About Christina

Christina Harbridge helps coaches, teams, and organizations in behavioral leverage, to understand and apply human biochemistry when dealing with irrational people – which is all of us. She helps large organizations design systems that create and sustain the behaviors they keep trying to train into people, and is a sought-after, spirited speaker and storyteller. Christina gets people up and out of their seats instead of passively writing in notebooks.

Her approach to storytelling is tested, deliberate and nuanced: Storytelling is about listeners, NOT the storyteller, a key factor so often missed. Christina’s most recent book, Swayed: How to Communicate for Impact, covers some of these storytelling methods and hit #1 in the Conflict category on Amazon.

Christina founded Allegory, Inc. a behavioral leverage company, and has spent her career nerding out on human behavior. She has learned that “Being fake is not a strategy that shifts people. Humans are deliciously irrational and emotional, and too many of us do not speak the way others listen. Most training tools deplete people by requiring cognitive load and willpower.”

Christina has partnered with neurobiologists, behavioral scientists, data scientists, physicians, and artists to apply rigor to behavioral data, making it practical and usable. These tested methods are steeped in human physiology, not psychology. Christina’s intellectual property comes from decades of influencing stakeholders in complicated, often high-stakes situations with competing priorities.

Highly motivated by social justice and applying counterintuitive storytelling methods as a winning strategy, Christina helped launch a political training organization in 2002 that now operates in 27 states. It has trained over 5,000 candidates to win their races, at a rate of more than 60%.

In her 20’s, Christina infiltrated a notoriously predatory industry by founding a high-growth debt collection agency that recovered 3x the industry average by being nice. Christina’s team applied emotional literacy, did the opposite of what every training company told them to do, and got invited to weddings as a result. Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why, wrote about Christina’s techniques, which are also featured in Mike Maddock’s Plan D and Maria Ross’s Empathy Edge.

As an artist, welder, and fabricator of large public art, Christina’s influence methods have led to permits and funding for large-scale, public-art installations and festivals across the globe. She served on the founding boards of Emerge America and The Bay Lights, and as a 20-year member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization; a chair of the Global Leadership Conference, and founding EO Global Communications Chair; a past board member for the San Francisco Rotary Club; an acrobatic swing dancer; and a test subject at NASA. Her favorite title ever is Mom.