Dan Dworkis at Pinnacle: Rewire Your Brain for Performance Under Pressure
Medical school is effective at giving you knowledge. It’s not as effective in teaching students how to apply that knowledge under intense pressure.
Dan Dworkis, MD, PhD, FACEP, chief medical officer of Mission Critical Team Institute, delivered the Opening Keynote address “Resilience and Evolution: Leading EMS in a Complex World” at the Pinnacle conference in Phoenix July 15, 2025.
Targeted toward EMS leaders, Pinnacle is an annual conference that facilitates networking, learning and discussion among public safety and EMS leadership. The 2025 conference is being held July 14-18 at the JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort & Spa in Phoenix. This is the conference’s 20th year.
EMS World is a media sponsor of Pinnacle.
Dworkis is founder of The Emergency Mind Project, author of The Emergency Mind: Wiring Your Brain for Performance Under Pressure, and assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Dworkis is keenly interested in how health care providers and first responders can apply the knowledge in their minds to help the patient in front of them during extreme life-or-death circumstances.
One powerful method that’s been employed throughout human history is via storytelling. “Our brains are wired to think in stories,” Dworkis related. Storytelling is not routinely taught in medical school, but it’s a proven way to make medical teams work better. Tell stories about identity, resilience and excellence. Dworkis urged his audience of EMS leaders to return to their roles and encourage their teams to share stories of both success and failures. This is how learning takes place in a collaborative environment and can lessen the extreme pressure each individual team member faces.
Resilience is a second principle. Dworkis stressed “service without self-destruction.” If you aren’t taking care of your physical and mental stressors, your brain will not be prepared for optimal performance under duress.
Dworkis closed his talk with a mention of excellence. “Excellence is more than just the lack of bad things,” he said. Using an analogy of garden roses, simply clearing trash from your yard will not make roses grow in your garden. You have to plant the roses. Likewise, removing negative concepts, practices, and even team members from your agency will not get you where you need to go. You must implement positive change and cultivate it for meaningful improvements. “What is the future we are aiming for?” Dworkis challenged his audience to ask themselves as they left his lecture.
