Heidi Hanna
- Chief Energy Officer of Synergy Brain Fitness & Best-Selling Author
Heidi Hanna Biography
As an experienced speaker, Dr. Heidi Hanna has been featured at many national and global conferences, including the Fortune Magazine Most Powerful Women in Business Summit, ESPN Women’s Leadership Summit, and the Million Dollar Round Table. She is founder and Chief Energy Officer of Synergy, a consulting company providing brain-based health and performance programs for organizations, and the Director of Education for the American Institute of Stress.
Dr. Hanna is a Founding Partner of The Academy for Brain Health and Performance, where she serves as the Director of Training and Development. She is currently pursuing a second PhD at Pepperdine University in Global Leadership and Change, researching integrative neuroscience applications for organizational resilience.
Dr. Hanna’s publications include the NY Times bestseller The SHARP Solution: A Brain-Based Approach for Optimal Performance (Wiley, Feb 2013), Stressaholic: 5 Steps to Transform Your Relationship With Stress (Wiley, Jan 2014) and Recharge: 5 Shifts to Energize Your Life (Synergy, 2015).
Dr. Hanna is a National Board Member for The Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor, a Fellow with the American Institute of Stress, and she currently serves as editor of their quarterly publication, Contentment. Recently, Dr. Hanna created The Beyond Funny Project, a non-profit dedicated to providing resources and education related to the benefits of healthy humor.
Dr. Hanna holds a bachelor’s degree in communications from Penn State University, where she competed on the Big 10 softball team and received academic All-American honors. She holds a master’s degree in mental health counseling and a Ph.D. degree in holistic nutrition. Clients have included Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Boeing, Proctor & Gamble, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, ESPN and Starbucks, the NFL and PGA Tour as well as professional and amateur athletes.
Heidi Hanna
- Chief Energy Officer of Synergy Brain Fitness & Best-Selling Author
Recharge Your Brain and Your Business
Session length: 45 minutes
In this session, Dr. Heidi Hanna will guide participants in an exploration into the most valuable resource we have - human capital and the power of the brain. Based on the latest neuroscience of stress, mindfulness and motivation, Dr. Hanna uncovers research-driven guiding principles and a simple framework for optimizing brain health and fitness. Through interactive discussions around best-practices, participants will create a Recharge Tool-kit with specific strategies for their daily routine and team rituals to best support relationships at home and work.
Key Learning Takeaways
- Learn the key organizing principles of the brain and how non-conscious bias can be both a challenge and an asset.
- Understand the new science of stress including the difference between reactions and responses, the power of perspective, and how to automate critical self-care strategies.
- A specific formula and simple process to create individual and team action plans for integrating simple daily shifts to use stress to drive performance and build health and resilience (building a custom Recharge Toolkit for individuals, teams and organizations).
Heidi Hanna
- Chief Energy Officer of Synergy Brain Fitness & Best-Selling Author
Building Brain Health and Fitness at Work
Session length: 90 minutes
Recent discoveries in neuroscience have provided a detailed framework for understanding human behavior and our resistance to change. What’s needed most, in this age of massive data aggregation in specific silos of science, are opportunities for us to integrate findings in an applicable way with real-world populations. Within organizations, we hold several keys to successful application of science, including support systems, shared meaning and purpose, accountability, measurement tools and more.
It’s important that health promotion professionals have an opportunity to fully understand the translation and application of the latest neuroscience, and then recognize how to communicate it most effectively within their training programs to employees with very little time and energy to engage in these types of offerings.
In this highly interactive presentation, Dr. Heidi Hanna will share the latest updates related to the neuroscience of health and behavior and offer a simple integrative framework for employee health and performance programming.
Participants will have the opportunity to experience evidence-based interventions and explore ways to incorporate brain health and fitness into their existing wellness platforms, including an integrative neuroscience assessment and other evidence-based assessments that can be used in their own program design. For every 50 minutes of discussion, participants will also engage in short, interactive practices such as breathwork, mindfulness meditation, social mapping, strategic humor, and more, to experience the practical application of the science.
Case studies will be presented, and all attendees will leave with a specific, customized action plan for improving the brain health and fitness of the employees, clients or patients they serve. In addition, each individual practitioner will also have in hand a personalized plan for boosting their own brain power so that they can sustain optimal energy levels while providing support for those in their organization or community.
Key Learning Takeaways
- The brain is the master conductor of our energy and attention, and can be trained to optimize performance while also enhancing mental and emotional health.
- Stress, including multitasking, overstimulation and ineffective communication, is the biggest enemy of engagement and performance, and if left unmanaged will lead to serious mental health problems.
- Training the brain and body to master stress and incorporating simple tools and techniques into existing workplace strategies not only boosts brain power at work, it improves brain health and performance leading to lower health care costs and greater measures of wellbeing that are correlated with better performance across all measures.
Heidi Hanna
- Chief Energy Officer of Synergy Brain Fitness & Best-Selling Author
Helping Clients get Unstuck from Stress: Shifting Stress for Good
Session length: 90 minutes
Stress is not a disease or disorder, but a personal relationship we have with the circumstances of our lives based on three primary factors: Stress Load (demand versus capacity), Stress Lens (perception and mindset) and Stress Signature (how stress shows up in short term signs and longer term symptoms).
Using the Stress 360™ Coaching Framework and Assessment series, we can guide our clients through deeper awareness of and appreciation for stress in order to use the energy and information it provides to fuel positive change. When we are able to effectively express and mobilize our innate stress reactions, we can release the negative effects of chronic stress and harness it for good.
In this coaching demonstration, Dr. Heidi Hanna will model how to use the Stress Mastery Formula (assess, appreciate, adjust) using the Stress 360™ Framework of discovery. She will work with a client on a specific “stress hijack” situation, to bring awareness to how the client is experiencing stress in a unique and personal way.
Part 1 of the call will quickly overview the Stress 360™ Framework of assess-appreciate-adjust works in coaching situations, and the integrative neuroscience theory that supports the methodology.
Part 2 of the call will be a live demonstration of a specific workplace situation that has triggered feelings of being stuck. Part 3 will be an open Q&A with the audience.
Key Learning Takeaways
- Understand the new neuroscience of stress and how it leads to feeling stuck.
- See the impact of a Stress 360™ Reframe to open up creative thinking and increase feelings of self-control and empowerment.
- Recognize the critical role of the coaching relationship in building brain fitness through confidence, connection and contribution.
- Learn a simple framework to use when guiding clients through stressful experiences to improve outcomes and sustainable change.