You Have a Body, Are You Using It?
The short answer to this question is “yes”, barring certain physical encumbrances, you are using your body every day to get the results you are getting now. This is what I meant in an earlier blog when I used the word “non-discretionary” regarding the role our bodies play in leading others. Our bodies are communicating to others and predisposing us to certain postures and actions whether we know it - or want them to - or not. So an even better question is – are you using your body to help you accomplish the outcomes you’d like to see, and build the future you’d like to have?
I’ve also mentioned before that for most of my adult life, I was blind to the impact my body had on my own work performance and quality of life, let alone how to utilize it better. I had gone deep in the research about improving individual and organizational performance (primarily productivity and quality and collaboration), without realizing I was missing an important piece of the puzzle. It took some sustained exposure to somatic and embodied practices to get me over that blindness. But I now know there is a growing body of research that helps explain and often demonstrates empirically that how we use our bodies make a huge difference in our health and competence. Of course, to apply what is known, you must put it into practice (this is what we offer at East Valley Leader Lab), but you can get a sense of what is going on by looking at the research. We will delve deeper into specific fields of research in this series, but for now, we can touch on just a few fields at a high level.
Biology and Behavior. Human beings are not machines. Through much of the first half of the 20th century parts of the scientific community tried to demonstrate that we behave predictably, kind of like machines. But as scientists have delved deeper into human development, and technologies have given us a more accurate picture of our physical biology, it has become clear that humans are never simply reacting to their environment. How we respond depends as much or more on our personal history and what is going on inside of us in any given moment, than on what is going on in the external environment. Some biologists (Maturana and Varela, 1987) use the term structural coupling to explain how our individual development in our unique environment produces people with different triggers and different abilities to control how we respond to those triggers. Our brains are the least developed organ when we are born because our brains are developing to a large extent in response to our particular experiences and challenges.
That being said, if we are not attuned to what our body is telling us, we can get trapped in the reactive mode. As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman (2011) notes from four decades of research, we are designed to assess and act very quickly (especially to anything the least bit threatening), but we also have a mechanism to put the brakes on and take a more rational approach to whatever we run up against. The challenge is noticing and being disciplined in our action when that second mechanism is needed.
Anatomy and Physiology. This may be the area that reveals the most and as technologies advance is beginning to explain how this all works. Scientist are learning more and more about the huge nerve structures outside the central nervous system (brain and spinal column). These structures in our gut and around our heart are mostly sensory. As Amanda Blake, author of Your Brain is Your Body (2018) puts it, the famous 5 senses are merely a subset of the 3 classes of sensors in our bodies (exteroceptive, interoceptive and proprioceptive). She explains further that because the nervous system evolved under pressures to keep us safe, to be responsive to the needs of others and to manage complex social dynamics, the sensors in our body in particular are a constant source of information about other humans we are interacting with. For example, studies suggest that when we perceive incongruency between what is displayed by another’s body vs their face, people are more likely to believe what they see in the body (Blake, 2020). And we perceive much of this “interoceptive” information bodily before our brains get involved in assessing any situation. In regards to embodied practices, the question again becomes how attuned are we with this incoming information, and do we use it to stay in touch with what is most important to us, and then to respond consistent with those key concerns?
Physical and Emotional Health and Resilience. “As we relax and redirect our preoccupied minds back into our bodies and focus on the sensations of the moment, we begin to let go of many of the psychological and physical stresses we brought with us”. This is a quote from The Harvard Medical Guide to Tai Chi (Wayne, 2013), a book that not only offers a roadmap for practicing Tai Chi, but also reviews substantial research that’s been done to connect these bodily practices to physical and emotional health. My associate Amanda Stradling is a Master Tai Chi instructor, and Tai Chi is one vehicle we use in our offerings to facilitate embodiment. Just doing Tai Chi has been shown in a meta-analysis of studies to produce significant improvements in stress management and psychological distress. Other studies linked Tai Chi to marked improvements in blood pressure.
But this is about more than health. The best leaders – like the best athletes - do not operate with harried and preoccupied minds. That’s because they know how to, and have developed practices for managing their physical and emotional energy and relaxing under tension. There is substantial research showing a link between physical activity and psychological well-being. Similarly, there are studies showing that physical exercise improves mood. One of the embodied leader principals is taking responsibility for the mood of yourself and those around you. This involves emotional sensing and taking actions to shift moods as appropriate. And being able to do this when it is needed and especially in crisis times requires what Wayne calls emotional resiliency. One of the things we are doing with embodied and somatic practices is building emotional resiliency.
What we are just beginning to do here is show that there is well established science underpinning the important role that our bodies have in our effectiveness as leaders of teams and leaders of our lives in general. In this blog, we will continue to explore patterns in the evidence that support measurable benefits and methods for developing embodied leadership.
References:
Thinking Fast and Slow. Daniel Khaneman, 2011.
Your Body is Your Brain. Amanda Blake, 2018.
Body = Brain Course by Amanda Blake, 2020 (learn more at embright.org/body-brain).
The Tree of Knowledge by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, 1987.
The Harvard Medical School Guide to Tai Chi by Peter Wayne (with Mark Fuerst), 2013.
