Your audience will leave seeing themselves more clearly than when they walked in.
I speak to coaches, practitioners, and personal development audiences, and to any room prepared to look at what is running underneath. I use AI to make invisible patterns visible: the control people cannot name, the beliefs they never chose, the dynamics quietly shaping their decisions. Audiences leave feeling genuinely seen, and with something they can actually use.
We were beyond fortunate that Lisa agreed to speak at our The Load We Carry event in Manchester in July.
From the moment she started speaking, Lisa had the room. She has that rare ability to take subjects that are complex, deeply personal and often difficult, and make them feel accessible, engaging and incredibly human.
What I particularly loved was the combination of Lisa’s expertise and warmth. There was no talking at the audience; she created a genuine connection with the women in the room, bringing humour, insight and compassion to a subject that resonated very deeply with so many of us.
The feedback afterwards was wonderful, but perhaps the biggest testament was the number of conversations her session prompted. People were still talking about what she’d shared long after she’d finished speaking, reflecting on their own experiences and seeing things through a slightly different lens, which was entirely the aim of the event.
As an event organiser, you want speakers who you can trust completely: people who understand the brief, connect with your audience and add something genuinely valuable to the day. Lisa did all of that and more. She even stood in at the last minute for an additional Q&A when another speaker couldn’t attend.
I really hope Lisa will join our next event in London and would absolutely recommend her to anyone looking for a knowledgeable, engaging and very human speaker.
Thank you, Lisa, for being such an important part of a very special day.
Hannah Beko, Founder, Authentically Speaking — organiser, The Load We Carry, Manchester
My TEDx talk: How AI Can Free Us From Invisible Control
I opened with the question people asked me after the five years I spent trapped in a coercively controlling relationship.
Why didn’t you just leave?
It is the wrong question. The right one is about awareness, and how a system of influence becomes so invisible that the person living inside it cannot see it. The most effective prison is the one you do not know you are in.
Humans are poor at noticing what changes slowly. Drop a frog into hot water and it jumps straight out. Raise the temperature by degrees and it never moves. That is how invisible programmes get installed, in relationships, in workplaces, and in the cultural scripts we are born into and never think to question.
AI does not have that limitation. On stage I showed the audience two ordinary-looking exchanges, one between a couple and one in a team meeting, and then what an AI trained on established models of coercive control could see in them that a person reading normally would miss. Not a judgement. Not a diagnosis. Just the mechanics, made visible.
Every one of us has a ghost in the machine. For the first time, we have a tool that can help us find it.
The mirror is in our hands. What will you choose to see?
See me in a room
Where you may have seen me
Five-time bestselling author. PhD in mathematical modelling. Twenty years teaching coaching models and professional practice.
What your audience walks away with
I work with the room rather than at it. Where the format allows, I take real questions and real situations from your audience and make the pattern underneath them visible while everyone watches. It is live, it moves fast, and it is usually funnier than people expect. There is a particular irony in how our worst patterns look once we can finally see them, and I am not above pointing that out. Never at anyone’s expense, always at the situation’s.
That is the part people talk about afterwards.
On the TEDx stage I did it with two ordinary-looking exchanges put up on screen, one from a relationship and one from a team meeting, showing the room what was actually happening inside them. That device works almost anywhere, and it can be built around whatever your audience will recognise.
I do not give the same talk twice, because the room is never the same twice. Where live work is not right for your event, and there are plenty of rooms where it is not, I deliver a tight prepared keynote that does the same job with my own material.
Either way people leave lighter and clearer than they arrived, excited about what has just become possible, having finally understood a pattern that confused them for years. Uplifted, expanded, and holding something they can act on rather than a good feeling that fades by Thursday.
One practical note for your run of show: I do not usually get off a stage quickly. The queue that forms afterwards tends to open with some version of “are you the app lady, where can I get them, and could you build me one?”
Two themes, two kinds of room
I speak on two themes that share one thread. One is about the discernment to escape something. The other is about the discernment to think clearly and rise. Both come down to the same idea: there is always an algorithm underneath, and most people never get to see it.
These are starting points rather than a fixed menu. If your angle sits close to one of them, or somewhere I have not thought of yet, tell me and we will shape it together.
Discernment and Invisible Control
For domestic abuse charities and frontline services, professional bodies, legal, HR and safeguarding audiences, and corporate events where culture is the real agenda.
How AI Can Make Invisible Control Visible
My TEDx territory, and the work behind my forensic tools. Coercive control, gaslighting, and the patterns people miss until it is almost too late.
Foglighting
Gaslighting is a word people know, and it does not describe most of what actually happens. Foglighting is the slow, deniable confusion that leaves someone unable to trust their own account of their own life. Why it is impossible to see from the inside, why intelligence and empathy make you more vulnerable to it rather than less, and what becomes possible once the pattern can finally be named.
Why Intelligent People Miss Coercive Control
The belief that intelligence protects you is wrong, and understanding why is the most useful thing a professional audience can take away. For lawyers, HR, safeguarding, and anyone who has ever wondered how someone so capable ended up there.
How AI Can Detect How Toxic Your Workplace Is
Toxic dynamics survive engagement surveys because they are subjective, deniable and invisible. Nobody sets out to be the villain of someone else’s story, but without a mirror they never find out they are. What becomes possible when you can measure the pattern instead of sensing it.
Discernment, Judgement and Consciousness
For coaching and personal development events, professional organisations, leadership conferences, and consciousness gatherings where the audience wants rigour rather than reassurance.
The Client Who Loops
Some clients go round in circles for years and every method fails. There is usually a reason, it is usually not the coaching, and it is usually visible in the language.
The Breakthrough Hiding in Your Client’s Own Words
A live look at what AI can read in a client’s language that no practitioner can catch unaided: the limiting beliefs, the attitudes, and the thought patterns sitting underneath what someone actually says. Not a replacement for your judgement. A way of seeing further with it.
From Magic to Method
Helping expert practitioners turn hard-won, intuitive skill into something teachable and scalable, with AI. I show how to find the algorithm underneath their “magic” and turn it into a repeatable “method”.
Using AI Without Losing Your Judgement
How professionals and organisations can treat AI as an instrument for discernment rather than a substitute for it. Includes the three honest uses: checking whether what you are sensing is real, checking whether you are the one causing harm, and catching it in your own words before you press send.
AI-Powered Discernment for a Gaslit World
Thinking clearly in an age of manipulation, misinformation and machine-generated persuasion.
Making the Mystical Practical
What happens when engineering precision meets consciousness work, and why rigour and depth were never opposites.
How I can work
Keynote, twenty to ninety minutes, and longer by arrangement
Keynote with live audience work, where the room suits it
Half-day or full-day workshop
In-house training for teams and professional bodies
Panels, interviews and moderated conversation
Podcasts
Virtual, in person, or hybrid
“Lisa has spoken at my events several times. She’s very, very engaging and charismatic speaker. You really are putting your audience into safe hands.”
Bernadette Doyle, Business Coach and Mentor
About Dr Lisa Turner
I spent thirty years researching personal and spiritual development, and more than twenty teaching coaching models and professional practice. Before that I was an engineer with a PhD in mathematical modelling of complex systems, which is an unusual route into this work and the reason I do it the way I do.
I build AI systems that detect patterns people cannot see in themselves: coercive control in relationships, toxic dynamics in organisations, and the beliefs running underneath decisions. I write books about it, five of which have been bestsellers, and I speak about it wherever the room is willing to think.
The thread through all of it is discernment, and making the invisible visible.
Let’s talk about your event
Tell me who will be in the room and what you want them to leave with. I will tell you honestly whether I am the right speaker for it, and if I am not, I usually know someone who is.