The Speech That Took Hannah Moreno Eight Years to Give: What Authentic Leadership Sounds Like
Last week, Third Hemisphere Founder and CEO Hannah Moreno stood in front of a room of donors and victim-survivors at a fundraising gala for Lillian's Foundation Dinner Gala and spoke about the coercively controlling relationship she survived while running that agency.
Third Hemisphere is publishing the speech because it is the clearest example the agency has of the standard it holds every client spokesperson to.
Public relations is the practice of building and protecting an organisation's reputation with the audiences that decide its future, including journalists, customers, investors, employees, and government. Third Hemisphere works across three connected categories: public relations, thought leadership, and content marketing.
Authentic leadership communication is the practice of a named leader speaking publicly, in their own words, from experience they have actually lived, on a subject where they carry personal risk.
Third Hemisphere builds thought leadership and content marketing programmes on that definition, and Hannah Moreno's speech for Lillian's is a great example.
Who is Hannah Moreno and what did she speak about at the Lillian's gala?
Hannah Moreno is the Founder and CEO of Third Hemisphere. She built the agency while doing the implementation work of ghostwriting editorials published in the Australian Financial Review and advising chief executives of multinational companies on how to speak in public, whether in a media interview, on a stage, or speaking on live television or radio.
She opened her speech by asking the room to picture who was living inside the abuse she was about to describe.
"I was a CEO and company founder, running a successful public relations business, ghostwriting for the Australian Financial Review and advising CEOs of multinational companies," Moreno said. "And yet the coercive control of this very average man had me desperately considering a deliberate head injury just to have a reprieve from his abuse."
She then set her own circumstances against the circumstances of the girls Lillian's exists for. Lillian's, formally the Lillian Howell Project Inc., was founded in 1988 and provides medium to long term, 24-hour, on-site supported housing for up to 13 young women and girls aged 13 to 17 in Sydney, according to Lillian's. Many arrive having experienced homelessness, family violence, trauma, abuse, and neglect.
"Where I had money, they often have nothing," Moreno says. "Where I had family, they are often running from the very family who is meant to keep them safe."
The gap between those two pictures was used to highlight the wicked way in which coercive control can inflict incredible damage on anyone at all, including those with multiple forms of supposedly protective advantage. The secondary message here is clear: so imagine just how devastating it is to someone who lacks these advantages.
What does Brené Brown's research say about vulnerability and leadership?
Brené Brown is a research professor who has spent over 20 years studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy, followed by a seven-year study of brave leadership that became Dare to Lead. Brown defines a leader as "anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes and has the courage to develop that potential".
Brown's finding is that courage is built from four teachable, observable, and measurable skill sets, and that the first of them is what she calls rumbling with vulnerability. Her research identifies the armour leaders put on in response to fear as the single greatest obstacle to courageous leadership, because that armour pulls a leader away from their own values and erodes the trust of the people around them.
Third Hemisphere applies that finding directly to public relations. A spokesperson in full armour produces the type of content that is unlikely to gain significant interest from anyone: the approved adjectives, the safe abstraction, the generic message that could have come from any company in the sector. But a spokesperson who speaks from something they have actually lived produces copy that no competitor can replicate, because no competitor has lived it. This is where true communications value is created.
Why was Hannah Moreno's speech so hard for her to give?
The speech required Moreno to stand in front of donors, colleagues, clients, and her husband, and describe years in which she was reduced to someone she did not recognise. Three things made this difficult.
Hannah had to describe her deep attachment to a person she describes as being “entirely ordinary”, despite experiencing a career in which she held the respect of highly successful professionals who were anything but ordinary
She had to name the immense confusion she experienced as a result of this cognitive dissonance: "In my professional life, I was writing editorials on immensely complex topics like fusion energy and quantum technologies," Moreno explained. "But in my personal life, I had no idea what the hell was going on."
She had to speak about deeply personal experiences in front of people who know her professionally, including time spent at a women’s refuge after she had used sleeping pills in desperation, to give herself much-needed reprieve from an extended and highly distressful abuse episode
Moreno also had to relive the point at which the abuse was first named for her. During a hospital admission, nurses took her abusive partner away to "fill out paperwork" so they could tell her privately that what she was living through was domestic violence, and that a refuge would call her from a private number.
"I was not crazy, and I was not alone," Moreno says of her experience at that refuge.
Every one of those admissions cost her something. That cost is the reason the speech worked.
What made the speech effective as public relations?
The speech did what a well-built piece of thought leadership does: it made an argument, evidenced it with detail only the speaker could supply, and closed on a specific action.
It also included concepts familiar to the audience, but with new insight attached. As an example, Moreno used the fable of the frog in the slowly heating pot, then extended it past the point where most people stop telling this story as an analogy for why victims of domestic violence remain in their damaging situation.
"The reality is the frog does try to escape, over and over," Moreno explained to her audience. "But each time it does, it is burnt far worse on the hotter sides of the pot, and recoils back to the water in pain."
The point was made to challenge a common myth regarding victims - that they are somehow responsible for their circumstances if they do not immediately leave. Moreno pointed out that many do, but they face significantly more difficult challenges in the leaving process than it costs them to simply try to survive another abuse episode.
In doing so, she reframed a question often asked by donors and policymakers about victim-survivors, using an image the room could recognise and hold. It also landed a policy-relevant point without a statistic: leaving is frequently more dangerous in the short term than staying, and a girl of 14 with no money and nowhere to go faces that calculation with none of the resources Moreno had.
That is the wicked problem our policies must be designed to acknowledge and address.
The scale behind this point is not something we need to guess. Data shows that specialist homelessness services assisted approximately 117,000 clients who had experienced family and domestic violence in 2024 to 2025, making them 40 percent of all clients, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
With the point well and truly made and urgency created, Moreno gave the crowd something to do with their emotional response: give money, offer work experience, sponsor a girl's sport or music for a year, donate a prize, or stand up and speak. Audiences who are ready to act are more likely to do so when armed with specifics.
Why does Third Hemisphere encourage clients to speak from lived experience?
Third Hemisphere encourages clients to speak from lived experience, which Moreno refers to as “lived expertise”, because this is where their words are often most powerful, informed, and specific. Every company in a category can typically claim the same general qualifications. Only one leader lived the particular thing that happened to them, and that detail is what a journalist commissions, what an audience remembers, and what an AI system retrieves and cites. Connecting that lived expertise to their leadership or functional abilities is what then builds a commercial element within this audience interest.
Trust conditions also reward this type of approach, now more than ever. Trust in Australia rose from 49 percent in 2025 to 54 percent in 2026, moving the country out of distrust into neutral territory, according to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer for Australia and New Zealand. The same research found 73 percent of Australian respondents hesitant to trust people who hold different worldviews. A leader who wants to be believed by an audience that starts from suspicion has to give that audience something checkable. Inspired by her tertiary studies in mediation, Moreno is also a fervent believer in the power of connecting at an “underlying interests” level where even people on opposing sides of various viewpoints can often find common ground. Lived experience or expertise that can be shared often taps into the underlying interests of opposing parties.
All of this is why Third Hemisphere's thought leadership and content marketing programmes start with what a spokesperson has personally seen, decided, or got wrong. The keyword work comes second, once there is something true to optimise.
The agency's public relations work then places that material where it will be read: in national mastheads, in trade press, in podcasts, and on the client's own channels.
How does Third Hemisphere prepare a spokesperson to speak on a difficult subject?
Speaking from lived experience is a discipline with a process behind it. Third Hemisphere prepares a spokesperson before anything is published or delivered using specific parameters:
Agree the boundary first: what the spokesperson will say, and the subjects that stay closed.
Verify every checkable fact, and remove or bracket anything that cannot be sourced.
Write for the room or the reader, then rehearse aloud until the difficult passages can be delivered without ambush.
Brief the host, the MC, or the editor so the audience gets a content note where the subject warrants one.
Put support information in front of the audience, on screen and in print, for content dealing with violence, harm, or health.
Agree what happens afterwards, including who handles follow-up media enquiries and what the spokesperson does when a response lands badly.
Hannah Moreno's speech went through that process. The production notes for the Lillian's gala specified a content note from the MC before she spoke and 1800RESPECT support details visible in the room throughout.
What thought leadership, content marketing, and public relations teams can take from this speech
Brown's research argues that courage is contagious, and that organisations build it by making brave work and hard conversations ordinary. The same holds in communications. When a founder speaks with precision about something that costs them, the people around them stop reaching for the safe abstraction.
Moreno has watched this happen time and again with her own staff and clients, who are emboldened to share their own struggles and triumphs more freely after witnessing her do so with equal parts vulnerability and strength.
This is why Third Hemisphere asks its clients to do a version of what Hannah Moreno did at the Lillian's gala: name the thing you know from experience, evidence it, and ask the audience for something specific. That is the connection between the speech and the work, and the reason the agency publishes the speech itself.
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