Lyra Puspa - Business and Organisational Neuroscientist
Leaders are often told that safety is always good and fear is always bad. Yet the brain tells
a more complex story. Brain-Focused Leadership reveals the paradox at the heart of
survival, emotion, and stress: the same mechanisms that protect us can also unlock
performance. The fight, flight, or freeze response isn’t just a relic of danger—it shapes how
people react to pressure, change, and leadership in the workplace. Stress is not inherently
harmful; the right level can sharpen focus and fuel results. Even psychological safety,
while essential for trust and openness, can quietly slip into comfort, complacency, and
stagnation.
This session challenges conventional wisdom and invites leaders to see safety and fear not
as opposites but as partners in performance. By the end, you will leave with practical,
brain-based insights on how to use both safety and fear—deliberately and responsibly—to
create conditions for engagement, innovation, and sustainable high performance.
Key Takeaways:
• Why creating too much safety can lower performance as quickly as creating too little.
• How fear, when reframed through the brain, can become a hidden ally of innovation and resilience.
• What leaders miss about pressure: the brain’s secret preference for just enough tension to unlock peak results.
Time Zone change - Our Head office is in Brisbane so we have used AEST as our default time zone. Many of our members are based in NSW and VIC so we have now moved to AEDT. QLD this session is 1 hr earlier, SA 1.5 hrs earlier and WA 3 hrs.