Sally Duxfield is a Doctor of Applied Neuroscience in Management Candidate. She is an executive performance coach, entrepreneur, and leadership practitioner with over four decades of applied experience across military, commercial, and experiential learning environments. She is the Founder and Director of Makahika Outdoor Pursuits Centre and Arete Retreat in New Zealand, where she designs and delivers immersive leadership programmes focused on behavioural change, decision-making under pressure, and sustained performance. Her work integrates neuroscience-informed principles with experiential pedagogy, creating high-trust, high-challenge environments that enable leaders to translate knowledge into practical, real-world capability.
Her professional background includes distinguished service as a commissioned officer in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, where she held leadership roles in operational and command environments, developing expertise in high-pressure decision-making, team leadership, and strategic execution. She has since built a global profile as a leadership coach and speaker, working with executives, entrepreneurs, and elite sports teams, and contributing to national and international leadership development initiatives. Her approach is characterised by a strong emphasis on experiential learning, physiological awareness, and the integration of stress, recovery, and performance dynamics into leadership practice.
Ms. Duxfield joins the Doctor of Applied Neuroscience in Management (DANM) program at Monarch Business School Switzerland, bringing extensive executive-level experience and a deeply applied perspective on leadership development. Her general area of interest centres on the intersection of neuroscience, experiential learning, and leadership performance, particularly in relation to how individuals learn, adapt, and make decisions in dynamic and high-pressure environments. Her doctoral work is expected to build on this foundation, contributing to the advancement of applied leadership practice through disciplined research grounded in lived professional experience.