SBDC Brain Hacks: Harnessing Neuroscience for Leadership & Success

This interactive, science-backed course takes you on a transformative journey, helping you master the art of managing stress and cultivating resilience in the face of everyday business challenges. Our brains, designed for survival, often respond to modern stressors with the same fight-or-flight intensity once reserved for life-threatening dangers, which can lead us to undesirable self-preservation reactions.If any of the following situations sound familiar, this course is for you!

• Feeling paralyzed by “stage fright” before a presentation or meeting
• Being defensive or withdrawn after receiving constructive feedback
• Keeping quiet during a meeting due to fear of being judged or rejected
• Feeling overwhelmed or distracted when trying to solve a big or new problem

Learning Objectives

In this course, participants will learn:

• practical ways to handle stress and avoid feeling overwhelmed by applying simple brain tools to stay calm and clear-minded in any situation.
• how to rewire their brains to respond positively to challenges instead of automatically reacting with fear or frustration, helping them make better decisions under pressure.
• to recognize when their stress levels are rising and practice quick techniques to keep stress-related reactions in check, avoiding the “fight or flight” response to everyday issues.
• to approach difficult conversations calmly and constructively, ensuring they stay focused on solutions instead of getting defensive or reactive.
• to build resilience, making it easier to bounce back from setbacks and keep moving forward, even in challenging situations.

The Science Behind the Curriculum

Developed by Dr. Niraj (Raj) Nijhawan, this curriculum has a proven track record of translating complex scientific concepts into straightforward tools that participants can apply immediately to improve their focus, resilience, and stress management.

The program’s approach combines the latest scientific insights with hands-on exercises, ensuring participants not only understand the “why” behind each technique but also have the chance to practice and adopt these methods. The curriculum’s science-backed strategies, rooted in research on neuroplasticity, stress responses, and brain health, make it effective, while its interactive design ensures that participants leave with practical skills to create real, positive changes in their professional and personal lives.

Course Details

Your brain has evolved to help you survive; the challenge is that your brain rarely distinguishes physical threats from the everyday – and ever-changing! – stressors of our chaotic and complex modern world. Without awareness and practice, the brain views all threats as triggers survival responses to mundane challenges like a perceived insult (loss of social status?),public speaking opportunities or suggesting a creative new solution to an organizational challenge. Our stress-related neurochemicals can ‘run amok!’; with practice, the brain hacks help you reduce your stress levels, forever.

The good news is that with understanding, intention, and practice, you can reprogram your brain using lessons learned from brain-science studies. In this highly-interactive course, you’ll take a journey that teaches you – through evidence-based techniques – how to shift from the reactionary, survival-focused “Lower Brain” to the “Higher Brain,” – a source of creativity, effectiveness and genius. This shift is achieved through targeted brain hacks that  strengthen desired neural pathways over time, empowers leaders to excel, and drives teams to thrive even in the most challenging environments. An end result: fear to fulfillment.

In this rapidly changing world, fostering innovation and agility is key to success, both at work and home. Being in control of the lower-brain’s often-turbocharged anxiety and self-preservation reactions help you boost your mental and physical health while contributing to these in others.

This workshop is an invitation to be a catalyst for transformation and help unlock the potential of your organization’s greatest asset – its people.

Brain Hacks: Harnessing Neuroscience for Leadership & Success