Maybe it was a line that finally named something you’ve been carrying for a long time. Maybe it was the quiet recognition that what you’ve tried before, the workshops, the frameworks, the honest effort, produced understanding without producing change.
Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe you are just tired of being capable and stuck at the same time, and you needed to know that someone else sees that clearly too.
Whatever brought you here, you are not here by accident. And you are not here because something is wrong with you.
You are here because the way most people explain your challenge has never been sound enough to actually fix it.
ABE™ exists because that needed to change.
Women Lead Company is a behavioral science company built for women business owners who are done surviving their businesses and ready to grow them. Applied Behavioral Engineering™ is the methodology we deliver; a framework grounded in behavioral psychology, behavioral neuroscience, and cognitive behavioral science, designed to produce real, lasting change in how you perform under stress and pressure.
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 20 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 wasn’t closing. And the existing approaches weren’t strong enough to close it. I know this because I lived it.
What I kept seeing was not a strategy failure. It was a behavioral neuroscience problem. The women I was working with weren’t 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’d been given to manage them. No amount of mindset work reaches that level. ABE™ does.
ABE™ is my answer to that gap.
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 actually 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 that spans behavioral psychology, behavioral neuroscience, 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 not just expertise. It is 20 years of understanding precisely why people stay stuck and exactly 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.
That the gap between knowing what to do and actually 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 actually 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. And 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, stress, and survival that no amount of insight will override on its own. In the space between intention and action, that can be exhausting. And intelligent, capable 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. And when that happens, when the behavioral pattern beneath the struggle is finally seen clearly, change becomes not just possible but inevitable.