Mari Oderzhakhivska is a human performance strategist, founder, and creator of Re:Engineering State, a methodology that helps founders, executives, and high-performing teams expand their capacity to operate under pressure, uncertainty, and rapid growth.
Her work explores the intersection of neuroplasticity, neurophysiology, the nervous system, emotions, energy, design thinking, and expanded states of consciousness without substances. Rather than treating burnout as a problem solved simply by stepping away, Mari focuses on building a human system that can hold greater intensity without getting trapped in chronic survival patterns.
Through Re:Engineering State, she works with the internal and collective states from which people think, lead, communicate, create, and make decisions. Mari’s work is especially relevant to founders and executives operating at the edge of complexity. She helps them develop greater nervous-system flexibility. She believes high performance is not about learning to tolerate more stress. It is about expanding the bandwidth of being human.
In this conversation, Mari shares her perspective on why the future of leadership will depend not only on strategy, technology, or intelligence, but also on the quality of the human states from which those tools are used.
Mari, you believe that the realistic answer to entrepreneurial burnout is not simply stepping away, because founders and CEOs can’t afford that luxury. Instead, you prioritize building a human system that can hold intensity. With that in mind, what do you believe is the first change entrepreneurs should adopt to rewire their understanding of human behavior, performance, and success?
Mari Oderzhakhivska: I would start by changing the question.
We are obsessed with optimization. We optimize companies, products, teams, technology, money, time. We upgrade our phones every year, and now we are upgrading machines with AI at an unbelievable speed.
But the human being operating all of this?
We still tell them to sleep more, meditate, take a vacation, manage their stress.
I don’t think the answer for a founder is to make their life smaller so their nervous system can tolerate it.
I am interested in making the human system bigger.
Can you hold more responsibility without becoming numb? More uncertainty without losing clarity? More success without losing your relationships? More money, visibility, and power without your system interpreting every new level as a threat?
That is a completely different conversation about performance.
My work sits at the intersection of neuroplasticity, neurophysiology, the nervous system, emotions, energy, design thinking, and expanded states of consciousness without substances.
And the question underneath all of it is:
How much of yourself do you actually have access to right now?
Because you can be incredibly intelligent and have access to only a fraction of that intelligence in a particular state.
You can have a beautiful life and be physiologically unable to feel it.
You can love someone and have very little capacity for intimacy.
You can have everything you once wanted and no longer feel desire.
For me, high performance is not about squeezing another 20% of productivity out of a human being.
We have machines for that.
It is about expanding our capacity to be fully alive while doing extraordinary things.
It is about increasing the bandwidth of being human.
Re:Engineering State, your method for helping founders, executives, and teams, focuses on the internal state from which they operate. What did you observe in founders and executives that convinced you the next step had to focus more deeply on neurophysiology and the nervous system?
Mari Oderzhakhivska: Because I kept meeting brilliant people who already knew everything.
They had read the books. They understood their patterns. They had coaches, therapists, mentors. They could explain exactly why they reacted the way they did.
And then the right trigger appeared, and the entire intellectual understanding disappeared.
That fascinated me. If I know something but cannot access it when I need it, do I really have access to that knowledge? Or is it just information?
This is where physiology became very important to me.
Your nervous system is constantly deciding what deserves your attention, what is safe, what is dangerous, and what can be ignored. And when a system spends too much time in survival or mobilization, it becomes very good at survival.
Which sounds useful, until survival becomes the primary lens through which you are building your company, your relationship, partnership, marriage, and your life.
I don’t want to remove intensity from entrepreneurs. I love intensity.
I don’t want a founder who is capable of building something extraordinary to become permanently calm.
I want them to have range.
Go into full power when it is needed. Execute. Fight for something. Move fast.
And then be able to come back.
Create. Feel. Play. Have sex. Be close to your children. See possibilities. Sit in uncertainty without immediately trying to kill it.
That flexibility is much more interesting to me than “stress management.”
The goal isn’t to eliminate the sympathetic nervous system or keep someone permanently in a parasympathetic state. That would make no biological sense.
The goal is to develop a system capable of moving between states.
To mobilize when life requires power, speed, and action, and to return to states where restoration, creativity, emotion, connection, intimacy, and more flexible thinking become available again.
That is where Re:Engineering begins.
High performance is influenced by the state a person operates from, especially during pressure, uncertainty, and major decisions. How do you help a founder recognize the difference between a productive response to pressure and a physiological pattern that is quietly limiting their judgment, creativity, communication, or leadership?
Mari Oderzhakhivska: I ask: How many options can you see?
This is one of the simplest ways to understand state.
Imagine you are standing on the first floor of a building and there is a huge wall in front of you. From where you are standing, the wall is reality. There is nowhere to go.
Go to the third floor and suddenly you can see that the wall ends fifty feet away. There is a way around it.
Go to the twelfth floor and now you see the entire landscape.
The wall never moved.
You did.
This is what happens to us in different states.
In survival, reality becomes very small. There is a problem. There is urgency. There is one answer. Sometimes two.
Change the state and suddenly information that was technically there the entire time becomes available to you. You make connections you couldn’t make five minutes ago. You become curious again. Humor comes back. Creativity comes back. Emotion comes back.
The landscape hasn’t necessarily changed. Your access to it has.
This is why I’m so interested in expanded states of consciousness without substances.
We have become fascinated with ways to access extraordinary states through psychedelics and other external interventions.
My question was different: What if the human system can learn to access more of itself without needing a substance to take it there?
Not to escape reality. To access more of it.
More information. More perception. More emotion. More creativity. More connections between things that previously seemed unrelated. More of yourself.
For a founder, this isn’t abstract.
A different state can change the question you ask.
The conversation you are willing to have. The opportunity you notice. The decision you make.
That, to me, is expansion.
Re:Engineering State brings individual performance into the context of teams. When you work with an executive or leadership team, how do you identify the patterns that exist between people rather than focusing only on each individual? What changes when a company begins treating the collective state of its team as part of its performance infrastructure?
Mari Oderzhakhivska: You can have ten extraordinary people and still create a terrible system between them.
Because a team has a state too.
You have probably walked into a room where nobody said anything was wrong, but you immediately felt that something was wrong. And you’ve walked into another room and suddenly had more energy, more ideas, more courage.
Environment changes what becomes available in us. This is why I don’t only look at individuals. I look at what people create in each other.
What happens when the CEO enters the room?
Do people expand or contract? Does information move freely, or does everyone begin editing themselves?
When something goes wrong, does the collective system become more intelligent or more defensive? Who brings creativity into the room? Who brings urgency? Who stabilizes? Who amplifies fear?
And emotions are a huge part of this. I don’t believe emotions are noise we need to remove to make “rational” decisions. Emotion is information.
Emotion = energy in motion
The question is whether you can experience an emotion without becoming completely owned by it.
A powerful leader doesn’t need to feel less. I would argue the opposite.
You need the capacity to feel more without losing yourself inside what you feel.
And when that capacity exists across a team, you change much more than culture. You change the quality of information, conversations, relationships, and decisions happening inside the company.
Eventually, state enters the numbers.
What has been the biggest challenge in explaining this newer category of work to founders who are highly analytical and accustomed to measuring everything through revenue, growth, productivity, or other business metrics? How do you demonstrate that internal change can produce meaningful business results?
Mari Oderzhakhivska: I actually love analytical founders because I tell them: don’t believe me.
Test it.
Treat yourself as a system. Change an input and observe the output.
If we change your state and suddenly the problem you’ve been thinking about for three months has five possible solutions instead of one, that’s data.
If you recover from conflict in twenty minutes instead of losing two days of energy, that’s data.
If you sleep differently, your HRV changes, your energy changes, and your ability to focus changes, that’s data.
If you finally have the conversation you’ve been postponing for six months, that’s data.
If you come home after an insane day and still have enough of yourself left for your partner and your children, I consider that performance too.
We have created a strange definition of success where a person can build a $100 million company while losing their health, desire, marriage, curiosity, and capacity to feel, and we still call the system high-performing because the revenue chart goes up.
I don’t.
For me, the question is not only how much you can produce.
How much life can you hold while you are producing it?
Of course business metrics matter. I am an entrepreneur. I understand numbers. But every number in a company is downstream of human behavior.
Revenue doesn’t make decisions. People do.
Strategy doesn’t execute itself. People do.
Innovation doesn’t happen in a spreadsheet. People create it.
People take risks. People communicate. People trust or don’t trust each other. People see opportunities, or fail to see them.
And the state of those people influences what they can perceive, what they can imagine, how they communicate, and which decisions become available to them.
So changing the state from which humans operate isn’t separate from business performance.
It is underneath it.
Looking ahead, what do you want Re:Engineering State to become over the next several years? How do you see the methodology expanding into larger corporate programs, technology, research, or a broader leadership framework?
Mari Oderzhakhivska: I don’t want to build another coaching methodology. I’m interested in a new operating system for human performance. And there is something important about how I approach this work personally: I never consider myself finished.
I am constantly learning.
I invest hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in my own education, experiences, research, mentors, and proximity to people who are operating at the edges of what we currently understand about human potential.
I am a seeker first.
My number one teacher is Donny Epstein.
For more than two decades, Donny has also worked with Tony Robbins, including helping him prepare his state before stepping onto the stage. I sometimes think of Donny as the Merlin behind Camelot.
The person on the stage may be the one everyone sees. But behind many extraordinary leaders there is someone they trust enough to help them access the version of themselves required for what comes next.
And that relationship has deeply shaped how I understand my own role with my clients.
I don’t need to be the person on their stage.
I want to be their Merlin.
Many of the people I work with don’t need someone to tell them how to run their business. They already know how to build. They are founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, engineers. They have built companies, raised money, led teams, solved problems most people will never have to solve.
They don’t come to me because something is wrong with them. They come because the next level sometimes cannot be reached with more of the same version of yourself.
The strategy may not be the problem.
The question becomes: Who do you need to have access to within yourself for what comes next?
My work is to help make more of that person available. More energy. More clarity. More emotional capacity. More creativity. More range. More access to parts of themselves that cannot always be reached through thinking alone.
And I believe this becomes even more important as AI develops.
We are entering this incredible moment where machines are becoming more capable almost every month. We know how to upgrade machines.
Now I’m interested in the human.
What happens when information is no longer the advantage because everyone has access to it?
What happens when AI can analyze more information than any human ever could?
Then being human becomes very interesting. Creativity, discernment, emotion, intuition, and connection become interesting.
The ability to hold paradox, uncertainty, enormous responsibility, and complexity without collapsing into a primitive reaction becomes incredibly valuable.
I see Re:Engineering moving into executive teams, companies, research, education, and technology.
Eventually, I want people to understand their internal operating system with the same sophistication with which they understand their business dashboard.
But there is something even bigger underneath that for me. I don’t want technology to make humans less human. I want technology to free us to become more human.
More creative, more emotional, more connected, more alive, and more capable of intimacy. More capable of wonder and of holding enormous power without losing ourselves.
More of you available for the world.
That is the future of human performance I am interested in building.
Conclusion
Mari Oderzhakhivska sees the future of leadership through a human lens. She asks leaders to define success beyond traditional performance measures. Revenue, growth, and productivity matter, but the people behind those results matter too. Through Re:Engineering State, Mari explores how internal states influence decisions, relationships, creativity, and communication. She encourages founders and executives to develop greater range. This means knowing how to access focus and intensity when needed. It also means returning to states that support recovery, connection, curiosity, and creativity. Mari also believes teams develop collective states that can shape how information moves and how decisions are made. A company’s internal environment can affect what people see, express, and create. For Mari, the goal is to become more capable, more aware, and more fully present for what comes next.
Connect with Mari Oderzhakhivska on LinkedIn to learn more.
