Speaking & Training
Speaking and Training
Mitch Abblett, PhD · Clinical Psychologist
Most conflict in a room isn’t about the issue on the table. It’s about the three seconds before someone’s mouth moved faster than their attention.
I’ve spent more than twenty years watching that gap — in therapy rooms, in schools, in leadership teams that could name their values and still couldn’t get through a Tuesday without someone going sideways. Momentology® is what came out of it: a practice for owning moments instead of reacting to them, built on behavioral science and tested on people under real pressure.
Your audience doesn’t need another lecture on mindfulness. They need something they can use before their next meeting.
Book a Free Orienting CallUpcoming
- 1 September 2026Massachusetts Partnerships for Youth
Live continuing education workshop - 16 September 2026Thrive Support & Advocacy Wellness Symposium
Keynote - February 2027School Mental Health: Treating Students K–12
Harvard Medical School Continuing Education, Boston
What your audience actually leaves with
Every program is built on the same architecture. Not a philosophy — a practice.
Participants leave having done these things, not having watched them. In a sixty-minute session, roughly forty-five minutes is participant activity.
Signature talks
1. Prizing, Not Praise
Why the child, the report, and the direct report all perform for you — and what to do instead
We have become people who audit each other like quarterly earnings. Kids perform for approval. Employees perform for review cycles. And the adults doing the auditing confuse surveillance with connection, then wonder why nobody tells them anything real.
The distinction is prizing over praising. Praising evaluates an outcome. Prizing meets the person’s actual present-moment experience — and it is a learnable behavior, not a personality trait. Drawing on Prizeworthy (Shambhala, Nautilus Gold Award), this session names the difference precisely enough that people can hear themselves doing the wrong one, then practices the right one in the room.
Takeaways: a diagnostic for catching a praise reflex mid-sentence · the prizing move that replaces it, rehearsed in pairs · the repair line for the times you catch it too late.
2. Stop Nexting Your Life Away
The anticipation habit that keeps a workforce everywhere but here
Attention initiatives fail in the same place every time. They treat distraction as a focus deficit and answer it with tools — notification rules, focus blocks, app blockers. The tools work for about a week.
Distraction is a conditioned habit loop, and a habit that was learned can be unlearned. The pattern underneath it is nexting: the reflex of leaving the moment you’re in for one that hasn’t happened yet. It’s what a distracted workforce is actually doing, and a fair amount of leadership development quietly rewards it.
Here’s the turn most audiences don’t see coming: nexting is not the same as planning, and the session spends real time on the difference. Planning has an endpoint. Nexting doesn’t.
This session was filed for ATD 2027 (Boston) as a Knowledge in Action workshop.
Takeaways: a four-part habit-loop map of the participant’s own most frequent cue · the Body Weather Check-In, a five-zone somatic scan used as early warning · a 30-second attention reset that needs no app, no budget, and no calendar slot.
3. Resonant Repair
What to do after the apology made it worse
Most communication training teaches people what to say. Almost none teaches what to do when what they said didn’t land — which is the moment that actually decides whether a relationship holds.
This session works the sequence: Regulate → Reveal → Receive → Resonant Repair. Regulate your own nervous system first, because a dysregulated repair is just a second rupture with better manners. Reveal what was actually going on, smaller than the original attempt. Receive what comes back without defending. Then repair for resonance rather than agreement — the two are not the same thing, and confusing them is why so many repairs stall at “fine.”
Grounded in affect-labeling research, reward-based learning, and the neuroscience of interpersonal threat. Built from clinical work, and from having personally botched more of these than I can count.
Takeaways: the four-move repair sequence with language participants can use the same day · a self-scoring tool for tracking how communication actually landed · the two-breath workaround for the defensiveness that hijacks repair before it starts.
4. Inheritance Without a War
Why families fracture over what gets left behind — and how the conversation can go differently
Families rarely fight about the money. They fight about what the money was standing in for — who was seen, who was chosen, who did the caregiving while someone else got the phone calls. The estate is simply the first occasion when all of it has to be said out loud, usually at the worst possible moment, usually with grief still in the room.
Advisors are trained for the instruments and not for the moment. So the conversation gets managed procedurally, everyone stays polite, and the real material goes underground until it detonates at the reading or the sale or the second Thanksgiving after.
This session treats the inheritance conversation as what it actually is: a family systems event with a legal document attached. It gives professionals a way to notice when the discussion has stopped being about assets, and a structure for naming that in the room without becoming the family’s therapist.
Takeaways: a read on when a planning conversation has shifted from logistics to loyalty · language for surfacing the unspoken claim without assigning blame · a boundary for advisors on where their role ends and a referral begins.
Also available
All programs can be customized to your audience, industry, and format, and all are available virtually.
Background
Mitch Abblett, PhD is a clinical psychologist, author, and the creator of Momentology®.
For eleven years he was clinical director of the Manville School at the Baker Center for Children and Families, a Harvard Medical School–affiliated therapeutic school program. He served as executive director of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. He has been in clinical practice in the Boston area for more than twenty years, and is licensed in Massachusetts (PY 8444).
He has published eight books, including:
The Owner’s Manual for Thriving Relationships — Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025
Prizeworthy: How to Meaningfully Connect, Build Character, and Unlock the Potential of Every Child — Shambhala, 2021 · Nautilus Gold Award
The Five Hurdles to Happiness and the Mindful Path to Overcoming Them — Shambhala, 2018
The Heat of the Moment in Treatment — W. W. Norton
Plus titles with New Harbinger, and mindfulness card decks with Shambhala and PESI, including The Unwinding Anxiety Deck with Dr. Judson Brewer
He writes for Psychology Today and Mindful.org, hosts The Momentologist podcast, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today, Tricycle, and Mindful Magazine.
What organizers say
Mitch has worked with TATRA Training Services over the years and he delivered a series of professional workshops across Australia; all very successful and well attended national highly educational speaking tours. He demonstrated great presentation skills, attention to detail, depth of knowledge, enthusiasm and high level of competency as a trainer.
His presentation style is highly impressive: he is not only knowledgeable but also funny and beautifully intelligent which unsurprisingly results in great feedback from the attendees. Mitch is a world-class presenter; his workshops are truly inspirational and it is always a pleasure to work with him.
— Hanna Nowicki, Managing Director, TATRA Training Services, Australia
These reflect training, coaching, and speaking engagements. Consistent with psychologists’ professional ethics, I do not solicit or publish testimonials from psychotherapy clients.
Booking
I’m available for keynotes, half- and full-day trainings, workshops, virtual sessions, and CE-eligible courses.
The simplest way to start is a free orienting call, 20–30 minutes. Bring your date, your audience, and what you’re actually trying to have change in the room. We’ll figure out in one conversation whether this is the right fit — and if it isn’t, I’ll say so.
Book a Free Orienting CallEmail mitch@drmitchabblett.com
Podcast: The Momentologist, on all platforms
Your organization runs on moments nobody thinks to notice. Let’s give your people a way to own them.
