Vicki Tyler
Meet
Vicki Tyler is a behavioural leadership strategist, keynote speaker and former President of Flight Centre USA, where she led a rapid turnaround, growing the business from $3 million to $27 million in two years. She later built a multi-million-dollar real estate enterprise in Los Angeles.
Today Vicki works at the intersection of leadership, human behaviour and communication. She is the creator of The Sleepwalking Effect™, a framework for understanding the small repeated behaviours that become automatic and quietly limit judgement, contribution and leadership impact. Her ACT Reset Model gives people a way to recognise those patterns, question what’s driving them, and choose a different response.
Vicki holds a Graduate Diploma in Applied Psychology, is a TEDx speaker, and is the founder of Campaign 195 — a global research initiative gathering the leadership perspective of one woman answering the same question in each of the world’s 195 countries, with the goal of presenting its findings to the United Nations and further developing a programme to uplift emerging women in leadership globally.
Her work is shaped by more than three decades of leadership experience and by surviving two life-changing accidents in her early twenties — experiences that sparked a lifelong fascination with one question: what gets in the way of what we’re already capable of?
No Permission Required
0.045%. That’s the probability behind almost everything I teach — the confronting odds of walking away from two broken spines, on my own two feet.
I learned early that life doesn’t wait until you’re ready. And once you understand that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, waiting for the right moment, the right title, more confidence, or someone else’s permission starts to look like a very expensive and lonely way to live.
At seventeen, the people closest to me were all struggling — and so was I. I didn’t yet understand that while I couldn’t control what was happening, I could get better at choosing my response. At times, the loneliness was brutal. I didn’t have a name for it then.
Vicki's Story
Today, we do: in 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General called loneliness and isolation an epidemic, and I recognise the same disconnection at work today. When people stop feeling seen, they stop speaking up.
A random flick through a newspaper led me to a mental skills course — back when "mental skills" sounded more like crystals and wind chimes than neuroscience. Something clicked. I had no idea how soon I’d need it.
While travelling in Australia in my early twenties, I was held at gunpoint. A few years later, one wrong step at the edge of a gorge sent me fifty feet onto a rocky riverbed — seven fractures in my skull, spine and pelvis. I spent three months in a spinal unit in Adelaide. And I walked out.
But here’s the part that actually matters. I returned to work and slowly slipped straight back into old habits. I’d survived something enormous, yet was still letting something as small as someone else’s opinion decide what my career would look like. I was waiting for permission I never actually needed.
Eighteen months later, at 23, I sleepwalked out of a second-storey window and broke my spine again. That second accident left me with a question I could no longer avoid: Am I meant for something more?
That question wasn’t just meant for me — it’s for all of us. Too many of us are sleepwalking wide awake through parts of our lives and careers. That contradiction became The Sleepwalking Effect™: the small behaviours we repeat so often our brains automate them, until it stops feeling like a choice and just feels like the way we’re wired. Staying quiet. Waiting to be asked. Avoiding the hard conversation. Holding back the question.
This time, I stopped waiting to feel ready. I became Flight Centre’s top salesperson in New Zealand, went on to run its most profitable retail store worldwide, and within ten years of that second accident was asked to lead Flight Centre USA as President — where we grew the business from $3 million to $27 million in two years. Later came real estate development in Los Angeles, a Graduate Diploma in Applied Psychology, TEDx, and the work I teach today.
These days I’m a little obsessed with one question: what gets in the way of what we’re already capable of?
I broke my back twice to learn the answer. My hope is you get to skip the hard way — and spend less of your life waiting, and more of it finding out what you’re capable of.
No Permission Required.