On this episode of the Bourbon Friday Show we had the opportunity to talk with Dixie Gillaspie and Philip Penrose from Return to Your Power about their recent workshop, Optimizing Your Brain for Leadership, and how leadership demands are changing for today’s workforce.

How Leadership is Changing

Return to Your Power began several years ago when two minds collided over one passion: the brain.

Gillaspie who has over a decade of leadership coaching and training, and Penrose, who has a background in sports therapy and somatic healing, joined forces to enable people to become the best version of themselves.

Through coaching, leadership training, and somatic healing, Return to Your Power helps business professionals and teams be more effective and better able to take on the challenges that are required from today’s leaders.

“Not only are we leading people who are very dependent on their brains,” says Gillaspie, “but also the level of emotional intelligence [required by business leaders] is also getting higher and higher because the business world’s getting more complex and more nuanced.”

Apart from coaching and leadership training, Return to Your Power recently completed a series of full-day workshops called “Optimize Your Brain”. During this series the Return to Your Power team focused on three facets of brain optimization: creativity, performance, and leadership. By harnessing these different facets, leaders are able to perform better which ultimately improves company-wide communication and helps eliminate many pain points organizations deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Upcoming Partnerships

Following this series Return to Your Power and EQ are excited to announce that they will be partnering to put on more workshops targeted to the St. Louis startup ecosystem. These workshops will be shorter, bite-sized sessions that help entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs in and around the community. Join the Return to Your Power Facebook page for updates and more information.

Bourbon Innovation

As always, the Bourbon Friday team does their best to choose a fitting drink for the occasion.

The bourbon for this week is Four Roses Small Batch. While this bourbon is known for its mellow spiciness and sweet oaky notes, it relates to our guests from Return to Your Power through Four Roses’ branding. Four Roses brand logo is, as the name might suggest, four red roses banded together. Coincidentally, the rose is an important symbol for Return to Your Power, as it is also their brand logo and holds great significance to their practice as a “visual mantra.”