Next-Level Leadership: How Somatics Can Help You Access 1% More of Your Potential
How Somatics Can Help You Access 1% More of Your Potential
Toxic patterns of thinking and feeling can block us from leading change and innovation and living our most authentic lives.
Memories stored in the body are the foundation for both negative or positive neural pathways that have formed over a lifetime.
They are the basis of our emotional and instinctual nature and impact our behaviors and the way we show up in the world.
In addition, the constant bombardment of social and emotional experiences triggers us to unconsciously design the patterns that dictate how to relate to fellow humans and all living things.
These types of memories result in strengthened neural pathways and synaptic connections that have a hold on how we live, and for that matter, how we lead.
When a memory, habit, or behavior has outlived its usefulness as an “operating mode” and is limiting our effectiveness, we need to retrain our neural pathways.
By retraining these pathways, we can develop new competencies, new ways of being, and new ways of responding to life’s pressures and opportunities.
Somatic practices offer a way to get these results - a way to unlock the next 1% of your potential.
What is Somatic Movement? A Methodology to Actualize Intentions.
Somatic movement is done with a focus on what is being experienced internally. It can take many forms and is a way to access our deeper selves.
We’re going to discuss three types of somatic movement you can use today to start unlocking more of your potential.
“The body is a domain of action that learns through practice.”
- Michael Merzenich, Neuroscientist, TedTalk 2004
Repetition alone is not enough, however. The practice must have emotional significance in order to last. (Zull 2002) What you practice must be connected to what you care about.
To retrain neural pathways, we need more than just activity—we need emotions. For the brain, emotion means “emotion chemicals,” such as adrenalin (fight or flight), dopamine (reward), or even serotonin (sleep and peace).
When our network connections are swimming in emotion chemicals, synapse strength is modified, and the responsiveness of neuron networks can be dramatically changed (Brembs, Lorenzetti, Reys, Baxter, & Byrne, 2002).
Your stories Are Running Your Life.
How are they Holding You Back
When coaching leaders, I often ask, what is the story you are telling yourself? Emotion and thought are physically entangled. This brings our body into "the story” because we feel our emotions in our body and the way we feel always influences our brain.
Accessing implicit emotional memory stored in our living tissues, cells, and nervous system is part of a learning framework that elevates leadership capacity and a sense of wellbeing. Understanding how to connect to one’s “internal guiding system” (head, heart, and gut), and integrating these, is part of the framework.
By paying close attention to and getting more intimately familiar with our own sensory and emotional responses to triggers, observing heat in his body, muscular tension, anger, and impatience, we start the somatic (bodily) awareness to access Whole-self Intelligence™.
Wendy Palmer, Founder of Leadership Embodiment, says that the head likes control, the heart wants approval, and the gut wants safety. Once the awareness is sensed (and understood), step two is to enter into “somatic practice,” where the goal is for the body and mind to connect and develop new patterns of response, thoughts, and feelings.
In a recent coaching engagement with a business owner, I facilitated her interactions around what I called a live “leadership simulations” (a somatic experience) with a team member that drove her up the wall.
The exercise: any time she would interact with this individual, she was to become “very aware” of how she was showing up, thinking, feeling, and sensing. The goal was two-fold. She was tasked to be intentional with the way she was showing up with her strengths. She was to be mindful in connecting with the team member by listening deeply and deciphering their strengths contributions and needs.
Because we had discussed her innate talents and strengths in detail (according the Clifton Strengths assessment), she was able to lean on her authenticity and innate abilities to maneuver through the “somatic simulation,” while managing her blindspots (weaknesses) and the triggers that, like kryptonite, reduce her leadership abilities. This takes a whole-body awareness and practice. Coaching through these “somatic interactions” develops emotional intelligence and strengths-based leadership.
Somatic learning is being accepted as essential for the human learning experience (and for next-level leadership capacity).
As you can see, the mind and body connection is no longer a woo-woo concept related to spirituality, mysticism, or alternative medicine.
I’ve written about the fact that us humans have three brains, and yet are not using them intentionally to lead.
Neurobiology says that for the head (the neocortex), and the body’s heart and gut (part of the limbic system) to be considered a “brain,” they must have their own interconnected, and yet independent, neural-networks and data transfers.
A brain must also have the ability to remember. Research has well established the head, heart, and gut to meet the definition of a brain (for those that need more concrete science) of why somatic practices work.
Through this process of deliberate mind-body practice, a leader builds more choice about how to react, rather than simply being driven by historical tendencies and conditioning.
Ultimately, this results in more grace under pressure, resilience, emotional intelligence, and the ability to model and develop others. Consequently, giving implicit permission and an invitation for others to show up as whole-self and authentic humans to connect with.
Somatics offers a way of integrating the mind and body to learn and relearn by using our full human capacity to experience living and leading. It’s a methodology to actualize intentions.
It enables a shift from the old ways of thinking, feeling, and being that keeps leaders from the vision they are pursuing, to a new way of being.
This fresh outlook based on the possibilities (and opportunities) is more effective and enabling of an authentic-self to live and thrive strengthened by the truth of self.
Whole-self learning allows for humans to be the Leader of their lives.
In the next installment of this 4-part series, Journey to the Next 1%, we'll look at how leaders can use somatic mindfulness to develop resilient, coherent, and inclusive cultures and teams. And if you missed the first part of this series, The Iceberg We Are, you can read it here.
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