Somatics (the body) and Business

This is perhaps the newest and most exciting edge for leadership theory and leadership development that we know about. In partnership with the Strozzi Institute, a pioneer and world-leader in this area, we incorporate this philosophy into all our work.

This philosophy is essentially that we have a physiology and a certain structure, by which we mean a ‘bearing’, or ‘deportment’. Our thinking and feeling are determined by both of these. The hunched shoulders or knotted forehead both reflect and predispose certain moods. Emotions are, at the most basic level, chemistry. It is difficult to think expansively and creatively when the gaze is tightened and narrowed. (Try it!)

In business, we can recognize the importance of phenomena such as presence, gravitas, centeredness, and intensity and focus. We know them when we see them, but how do we know? These are being communicated by the body, which a well-cited piece of research suggests is critical in forming powerful impressions. (You may recall that this research suggested that only 7% of first impressions were conveyed by the words themselves.)

The body can be trained, and leaders can be developed so that, when inspiration is what is needed their body looks inspirational and not just their talk. When assuredness and self-confidence are what is called for, the non-verbal signals add up. However, strictly speaking, this isn’t about ‘body language’ or artificially shifting postures to create a certain impression. Those do not work well, and almost always look faked.

Work in this area produces a fundamental shift in ‘the self’, so that speaking, feeling and action are aligned. Awareness of mood and emotion creates the possibility of shifting them, in ourselves and in others. Communication is congruent, leaders aren’t saying one thing and communicating something else. Essentially, work in this area is about creating a vital, centred, authentic, and powerful presence: the essence, some would say, of leadership.

A few central concepts which distinguish this approach from others are listed below:

• Learning: Just as one cannot learn to swim by reading a book, leadership is not learnt through cognitive understanding. In the work that we do, cognitive understanding is not learning, it is understanding. Learning is an ability to take new actions – to use the metaphor of swimming; it is being able to swim. This is crucial. We live in a world where learning stops when we have understood. From our point of view, understanding is a beginning, and from this point we take on a series of recurrent practices to develop learning.
• Practices: Swimming the length of a pool is different from being a proficient swimmer, and still different than being an Olympic swimmer. The differentiator is practice. We practice to achieve the level of mastery that we desire in other disciplines, but in business there is virtually no notion of practice or practices in the leadership development sphere.
• Our history: We are the sum of our histories and experiences. Our histories and our interpretations of our histories shape our behaviour and interactions with others. Often this leads to us being limited by certain learnt behaviours. Such a learnt behaviour could be an arrogance which served us in promoting ourselves at the beginning of our career, or a need to control all details, which made us a great project manager on a small level, but restricts us in managing a team to deliver a project. New behaviours need to be learnt to deliver on a higher level, to be a leader at a higher level. Then they require practice, to develop mastery as a leader.

In this discourse, we work with individuals on their historical limitations and develop a series of practices that allow them to develop a 'muscle' for new actions. All these practices: physical, mental, or emotional in nature, develop ‘the self’, which in a reliable sense is what makes one leader more effective than another.