“My name is Michael. I can hop. Do you want to see me hop?” That’s how I introduced myself to bemused strangers at the supermarket when I was three. Honestly, not much has changed. Here’s the formal bio, with the best bits at the end. Michael Bungay Stanier is at the forefront of shaping how organizations around the world make being coach-like an essential leadership competency. His book The Coaching Habit is the best-selling coaching book of this century, with over a million copies sold and thousands of five-star reviews on Amazon. In 2019, he was named the #1 thought leader in coaching.

Michael was the first Canadian Coach of the Year, has been named a Global Coaching Guru since 2014, and was a Rhodes Scholar. Michael founded Box of Crayons, a learning and development company that helps organizations transform from advice-driven to curiosity-led. (Learn more at BoxOfCrayons.com.) Michael is a compelling speaker and facilitator, combining practicality, humour, and an unprecedented degree of engagement with the audience. He’s spoken on stages and screens around the world in front of crowds ranging from ten to ten thousand. His TEDx talk has been watch by one and half million people. (Learn more at www.MBS.works.) En route to today—and these are essential parts of his origin story—Michael knocked himself unconscious as a labourer by hitting himself in the head with a shovel, mastered stagecraft at law school by appearing in a skit called Synchronized Nude Male Modelling, and his first paid piece of writing was a Harlequin Romance-esque story involving a misdelivered letter … and called The Male Delivery.