Women Lead Company is a behavioral science company for women business owners who are ready for what comes after the insight work. Applied Behavioral Engineering™ is the methodology we deliver, a framework integrating behavioral psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, and cognitive behavioral science, designed to produce real, lasting change in how you perform under pressure.
ABE™ exists because the approaches most women have been given to work with under stress were never sound enough to produce the change they promised.
Michelle Cross · Business Psychologist, M.S. · Founder, Women Lead Company · Creator, Applied Behavioral Engineering™
Hello, I am Michelle Cross, a Business Psychologist with a Master of Science in Business Psychology and twenty years of experience at the intersection of behavioral science, behavioral neuroscience, and real-world business performance.
I developed Applied Behavioral Engineering™ because I kept seeing the same thing. Capable, intelligent, hardworking women who understood themselves well, who had done the work, read the books, invested in their growth, and were still hitting the same invisible walls. The gap between knowing and doing was not closing. And the existing approaches were not strong enough to close it.
What I kept seeing was not a strategy failure. It was a behavioral neuroscience problem. The women I was working with were not stuck because they lacked insight or commitment. They were stuck because the automatic responses their brains had built under years of chronic stress were running faster and deeper than any framework they had been given to manage them. No amount of mindset work reaches that level. ABE™ does.
My foundation in behavioral science was shaped early. In the beginning years of my education and training I worked directly in clinical settings as a research assistant, observing behavioral patterns under pressure, understanding how they form at the neurological level, and learning what it takes to change them. That clinical grounding never left me. It is why ABE™ intervenes where it does: not at the level of thought, but at the level of the automatic behavioral responses that thought alone cannot override.
Over the years I have built an integrated body of expertise across behavioral psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, cognitive behavioral science, emotional intelligence, and leadership. I am neuroscience-informed in both methodology and practice. That distinction matters. It means the science is not a backdrop for this work. It is the work, present in every assessment, every intervention, every protocol ABE™ delivers.
What I bring to ABE™ is twenty years of understanding why capable people stay stuck under pressure and what it takes to change that, permanently and by design.
Credentials & Training
• Master of Science in Business Psychology
• Master Practitioner in Emotional Intelligence
• Behavioral Neuroscience Informed
• MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) Certified
• Neuro-Somatic Mindfulness Trained
Michelle Cross, M.S.
You will notice the absence of certain things on this site. No countdown timers. No urgency language. No pricing anchors designed to make you feel what you cannot afford. Those choices are intentional. They are part of a larger body of work, one I write about more fully in Rooted, about what it looks like to build a business that does not borrow its methods from a system that was never built for us.
The gap between knowing what to do and doing it is not a character flaw. It is not a discipline problem, a motivation problem, or evidence that you are not cut out for this. It is a behavioral pattern, specific, measurable, and changeable, and it has simply never been addressed at the level where it lives.
Most approaches to business performance work at the level of thinking. They ask you to think differently, reframe your perspective, adopt a new mindset. Thinking is important. Your mindset is important. But thinking is not where behavior shifts.
Behavior lives deeper. It lives in the automatic responses that fire before conscious thought catches up. In the patterns laid down by years of pressure and stress that no amount of insight will override on its own. In the space between intention and action that capable, intelligent people know better than anyone.
The belief that drives this work: you do not need to be fixed. You need to be understood at the right level. When that happens, when the behavioral pattern beneath the struggle is finally seen clearly, change becomes possible in a way it has not been before