Leading With Your Body

Whether we are leading, labouring or just plain living, we are often blind to the subtle but powerful role our bodies play in helping us to be resourceful and resilient.

From time to time I get together with fellow ontological practitioners to share insights and best practices in our work. One time when we met, we discussed a question often asked by clients: what has paying attention to our body got to do with leadership?

Most of us understand the importance of good nutrition, exercise and fitness, or body language in communication. But the ontological approach puts the body in a much more central position. Our body isn’t just a taxi for carrying around our brain. And our brain is part of our body. As Alan Sieler says, our body is 'the vehicle of our being'.

I may be mangling the taxi analogy a little, but your body is as much the driver and navigator of the taxi as your brain is your luggage. The human nervous system is distributed throughout the body via the vagus nerve which runs from the brain stem through the neck to:

• the heart, where it plays a role in heart rate and blood pressure;
• the lungs, where it communicates with our diaphragm (breathing);
• the abdomen, where it is linked to dealing with stress, anxiety and fear.

The vagus plays a key role in our body’s autonomic nervous system which balances the ‘fight or flight’ system with the ‘rest and digest’ (or ‘feed and breed’) system.

'Our body is the only place from which we can act.'

The body is also involved in perception, listening, thinking, speaking and feeling. 'Our body is the only place from which we can act,' says Sieler. Even thinking relies upon inner processes and our posture affects the flow and development of thoughts.

There’s some great research that demonstrates this interconnectedness between mind and body. But none of this is new to human experience and it is already baked into the vernacular: a pain in the neck, gut feeling, heart ache, a feeling in your bones, follow your heart, get it off your chest, a lump in your throat, a weight off your shoulders.

Both somatic and emotional learning are felt experiences and we can expand our capacity for personal development by developing skills that add to our rational, logical and analytical learning. Typically we are unaware of the habitual ways that we use our body and may have developed suboptimal or even unhelpful ways of using our body that compromises our effectiveness or even wellbeing.

Richard Strozzi-Heckler has spent a lifetime working with leaders in this domain. He says, 'Somatics declares the human form as the space in which humans act, relate, think, feel, and express emotions and moods. In this interpretation, the body is the field in which we build trust and intimacy, produce meaningful work, create family, community, and teams.' Without being aware of what is going on, we can manifest to others as negative, insincere, untrustworthy and demotivating.

The ontological methodology provides very practical ways of doing something about this. Leaders can uncover habitual ways of being that are rigid or compressed, or identify postural configurations that contribute to frustration, vulnerability, anxiety or resignation. Leaders who are developing their physiological and postural fluency experience greater mental flexibility and can access more resourceful attitudes in their work. As embodied leaders they show up with greater competency and expanded potential.

Ontological coaches help others explore this physiological domain, observing and respectfully inviting their clients to notice what is going on for them so that they can experiment with new and more helpful ways of being.

As I have hinted here, the physiological domain is only part of the picture. Attitudes, thinking and mindset are also intricately wrapped in too and are addressed in the ontological domains of language and moods. But let’s not forget that the body has an integral role in the way we engage with the world.

Are you paying attention to how your body is serving you?

[This is an updated version of an article I wrote in 2018.]

#leadership #physiology #coaching

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As an executive coach and facilitator, I use the ontological approach where I focus on the way that someone interacts (is “being”) with their challenge or issue, and not just on the issue itself. This is done through exploring how the person engages with their challenge using an integration of their language, their moods and emotions, and their physiology. This can be used to help people access more resourceful mindsets, attitudes or even postural configurations so they can make transformative shifts at deep levels (their “way of being”) rather than merely surface change.

I also teach ontological coaching through the Ontological Coaching Institute.

If you feel that it would be useful to have a conversation with me, please contact me at jeremy.stunt [at] limbicsolutions.co.uk.