing unprecedented challenges daily. Hiring and retaining talent, the push towards digital transformation, even business concerns relating to the economy – each of these, and many more, are elements you may have to handle and communicate about each day.

The pressure of managing these challenges while standing in the spotlight can make it tremendously difficult to think and communicate on your feet. This can lead to feelings of dread that you might go blank when every second counts. Or a feeling that you just can’t get your point across or make yourself heard. You might even find yourself worrying about every word that you say, waffling, or even rambling, during presentations and meetings.

This relentless cycle chips away at your confidence and your ability to lead with influence. It can leave you questioning your capabilities. It can even lead to concerns over job security.

Date: Wednesday – Friday, 20th- 22nd August 2025
Location: The Imperial Hotel Gold Coast (previously Versace Hotel)

REGISTER NOW!

The Confident Leader Retreat is designed to help you overcome the challenges that leaders face today by teaching you how your voice and body language can work together to enforce the audience’s perspective of you and your message.

Dr Louise Mahler’s transformative three-day retreat will help you enhance your influence and leadership by giving you:

Personalised analysis on your communication, presence and influence
Insights into the psychology of performance and audience connection
Strategies for navigating challenging interactions
Techniques to strengthen your physical presence and vocal impact
Methods for managing various leadership scenarios, including presentations and critical conversations
Focused practice and constructive feedback sessions

Together we’ll refine your leadership presence, amplify your confidence and enhance your influence. We’ll ensure that you’re not just meeting your own expectations but smashing through them to become the confident leader you know you can be.

Join us to transform communication hurdles into leadership strengths.

The Confident Leader Retreat Can Help You
Become the Leader You Aspire To Be

The Confident Leader Journey

Level 1: Collapser

When a collapser speaks, they tend to allow their words to trail off without finishing sentences. Their voices loses volume and pitch and this undermines their ability to make their point. Their audience loses connection and confidence in them as they often have to pick up the rest of the conversation. Collapser’s find their confidence is deteriorating, but they don’t understand why. At this level we need to make them aware that it’s happening and help them decide to change.

Level 2: Struggler

The struggler will often keep their volume and pitch low in their voice. They’re often afraid of saying the wrong thing and hope that if they speak quietly enough, no one will notice. The irony is that it stands out even more but for the wrong reasons. The struggler needs to be given the right advice and steps to improve their communication.

Level 3: Amateur

The amateur often has some confidence and ability but isn’t using their body and voice intentionally or in a way that aligns with their message and audience. The next focus for them is to have pressure applied to them so they have the opportunity to use the skills in different contexts. This will allow them to see the impact of their mind, body and voice on the audience and ability to get their message through. The key insight for the amateur is that they don’t know what they don’t know.

Level 4: Intern

The intern often has the ability to use a broad range of skills to get their message across. But they haven’t had enough experience to use it all to improve. They recognize they have the things to learn and are very keen to do so. At this level, it is about observing the master, operating from high to low pressure to see them in action and applying these learnings in practice themselves. Interns are about 80% of the way on their journey to communication mastery.

Level 5: Professional

Professionals appear confident and skilled but may doubt themselves in some situations which can cause them to lose their self-belief. Often they’re listening to the wrong people or beating themselves up a little too much when they are in fact quite effective communicators. Things like going red, shaking legs and pitch variations and other irrelevant things may be putting them off, but in fact, the audience isn’t noticing them at all. At this level, leaders have about 90% confidence. They just need reassurance that they’re on the right track.

Level 6: Master

The master is focused on being exceptional. They know that you never achieve perfection, but they can keep learning to help them stay sharp and focus on continuous improvement to be the best communicator they can be. They surround themselves with masters of their craft, thrive on the challenge of communicating well and will even begin teaching other leaders to be more effective in their communication. This is the level the Confident Leader Retreat wants to help you achieve.

Why You Need The Confident Leader Retreat

At The Confident Leader Retreat you will learn how to harness and align the power of the body and the voice to support all the other elements of communication. Having these skills – body, voice and structure – in play when you communicate has the power to move you from a ‘collapser’ to a ‘master’ communicator!

Who Will Benefit from The Confident Leader Retreat?

This program is ideal for you if you are a movivated C-suite executive or leader who:

Is prepared to invest in communication and is looking for your edge
Has a change need, for example, increased requirements to present, do media interviews or, handle disgruntled shareholders or staff
Is looking to show greater empathy in how you communicate and create a deeper connection with your audience

This program is not ideal for you if you:

Are not open to change
Don’t want to do the practice
Are not prepared for feedback

What You’ll Gain From the Confident Leader Retreat

You’ll walk away from the Confident Leader Retreat with:

Skills, techniques and understanding of your body, voice and structure
Confidence to answer questions, get your message across and think on your feet
The ability to handle high-pressure media interviews, press conferences, town halls, shareholder meetings and difficult conversations
Skills in crisis management presentations where you have to deliver under difficult circumstances and relentless pressure
Powerful confidence and influence as a leader!

The Confident Leader Retreat Details

In this 3-day and 2-night retreat, Dr Mahler offers theory and interaction-based around winning the hearts and minds of those around you with the following outcomes:

In-depth analysis of your individual body, mind and voice patterns to create a program for ongoing long-term presence and influence improvement
Understanding of the psychology of performance and audience engagement
Unravelling the psychology of difficult situations
Building the skills of body and voice that underpin interpersonal engagement
Discovering processes for handling various leadership opportunities, including presentation, media, emotional face-to-face engagements
Obtaining ‘practice’ feedback

Tailored for small groups

This retreat provides an outstanding executive development opportunity tailored for an intimate group who wishes to experience transformational growth. Numbers are strictly limited to allow for individual attention.

Retreat sessions:

Managing Self & Others

Diagnose your habitual patterns of engagement
Take back control and build confidence
Build a process of mind, body and voice that will work for you in all face-to-face engagements

Improving presentation skills for high stake engagement

Concentrate on what is within your control and range of influence
Learn a well-researched structure to allow for immediate success
Present any content with originality and creativity

Building your stories

Build a unique template for ongoing personal application
Enhance your ability to handle emotional/difficult questions
Recognise your current response patterns
Learn new processes for effective engagement for difficulty and feedback
Analyse paralinguistics and nonverbal patterns that remove the flame from emotionally charged interactions

A woman guides another person’s posture by gently positioning her hands on the back

Enhancing media presentation skills & presence

Build a process of preparation under stress
Understand what fascinates audiences
Have a process for delivering powerful messages

Managing performance anxiety

Diagnose your level of anxiety
Take back control
Build a process of mind, body and voice that will work for you in all public appearances

Your retreat package includes:

Small group engagement over three days
Retreat facilitated in the beautiful Gold Coast Imperial Hotel
Delicious catering over the three days
Workbook and materials supporting workshop sessions
A copy of Louise’s book Gravitas
Pre-retreat and post-retreat 1:1 discussion
Bonus 12 months access to “The Mahler Method”, and to Louise’s entire curriculum of over 100 online resources and tools (valued at $5000)