Becoming an Embodied Leader

By: Ben King, Embodied Leadership Coach

Have you considered the important role your physical body has in leadership?

How often do you check in with your physical sensations as a welcomed and influential part in your leadership?

If you haven’t, you aren’t the only one. The body is often excluded from conversations around leadership and, instead, the emphasis in leadership tends to be more focused on mental and cognitive aspects.

We know your posture and body language influence your leadership presence. But, did you know there is so much more to how the body impacts your experience?

To understand the importance of the body, it needs to be viewed more broadly than a collection of muscles and tissues that make up our physical bodies. As discussed below, it is a place of wisdom, resource, guidance, learning and expression; our body and the sensations we feel have an incredible influence on how we think, act and lead.

What is an Embodied Leader?

An embodied leader is authentically connected to and leads with their whole self. Embodied leaders have great respect for the balance between the mental and physical aspects of themselves and utilize both components in their leadership.

Becoming an embodied leader requires returning to the intelligence of the body. They realize that the body is a powerful tool in leadership and understand the importance of accessing this intelligent resource. By accessing this source of wisdom, they understand the distinction between the “thinking mind” and the “feeling body.”

On the other extreme, leaders who are disconnected from their body’s wisdom tend to operate in default mode and can show up reactively.

The Four Phases:

Overview:

There are four phases to become an embodied leader. Acknowledging where we are along the path of the different phases can help us move forward to become a true embodied leader.

It is important to recognize these are not linear, definitive phases. We may move forward and back as well as somewhere between them.

Phase 1: Awareness and Envisioning

In this phase, we connect to a vision for ourselves, becoming more aware of how our physical body can support that vision. This is when we build awareness of what’s going on in our body and how it’s contributing to our experience. Through that new awareness, we can begin to include our physical experience as we envision what’s possible. When we get excited about our vision, we make greater contact with the aliveness within us, feeling the body as a place of resource and refuge.

By listening to and connecting to our intentions, we set out on a path towards achieving our vision.

Reflection questions: What’s your vision for yourself in leadership? How does your physical self support that vision?

Phase 2: Recognizing Patterns

In this phase, we learn to recognize our default patterns. This includes both the aspects we want to change and all the positive aspects that we want to maintain. We discover what is, and what is not, working.

“What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size,” the psychologist Carl Jung stated. This quote reinforces that rejecting our bad habits will make it more challenging to break or change them.

Instead, we can learn to accept the original purpose the default pattern served. We learned the pattern because it helped us out somehow in our past. When we recognize these habits served us in our past but we have outgrown them, we have the autonomy to move forward on our commitments. 

Reflection questions: What is a strength that’s part of this new vision for yourself? What habits no longer serve you?

Phase 3: Letting Go to Grow

In this phase, we start to let go of who we have been and embrace new habits and behaviors to support our growth. Usually, this is the most uncomfortable territory because it’s so unfamiliar: while we are moving towards achieving our vision for ourselves, we haven’t yet realized it but simultaneously, we have made progress and have started to change.

This is the stage when old coping mechanisms and self-sabotaging tendencies tend to reemerge to escape the discomfort of change. When we stay committed to our future vision and continually let go of what no longer serves us, we pass through this often uncomfortable phase.

Towards the end of this phase, we begin to build more connection with our vision of who we want to be.

Reflection question: How will you hold yourself accountable to letting go of old coping mechanisms?

Phase 4: Stepping into the Embodied Leader

The last phase is to step into being an embodied leader. We demonstrate embodied practices, habits and behaviors that are authentically aligned with the future state we envisioned. But what does that mean? Once you step into embodied leadership, you gain the ability to take new action even under the same previous pressure. You have greater integration with the physical and mental aspects of yourself to utilize within your leadership.

As an embodied leader, skillful action and authentic contribution become natural. Our physical self becomes an embodied expression of how we share our vision with the world.

What action could you take to become more embodied?

Acknowledge with kindness what phase you are in your journey towards becoming an embodied leader. Determine a step you could take next that aligns with your vision.

There is a powerful embodied leadership tool that we often don’t pay attention to: our breath. Our breath can help us become a more present, responsive leader.

Unfortunately, most people breathe in a way that’s called an inverse breathing pattern, where we breathe mainly with the chest and less with the diaphragm. To access the power of our breath, we need to breathe from our diaphragm, which moves us back to a state of calm and can elicit a relaxation response. 

Try the exercise below for a few minutes daily for a week to practice diaphragmic breathing.

Diaphragmic breathing exercise: 

(As referenced in: Brilliant by Jamie Shapiro)

1.      Find a posture that is steady and comfortable: sitting on a chair, cross legged on the floor or lying down

2.      Place one hand on your chest and the other on your belly, just below the navel.

3.      As you breathe in, attempt to make the hand on the belly move while keeping the hand on the chest immobile. Doing so activates the diaphragm. As you exhale, the belly hand will fall.

4.      Once you get used to expanding the diaphragm, start to regulate your inhale and exhale by inhaling for a count between three and five seconds. Make sure that:

a.      Both inhalation and exhalation are equal.

b.      You Manage to take a full in-breath and out-breath

c.       You do not strain.

Consider how this practice helps you bring awareness to your physical body.