Brain Hacks: Harnessing Neuroscience for Leadership & Success

Looking for additional leadership opportunities for your new supervisors and aspiring and emerging leaders? Want to bring training to your team? Join us for our GROW classes, indicted on our Classes & Training page by the icon at left. These affordable courses are designed to help you improve your skills in areas like conflict management, emotional intelligence, delegation, communication, performance management, and more.

Overview

Your brain has evolved to help you survive, and its primary job is to keep you safe. The challenge is that your brain rarely distinguishes evolutionary threats (e.g. avoiding a lion) from the everyday – and ever-changing! – stressors of our chaotic and complex modern world. If left untrained, the brain will regularly trigger survival responses to mundane challenges like wading through email or even exciting opportunities like speaking in front of an audience or piloting a creative new solution to an organizational challenge.

The good news is that with understanding, intention, and practice, you can reprogram your brain to capitalize on principles of neuroscience. In this session, you’ll take a journey of brain optimization that teaches you – through evidence-based techniques – how to shift from the reactionary, survival-focused “Lower Brain” to the analytical, rational “Higher Brain,” – a source of creativity, empathy, and strategic thinking. This shift – achieved through targeted brain hacks that can actually strengthen desired neural pathways over time – empowers leaders to excel and drives teams to thrive even in the most challenging environments.

Leadership begins from within. The impact you make starts with you and ripples outwards. By using these brain hacks to bring intention to your own responses, you’ll not only enhance your own leadership abilities but create a culture of success by modeling:

  • The normalization of experimentation as a “courageous scientist”
  • Embracing authenticity, vulnerability, and transparency in support of a growth mindset
  • More confident, nuanced conversations around difficult or risky topics
  • Fostering teamwork and innovation
  • The embodiment of a culture of learning
  • Increased risk tolerance
  • Normalizing feedback and resilience
  • Supercharged productivity through decreased fear-brain responses (e.g. anxiety, distraction, tunnel vision, and gossip)
  • Personal ownership and accountability
  • An innovative and agile culture

In this rapidly changing world, fostering innovation and agility is key to survival and success, and taking control of the brain’s often-turbocharged anxiety and self-preservation responses help you boost the mental and physical health of yourself and those around you.

Be a catalyst for transformation and help unlock the potential of your organization’s greatest asset – its people.

Registration Fall 2023

Location: Grainger Hall, UW-Madison

Date: November 3, 2023

Time: 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Fee: $269

Register here for Fall 2023  or call 608-262-2451 to register. BONUS: Place 2 or more paid leadership courses in your cart, and use discount code SBDC10 for 10% off. Classes must be purchased in the same transaction.

Registration policy: Payment will be required at time of registration. You must have either a credit card or valid UW-Madison funding string to be able to register.

Cancellation policy: If you cancel before the program begins, there is a $25 cancellation fee. If you cancel after the program begins you will be charged for the full program fee. To cancel, call registration at 608-262-2451. Please note that in the case of a cancellation (by either the participant or the SBDC), participants can only be transferred one time into a new course.

Disability Statement: Reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities will be made if requested at least two weeks in advance. Contact the UW-Madison SBDC office at sbdc@bus.wisc.edu to request accommodations.

The Small Business Development Center at UW Madison is recognized by SHRM to offer Professional Development Credits (PDCs) for the SHRM-CP® or SHRM-SCP®.

Instructor

Paul Riehemann, Senior Trainer and Coach, Life Ecology Organization (LEO)

Paul (MBA and Certified Public Manager, UW-Madison) has led public, private and non-profit organizations and is also an experienced wellness coach and workshop instructor. Paul has earned multiple certifications including Emotional Intelligence and Primal Health Coaching, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and Project Management. He is a Mechanical Engineer and earned his Professional Engineer license in New York State.

Paul is Founding Chair of the Environmental Sustainability Rotarian Action Group (ESRAG.org, an international environmental organization through Rotary International), a Past President of the 400+ member Rotary Club of Madison, and has qualified and competed in three Ironman Triathlon World Championships.

He is skilled at interactive/task-based adult learning. His purpose as a trainer is to help others be their best.

The Wisconsin SBDC Network is a proud part of the Institute for Business & Entrepreneurship in the University of Wisconsin System.
It is funded in part through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities will be made if requested at least two weeks in advance. Contact us at sbdc@bus.wisc.edu or call (608) 263-2221.