Our thinking brain and survival brain are at odds during stressful times. As a result, many choices to calm ourselves are actually exacerbating our stress and anxiety. This talk explains this paradox—and offers alternatives to build our resilience. Building on the core principles of my resilience training program, this talk explores how where we direct our attention—consciously or unconsciously—has tremendous ripple effects throughout our brain, nervous system, and body. Thus, by training our attention and adopting simple habits that help our survival brain feel safe, we can teach our thinking brain and survival brain to work together cooperatively. The more they do, the easier it is for us to function effectively during challenges and recover afterward. We can train ourselves to make wise decisions and access choice—even during times of incredible stress, uncertainty, and change.

Because leaders send strong ripples into the social environment, they have an extraordinarily powerful effect on other people’s resilience (or lack thereof). This talk explores how stress and emotion contagion work—and this contagion’s implications for leaders. Because of this social wiring, one critical component of effective leadership is the leader’s own self-regulation and resilience. This talk offers leader self-care strategies and powerful tools that help with decision-making under pressure. When leaders make choices to boost their own resilience, they can also enhance the collective resilience of their groups. Through simple shifts, leaders can shape for the better how their subordinates respond during stress, uncertainty, and change.

Humans produce the greatest stress arousal when situations are perceived to be novel, unpredictable, uncontrollable, and threatening to our survival. Uncertainty checks most of these boxes—and thus, we constantly seek tools (especially technological tools) for controlling it. This talk explores the two main approaches for coping with uncertainty: anticipation and resilience. Anticipation tries to predict and prevent unwanted events from occurring—and our reliance on technology leans towards anticipatory strategies. In contrast, resilience involves functioning effectively before and during unwanted events and then recovering completely, learning, and adapting afterward. We actually need both approaches to be our most effective—but many of us lean too heavily on anticipation, to our disadvantage. This talk explores how to create a balance between them—and especially how to build the adaptive capacity that allows us to respond effectively to whatever happens.

Trauma is surprisingly common: it occurs whenever our survival brain perceives us as helpless, powerless, or lacking control during a challenging event. Because of its pervasiveness—and the dramatic increases in anxiety, depression, substance abuse, chronic pain, and suicidality that have co-arisen with trauma in the last 30 years—there’s now a growing desire for “trauma-informed” policies in education, healthcare, and law enforcement. Nonetheless, our society still tends to collectively disown trauma, with many negative repercussions. This talk explores why we tend to disown trauma—and it surveys the surprising range of negative effects that result. What can we do to change this? This talk offers some simple yet effective recommendations for working skillfully with trauma in schools, workplaces, and communities.