From oy to joy: Train your brain to thrive in the age of AI
Dorice Horenstein is an international speaker and author on a mission to transform stress and disconnect into joy, engagement, resilience and peak performance. She shares the thinking behind her Train Your Brain education session at IMEX America 2025.
Event day. You’re stuck in traffic. The Wi-Fi just dropped. The keynote’s running late. In frustration, you fire off a sharp message to your team—regretting it the moment you hit send.
Sound familiar? That overwhelm, stress, fear, things won’t go smoothly, or the mental loop of “what if everything falls apart”? These are what I call “Oy” moments—when your brain locks into survival mode, scanning for danger, fueling stress and leaving you stuck. You’ve been there. I’ve been there. We know Oy. In fact, research shows the average person has 6,200 thoughts a day—and 85% of them are negative. Let that sink in.
Here's the good news: you don’t have to stay in the Oy. With the right tools, you can flip the switch—from Oy to Joy.
At IMEX America, I’ll show you how to train your brain to handle pressure with clarity, creativity and calm. Using my CHOOSE Playbook, we’ll explore quick, practical, neuroscience-based Positive Intelligence® tools you can use the moment stress hits:
- Clarity: Spot your saboteurs—the judge, the pleaser, the controller—and reclaim control
- Honor: Recognize feelings as data, not dictators
- Openness and oneness: Shift from fear to flow with Positive Intelligence® practices that rewire your brain
- Strategy: Harness sage powers to turn setbacks into opportunities
- Enactment: Anchor joy into daily actions that fuel resilience and performance
And here’s the twist: while the world is buzzing about AI I’ll reveal the power of your own intelligence. Just like AI delivers outputs based on the prompts it’s given, your brain delivers results based on the thoughts you feed it. Change the input, and you change the output—your wellness, your relationships, your productivity.
So, when life hands you an Oy—you’ll know how to answer with Joy.
Dorice Horenstein at IMEX America
Back to IMEXscoop
