Caterina Perry

Master (M.npn) Neuroplastician® (applied neuroscience, behaviour change, and neuroplasticity)
Founding Fellow – Institute of Applied and Organizational Neuroscience
Graduate Studies in the Foundations of NeuroLeadership | NeuroLeadership Institute
Certified Assessor, Trainer and Coach, Emotional Intelligence EQ-i 2.0®
Certified Assessor, Trainer and Coach, Personality Dimensions®
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Practitioner
Reina Trustbuilding® Certification

Caterina Perry is an Executive Coach, Master (M.npn) Neuroplastician®, speaker, and the creator of the ClaytoGold™ methodology, a neuroscience-based approach that helps high achievers understand and regulate the brain patterns that drive self-doubt, over-preparation, people-pleasing, perfectionism, and imposter syndrome.

After more than two decades supporting leaders across the military, public, not-for-profit, and corporate sectors, Caterina noticed that capability was rarely the problem. Accessing it in the moments that mattered most was. That insight became the foundation of her work.

Rather than treating confidence as something people need to build, Caterina helps professionals understand how the brain responds when visibility, uncertainty, evaluation, or significance are perceived as threats. Through her Four Neural Safety Systems™ framework, she helps people identify the specific neural response activated under pressure and develop practical strategies to regulate it before it limits their performance.

Caterina is the author of Now That the Candy’s Gone: Mastering the Art of Self-Confidence and the founder of Your Success Unlimited, a firm dedicated to advancing leaders. Her work integrates neuroscience, emotional and social intelligence, systems thinking, and adaptive leadership to help accomplished professionals stop performing confidence and start leading, speaking, and showing up from a place of genuine self-trust.

Whether coaching executives, training practitioners, or speaking to audiences around the world, Caterina’s mission is to help people understand that the greatest barrier to visibility is rarely a lack of talent or potential. It is the protective pattern the brain has learned to activate. When we understand the pattern, we can regulate the response, reclaim our capability, and show up as the person we already are.

Summit Session

The Emotional Cost of Being Visible

Session type: Session

Track: Integrated

Time: 1:55 pm EST

Duration: 30 minutes

Description: Most of us have had the opportunity to be visible. Speaking up in a meeting. Speaking at an event. Making the case for our own value, to an employer or to a client. And something tightens. Sometimes we say it anyway. Sometimes we talk ourselves out of it on the way to saying it, and afterwards we cannot quite explain why.

We call it nerves, or wanting to get it right, or being detail-oriented. What is actually happening is older and more physical than any of those words. The brain reads being seen as a risk, and it responds before we have had a say in it.

This session looks at what that costs us, and why it costs more than the moment itself: the three things the brain is reading when it decides how big the risk is, and the four ways we protect ourselves when it does. All four are overperformance. And what they are protecting us from has a name most of us have heard, and quite a few of us have dismissed. Imposter syndrome is a nervous system response, not a confidence problem. That distinction is what my work rests on, and it changes what actually helps.

We finish by working through the Regulation Before Visibility Framework against a real moment each of us has coming up. We leave with a name for what happens to us in those moments, and something to do about it in the two minutes before the next one.

(Limited to 180 attendees)