Episode 62: How to Strengthen Your Executive Presence
Discover how to regulate your nervous system, reduce stress, and elevate your executive presence using science-backed strategies. This episode breaks down practical steps any leader can take to strengthen composure, confidence, and overall effectiveness in high-pressure environments.
Blog Recap
Burnout Isn’t a Flaw—It’s Your Brain Asking for a Reset
What if executive presence has nothing to do with how you dress or stand, and everything to do with your nervous system? In a recent episode of the Two Marketing Moms podcast, Dr. Lizette Warner, a biomedical scientist turned executive coach, reveals how neuroscience holds the key to stronger leadership and beating burnout.
Executive Presence Is Really Nervous System Regulation
Dr. Warner shares a powerful insight from her own journey: that brilliant, capable leader who freezes under pressure isn’t lacking skill—their nervous system is simply misfiring. As she explains, the leaders we most admire aren’t necessarily the most polished or poised. They’re the ones whose nervous systems are the most regulated.
Think about it: when a chaotic leader enters a room, chaos follows. When a calm leader arrives, the entire energy shifts. That’s because people unconsciously regulate to your nervous system. Executive presence, Warner argues, is actually about your nervous system being in sync with your leadership identity.
The SMART Rewiring Method: Three Steps to Retrain Your Brain
Warner developed a science-based framework to help leaders literally retrain their brains for sustainable success:
1. Recognize: Map out your system. What triggers you? How do you show up under pressure? Warner suggests tracking your stress responses—even using tools like an Oura ring to identify patterns you might miss.
2. Regulate: Use micro-practices to bring your nervous system back into balance. This could be breathwork, grounding exercises, or even naming your emotions. Research shows that accurately labeling an emotion can actually halt it from cascading. Warner’s personal trick? Reframing “nervous” as “excited”—they’re the same energy, just different interpretations.
3. Rewire: Replace old neural pathways with intentional habits. This is the long game—research shows it takes six to nine months to carve new neural pathways. But with consistent practice and accountability, lasting change is possible.
Burnout: When You’ve Been Brilliant for Too Long
Warner offers a refreshing reframe on burnout: “Burnout is when you’ve been brilliant for too long.” It’s not a character flaw or weakness—it’s a system failure.
She compares it to a laptop that gets slower and slower by Friday. It doesn’t need to try harder; it needs to reboot. The same is true for us. We’re often at our best in the morning because we just slept all night. But we can maintain that brilliance throughout the day by implementing regular system refreshes.
The warning? If you don’t reset intentionally, your body will force you to. Warner shares the story of a young VP who developed TMJ (locked jaw) because she felt pressured to have all the answers. Her body was literally telling her to stop speaking—to admit when she didn’t know something.
One Simple Practice to Start Today
For perfectionists and high achievers who struggle with traditional meditation, Warner recommends progressive breathing: Inhale for three, exhale for three. Inhale for four, exhale for four. Continue increasing by one count each round up to six or seven. This technique keeps your mind engaged while shifting your brain from stress mode to strategic thinking.
The Bottom Line
You don’t need to wait six months to see results. Start by recognizing your stress patterns, experiment with regulation techniques, and give yourself permission to reset. As Warner reminds us, athletes have reset protocols—why shouldn’t leaders?
Want to assess your own nervous system regulation? Check out Dr. Warner’s Smart Rewiring Assessment to identify your growth areas and get personalized strategies for strengthening your executive presence from the inside out.
Episode Transcript
Kelly Callahan-Poe
If you want to use neuroscience to strengthen your executive presence and lead with calm, confident impact, this episode is for you. Welcome to the To Marketing Mom’s podcast. I’m Kelly Callahan-Poe, and today’s episode is called Executive Presence with Dr. Lizette Warner. Lizette is a smart, rewiring scientist and executive coach who helps leaders beat burnout, make better decisions, and accelerate their careers using neuroscience. She’s the COO at Trust and Leadership and author of Power, Poise, and Presence. Welcome, Lizette.
Lizette Warner, PhD
Thanks for having me, Kelly.
Kelly
I am so excited to pick your brain. Yeah, your background is biomedical science. Can you tell us how this background really led you to learn about the secrets of executive presence based on neuroscience?
Lizette
Yeah, this certainly wasn’t where I started out. It wasn’t where I thought this would take me, a degree in biomedical engineering. I was very systems-focused, and I was so fascinated by the human system, as it were. And what I found fascinating when, after I got my degree, I entered leadership, I found that human leadership was just another biological system.
It’s electrical, it’s chemical, it’s behavioral. I was doing a lot of work with biomarkers in my career. And when I became chief science officer, I saw brilliant people whose brains were misfiring under pressure, not because they lacked any skill. And it was my own nervous system that was misfiring under pressure. remember people ask me a lot of times, my gosh, how are you so calm when you’re speaking to a room full of people?
And I was like, it wasn’t always so, right? It was my own nervous system was misfiring. I remember being in front of a group of other PhDs and just psyching myself out of, my gosh, they’re going to be judging me. How can I be speaking to all of these people, right? My nervous system wasn’t regulated. And that is what drew me into neuroscience and neuroscience-based coaching, right? It’s helping leaders learn to self-regulate their own nervous system so that they can lead with clarity.
with confidence and with connection because the peoples whose nervous systems are the most regulated, they’re the ones whose leadership is admired. We talk about executive presence, but it’s really your nervous system regulation. And the more that we can understand that, because when you get someone who comes into a room, a leader, Kelly, you’ve probably been in this situation, right? You get like a chaotic leader who comes in and all of sudden the entire room is just chaos in there.
People are regulating to your nervous system. So, we as leaders need to understand that we need to self-regulate our own nervous systems because executive presence, it’s not about posture, it’s not about polish, it’s about your nervous system being in sync with your leadership identity.
Kelly
You’ve cleverly branded this, the smart rewiring method. What are the stages or steps of smart rewiring that leaders can start practicing today?
Lizette
Yeah, so smart rewiring is the science-based framework that we developed to help leaders literally retrain their brains for sustainable success. And it has three different stages, really. So, the first is recognize. So, this is mapping out your own system, understanding, like that example that I gave of me being in front of this audience, what was going on with me at that? You know afterwards we tend to catastrophize right? We’re like I did this this was horrible. This was awful I did this and that but had I taken a moment in that in that aftermath to just ask myself Liz that what was going on? What would in I might have been able to answer well, I was super I was really nervous like I had a lot of butterflies in my stomach I had these thoughts in my head of what are people thinking about me? So that’s the first step is recognize. What are your own triggers? How are you showing up? And just that one, recognize, right? The second is then to start to bring your nervous system back into balance. you can use, so that one is regulate. So, you first recognize, then you regulate. You use kind of micro practices to bring your nervous system back into balance.
And so, for me in that moment, it could have been breath work. Breath work doesn’t work with everyone, right? It could have been grounding. It could have been like just putting my feet on the ground and then just feeling my posture that I’m just aligned. It could also be naming the emotion. So, research has shown when we are able to accurately name the emotion, we can halt that emotion from cascading. So, for example, you know, Lizette, you’re nervous, right? Or I could have labeled it, wow, you’re excited. The excitement and nervous, it’s the same energy, it’s the same pathways in the brain. So, I got into the habit of telling myself, you’re just so excited to speak to this team. You’re so excited to be here to be able to present to them. So, it’s those three steps, recognize, regulate, and then you start to rewire, replace those neural pathways with intentional habits. And that takes time, right? That rewiring is really the inside job that we have to do with ourselves. So, research shows that it takes anywhere from six months to nine months for us to carve new neural pathways in our brains.
So, we can learn something really quick in a podcast, in a training, but to actually put it into practice is going to take time.
Kelly
What are the steps for rewiring?
Lizette
Yeah, so rewiring takes the first step, recognize. So, you’ve got to recognize what that is when I’m in stress response. So, for me, when I’m able to, the other part of recognizing is being able to take those assessments. So, I have an aura ring as well. And a lot of times we work our leaders; we advise them to have some sort of way to measure what’s going on. That’s another recognition, right? And use those along with identifying what are your regulation practices. But the rewiring is really that longer step of like, okay, so I recognize that I’m about to speak on a podcast with Kelly and normally I get really nervous. So, a rewiring step for me has been, and actually my aura ring, the reason I brought it up is because it will show me when I’m in stress during the day. And so, I use that with my leaders to go back in their day and try to put in experiments to experiment with different ways of dealing with their stress. So, for me, when I’m speaking in front of any audience, even though I may not look like I’m nervous, my nervous system gets nervous. So, I got into the habit of telling myself, Lizette, you’re excited. And what that did with me with my aura ring, I started to track when I was speaking in front of audiences, and my stress went from being very high stress to now I’m engaged or relaxed even when I’m speaking. Just because I re-labeled that emotion from nervous to excited. I’m excited to be here. So that rewiring is using those recognition pathways, identifying how do you want to try and experiment with different ways to address those things that might be throwing you off? And then the rewiring piece, the different phases of that are using those, the recognition and the regulation and really starting to play with that. Now, another piece of rewiring is accountability, right? Holding yourself accountable. And so, a lot of times coaches can do that for clients, right? We hold them accountable, but a buddy. You know, someone in your network could hold you accountable. it’s, yeah, it’s being able to take the things that you’ve identified, have some practices, you know, put those in practice with the rewiring piece and then the accountability pathway and then the feedback, right? The feedback, what do I do? How did it, did it work? Did it not work? And if it didn’t work, that’s great. That’s more data.
So, then I could try something else. For me, the labeling nervous to excitement really, really worked. So, I’m like, okay, I’m gonna go with that, right? Until it stops working, in which case, then I’ll have other feedback. Yeah, great question.
Kelly
On your website, you offer a smart rewiring assessment that I found, and I took the assessment and my results are balanced, but with growth areas. And so, I’m not in like the high-performance zone that I aspire to be, suggesting that I need to optimize my system and how my brain works under pressure. Can you tell us a little bit about this assessment and how we can use it as a tool?
Lizette
Yeah, so I love assessments. The problem sometimes with assessments, and I don’t know, I haven’t told this story yet here, but I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s. So, I was initially, and if you don’t know what it is, it’s an autoimmune disease, you have low thyroid, but I was diagnosed like three to five years after I went to the doctor.
So, I had gotten my assessments with the doctor, and they diagnosed, you know, I had low thyroid, so they put me on some medicine, that’s fine. I still wasn’t feeling like things were right. And so, a few years later I went, and I got some additional testing through a different organization. And lo and behold, they said, oh, you actually have Hashimoto’s, which is an autoimmune disease where your antibodies start attacking your own thyroid. And so, it’s not good, right?
But I took the assessments with the doctor, they just missed it. Right? And so, I had to take these other assessments. So, the point is the assessments are good and the Smart Rewiring one that we have, it’s a good assessment. It was derived from one of the assessments that we use within total, within our total practice. But it’s not just one assessment, it’s a number of assessments. And that gives you a really clear picture. The assessment that you took, the Smart Rewiring one, right? It’s a conglomeration of several of our assessments and we brought it into one so that we could tell people, okay, here’s where you are and here’s some growth edges for you where you can start to practice. And we even give people some examples and some steps. Here’s how you can move forward.
One of them of course is to move forward with us, that’s not necessarily, not everyone has to do that, right? But it’s good to sometimes have an outside assessment that is whole from a certain point of view, right? So, you don’t fall into this situation that I was in with my Hashimoto’s disease that the doctor couldn’t tell me because he hadn’t run all of these other assessments. And so that one is, yeah, like I said, it’s made from a couple of different assessments in order to give someone information and knowledge that maybe they didn’t have before
Kelly
I thought it was very helpful and asked some questions that I hadn’t really thought about before, but a lot of them I recognize. I recognize myself in areas that I know that I need to improve on. So, it’s worth checking out. A lot of us, especially women, suffer from burnout. And you say burnout isn’t a flaw, it’s a system failure. What do you mean by that?
Lizette
Yeah, oftentimes people think in label burnout, know, it’s almost a weakness, right? You’ve got to do all of these things. Though here’s the way I describe or how I define burnout, Kelly. It’s maybe different than what everyone else has heard. Burnout is when you’ve been brilliant for too long.
Kelly
I love that. That’s just amazing. I’ve never thought of it like that.
Lizette
Burnout, yes, burnout is us just trying to be brilliant for too long. It’s that I always give the example of a laptop, right? My laptop by Friday is running so slow. I’m aggravated and annoyed with it when in reality what it needs is it needs to be rebooted, Lizette. Can you just take five minutes to reboot that thing? Right, because it’s been storing up cache. It’s had all these things. You keep downloading stuff. Can we just delete and clear out space? And that’s what happens with us, right? We think we can continue to be brilliant without either taking that break or then we’re best in the morning, right? And why are we best in the morning? Because we just slept all night. But you can be your best all day long. So, your body, instead of focusing on being brilliant all day, right? And overclocking your body on stress hormones and your system that hasn’t been recalibrated, you need to figure out what do you need to do so that you can remain brilliant all day. And that might be involving some sort of resets for yourself. Maybe it’s not a whole system reboot, but it’s some sort of system refresh for your own system so that you can continue to be brilliant for as long as possible during your day. Because it is possible.
Kelly
That makes a lot of sense. I’ve thought about that recently a lot because I I’m a bit of a perfectionist myself. I think that when you suffer from perfectionism, you feel like you operate at 100 % all the time. The problem that you don’t realize until later in life is that most people can’t operate at 100%, 100% of the time. And so, you do need those moments of breaks and timeouts for yourself. And that’s a huge part of all of these things that you’re talking about in terms of smart rewiring and something that I need to think about. And I’ve been working on myself to help myself reset as I do my work.
Lizette
Yeah, because if you don’t reset, the hard and ugly truth is your body will reset, right? It will force you to take a break. You’ll have some sort of disease. This is where disease starts cropping up, because we run our systems. When we’re young, we can, like we can do it. My daughter, she wakes up at four, five in the morning to go to the gym and go to work, and then some, not every night, but…You know, one night we’re working late because we we’re in choir and so we don’t get home till late and then she’s got to get up really early the next morning. I get up at the same time that she does and I’m like, my gosh, I don’t know how she does this. And I’m like, well, she does it because she’s so young, right? But she does that one night a week, okay? Not all the nights in the week. So, you can stress your system, but there’s a penalty to be paid if you’re not honoring your body.
We had a coach once, we were speaking and she was sharing how when she had her exec job, she worked in a corner office, she had gotten elevated to VP very early in her career. And the person who had been a VP prior, everyone came to their office, asking them questions, they had all the answers. So, she now steps into that role, and she’s feeling like, I have to have all the answers. People are still coming to my desk. She ended up developing TMJ. And so, for people who don’t know, that’s, I don’t even remember what the, anyway, it’s kind of locked jaw. And so, I had asked her in that moment to go back and think, what might your body have been telling you in that moment? And it just, it was like a light bulb going off. It was telling me not to speak. You don’t have to answer a question you don’t know.
And so, her body ended up locking her jaw that she still to this day is working through. And this was years ago, right? So, your body, your body will, it’ll pipe up, it’ll speak. And the thing is we don’t want that, right? We want people to live healthy, to not live in burnout, right? To understand like you are, Kelly, what are your reset protocols? Athletes have them. What are ours? And so, a lot of times when we work with leaders, we help them define what their reset protocols are.
Kelly
We’ve talked a lot about different things today and is there one additional science-backed action that someone can take to start rewiring themselves for making better decision-making, something that you can do that’s not necessarily going to take six to eight months?
Lizette
So, and one that I’ll introduce and it’s one that I learned and I love it because it’s so simple, it’s your breath, but it’s not your, know, if people are familiar with box breathing, you breathe in four, you hold for four, you exhale for four, you hold for four. It’s not that. What I love about it is that the hard part that people have with breathing exercises is, you know, just staying with it focusing that long enough to stay with it and stay calm because if you’re in burnout, if you’re a perfectionist, you’re always on the go, right, you need something that’s moving that you can kind of keep your mind up with. And so, it’s a progressive breathing. So, it’s like you inhale for three, you exhale for three, you inhale for four, you exhale for four. You inhale for five, you exhale for five. You inhale for six, you exhale for six. Right? And so, it’s this progressive breathing. so, you can kind of stay with it and it’s, it’s, it’s ever changing. So, it’s one of those things. It’s a little, it’s a little bit different than your regular, just take a breath, like just breathe through it. Right. but it’s a progressive breathing that one stimulates your mind and your body so that you can, you can try and reset yourself. And so, it’s something you can use like before meeting before literally before anything. It shifts your brain from stress to strategic thinking.
Kelly
I will try that. I appreciate your insights today, Lizette. We will provide your contact and a link for the Smart Rewiring Assessment at twomarketingmoms.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And don’t forget to subscribe and share. Thanks for joining.
Dr. Lizette Warner Contact Information
https://www.trustandleadership.com
https://www.trustandleadership.com/mind-performance-assessment
https://www.linkedin.com/company/trust-and-leadership
