The Secret Ingredient to Success: Your Body’s Wisdom

Body wisdom – or interoception – is often referred to as our 6th sense. It is the root of mastery and our intuition. It allows us to ‘know’ things that we cannot be aware of consciously. It is what allows successful poker players and negotiators to outperform so many others.

To understand what body wisdom is and how to make it work for you, read on. Please leave a comment if you find it valuable.

Table of Contents

?1. Our Body Processes are Designed to Keep Us Alive (…in the wild)

• Threats in ‘Modern Times’ are Quite Different From Our Ancestor’s ‘Wild Times’
• Modern Threats Can Trigger Ineffective or Destructive Responses

2. Our Body Processes are Both the Cause of Our Actions AND the Result of our Actions

3. Body Wisdom Creates Powerful Advantages

• The Costs of Not Developing Body Wisdom
• The Benefit of Developing Body Wisdom is Long
• Developing Body Wisdom Can Create Competitive Advantage

4. Developing Body Wisdom

• Basic ‘Rules’ of Body Wisdom
• The Skills of Body Wisdom

4. Conclusion

Our Body Processes are Designed to Keep Us Alive (…in the wild)

Our non-conscious body processes notice and respond to things long before our conscious processes do. This is what allowed our ancestors to run away from tigers and bears before they were consciously aware of the threats. And they would move towards things that were beneficial to their survival (food, an attractive mate, etc).

Our sensing/responding processes are continuous and deeply interconnected. Our non-conscious responses are the result of our nervous systems:

1. picking up on things in our environment through our five senses (eg sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste);
2. starting to interpret those signals based on biological and learned response patterns stored in our head-brain, heart-brain, and gut-brain; and,
3. transmitting a combination of electrical, hormonal, or chemical signals to various parts of our bodies to generate responses, some almost instantaneously.

Responses can include:

• fight or flight responses,
• freeze, or
• ?fawn.

There are several YouTube videos that show how animals respond to physical threats. An animal that is usually lunch (eg a gazelle) has it’s senses constantly attuned to possible predators (eg a lion).

• If a lion is sensed, since it can’t fight, the gazelle will try to run away and join its herd.
• If the lion catches it, its nervous system might cause it to ‘play dead’ (all non-critical body systems shut down but the senses are extremely keen).
• If/when the ‘dead’ gazelle notices the lion has relaxed (a little rest before enjoying its feast) the nervous system will immediately kick back into a super-charged flight.
• The gazelle can survive, and the lion may need to find a new lunch.

Once the threat is over, the nervous system should reset itself, and the animal (or human) should be able to return to eating and resting appropriately, socializing, and playing.

Threats in ‘Modern Times’ are Quite Different Than Our Ancestor’s ‘Wild Times’

?Most of us in the urban environment might see lots of raccoons and squirrels – which can make a mess of our yards when they are looking for lunch. But we rarely see lions or tigers or bears that might think of us as lunch.

We encounter physical threats such as: inattentive drivers, unexpected people in unexpected places doing unexpected things, texting walkers on narrow sidewalks. Our ancestors dealt with things that could maim, kill, and possibly eat them.

We encounter physical opportunities such as food and drink from around the world, and lots of attractive, interesting people. Our ancestors may have been lucky to have a few berries and a squirrel on a regular basis, and a mate that was the best of the neighboring families.

We encounter psychological threats such as: an angry boss or client, or a disappointed family member. That may end up with reprimands, fights, and firings. But for our ancestors, psychological threats may have ended up as physical threats with dire outcomes (short-tempered kings and lords made for short life-spans).

The psychological opportunities we have are numerous, and may include: a happy team that we really enjoy working with, a new business opportunity that gives us new, desired challenges, and a happy family that is a joy to spend time with. Our ancestors likely had similar opportunities, but the impacts had a greater impact on their ability to survive. Our psychological opportunities have a much greater impact on surviving AND thriving.

Modern Threats Can Trigger Ineffective or Destructive Responses

With well-developed judicial systems and all the mod-cons of a wealthy society, we face much fewer physical existential threats. However, we constantly face threats to our identities and our beliefs.

Our identities include how we see ourselves, how we want others to see us, and who accepts us as peers. Our beliefs help us make sense of the world. If our identities and beliefs are reinforced, we feel safe, or even empowered and confident.

A sense of threat to our identities or beliefs will trigger a nervous system response as if we are under physical threat. Modern-day responses might look like one of these 4Fs:

Fight:

• This can include being argumentative or aggressive (great for some negotiators, salespeople, and athletes … in some situations).
• Inappropriate fight responses can damage relationships and desired outcomes.
• Many people stuck in – and rewarded for – fight behavior often create threats in modern, urban environments.

Flight:

• Since we often can’t run away from our ‘predators’ or threats in our office or home environment, flight can look more like psychological flight such as an overly-active fantasy life, too many screensavers of ‘places-I’d-rather-be’, addictions, obsessions, etc.
• ‘Escapism’ is a disconnection to the present, leading to superficial relationships and engagement (at best).

Freeze:

• People who can’t escape their threats, resign themselves ‘to their fate’. We’ve all seen the zombie-like people who go through the motions of work and life, but really only do the absolute minimum necessary.
• ‘Frozen’ people get no joy from anything, and give no joy, including to themselves.

Fawn:

• Another response when people can’t escape their threats is to fawn over the person creating the threat. Think of the tyrannical ‘king’ who is surrounded by self-preserving ‘yes men’, opportunists, and Pollyanna’s.
• Fawning – and the need to fawn – is kryptonite to co-creation, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Organizations that condone and/or reward excessive ‘fight’ behavior (ie a culture of aggression vs. a culture of strategic assertiveness) will often also have lots of people in fawning, and several people in flight or freeze. These cultures tend to be shame-based, and quite toxic.

Our Body Processes are Both the Cause of Our Actions AND the Result of our Actions

Different people react to threats in different ways. This is in large part due to their previous experiences and how they navigated those.

• If someone experienced lots of threats (eg unsafe family, unsafe neighbourhood, unsafe work), they will likely switch into threat responses sooner than people who have had fewer threat experiences.
• If someone was unsuccessful in previous threat situations (eg could not escape or felt overpowered somehow), they will likely resort to flight, freeze, or fawn, rather than fight.
• If someone was successful in previous threat experiences (eg escaped the threat, overcame the threat, or was ‘saved’ somehow), they will likely respond with a fight response, but remain more coherent (eg ‘rational’) and will normalize their response quicker, once the threat diminishes.

Our patterns of behavior are developed through our childhood and adulthood. Childhood patterns will be ‘stickier’ because our nervous systems were forming at tht time.

Our patterns of behavior include:

• how we sense things, and how aware we are of certain stimuli;
• how we interpret what we sense – at non-conscious and conscious levels (influenced largely by our identities and beliefs); and,
• what body processes are triggered.

With each new experience (the trigger, the responses, and the outcomes) we reinforce or reshape our patterns. Neuroscience is showing us we can change our patterns of behavior over time. The more intentional and diligent we are, the more we can change those patterns.

Body processes are temporary states that create the patterns of behavior (more durable characteristics), which then influence future states.

This feedback loop can become a vicious or a virtuous cycle. In every experience, we intentionally or unintentionally choose whether we reinforce counterproductive responses or productive ones.

The good news is we do not have to be slaves to our nervous systems. We can learn to WORK WITH our nervous system and develop significant advantages.

Body Wisdom Creates Powerful Advantages?

We may perceive our physiological responses as emotions, as body feelings, or not at all.

Too often, our body responses (especially our emotions) are seen as serious inconveniences that need to be controlled. This could not be more wrong and more dangerous!

Controlling or suppressing our physiological signals can reduce our decision-making abilities and cost us our health. However, learning to WORK WITH our physiological signals (body wisdom) can help us make significantly more powerful decisions, improve our health, and create competitive advantage.

The technical term for body wisdom is interoception (internal perception). It is also frequently referred to as our ‘6th sense’, or ‘felt sense’. Body wisdom includes awareness of:

• what we are sensing externally (exteroception)
• our nervous system activity (neuroception),
• our body posture feedback loops (proprioception), and
• our organs (visceral sensations).

The Costs of Not Developing Body Wisdom

Trying to ‘control’ our physiological processes (including our emotions) results in:

• distress to ourselves physically and psychologically;
• potential ‘hijacking’ of our nervous system (excessive fight, flight, or freeze responses);
• having to constantly apologize and clean up messes because of the ‘hijacking’;
• missed opportunities to act effectively in the situation;
• impaired ability to leverage the information of our body processes; and,
• eventually, physical and psychological illness (sometimes, quite significant).

The Benefits of Developing Body Wisdom Are Extensive

In contrast, if we learn to work with our body processes, we can develop powerful advantages:

• perceive and understand much more information in our environments such as people’s micro-expressions and subtle and nuanced changes in the environment;
• develop our intuition;
• make much better decisions –and adapt them – in the situation;
• follow-through much more effectively on our decisions;
• repattern our learned responses to be much more effective;
• recognize when we have blind spots or discrepancies between our desired beliefs and identities and our actual beliefs (eg biases) and identities;
• heal low-value patterns of behavior;
• strengthen our resilience and that of others; and,
• increase our overall health.

?

Developing Body Wisdom Can Create Competitive Advantage

To improve our performance, we need to develop the ability to reflect. Reflection is the cognitive process of evaluating a situation or event; often referred to as post-mortems, retrospectives, etc. This fact-based and interpretive process can be described as determining what to ‘stop, start, continue, do less of and/or do more of’.

However, to improve-how-we-improve our performance (meta-leadership), we need reflexion. Reflexion is the exploration of conscious and non-conscious drivers of our behaviors – why we did or didn’t do something that would have generated better outcomes. This depends on learning-to-learn (meta-cognition) and being able to leverage our body wisdom (interoception).

Reflexion is a meta-process that can become a competitive advantage.

Developing the Competitive Advantage of Body Wisdom

Throughout our lives, we’ve learned to dull our body wisdom and we can become disconnected from our bodies. We:

• learn to ‘suck it up’ when we are injured, physically or psychologically;
• learn to ‘control’ our emotions because they are considered bad manners, a sign of weakness or ‘personality flaws’;
• miss or ignore important signals about our health, our relationships, the environment, etc (eg ‘I knew something was not quite right, but …’);
• transfer our physiological responses to ‘safe’ contexts (eg we transfer our anger or fear of someone or something with power over us, to someone or something we have power over); and,
• develop healthy and unhealthy coping mechanisms that eventually become unhealthy vices/addictions.

Physiological signals allowed us to survive by forcing us to move, to take action. If we think of these signals as good or bad, we will lose their value, and only be burdened with residual unpleasant feelings (eventually they stop being emotions), or chasing pleasure, but getting less reward from it when we do get it.

Like any new skill, changing our responses and our patterns is hard at first, but with competence and self-efficacy (from early small wins), it becomes much easier.

The process requires being willing and able to listen and observe ourselves. This can be very uncomfortable. But it is very empowering and joyful when we notice we are developing much more effective responses.

Basic ‘Rules’ of Body Wisdom

Some basic ‘rules’ of body wisdom include:

• being conscious of - and honoring - our physiological responses (the pleasant ones, and unpleasant ones);
• careful to not ignore or suppress the unpleasant emotions or think of them as irritants; and,
• grateful for the pleasant emotions, but not think of them as our 'natural state'.

The Skills of Body Wisdom

To work with our physiological signals, we have to do three things:

1. quiet the ‘noise’ in our heads and nervous systems (meditation);
2. learn the language of our bodies without cognitive interference (mindfulness); and,
3. develop a true feeling of unconditional self-love and self-respect (loving-kindness).

Although these are simple to do, they are not necessarily easy to do. They are not easy because we need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. The truth of body wisdom is that although it is incredibly powerful, we also experience times that truly and completely suck. Fortunately, the payoff is:

• greater comfort with discomfort (creating room for growth), and
• self-efficacy (the sense of being able to navigate more situations more effectively).

Some of the things we need to learn to do to develop body wisdom include:

Discipline

Developing a body wisdom practice takes discipline as it feels so intangible and so unproductive. You think ‘how can just sitting here and feeling really make a difference … I should be DOING something!’

We need to redefine (and really believe) that ‘doing something’ includes the hard but quiet work of feeling/listening, accepting, and calming our nervous systems. We also need to redefine our identities from 'people of action' (shoot first; ask questions later) to 'people of valuable action' (knowing how to identify the most effective action).

Experimentation and Adaption

Developing body wisdom takes some experimentation and adaption to figure out what works for you in this moment.

• For some people, it is sitting in lotus pose on a pillow.
• For some people, it is doing rhythmic exercise with consciousness (eg cycling).
• For some people, it is walking in nature.
• For some people, it is only a formal daily practice.
• While for others it is several short, informal practices throughout the day.

Body-Focused Practice

Body wisdom requires continuous, regular, patient body-focused practice (ie feeling and accepting what is happening in our bodies and nervous systems), rather than a cognitive process.?

We have been taught our brain (in our head) is where all our decisions and actions come from. However, research is showing that our nervous systems, primarily our vagus nerve which connects our 'heart brain' and 'gut brain' is really the driver of environmental awareness, decisions, and actions.

Modulation

Sometimes working through what our body is telling us is incredibly difficult because old emotions come up. We need to let those suppressed emotions do their work, and eventually they go away for ever. We need to learn to modulate:

• when we have those experiences, and
• how strongly we feel them.

Noticing

Often it feels like you are not making progress from meditation and mindfulness. And we don't become ‘perfect’ at meditation and mindfulness (ie we never get a ‘gold star of completion’). What we control is our ability to keep noticing what we are doing, and to choose to resume our focus on our bodies sensations.

But then, all of a sudden – several weeks later – you’ll notice you responded more effectively to a situation. Or you notice you no longer feel as overwhelmed by something as you would have in the past. Or you notice that you seem to understand situations much better that you did in the past. However, even as the ‘wins’ rack up, there are times it is easy to forget about the benefits of body wisdom.

Therefore, most people find themselves in a cycle of:

• experiencing some sort of crisis,
• so they start practicing meditation and mindfulness again,
• get some wins and feel like their work is done …
• and then a new situation pops up.

If you keep returning to the practice, it eventually becomes second nature. It requires continuous, regular, patient body-focused practice (ie feeling and accepting what is happening in your body and nervous systems), rather than a cognitive process. And it helps to remember how much better you are getting over time.

Accept and Work Through Emotions

One of the reasons we need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable is that as we develop our body wisdom, we start seeing things we previously had hidden from ourselves through fight, flight, freeze, or fawn behaviors (4Fs). We are able to see more clearly the patterns of our own behaviors and how they contribute to difficult situations. And that allows us to start seeing identities and beliefs that no longer serve us.

These realizations result in shame (eg ‘I’m not good enough. I’m not worthy. I’m unlovable.’)

• If we try to suppress or escape the shame through more 4Fs, things get worse.
• However, if we are able and willing to accept and work through the shame and other emotions, we can adapt ourselves and become much more powerful. And shame will eventually become much weaker.

Feel Unconditional Love for Ourselves

Research has shown quite unequivocally that one of the greatest predictors of a successful, balanced life is whether someone felt loved as a child. Yet, many of us did not grow up with unconditional love (or in some cases, we never/rarely felt loved or safe).

To feel (temporarily) loved or even accepted in conditional environments, we needed to perform or behave in certain ways (eg be the best, ‘be a man’, ‘be more feminine’, be tough, be invisible, etc). Therefore, a lot of our underlying shame arises from not being lovable, not being enough, not being worthy. This is a strong reason why we are unable and unwilling to feel what our bodies are telling us - it can be excruciating.

To heal from this shame, our regular daily practice (or ideally several times a day practice) is to stop and feel unconditional love for ourselves (this is a feeling exercise, not a thinking one). This does not mean we are perfect, but it does mean we are perfectly human and worthy of love.

When we feel unconditionally loved by ourselves, we start treating ourselves with more respect (which opens up doors we didn't even know existed). Then we treat other people with more respect (opening another set of closed doors). We become kind. Kindness is not weakness; kindness and respect are essential to build various communities that support us and that get things done. Winning and kindness are not opposites. In fact, in the world we live in today kindness is essential to build the competitive teams that win and continue winning.

Conclusion

Successful poker players and great negotiators have developed their ability to leverage their physiological signals. And many researchers have proposed that body wisdom can create significant competitive advantage in leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

By learning to work with our physiological response, we have access to a wealth of information our bodies pick up on about ourselves, other people and the environment, so we can make better decisions and follow through more effectively.

If we learn to work with physiological responses (including our emotions) as a source of information, power, and insight, we can accept emotions and mistakes as signals and opportunities to help us make much better decisions. And over time, we can heal low-value responses that result in more effective body wisdom. This can be a powerful virtuous cycle.

I’d be curious to hear about your experiences and how you leverage your body wisdom. What works for you??

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