LOVE LETTER TO LEADERS NUMBER 4 — The Physicality of LEADERSHIP

Dear (Embodied) Leader

My newest leadership program is called The Body in Leadership

Leading needs your body. Have you noticed that? A viable growing career will need you to be alive, attentive and active. Vision, manifestation and growth need the body to come along, energised and engaged via the body processes of:

Your energy

Your stamina

Your flows and rhythms

Your resilience

If you think your busy mind is what helps you lead … you are wrong. It’s a hefty statement but I will stand by it! I have learnt this from my clients … CEOs and their top teams. I have watched for over 20 years as an executive coach in large corporations and start ups.

All coachees are bright. All are successful.

Most have degrees. Or two.

The point is that the biggest impacts of potent leadership … like influence, inspiration, stamina … are lived via or in the body.

True leadership is an embodied experience.

Lately I am calling leadership a “phenomenon”.

(So we don’t get caught up with power and positions!)

Humans are curious and wonderfully complex beings. We are especially clumsy about power, love, trust and grief … topics I will write more about soon.

“Leadership has nothing to do with power”, I wrote recently. Leadership is expressed via the body, it is a phenomena experienced, it is embodied when it is true.

And for me it starts with self.

Leading one’s self is the starting challenge, the deepest practice in being a good leader. Then comes leading team and leading dynamics.

In this pandemic of change, in this tsunami of shifts and overwhelm, in this alchemical fire of dissolution and testing … in all the challenges humans on our planet are feeling, we experience an uplevel of energy, distractions, overwhelming pace or overwhelming aloneness — all VIA the body.

The idea of embodiment in leadership requires us to start recognising we are inhabiting a physical body. We are mind,heart, conscience and consciousness, energy, will and stamina.

All if these live in the body.

So bluntly, it’s not the cleverness of the busy mind that wins staff loyalty.

It’s presence, open energy, heartfelt radiance, and grounded wisdom that influence and draws followers.

It’s not the positional power that ignites inspired action.

Aligning your mind with heart, body, energy and insight is a body experience. It’s palpable, felt, registered in the body and alive between people.

I used to think as a frantically busy senior team leader that the firm just wanted my mind. So much to plan, execute, organise, reflect upon.

The days just flew by.

I felt like my head was full, my body like a paddle-pop stick that just carried my head along.

So integrating and living in harmony and balance in my body, has been part of my learning.

Now I teach body wisdom. I am interested in encouraging the body intelligent leader.

This new paradigm enables leaders who want to develop more sustainable energy, respect their bodies and practice the high mastery of potency, vibrancy,radiance, calmness and clarity.

SO

Are you tired?

Overwhelmed?

Feeling unsupported?

In unhealthy patterns, even addictions?

Let’s have a possibilities conversation on this.

If your body is telling you it’s needing change.

Flourishing IS DIFFERENT TO SURVIVAL.

Magnificent harmony in Leadership is expressed in body intelligence.

The body never lies. We leaders need to listen more to the messages and potency of the body.