Speaking at the Brisbane Business Hub, Danni invited local business owners and executives to rethink the way they lead. Her focus was on presence: teaching leaders how to regulate their nervous system, protect their mental bandwidth and set boundaries that preserve energy, so they can lead themselves – and their teams – with confidence and clarity.

Why presence outperforms push

In many organisations, Danni noted, leaders are praised for busyness and rewarded for resilience at all costs. But the toll is high: disconnection between managers and their teams, reactivity that leads to short-term fixes, and a culture of burnout.

She argued that the true role of a leader is to create the conditions for better decisions. That begins with the basics of neuroscience: a regulated nervous system, protected mental bandwidth and a clear sense of direction.

“Your energy comes into a room before you do,” she told the audience. “When you walk in, what are you telling yourself? That no one will want to speak to you, so you’ll just hide at the back? Or are you arriving with a clear intention – even if it’s just to bring some happiness into the room?”

The EMBODY Framework

To help leaders move from intention to action, Danni introduced her six-part EMBODY framework. It’s a model she uses with all of her clients, from solo entrepreneurs to chief executives.

• Energetics – The charge you bring into a room.
• Mindset – The stories you tell yourself before you walk in.
• Body – Regulating the nervous system in real time; grounding yourself so you can get out of your head. “Imagine if you could take a step back, take a breath, and actually respond instead of react.”
• Ownership – What Danni calls ‘radical responsibility’. As she explained: “I’m where I am because of the decisions I made. Taking responsibility for the decisions you make is going to shift the trajectory of your life.”
• Direction – A clear sense of purpose, vision and values. “Do you actually know what your vision is and what your values are? Not your company’s – yours.”
• You – Self-leadership as the foundation of leading others. “How can you lead somebody else when you can’t even lead yourself?”

For Danni, ownership is the inflection point. Once leaders take radical responsibility for their choices, everything else – from energy to direction – begins to shift.

Three practical tools leaders can use today

To make her framework tangible, Danni guided the room through a series of short practices that turned theory into habit. The first was a simple 90-second breathing reset – a way to calm the nervous system in less than two minutes.

“If you do this breath work, you’ll notice you feel calmer, more relaxed, and you’re allowing your brain to rest,” she explained. “It regulates the amygdala, restores strength in the prefrontal cortex and brings clarity and purpose.”

Next came an anchoring exercise, where participants learned to recall a calm, relaxed state before stepping into a meeting or presentation. The process was simple: reflect on a moment when you felt clear, confident and capable, then fully relive it – what you were thinking, hearing, saying to yourself, and feeling in that moment. At the peak of that memory, squeeze your thumb tightly to lock the state in.

“Anchor that feeling into your body,” she said. “When you want to step into executive presence, grab your thumb and it will bring that feeling back.”

Finally, she shared a deceptively simple daily journaling prompt: “I choose to be… / I want…”. Danni explained that she writes them down each morning to set her intention for the day.

“I used to think it was a whole lot of rubbish until I started doing it,” she admitted. “But it literally shifts the way that you show up if you set the intention of how you want to show up.”

The ripple effect of embodied leadership

Danni also challenged leaders to stop wearing “busy” as a badge, and instead protect their strategic edge. “Instead of burning out everybody around you and yourself,” she said, “imagine if you could just show up as you – vulnerable, and asking people to walk with you.”

The ripple effects of this kind of embodied leadership are significant: decisions made with clarity instead of haste, leaders with more energy to sustain performance, teams who feel safe to contribute, and cultures that are aligned to values rather than drained by busyness.

And at the heart of it all is self-leadership.

“If you impact one person and it ripples through a team, you’ve lived your intention,” Danni said.

For the business leaders gathered at the BBH, it was a reminder that true authority isn’t about speaking louder or working longer. True authority comes from the quiet discipline to pause, breathe and lead with presence.

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