Outsmart Your Stressors with Neuroscience

Two ways to bring this body of knowledge and its science-based practice to your audience or team:

• 60–90 minute keynote for conferences and all-staff events
• Half-day workshop with hands-on practice

Stress Givers, Stress Receivers

You had a rough day at work. By dinner, so did your partner. By bedtime, so did the kids.

Most of us grew up watching this at the dinner table, and most of us still live in it. Yet we rarely talk about stress as something that moves between people. We treat it as a private problem: your stress, your fault, your fix.

The problem isn’t that you’re not tough enough. Nobody taught you how stress works, or what it does to the people around you. So you white-knuckle through it, start a gratitude journal, and wonder why it hasn’t fixed your inbox, your to-do list, or your commute.

So Dr. Wu goes after the stressor, not just the feeling, using the 5 safety signals the brain checks for before it lets the stress response stand down.

Learning Objectives

Participants leave better equipped to look at any stressor and understand what makes it stressful, why their brain reacts the way it does, and what to change. Not a vague sense of calm that fades in half an hour.

• Stress givers and stress receivers. — Why your stress doesn’t stay yours, and why it hits the people closest to you hardest. Participants learn how to stop passing their stress on, at work and at home, and how to keep other people’s stress from becoming theirs.
• What chronic stress does to the brain — How long-term, debilitating stress affects memory, decision-making, and emotional regulation, and why toughing it out backfires.
• The 5 safety signals — Control, predictability, progress, outlets, and social support: the signals that tell the brain it’s safe to stand down. Participants learn to build each one into their own day and provide it for the people around them.
• How to handle stressors, not just manage stress — Practical changes at work and at home that go after what’s causing the stress, not just how it feels. Actionable steps to support others in tackling stressors.
• Why most stress advice falls short — Coping tools like breathing exercises can calm the body in the moment. But they don’t touch the stressor, which is why stress keeps coming back.

Once people see how stress moves between them, they can’t unsee it, at work or at home.

Choose Your Delivery Option

• Keynote — a 60–90 minute presentation. Ideal for conferences, all-staff events, all-hands meetings, wellness programs, mixed audiences of any size. It covers the core science, the 5 safety signals, and tools to use the same day, with audience engagement throughout.
• Half-day workshop — ideal for wellness training, team retreats, staff development programs, and conferences. Everything in the keynote, plus small-group exercises and discussion.

Every session is customized to your audience’s industry, challenges, and experience level. Not sure which fits? Tell Terry your date, your audience, and how much time you have, and he’ll recommend one.

Who It’s For

Everyone. The session is built for people at every level, from frontline staff to executives:

• All-staff and all-hands events
• Employee wellness and benefits programs
• Conferences and association meetings with mixed audiences
• Teams under steady pressure, such as healthcare, social services, and customer-facing staff
• Schools, family-service agencies, and community groups

How Is This Session Different?

• It goes after the stressor, not your tolerance. Most resilience programs focus on helping people cope. The message underneath is easy to miss: if you’re overwhelmed, the problem is you. Dr. Wu goes after the real culprit, the stressor, and shows people how to shrink it at work and at home.
• It treats stress as a relationship problem, not just a personal one. Most stress programs treat stress as something you handle alone. But stress moves between people: boss to employee, partner to partner, parent to child. This session follows it home, where it often lands hardest, and shows people how to stop passing it on.
• It’s not a typical wellness or motivational talk. Dr. Wu explains the science in plain language, with everyday examples from work and home. The tone is calm, practical, and occasionally funny. People leave with specific changes they can make that day, not a pep talk.

Track Record

This session is built on the same science as Dr. Wu’s most requested program, Transform Leadership, Beat Burnout with Neuroscience. Here’s how that science has landed with audiences:

• SHRM National Conference, June 2025 — 2,100+ HR leaders attended. 91% rated the session Excellent (66%) or Very Good (25%). Some called it the best among 400+ sessions at the entire conference. Read the survey results and 31 attendees’ comments.
• U.S. Department of the Interior — Part of its leadership training every year since 2023.
• Vistage — 67 leadership peer-group sessions in 21 states, with a 100% recommendation rate.
• Performance Excellence Network — A 3-hour, in-person workshop earned a Net Promoter Score of 100 in August 2026 (8 of 23 attendees surveyed).

Select comments from participants:

• “Thank you for presenting to GOAL Academy last week in Omaha, NE! I learned a lot and look forward to applying aspects of your training into my personal and professional life – specifically, considering where I am lacking control and predictability and how that affects me and where I could provide more control and predictability to help others!” — National Park Service GOAL Academy participant, 2023
• “Terry presented a very different way of looking at stressors and ways to deal with them. His presentation contained many good takeaways that can be used in both professional and personal life.” — Vistage member, 2026
• “Super helpful application for both business, family, and personal life…” — Vistage member, 2025
• “Excellent presentation and information. Great combination of scientific information and humor. Definitely doing this homework assignment.” — SHRM25 attendee, 2025
• “This was the best session I took at the conference. Sessions like these really provide context and insight into how to manage, understand and change where needed. Amazing session!!” — SHRM25 attendee, 2025

Sunday I shot the best nine holes of my life. A 38. The score isn’t the point. What I’d stopped carrying is. In late August, neuroscientist Terry Wu spoke to my Vistage group: “Transform Leadership, Beat Burnout with Neuroscience.” He said one of the most common sources of stress isn’t workload. It’s a lack of control. Not hours. Not volume. Being responsible for an outcome without the authority to move on it at the speed you can see it needs.

That one landed. I looked at my last six months and found it everywhere. Decisions made but not executed. Fixes I could see but couldn’t act on yet. The pressure of decisions you can’t move on leaks out. A short answer in a meeting. An impatient email. A tone…

Here’s the part I missed. For years I biked 12 miles a day. Every day. At the time, it was to lose weight. But it was doing something else I didn’t realize. It was burning off the stress… Workload and life changes pushed the riding out, and I stopped. I removed the outlet and kept the pressure.

So last week I took a vacation. I stayed home. No email, no phone. Golf, work in the shop, riding the bike. Each one gave me what the last six months hadn’t. I controlled the outcome. I knew what came next. I could see progress by the end of the day. That’s where Sunday came from. For the first time in months, my head was clear enough to learn.

This morning I walked back into the same structure I left. A week off resets the gauge. It doesn’t break the cycle. But I know one thing I’m putting back. ~ Rick Darsey, Monroe, Louisiana, Chief Operating Officer, Pelican Broadband

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