Episode 38: Embodied Leadership

Hello and welcome back to Courage Is Calling!

Over the summer I found myself beginning to switch gears a little bit in my work. After quite a long time of not feeling super inspired, I had some new downloads of some gentle (but also quite mighty) ideas.

One that has been formulating for quite some time is a new model of resourcing and support for female leaders and the idea of exploring what it means to lead from an embodied approach.

I'm sharing more about this idea and approach in this episode and inviting you to join myself and Michelle Leeder (psychotherapist & embodiment expert) to hear more about what we're working on around Embodied Leadership in a free online gathering/webinar next Monday (Sept 11th) at 7pm GMT.

If you're a leader, manager, founder, executive, head of dept, or you lead in any way, we'd love to invite you to sign up and come along - click here and stick your email address down and we'll send you the info.
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Hello and welcome back to Courage Is Calling! I am your host Mel Wiggins and it is good to be back behind the microphone talking to you about all things bravery in work and life.

Over the summer I found myself beginning to switch gears a little bit in my work. After quite a long time of not feeling super inspired, making adjustments for myself, letting things be what they are in my business and not pushing for inspiration in my work - I had some new downloads over the summer of some gentle (but also quite mighty) ideas.

One that has been formulating for quite some time is a new model of resourcing and support for female leaders. This is something I think I've been sitting on for quite a while but has needed to make it's own way to the front in it's own time. I began to think about my own leadership journey, the roles where I have been the person in charge or the person managing or coordinating work - both for myself and my team in my business but also in my roles in the charity sector where I managed big projects with loads of moving parts.

And I realised that I never really had any support to lead well. I was in the roles because someone thoughts I was capable but ultimately I had to piece together my own version of leadership and as we all know - this often happens on a wing and a prayer because when you’re leading - rarely is there time to reflect on how you’re actually doing that and what kind of leader you want to be - you are usually just fighting fires, trying to manage other people, pushing ahead and learning on the job.

What I also realised is that when it came to how I led, I often felt like I had to lead like the men around me and there was a sense both implicitly and explicitly that I had to prove myself that bit more, keep an eye on the balance of my assertiveness that bit more and justify my decisions much more than the males that I worked with.

When you are leading with that kind of feeling surrounding you, the only real outcome is self-doubt and questioning yourself and I have witnessed this many times in my own journey of leadership and in the experiences of other women.

So earlier in the summer I decided to get some information from other female leaders to get a wider sense of how they felt in their roles - what they were struggling with, how they felt about being in their positions as females and what kind of support they were receiving already to help them lead well.

I had over 60 responses from women in all kinds of fields - and it was so enlightening, affirming and also enraging to hear their stories and to understand that the picture of leadership for women still remains largely under resourced and supported.

Sure there are training programmes out there for women in leadership - but as far as I can see - so much of them continue to focus on a very male-centred approach - one that largely looks at goals and vision and evaluations and leveraging teams and lots of the more rigid HEAD stuff.

What I have noticed is that there are no models of leadership development that actually help women make peace with and understand the nuances for women leading that requires us to take what I am calling, an embodied approach.

What this means is that instead of following rigid leadership models that require us to turn away from our intuition and feelings in order to get the job done - actually the key to unlocking the power of female leadership lies in turning toward our intuition, toward our instincts, toward our gut senses and to pay attention to the wise knowing in our bodies in order to lead well.

Embodied leadership actually recognises that our bodies are completely in allyship with us and can be a great intelligence source to help us deepen our sense of self-trust as we make decisions, communicate, develop teams and create environments for people to thrive and for the work we are doing to be impactful.

I actually think that an embodied approach to leadership is actually the missing piece in leadership development for women. Learning or relearning to trust the wisdom of our body, heart AND mind to lead well. Not cutting off the body and heart - but bringing them in to all aspects of leadership and recognising how these aspects, often left at the door, have the power to develop female leaders that will completely change the game for us indiviudally, change the culture of work and change the levels of impact our work can have.

This realisation, when it came, got me fired up and I enlisted my most trusted friend, Michelle Leeder to help me formulate some sort of support and training that approaches leadership development in this way. Michelle is a psychotherapist and embodiment expert with two decades of experience in leading work with women and girls and together we are creating a brand new piece of work around this - something that as far as I can see - is not available anywhere else for women who lead.

Together we are creating something that is going to give women in leadership a fuller, more nuanced understanding of their leadership potential by integrating their body, activating their intuition and understanding the power of embodiment. We are collating all of our own training and research to bring you - brilliant female leaders - something dynamic, evidence based, practical and hopeful.

What if instead of feeling like we need to prove ourselves, women could come into a deeper understanding of self-assurance and trust and lead from there.

What if instead of pushing down feelings of frustration or anger when our judgement or decisions are questioned, we could pull on some powerful inner resources and tools to feel more regulated and lead from there.

What if instead of second guessing our approach or communication style, we were able to ground ourselves in ways of communicating that feel powerful and authentic and we lead from there.

What if instead of feeling deflated by constant issues arising and having to troubleshoot, we have ways of dealing with conflict that are person-centred and boundaried and we lead from there.

What if instead of everything living in our heads, responsibility overwhelming us we are able to work with our bodies as a source of intelligence that can help us manage stress and we lead from there.

Wouldn’t our lives be better, our work be better and the impact of our work stronger if women felt liberated and supported to lead in this way?

Michelle is going to be joining me over the next couple of weeks on this podcast as we share a bit more about what it means to be an embodied leader - so look out for more episodes coming soon. And if you’re a female leader and you’re curious about this piece of work and how an embodied approach might support your leadership journey we’d love you to join us for a webinar gathering on Monday Sept. 11th at 7pm. The link is in the profile to sign up to come to that.

Until then, all the love and courage to you.