Dr. Laurine LeBlanc-White is a nationally recognized trauma-informed clinician, transformational speaker, and author of Unapologetically Resilient. With over 15 years of experience in mental and behavioral health, she has helped families, veterans, and diversecommunities move from trauma to transformation. As co-founder of Xponential Growth Academy LLC in Hawaii, Dr. LeBlanc-White brings powerful insights on resilience, epigenetics, and healing that inspire audiences worldwide to lead, heal, and transform.
ElDon White is an Executive Leadership Strategist,Transformational Speaker, and retired U.S. Army Sergeant Major with over 21 years of distinguished service, including 15 years in Special Operations and the elite75th Ranger Regiment. As the first enlisted ICF-Certified Executive Coach in the Department of Defense and Joint Special Operations Command, he has led thousands through high-stakes environments and now brings that same expertise to corporations,schools,and organizations worldwide. Based in Hawaii, ElDon empowers leaders, teams, and individuals to ignite purpose, build resilience, and achieve lasting transformation.
Lessons of a 1% Leader: Redefining Leadership Through Healing, Epigenetics,
and Emotional Intelligence
This talk explores the lessons of a 1% Leader by integrating lived military leadership experience, the neuroscience of trauma and epigenetics, and the evolving nature of healing-centered leadership. It distinguishes the often misunderstood terms resilience and healing and examines how unresolved generational trauma, via epigenetics,can become an unseen barrier to growth. Using the Eight Principles of a 1% Leader as a framework, the talk proposes a new leadership model built on emotional intelligence, somatic awareness, and the legacy of transformation. This research provides practical recommendations for training and policy implementation across institutions.
Leadership is the art and science of the fabric designed for healthy success. Every living organism needs an example, direction,and motivation to connect and thrive in purpose. Leaders act as the bridge, while leadership is the path. However, before we get to the leadership principles, we must first address trauma and how it impacts our lives.
True leadership is not about recovering from adversity. It is about being transformed by it. Trauma disrupts identity, but healing redefines it. The work of a 1% Leader is to walk that path first for themselves, then for others. Through integrating emotional intelligence, addressing inherited trauma from epigenetics, and leading with intentionality, the new standard of leadership emerges: not perfection, but transformation.
People feel the negative impacts of trying to resemble resiliency by doctrine and definition, which provides an unstable platform for those fielding multiple traumatic events. Trauma creates an environment that forces personal, internal change. Trauma creates a person you were not before the event. Resiliency acts as an attempt to reform you to the previous version of yourself.
However, strength remains in the healing and growth from the event instead of recovery. Resiliencyresembles sustainment, while healing represents positive transformation. The skills needed include grief recovery or learning to deal with loss, emotional intelligence, and a baseline understanding of personal mental health disposition. When a basketball loses air, resiliency acts as the pump that recovers the lost air and places it back into the basketball. However, the ball takes on a new form as the leather compresses and stretches. The ball will not move the exact same as it did before. Understanding the relationship between the ground (trauma), it bounces off or how the hand influences the direction and represents the healing. Once the relationship is understood, then transformation can begin. Healing leads to complete exposure of potential and maximum health optimization.
In this talk, you will understand how to lead the person, not just the process, apply 1% Leader principles in daily leadership roles across industries, develop emotional intelligence and self-awareness as leadership assets, understand the science of epigenetics and its impact on behavior, identity, and leadership, and explore how inherited trauma and learned behaviors affect leadership style and workplace culture. This will lead to a clearer sense of identity, purpose, and leadership philosophy, reconnection with purpose and identity beyond roles or trauma, and the ability to lead with greater empathy, clarity, and discipline.
