The Leadership Wake-Up Call: Decoding the Triggers That Shape How You Lead

Season 7, Episode 3

Guest: Princess Castleberry, Global Keynote Speaker & Leadership Capacity Strategist, Castleberry Global

Princess Castleberry, leadership capacity strategist, global keynote speaker and author of The Truth Is in the Trigger™, joins host Courtney Stanley for a conversation about the growing leadership capacity crisis and what it takes to stay effective in high-pressure, fast-changing environments. 

Together, they explore why triggers are powerful signals—not weaknesses—how leaders can decode them to improve judgment and resilience, and what it really means to stay on your “A-Game” in today’s complex world.

Listen now:

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Podcast sponsored by Myrtle Beach Convention Center.

Meet Our Guest:

Princess Castleberry is a leadership capacity strategist, global keynote speaker and author disrupting the leadership capacity crisis with her Live, Lead, and Build Leverage™ Framework.

She partners with organizations across the global business events and associations industry operating in high-pressure, fast-changing environments, offering her keynotes, immersive workshops, and digital programming to strengthen judgment, resilience, and execution—especially as leaders navigate the realities of AI-enabled work. 

She brings a unique blend of more than two decades of experience in enterprise risk management, crisis response, and wellness counseling, helping leaders integrate her leadership framework by connecting human behavior, decision quality, and AI-driven systems to real business outcomes. 

She is the author of The Truth Is in the Trigger™, a leadership playbook for decoding the stress and burnout that drive leadership breakdowns.

Connect With Princess:
LinkedIn
Instagram: @PrincessCastleberrySpeaks
Facebook
Website

More About Our Host:

Courtney Stanley believes that transforming past experiences into impactful conversations through raw, authentic storytelling challenges the status quo, connects people from all walks of life and results in great change for the world.

Courtney is the youngest member to have ever been elected to Meeting Professionals International’s (MPI) International Board of Directors.

She is the recipient of Smart Meetings’ Entrepreneur Award, MeetingsNet’s Changemaker Award, the Association for Women in Events (AWE) Disruptor Award, the MPI Chairman’s Award and MPI RISE Award.

She was also named Collaborate and Connect Magazine’s 40 under 40 and a Meetings Today Trendsetter.

Recognized as one of the event industry’s most impactful change-makers, Courtney serves on the Events Industry Sexual Harassment Task Force, AWE’s Board of Directors, MPI’s Women’s Advisory Board, is a Meetings Mean Business Ambassador and is the co-founder of the award-winning movement, #MeetingsToo.

Courtney was named as a 2020 Meetings Trendsetter by Meetings Today.

Connect With Courtney:

Website
LinkedIn
Instagram: @courtneyonstage
Twitter: @courtneyonstage
Facebook

Transcript:

Editors note: The following transcription was facilitated by AI program Otter.ai and proofed by our editors. Although it is fairly accurate, there inevitably will be some mistakes, so please consider that when reading. Thank you.

Courtney Stanley  
This episode is sponsored by the Myrtle Beach Convention Center. 

Welcome back to Dare to Interrupt, the podcast where we have honest conversations about leadership, ambition and the real work it takes to lead without sacrificing yourself in the process. I'm your host, Courtney Stanley. Today I'm joined by Princess Castleberry, leadership, capacity strategist, global keynote speaker and author of The Truth is in the Trigger.

In this conversation, we explore why so many leaders today are facing what Princess calls a capacity crisis, operating in environments that are faster, more complex and more demanding than ever before. She shares why understanding your triggers is one of the most powerful tools leaders have for improving decision making, resilience and performance. We also talk about what it truly means to stay on your A game as a leader, not through hustle or constant output, but through awareness regulation and intentional leadership. 

If you've ever felt stretched thin, reactive instead of strategic, or wondered how to lead effectively in a world that's only getting more complex, this conversation will give you a new lens and practical tools to navigate it. Let's dive in. Welcome to the show, Princess. How are you?

Princess Castleberry  
Boo, I am fantastic. Thank you for having me, honey.

Courtney Stanley  
I am so excited to interview you. I've had you on my list for a minute, and I feel like, after we had our, you know, little lunch chat  earlier this year, I was like, I've got to get you on the show and just dig a little bit deeper. Thank you. I appreciate that. How's the family?

Princess Castleberry  
How are the kids? My family is fantastic. We just celebrated my boys two birthdays back to back, you know, February and March. So, I officially the mother of 13 and 15 year old sons, which is exciting. I love them. They're amazing, but scary. At the same time, they're turning into, they're turning into young men right in front of me.

Courtney Stanley  
How do you balance everything? I mean, I know that you're on the road quite a bit. Your business has taken off, which is beautiful to see. But you've got, you know, a whole life happening at home with, you know, being a wife, being a mom, being your own person, too.

Princess Castleberry  
Well, the first, the first thing is, I am super intentional about trying to land more engagements and clients in Michigan, where I'm from and where we're from, and just stay closer to the nest, right? I'm super intentional about that. But when I do have to travel, I am, you know, intent on quick trips getting back home, and my kids are very responsible, like, you know, I've been busy my entire career, even before my speaking practice, and so they've always had to have, you know, some level of, you know, self reliability. 

And I make them accountable for each other as well. So they both cook. They know how to keep the house clean, and my husband is there. I have a phenomenal mother, with which, without her, honestly, I would not be able to do most things. She is really the linchpin to everything, because sometimes, you know, there does have to be somebody present right, to make sure the house is locked, the house is really clean, or if there's an issue at school. So my mother does jump in and fill in for me a lot of times.

Courtney Stanley  
I love that. Yeah, it takes a it definitely takes a village. But having those core people that are in your corner that are able to support you when you're there, when you're not there, is crucial. That's definitely crucial. 

Tell us more about what you do. I know what you do, and I've had the pleasure of seeing you speak, and I'm sure that there are people who are tuning in that love you and have gotten to see you speak too, but share with the audience a little bit more about what you do, who you serve, how you got into this kind of work. Let's tell them a little bit more. Yeah.

Princess Castleberry  
So today, you know, I am primarily speaking on leadership performance and leadership capacity and all things that put that at risk. Right. As you know, I say all the time that I believe leaders are in a capacity crisis and I feel like, you know, it's partly my responsibility to help solve that, because prior to launching this speaking practice three and a half years ago, I spent the first 22 years of my career as an Enterprise Risk Manager, and that sounds fancy, but really I was a professional problem solver, and I have lots of different experiences in the Risk Management world from everything from global insurance program management to business continuity, disaster response planning, cyber security work. 

So, I've done all kinds of cool things on the risk management side of the house, but at its core, risk management is about protecting the people, the purpose and the profits, and that is the mission of all leaders. And so I also kind of combine that technical risk background with two areas of specialty. 

My master's degree is in training and development instructional design, so I'm a professional educator, and then I also have a certificate in wellness counseling, and I didn't get all of that education with the intent of ever purely designing curriculum or counseling people or becoming a therapist. I did it because I know that how we learn and whether we're well or unwell impacts business performance, and that's what I've always cared about. I care about the bottom line. 

I care about the people, and so I've crafted an entire speaking practice around that.

Courtney Stanley  
I love that. And when you say that leaders are in a capacity crisis, what does that mean?

Princess Castleberry  
Yeah, so I started looking at all of the stats, especially post pandemic, and I realized the leaders that I'm talking about are like you and I. We are educated, like highly educated. We are certified. We have all kinds of experiences, personally and professionally. But if you look at the statistics, you know more than 60% of leaders are still reporting symptoms of burnout, which is a very serious condition. 

It's not trivial. Burnout can change the size, structure and function of the brain. Leaders are especially emerging. Leaders are still reporting that they have a lot of difficulty navigating healthy conflict, especially with so many divides going on in the world. People are struggling with are struggling with AI adoption and integration, and it's not just because of the tech, it's because of all the decisions that have to be made around the tech. 

So, when I think about those core areas, how you manage your own stress, how you align and keep teams moving forward, even through conflict, and how we integrate technology, those are some of the biggest leadership capacities that we all have to have to be successful in business. And if we keep looking at the stats, all of those areas have red flags associated with them. 

So, that's where I got the notion that we're in a capacity crisis. It's not that we're not well intentioned or that we're not well educated, but something is a myth, and I think it's that we're out of space, mental, physical, sometimes emotional space, and we're out of decision making power because of conditions like decision fatigue. And I create systems that help to alleviate some of that and teach people methods and strategies that they can use right away. Some are short term, you know, immediately actionable, which is what I put in my talks. And then some are more long tail, because these are not quick fixes in life hacks. I don't specialize in life hacks. 

Sometimes you have to really dig in and do the work. And so that's the work that I do off the stage with companies.

Courtney Stanley  
I want to go back to conflict for a second here, when you are doing research, when you are working with different organizations, individuals, what are you coming across as some of the greatest sources of conflict in workplaces today? 

Princess Castleberry  
Yeah, so first I want to, I want to put you up on a term that I coined, that I use in my in my talks, in my book, which is this concept of conflict waste. Most of us have an idea of what conflict is, right, these disagreements that happen over different ideas or approaches to solve challenges in the workplace and even in our personal lives. But I really specialize and dig into eliminating conflict waste, which I define as the time, energy and resources that we lose when conflict is avoided, mismanaged or escalated too quickly. 

So, I frame it that way, like, Where Are we avoiding and why? Where are we mismanaging? Because we don't have the skills and where are we simply escalating too quickly, because we're triggered in our central nervous systems are out of whack. And so when I look at the sources of conflict waste, one of the biggest areas that comes up all the time is incivility in the workplace. 

There have been so many studies, and then I know some fellow speakers of ours that, you know, their entire practice is on, you know, studying and alleviating incivility in the workplace, that's a huge thing. And then some people are just completely triggered by conflict because of past traumas in their childhood, their early adolescence, or even in adulthood. I mean, if when people don't experience conflict in a healthy way, it's really difficult. To model it. And if you've experienced conflict in a in a way that's abusive, even people will shy away from it. 

But conflict is one of those things that is inevitable in every type of relationship we have, like as friends, as speaking colleagues, as you know, partners in our romantic relationships with our children, and I even go as far to say, hell with your pets, because some people you know have one of my really good friends has a dog that she just can't even she can't go on vacation. Her dog literally gets sick when she's not around, and so she has tension even in that relationship. 

And so conflict is not going anywhere, and because so many people are triggered by it and shy away from it, they don't really develop the skills to manage it in a healthy way.

Courtney Stanley  
If there are people who are tuning in, and they describe themselves as non confrontational, as conflict avoidant, what would be some advice that you would give them to start to try to adjust, to have healthier, more transparent relationships? Yeah.

Princess Castleberry    
So, the first solution that I have to any challenge, not just conflict, but especially conflict, is to identify the truth in your own triggers, right in the framework that I created, live lead and build leverage. Identifying the truth in your trigger is the first step in the through line to my entire framework, you have to know what the back story is in your own life of why you've developed these feelings around conflict. Because, again, like I said, it's inevitable. It's in every part of life. 

And so if you can literally just admit and tell the story about why and what and who framed and shaped your view of conflict, that's the starting point, and being truthful about how it's impacting you today, right? If you know, like, I love my mother. I love her. I adore her. I just told you, like, I couldn't even do half of what I do without her help today, but when I was younger, I mean, first and foremost, when I was born, she was 16, and so she didn't have the best conflict skills, you know, when it came to the mother daughter relationship, especially as I started going through those, you know, pre teen and teenage years, we didn't have the best relationship, because she was very strict and she was easily triggered, and she would yell flat out. 

She yelled at me all the time, and today she would be embarrassed, you know, for me even telling us so I hope she's not listening. I love you, Courtney. Don't share with us. I will not be sharing this on Facebook. But my mother, though she yelled at me a lot, and you know, as I got older and got into relationships, if somebody even remotely raised their voice at me. I'm talking personal relationships, or even work relationships. If your voice became slightly elevated, I was so triggered and so on edge, I was ready to bite your head off. 

And that that behavior on my end started to cost me friendships and relationships really early on, and it's serious when you don't slow down long enough to examine it, right? Because I could have just made that the excuse for why my first, you know, my first marriage failed. I could have made that the excuse for why I broke up with a best friend, right? But what I advise people to do is slow down enough to a identify what is the truth. It's not that the truth isn't that I had a bad childhood or I had a mother who didn't love me. I had a mother who was young and didn't have the skills to communicate in a healthy way, and it hurt, and I needed to address that with her and with counseling. I identified it, but then I assessed it, right? 

So, in that assessment, you have to look at, how is it impacting you today? How is it impacting me to shy away from conflict? How is it impacting me to overreact in moments that don't call for the full weight and venom of the you know, the anger that I felt toward my mother, right when you start to really assess, that's when you create space and more capacity to build an actual solution and learn from it. And only until you identify and assess and really get truthful about it do you have the space to build and learn.

Courtney Stanley  
Oh, Princess, I feel like there are going to be so many people that listen to this and can relate myself included. I think we have parallels in our childhoods that I can very much relate to. And even when I was asking the question of, you know, if somebody considers themselves conflict avoidant or if they self just. 

Describe as non confrontational. That is the box that I typically put myself in, and the box that I am doing a lot of work to just break those walls down and try different approaches and also go back to the beginning of explaining the why behind these behaviors in these communication patterns. So I think, yeah, go ahead. 

Princess Castleberry  
Go ahead. I want to give you another one too, just another quick example, because I know some people listening to this will think, Well, I had an idyllic childhood, and I'm still conflict avoidant, right? 

And the one thing I want to convey is that sometimes the things that trigger us don't always have to start as a negative like mine. That was my truth. It started in a negative way. I have another friend who is literally Miss Congeniality, and she was literally like a child, like pageant queen, wonderful parents, mature parents, healthy communicators. She was spoiled rotten. I remember this as a kid going to her house and being like I thought I was the princess, you're the Princess, right? 

And seeing all this, but as we got older, she was also very conflict avoidant, because she was always celebrated and rewarded for her Congeniality, for her ability to just go with the flow, and so much so that she just never learned how to stand up for herself. Because, guess what, life is not a pageant all the time, and so when she got into the air, quote, real world, she found it really difficult to navigate. 

And she was having some of the same challenges and relationships break, you know, relationship breakdowns that I was experiencing, but for an entirely different reason.

Courtney Stanley  
Yeah, I think that's a really good it's a good example to give and how it differentiates from the childhood that you had. But you still come to places where you're struggling with certain things. 

And again, I think that this opportunities, these offer such opportunities for people to ask themselves certain questions about their own triggers, their own truth in the triggers. And I want to talk about that for a second, because you've got a new book that's called the truth is in the trigger. Why is it? Why is this book so important today? Let's talk about it.

Princess Castleberry    
Yeah, I think it's super important, because knowing your triggers, and if you can, like, really put your finger on them, knowing your triggers unlocks so many possibilities for you to grow and learn, right? And we, all you know, know our core behaviors and our core beliefs. But like, what are your triggers? 

You know, we do all this studying, like when you think about all the assessments that you could take around your personality. Are you introvert, extrovert? Are you open minded? Are you more closed and, you know, and rigid in your beliefs? We do all this assessment, and I've never seen an assessment that just got us to the truth behind our own story. So I created the tools to do that. And the truth is, in the trigger, that's exactly what the book is. It's a it's a tool for leaders to decode the triggers that drive their stress and burnout and so much more than that. And you know, simply, you know, triggers are the basis of all of our behaviors. 

Again, they're not inherently negative, or they don't always result in negative consequences even, but that is literally in the basic psychology. That's how every behavior change starts with some type of external or even an internal stimuli, some trigger happens, and then you feel some type of way, and because of those feelings and thoughts, you take an action, and there's a consequence, positive, negative or neutral, because of the action that you took. 

And so it's just basic behavior. But when you bring that into a leadership context, which is what the book is written for, and it's leaders at all levels, right? Leaders who are aspiring to leaders who are executives, it's so important today, because in our economy and in our businesses, the stakes are really freaking high. The stakes are high, and there's so much pressure happening externally that oftentimes the only thing that we can control is our own behavior. 

There's so much outside of our control right now, economically, politically, socially, that the only thing that you have to bring to the table is how you how self aware you are, how solid you are, how decisive and clear your decision making is, and all of that is impacted by how you respond to your triggers. 

And in 2026 if you don't know what that is, you don't know what those triggers are, you're, you're taking gambles every day with your decisions. And if you're a leader, you're gambling with the downstream impact on your team and your community.

Courtney Stanley  
Let me ask you this princess, because you've probably heard the expression you can't heal in a toxic environment. And let's say that you are working in an environment where you have a leader who is consistently triggering you with their behavior, and it's become a space that feels anxiety ridden, that feels trigger happy. What do you do with that?

Princess Castleberry  
Yeah, so I know the same I know that saying, and I do believe in it for the most part. But let me give you a slightly different perspective, because the reality is we can't always quit. We can't always quit. We can't always change a position at a particular time and whenever we want to. 

And I and, you know, I'm not telling people to just tough it out, but I do want people to understand why everything feels so high pressure, why that boss that's just being who they are sometimes, why it feels so much heavier than maybe it did in the past, and it's because we have experienced so many of what I call mega triggers. And mega triggers are the things that happen in society that are way outside of our control, things like the pandemic, things like even the onslaught of AI adoption and integration things like war, major massive political shifts like the ones that we've experienced here in our country. 

I know your audience is global, but people around the world can appreciate the real hard line shift in the politics here in the US. You have those mega triggers that completely disrupt our way of life, and then, if we walk my framework backwards, then we have global triggers that we have to contend with. Those are all the isms and the phobias and the things that just intersect with our own identities. 

These are things, again, that are shaped by our culture that we can't directly control, but we're impacted by them. Now take it down one more notch and look at what happens in our workplaces. That's where the symptoms and signs of most triggers show up, because we spend so much time with our colleagues, so much time working, that's where everything manifests, but at the core of it, you know, if you can just imagine that concentric circle coming in are just your own triggers, your own personal identity, your own beliefs, your triumphs and your traumas. 

Now look at it back from the other way, you have your own personal triggers you go out into the world intersect with global now you're at work. Now let me get back to your question of that toxic boss, that environment, and everything going on, and all the anxiety that you're carrying is not just that boss. It's your personal, it's your global and it's the pressure coming from the mega triggers. It's nothing is as it seems today, and that is not an excuse for a poor leader that can't communicate their way out of a freaking paper bag. 

That is just a way to say we all need a central nervous system reset. We all need to develop better communication capacity. And it really does begin with a willingness to explore triggers. I believe that. And so what I would tell a person, I know this is the longest answer ever, but I had to frame it up. 

But what I would tell that person is slow down enough to cope with and identify what is going on internally, and why is this person able to trigger me repeatedly? Now if you notice that this person is literally just a bully, literally not trying to produce anything operationally, and certainly not trying to produce anything great in you. If they're abusing you, they're diminishing you, they're putting you down. 

It's time for you to get out of there, and then you got to figure out what you're going to do financially, because there are real consequences to that. But sometimes we're so triggered and so afraid that we don't even have direct conversation with the boss, and so many people leave their jobs, having never said a word, because they they lose and give away their power at the moment of being triggered, they can't move past that point. So I would encourage a person to ground themselves in what's triggering them, find the words to tell the truth about it and at least, at least try to engage that leader and share what you're experiencing before you have that mental breakdown, because that's what it leads to when you don't address it.

Courtney Stanley  
There's so many directions that we could go from here. I know I was like, ah, but the. We have to talk about trauma responses, and we've just, I'm like, there's so much to cover here. I do want to ask you another question about your book, though. So in the book, you talk about staying on your A game. What does that mean?

Princess Castleberry  
And how do you do it? Oh, the a game is a model, like a model within the framework, right? And that's my that's the most basic way that I introduce triggers to people without, like, diving like so far into the deep end of your traumas. And, you know, I think about what it takes to get things done in our lives. And you we, everybody knows, like, you got to stay on your A game. So I break that down into five parts. Your a game are consists of your affirmations, so the words you say to yourself about yourself, your attitude, that outward projection of how you're feeling, your affections, right, your intimate affections. 

Who are you sharing that close, intimate space with? And whose advice are you taking, whether that's from a romantic partner standpoint or even your inner circle of your friends and colleagues. The fourth a is your your affiliations. Who are you affiliated with? Where? Where are you hanging out? Where are you getting advice? Where are you connecting with clients and meeting people? And then that last part of the a game is your are your actions? So what literally are you going to do or or not do? 

So, affirmations, attitude, affections, affiliations and actions and and when you can identify what keeps you on your A game. The second you can identify what knocks you off of that a game, you've identified one of your core triggers when you think about what disrupts your affirmations, what disrupts Courtney from getting up every day and saying, I'm a badass chick, and I look great, I feel great. I'm as healthy as I can possibly be, and I'm going to get up here and rock this stage. 

What stops you from saying that that is a trigger, that is a risk and a red flag for you, and it's a real quick way to assess those five core areas of your being and size up really quickly who needs to be in that space, who doesn't need to be in that space? What things should I and shouldn't I be doing? It's just a quick and easy way to get through triggers before you do the deep dive work.

Courtney Stanley  
You know what the first thing I do is, after this call, I buy your book. Buy that book.

Princess Castleberry  
See that $20 will save your life. Yes, it will get you your whole life together.

Courtney Stanley  
It really, no, it really sounds like an incredible read. And so applicable to anybody. And I love that you talk about how applicable it is to anybody at any level. You know, this is people work. It's not, you know, people at a certain level kind of work. This is just human work, exactly.

Princess Castleberry  
And I give lots of examples in the book for, you know, my career at all levels. I tell a story at the beginning of the book about 24 year old princess, and the first time I was ever triggered in a professional environment. There are stories. There's a story in there about when I was leading business continuity and disaster response planning for a fortune 500 company, and how that felt to be triggered in that space, and that intersection between what was going on at work and what was happening in my personal life. 

And then graciously, I'm able to bring in some anonymized stories from real clients, from real C suite executives from our industry, from the global business events industry, and from banking and finance. You know, I bring in a lot of different stories. So the book is really the book. I always say the book is just like me, short and direct, because for those that can't that don't know me and don't know what I look like, I'm I'm all a four foot 10, but I got the you know, attitude of a seven footer the book. 

But the book is short and direct like me, and it's a fast read, but a slow study. I love that very fast read, under 110 pages, you could get through it quickly, but if you sat and did the work that could take you months.

Courtney Stanley  
Okay, well, I've definitely got it in my cart so and everybody else needs to check it out for sure. Princess, this has been such an awesome conversation, and I knew that it would be, but I want to give you an opportunity to share any lasting words that you would like to leave with the audience today,

Princess Castleberry  
I want everybody to know that the world wants you to be intentional. The vast majority of the people that I meet are great they have great intentions. They wake up every day with an all. Altruistic attitude. They're giving, they're loyal, they want to lead in a healthy, positive way. But those same exact leaders, if they're triggered and they're stressed, they tend to behave in a very different way. 

And if that's you, if you have great intentions, but when you're triggered and stressed, you show up differently. Then I implore you to identify the truth behind your own triggers and to do the real work. You are worth it, and the world is waiting for your brilliant ideas. Bravo.

Courtney Stanley  
Thank you so much, Princess, this has been incredible. I appreciate your time, and I appreciate your energy and your wisdom. Very, very much. And audience, of course, thank you guys for tuning in. 

Share what you learned from this episode with us on social media by following at @Meetingstoday and at @Courtneyonstage, and be sure to never miss an episode by subscribing to Dare to Interrupt on any major podcast platform. 

Get curious about your triggers. Have the courage to tell the truth and keep daring to interrupt my friends until next time.