At one point during her “Five Steps to Being IncREDible” workshop, Gianna DeBruyn kicked aside her high heels and opted to go barefoot as she spoke to nearly 40 of her peers inside a sectioned-off space in the DoubleTree hotel’s grand ballroom. But it’s not as if she hadn’t done that before.

“My first leadership conference, six years ago now, the speaker in the morning was a hypnotist who did mind games and such, and it was really cool,” recalled the Southern Regional High School senior on March…