Ko Tokumaru te maunga
Ko Wairau te awa
Ko Tainui te waka
Ko Ngāti Rārua te iwi
Ko Morris rāua ko Helena ōku mātua
Ko Monique Bradley tōku ingoa
He kaikōrero ahau
Tokumaru is my mountain. Wairau is my river. Tainui is my canoe. Ngāti Rārua is my tribe. Morris and Helena are my parents. My name is Monique Bradley. I am a storyteller.
I share this at the opening of every keynote and every workshop. Not to ask the room to understand my culture, but to give everyone in it permission to bring all of theirs.
I started speaking at age eight.
Not because someone told me to. Because I felt I had a million words inside my body and I needed somewhere to put them. Speech and drama became the place where I discovered that words, used with intention, could shift the state of an entire room.
That discovery has never left me.
Thirty years. One question.
Over thirty years across performing arts, theatre, film, television, live TV shopping across New Zealand and Australia, online selling, keynote speaking, MC work, communication coaching, and academic research, I have been studying one question from every possible angle.
How do stories impact people?
In leadership. In sales. In the way we talk to ourselves when nobody is watching. On stages, on screens, in sales conversations, and in the quiet moments before we decide whether we are worth it.
The answer, every single time, is that stories are the mechanism. Not strategy. Not technique. Not the perfectly crafted pitch. The right story, told at the right moment, with genuine care for the person receiving it, changes something. In them. In the room. In the relationship. In the outcome.
I have watched a single story make a sale that hours of pitching could not close.
I have watched a single story give someone the courage to charge what they are actually worth.
I have watched a single story bring a room of six hundred strangers to complete, connected silence.
One story. Just one.
The credentials.
I hold a Master of Creative Practice with First Class Honours from Unitec, becoming the first person in New Zealand to undertake a Masters focused specifically on keynote speaking. My research examined what happens in the space between a speaker and an audience when genuine connection occurs.
Clients include Xbox, Dilmah Tea, DeLonghi, Kenwood, AA Insurance, MBIE, Auckland Convention Bureau, and Best Start Early Learning Centre.
What I believe
The beliefs that
drive everything.
One story can change a life. Save a life. Make a sale.
Storytelling is not a soft skill. It is the skill underneath every act of leadership, every sales conversation, every keynote, every piece of content, and every quiet internal conversation we have with ourselves about what we are worth.
The people who create lasting change and leave genuine legacies are not necessarily the most talented or the most visible. They are the ones who found their story and learned to use it well.
That is the work. And I am just getting started.