Stress Physiologist, Author, and Tech/ Entrepreneurship Keynote Speaker
Hi, Tech/AI/ Entrepreneurship partner
Dr. Rebecca Heiss here. As a stress physiologist I understand the fears that many tech companies and entrepreneurs are facing right now in the face of substantial changes coming at unprecedented speeds.
Your engineers are shipping faster than they ever have. Ask them how it's going and watch what happens to their face.
I speak to tech companies and founders in the middle of the strangest stretch most of you have worked through. The tools have become extraordinary. The roadmap has been rewritten. Decisions that used to take a quarter now take a week, and everybody in the building knows it.
And the thing nobody says out loud in the all-hands: your people are producing more and feeling worse, and they can't explain why. Leadership reads that as a morale problem, or a comms problem, or a change-management problem, and throws the usual things at it. None of them work, because it isn't any of those.
It's physiology. Specifically, it's what happens to a nervous system that has been handed infinite options and no way to close a decision. That's a solvable problem, but only if you name it correctly first.
Your teams aren't afraid of AI. They're exhausted by it.
Those are different problems and they have different fixes, and most organizations are solving the wrong one.
The fear story is the one that gets written about — people worried about their jobs, resisting the tools, quietly hoping this passes. That's real, and I address it. But it is not what's flattening your teams. What's flattening them is the cost of a decision that never closes.
This is not burnout
Nearly everything written about AI and exhaustion right now calls it burnout. That's the wrong diagnosis, and it matters, because the burnout fix is rest — and rest does not touch this.
Burnout is depletion. You gave everything and there's nothing left. What your teams are carrying is different. AI didn't add tasks to their day; it added possibilities. And a brain pays for every option it considers, not just the one it picks.
Send an exhausted engineer on a week's leave and they come back rested into the same infinite aperture. The tiredness starts again in about ninety minutes. If your last three retention fixes were wellness-shaped and none of them moved the number, this is why.
What's actually happening in the body
The stress response is a mobilization system. It floods you with resources so you can act. That's its job and it's superb at it.
But mobilization needs a target. When the threat is a bear, you run, the system discharges, and you're fine. When the threat is I could have built this eleven other ways and I'm not sure the one I shipped was right, there's nothing to run at. The energy mobilizes and stays mobilized. Blood flow shifts away from the prefrontal cortex — the exact region your people need for the judgment you now depend on them for, because the tools took over everything below it.
So the output got faster and the humans got worse at the one thing the tools can't do.
The quieter cost, and why senior people feel it worst
The grunt work you just automated was doing something for your people.
A brain files by effort. Struggling through a problem is how it gets stored and retrieved later. Take away the struggle and you take away the filing — which is why capable engineers are starting to say they can't quite remember how they used to know things. It reads as impostor feeling. It isn't. It's a retrieval problem with a physical cause, and the fix is deliberate friction in specific places rather than reassurance.
This lands hardest on your most experienced people, because they have the most to lose from a skill quietly eroding. They're also the ones least likely to say so.
What I do about it in the room
I give your people the mechanism, and then something to do with it the same day.
No tool advice. I don't teach prompting, I don't name products, and I don't do "five ways to use AI better." Any talk that does has a shelf life of about eleven months. This is about the wetware, and the wetware is not getting a patch.
Your audience leaves with a name for what they've been feeling, an understanding of why rest didn't fix it, and a deliberately narrowed aperture — a short list of possibilities they've decided, on purpose, to stop considering. That last one sounds small. It's the whole thing.
Keynotes for Tech/ Entrepreneurship
![FEAR[less]](https://rebeccaheiss.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Fearless-purple-white.png "Fearless purple white")
Leadership
Excelling Through Uncertainty
In this engaging keynote, Dr. Rebecca leverages decades of research into stress and human behavior to share simple, science-backed techniques for transforming fear into the fuel that will propel leaders and their teams to greater confidence, focus, and performance.
This presentation is perfect for leaders and teams:
-
Feeling overwhelmed by the stress, challenge, or unpredictable change they’re facing
-
Ready to return to performance growth and/or concerned about how failure might be perceived
-
Hoping to understand the science behind stress and anxiety better so they can know how to manage it more effectively
-
Needing to come together to drive performance forward
The audience will leave able to:
-
Rapidly transform stress and fear into energy that works for, rather than against, them
-
Recalibrate their stress response so they can step into uncomfortable changes and challenges
-
Adopt an adventure mindset that will fuel their resilience and adaptability in high-pressure situations
The Stress Advantage
Harnessing the Power of Stress to Boost Performance
We’ve gone through pandemics, supply chain issues, and uncertainty in global markets and now it’s time to get back to work. What if instead of trying to fight stress, we could transform it into a competitive advantage?
In this eye-opening keynote, Dr. Rebecca reveals the secret upside of stress that the highest-performing athletes and leaders use to fuel their performance. Helping to move individuals and companies from symptoms of PTSD to PTG (Post Traumatic Growth), she shares her simple science-based framework that allows anyone to stop fighting stress, and start leaning into it - improving productivity, increasing connection to others, and growing through challenges.
This presentation is perfect for leaders and teams:
-
Trying to battle increasing levels of stress, burnout, and disengagement
-
Ready to return to performance growth
-
Feeling stuck on a treadmill that’s always moving faster
-
Wanting to alleviate stress, but wary of the traditional “stress management” techniques that only add MORE “to do’s” (and stress) to their plates
The audience will leave able to:
-
Understand the biological root of their stress response and recalibrate that response to work for their benefit in the modern world
-
Effectively engage with their fears and reframe them as energy that can optimize performance and growth
-
Adopt a simple framework for rewiring their brains so they can respond differently to challenges, reduce burnout, and restore purpose and fulfillment to their work
![FEAR[less]](https://rebeccaheiss.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/FEARless-Logo-Teal-White.png "FEARless Logo Teal White"){kind=logo}
Fueling Profitable Growth
Winning streaks exist. In sports and sales, the winner’s effect is real, measurable, and simple to execute when you understand the science that drives these clutch performances. Welcome to your competitive edge. The Fear(less) Sales framework motivates individuals and teams to find a new peak performance level by harnessing the stress and pressure they feel to work for them (rather than against them). Olympic athletes don’t break world records during practice - they break records when the stress and pressure are at their highest. With a shift in our mindsets, we too can smash records, all while finding deeper meaning and purpose in our work.Â
This presentation is perfect for leaders and teams:
-
Looking to use stress and change as a catalyst for growth
-
Stalled, plateaued or settled into apathetic patterns of behavior
-
Wanting to bring more purpose and meaning to the work they do
-
Ready to level up their performance and springboard their growth potential.
The audience will leave able to:
-
Tackle tough goals with a positive, fearless approach that builds confidence in both the individual and the team.
-
Understand how challenges, changes, and stress can lead to greater purpose and fulfillment in their lives
-
Harness the physiological and psychological power of the "winner’s effect.
-
Develop personalized strategies for transforming pressure into performance.
Amplify
the
Learning
Keynote Add-Ons
Bulk Books
Dr. Rebecca’s newest book, Springboard, asks the question "What if we’ve been trying to get rid of the very thing that enablesÂ
our greatest level of performance, meaning, and purpose?" Rather than attempt to get rid of stress, learn how to put it to use and wield stress as a competitive advantage. Â [And check out hte accompanying course and workbook to immediately apply the learnings]
Stress & Anxiety Masterclass
Participants won't feel less stressed after this program—they'll feel more powerful in their stress. Learn to use ALL levels of stress as fuel for excellence, not just the elusive "optimal zone" that traditional stress management promises.