Why is embodied leadership a founder superpower?

How accessing the "wisdom of the body" is a founder superpower

I recently sent an update to some of the folks in my professional network about the work I’m doing as a coach, helping founders with my trainings in somatic therapeutic modalities rooted in embodied awareness. One of them wrote back: “So great to hear from you and hope you’re well! I really appreciate the update and am excited for your new adventure. I’m not familiar with the practice of embodied awareness but you’ve definitely inspired me to learn more, especially as I’ve found such strength and joy through my work with the Conscious Leadership Group.”

It dawned on me that I’ve struggled to communicate what exactly the work is I do because it is so deeply experiential. It’s like trying to explain the experience of an orgasm to someone who’s celibate. I don’t even have the words.

But that’s not going to stop me from trying (to explain embodied awareness in coaching, not orgasms).

Let’s just take a minute and define “embody”. From Merriam-Webster: “to cause to become a body or part of a body.” To become a body. To embody is to recognize that we are humans with bodies. Second definition: “To give a body to (a spirit).” I love this definition. It’s as though our spirits float around in the universe waiting for a body to take hold in. This latter reference particularly speaks to me in the context of founders, because we (founders) are people with ideas and thoughts. Lots of ideas and thoughts. But they aren’t just swirling in space. They exist within the context of a human body. A human body with feelings, perceptions, and emotions.

Embodied awareness, then, is simply having an awareness of what’s happening in your own body at any moment in time. Our bodies are constantly giving us signals and sharing information with us that we often choose to ignore. Feeling a grumbly tummy and lethargic after eating a big pile of french fries? Yeah, that’s your body telling you to eat less of that. Feeling moist palms and a shortness of breath when you get on the investor pitch call? Yeah, that’s your body telling you you’re nervous.

As you become more aware of what’s happening in your own body, you gain more agency over influencing it. You can choose to not eat french fries. You can choose to meditate for five minutes before an investor call in order to calm your nervous system (I’ve done that).

But there’s more benefits than just existing in a happier state yourself. Other people perceive these things happening in your body even if you don’t. That shortness of breath you had on your investor call? They might have noticed it, and you probably came across as anxious and unconfident. If you met in person and shook their hand, they might have noticed your clammy hands. If they are perceptive, they read you as nervous. You don’t want to come across as nervous to investors.

If you’re running anxious all the time (most founders are and most don’t realize it), your anxiety is likely penetrating throughout your work environment adding a layer of exhaustion to your entire team and driving everyone towards burnout. I left a startup I worked for because the founder’s unmanaged anxiety was like a contagious disease. The moment you entered the office there was perceptible anxiety in the air. You had to have a strong energetic bubble in order to not be impacted by it. I noticed that founder’s anxiety created more anxiety for me, and I had to expend considerable energy to not take on his anxiety. The rest of the team was exhausted by it.

If you aren’t present in your own body, if you aren’t aware that you’re channeling a high level of anxiety or fear or stress, it will have large consequences. It will impact your team and your relationships with customers, key partners, and investors. It will impact your romantic partner(s), your kids, and your friends. And it will also impact your own health. Founders tend to carry an extreme amount of stress; my own load took its toll on my physical health in the form of chronic pain. I used to work a disembodied day, typing away at my computer and disconnected with how I was feeling in my body until mild stress would tighten into pain in my back and shoulder, which would tip past a point such that I couldn’t work at a desk anymore, and I’d be forced to lie down and take a break. This would happen almost every week, and eventually while lying on the couch in tears of pain, unable to run my company, I realized I needed to pay attention to my body to heal this problem.

There’s so many more benefits to embodied awareness than simply preventing bad things. Embodied awareness allows you to tap into your inner intuition, the inner signal within your body that offers a deep knowing. It’s the part of you that digests all the sensory information you’ve received about a problem and delivers an answer felt deep within.

When I work with founders on tuning into the signals of their bodies, they are usually very clear. They’ll be grappling with a decision that’s kept them up at night for far too long. We’ll talk through the different options so I have context, and then I’ll ask them to go inward. We’ll slow down our breathing together, close our eyes, and I’ll ask them to notice what sensations are present in their body. What seems to want to call out to them, what wants to be noticed. Often, founders will point to some sort of tension - neck and shoulders are very common - where they are carrying their steady-state level of stress. Once they’ve connected their awareness to their bodies, I’ll bring their awareness to each possible outcome of their critical decision one-by-one, and ask them to tune into what happens in their body when I say that possible outcome.

I have yet to encounter a body that can’t make a decision. Bodies will usually signal their desires via a relaxation, a loosening, a settling, or some feeling of greater peace. They’ll tell us what they don’t want by a constriction, contraction, tightening, pain, or other unpleasant tension. They tell us things our rational brains might not yet be ready to see. If the founder can learn to tune into the wisdom of the body and trust it, they will make their decision faster based on the inner knowing of their body.

Coming back to my friend’s reference to his work with the Conscious Leadership Group, I’d like to explain embodied awareness in the context of something many leaders are familiar with. The Conscious Leadership Group works with the lessons from the book The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. What I love about the 15 Commitments is they outline a way of being for leaders that I find really inspirational. One of my favorites is #3, Feelings: “I commit to feeling my feelings all the way through to completion. They come, and I locate them in my body then move, breathe and vocalize them so they release all the way through.”

Embodied awareness is essentially feeling your feelings, and becoming aware that you are feeling them. But there’s a deeper wisdom to this than most of us realize. When we don’t fully feel our feelings and let them move through, they become stuck in our bodies. The most well-known example is trauma resulting from the inability to fully feel or express in the way the body wanted to at the time of a traumatic event. Or, as in my case, the accumulated stress of running an early stage company through a pandemic as a solo founder manifested as persistent tightness and chronic pain in my back.

And yet we only have the skills we have. We aren’t born with the knowledge of how to heal our own trauma, just as we aren’t born with the awareness of how to heal our own chronic pain. Tapping into embodied awareness is a skillset that founders can acquire by working with skilled professionals to gain a founder superpower: embodied leadership. Being able to be maximally productive without stress? Yes, please.

The last piece I’ll share is how to shift your way of being through embodied awareness. While the 15 Commitments propose these great ways of being, often we’ve learned most of how we show up from the other humans we’ve interacted with in the course of our lives. In some cases we’ve learned from positive role models - a family member that was highly skilled at taking ownership for their own feelings and modeled this behavior for us. But in other cases, our patterning resulted from a series of incomplete lessons at best or trauma memories at the worst. If your family yelled at each other and blamed each other for their misfortune, the pattern you might have learned is to blame others for your bad feelings and circumstances.

There are (at least) two ways to unlearn these things. One way is to learn from positive role models for the skills we want to develop. Coaches, therapists, and peer circles are all great ways to learn these skills from people who embody them.

Another way is to become the positive role model for yourself. In a client session, I will have someone slow down to step through piece by piece an emotionally challenging or difficult situation, noticing each sensation in their body as they come up, and remaining deeply present with those sensations. We’ll trace the sensations and, if they have a story from the past they want to bring your attention to, we’ll follow them backward in time. Sometimes, those sensations are caught years in the past, triggered by the present moment, and the overwhelming body response is not actually due to the circumstances in the present moment but by the trigger that leapt the body into the past. These are because these emotions were never released. Together, we’ll release them in little packets, safely, so they don’t overwhelm the nervous system. And then we’ll be able to come back to the present difficult situation and you’ll have more spaciousness to experience it with a response tied to what’s here in front of you, not what’s lodged in the past. As you have that spaciousness, you’ll learn how to respond to an emotionally challenging situation with greater capacity, and you will essentially model this behavior for yourself. Knowing that you can face something emotionally challenging, explore what’s underneath it, and thereby reduce the difficulty builds your confidence to tackle emotionally challenging situations, since you’ll trust that on the other side is greater ease.

If you’re interested in exploring growing your own embodied awareness as a leader, I have a few spots left in my coaching practice. Reach out to me: lunarayemail@gmail.com.