When Rashmi Aidan takes the stage on Monday, June 22, during PCMA Business Events Summit (BES) in Puerto Rico, she will share her RISE leadership framework. Yes, those initials stand for something — Reframe, Identify, Surrender, and Evolve — but it’s not just a clever construct created by an everyday business consultant. It comes from the lived experience of a high-achieving lawyer and mother whose world shattered when her business choices led to a federal prison sentence.

Airan bares her soul in the newly published book All Rise: A Lawyer’s Evolution From Prison to Purpose, and the BES audience can expect nothing less from her in Puerto Rico. Her story is not just about her redemption, it’s why what happened to her can happen to any of us, and how to pay more attention to the small, quiet voice within us.

Via email, Airan told Convene what she is planning for her TED-style talk followed by a masterclass. But you don’t need to be in that room to be moved by her insights below.

How will you structure your talk and workshop at PCMA’s Business Events Summit?
One night changed my life. That’s where it starts. Eighteen minutes on the main stage. No fluff. No recycled leadership advice. Just the raw truth about how one decision, made under pressure, that felt completely reasonable, can unravel everything you’ve spent a career building. My keynote is about what it actually takes to build unshakable trust and rise to the moment when it matters most.

Then we go to work.

The 75-minute Keyshop is unlike anything most audiences have experienced. It’s not a lecture with a Q&A tacked on at the end. It’s not breakout groups filling out worksheets. It’s a live immersive experience where I take a decade of work in behavioral science, psychology, and decision-making and put it directly in their hands.

By the time they walk out, they haven’t just heard something powerful. They’ve done something with it.

How will you tailor this to business event professionals?
I don’t have to translate anything for this audience. We already speak the same language.

We know what it’s like to carry impossible timelines and smile through them. The vendor decision made because switching felt like too much friction. The team member whose burnout we saw and filed away because the event was six weeks out. The programming call that got locked in because the board already approved it.

None of those are scandals. All of them are drift. And drift is exactly how trust quietly collapses long before anyone notices.

This audience doesn’t need a wake-up call. They need a mental process that works inside the actual conditions of their lives. That’s what I’m bringing.

And they’ll leave with a different relationship to pressure. Not relief from it. Clarity inside it.

What has been your biggest takeaway about how audiences respond to your message?
The silence.

I’ve spoken to rooms full of people who are paid to project confidence. People who have spent decades being the most prepared person in every room. And when I finish my story, before I say another word, the room goes completely still. Not uncomfortable. Not polite. Stunned.

After one session, a senior leader, 30 years in with an impeccable reputation, pulled me aside. He said, “I’ve made that decision. I just haven’t been caught.” He wasn’t confessing. He was exhaling. Because for the first time someone had given language to something he had been carrying completely alone.

That stopped me. Because I realized my story wasn’t doing what I thought it was doing. It wasn’t just creating connection. It was giving people permission to finally tell the truth to themselves.

That changes everything about why I do this work.

What do you hear from audiences after your talks?
The line I hear most is this: “I thought this was going to be a story about you. I didn’t realize it was going to be so relatable to me.”

That’s the whole point. The experiences that stay with people are the ones that make them feel personally seen. Not inspired in a general direction. Seen. Named. Understood.

When that happens, something opens up that no amount of strategy or content can force open. And that’s exactly when real transformation and impact become possible.

How do you make an impact on top business leaders, and do you encounter resistance?
Every single time. And I welcome it.

Leaders who have built something significant have done so partly by trusting their own judgment. Walking into a room and suggesting that their judgment can drift is not a comfortable opening. Some of them let me know that with their body language in the first five minutes.

That’s fine. I’m not there to be comfortable. I’m there to be honest.

What breaks through isn’t my resume. It’s specificity. The moment I describe the exact texture of a decision that felt completely justified and quietly destroyed everything, leaders stop evaluating me and start auditing themselves. That’s the shift. And once it happens, the conversation changes completely.

My background opens doors — my Wall Street career. The Ivy League law degree. The corporate — and then federal prison — experience.

But what earns the room’s attention is being willing to be honest about what none of that protected me from. That combination is rare. And they feel it immediately.

You talk in the book about slowing down enough to hear the signal our gut is already sending us. Can you tell us more about that?
This one is personal for me. Because I didn’t slow down. And I know exactly what that cost.

After a decade of research into behavioral science, psychology, and how human beings actually make decisions under pressure, here’s what I know. The gut signal never disappears. It gets buried. Under urgency. Under rationalization. Under the very reasonable-sounding arguments we make to ourselves when we already know what we want to do but the pressure is pointing somewhere else.

We are experts at solving problems fast. That’s our greatest strength and our most dangerous vulnerability.

What I built and what I teach is a structured pause. Not a slowdown. A discipline. A set of questions that takes less than three minutes and create the kind of clarity most people spend entire careers searching for. But it always starts the same way.

You have to be willing to ask what you’re actually feeling before you decide what you’re going to do next.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?
We are in the business of creating moments that transform other people. We pour everything into making sure our audiences leave changed. We obsess over every detail of the experience we’re building for someone else.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, we stop asking whether we are doing the same for ourselves.

The most dangerous decisions aren’t made by bad people. They’re made by good people who didn’t have a mental process for their own thinking. That includes us. It included me.

This work is not a cautionary tale. It’s a discipline. Built for the moments that actually define a leader. Not the keynote stage. The hallway conversation. The budget meeting. The vendor call where nobody is watching and the pressure is loudest.

Those are the moments that build or destroy trust. And those are exactly the moments I built this for.

• Michelle Russell is Convene‘s former editor in chief.

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• Learn more about Business Events Summit at businesseventssummit.org.
• Learn more about Rashmi Airan at rashmiairan.com.