by Mark Walsh
EMBODIMENT AND LEADERSHIP
One of the main areas that I’ve worked in is developing leaders across many diverse businesses, as well as in the public and third sectors, on five continents. This has involved brief courses or work over a more extended period. Here are a few thoughts on this large topic.
A practical “how” of leadership
The first thing to say is that embodiment training is leadership training, as embodied capacities are the critical “soft skills” of leaders. Assuming technical expertise and intelligence (really a given in most competitive environments), it’s bodymind competencies such as self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy and the ability to inspire that make the difference.
I’ve found that people have often read all the leadership books and maybe done an expensive MBA. However, all this does is give people a sense of what a leader should be like, without giving people the tools to actually develop such skills in themselves. Likewise, organisations may have nice values written on a wall, but don’t live up to them – or know how to. Embodiment fills these gaps nicely and provides a practical “how” of leadership.
A long-term practice perspective is often somewhat foreign to organisations where people spend most of their time “performing” under pressure and not developing skills, and because results are often expected immediately (unlike say in sports). That being said, if embodiment is presented in the right way, then it can be embraced. The rise of emotional intelligence, mindfulness and neuroscience have helped tremendously with making embodiment accessible during the time of my career.
There is a hunger in even very mainstream organisations for genuinely interactive training. People are often really sick of PowerPoint and traditional training that doesn’t stick. As long as you give people good reasons for doing “weird” things, and are fully at ease with them yourself, embodied training is usually well received.
Centring
Centring is often a very quick and demonstrable place to start leadership training. I find that the no guru and test it for yourself approaches work best in business. The idea of developing calm in the face of Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous times is very attractive, as VUCA is now regarded as the norm. A centred leader is also a persuasive and charismatic one, as nobody trusts panic!
Self-awareness
Many also already recognise the importance of self-awareness as a base for good leadership. This can quickly be increased through simple embodiment exercises like seeing someone else “do” your stance or walk, and pattern-revealing, non-athletic EYP (Embodied Yoga Principles) poses. Sometimes, I use embodied versions of familiar typologies, such as DISC and Myers-Briggs30.
People not only learn about themselves, but gain more understanding of and empathy for others’ types, which is a big advantage over traditional verbal and cognitive ways of teaching such systems, as well as being way more fun!
There are also excellent embodiment exercises for developing empathy skills (a bodily capacity after all), as well as revealing patterns in leading and following. Such an embodied approach to exploring leadership is very direct and people’s tendencies quickly come out.
Embodied work brings back the heart of business
Embodied work helps people access their values, access creativity and lead from a place of depth. This is much more compelling than “head on a stick” management and that becomes very obvious to people, even after just a little training. Ethically, the “heart” of business also returns along with the body. Once they get back in contact with their bodies, I have often seen executives address corporate social responsibility, diversity and environmental concerns with a new level of passion.
This is a large topic, but I hope this piece gives a starting point.
I would recommend Wendy Palmer, Richard Strozzi-Heckler (who coined the term “Embodied Leadership”), Stuart Heller and Ginny Whitelaw on this subject – all of whom have been influences.
NB: I have also written many articles and blogs on embodiment and leadership – feel free to search online!
THE BODY OF BUSINESS
– An office in Germany.
I’m 33. I look around the room at the smart young executives. People on their way somewhere, already on some serious money and keen to learn. I like groups like this.
There are several types of expensive mineral water on the immaculate tables. This telecoms company was one of my first well-paid international corporate clients, and I’ve been coming every year for a while. I followed the flow from Cyprus, trained with many people I met there, volunteered with others and learnt a trade, I guess. I’m now an embodied business trainer. I’ve replaced the suit I wore as a joke for my dissertation with a better one. The room is not so different from that grey day, a bit posher but still as sterile. The food at lunch is perfect and soulless.
I learnt to talk the talk. Go on, ask me about KPIs, ROIs, “churn rates”, “employee engagement” or any of that bullshit. Embodied training works and it’s just a matter of knowing the right words to sell it. The well-meaning HR manager here is trying to humanise the place and look after people. He’s a good guy – surprisingly open minded (but you do meet a lot of closet yogis in HR and mindfulness apps are spreading). He spends his weekends on a horse ranch to de-stress. I’ve been working ten hours a day six days a week, to establish my company, but most of these people I train would regard that as lightweight. I’ve been surprised by how many lovely people I’ve met in business in the last few years, and have had to amend my “us and them” picture. That being said, the environments I’m now in are often brutal beyond any sanity. I make a joke about my war zone experience and how it prepared me to be here. People laugh and don’t.
Natasha asks me another aggressive question – kicking the tyres of trust. She’s tough, Russian, here on merit and I like her. From her file I know she has an IQ over 130, speaks 5 languages, has an MBA, has read all the leadership books…and it’s also obvious she has almost no emotional intelligence or self-awareness. I’ve been told to help her or she’s out, as she’s in so much conflict.
What education teaches and values isn’t actually what business leaders need. I tell everyone here that I assume they’re clever and good at the technical aspects of their job. I ask them if they think that’s enough. They then tell me about another set of skills that they have seen are important in leadership, but when I ask where they practise these skills, there’s silence (I saw Richard do this in Cyprus to the aikido senseis who actually could respond). Their ears prick up when I show a study that illustrates the connection between emotional skills and salary in senior managers.
Next to Natasha is Sarah. Again, smart and technically capable at her job, which involves lots of money and Excel spreadsheets as far as I can tell. She’s terminally shy however and it’s holding her back. She’s following my explanation of fight-flight and why we need to manage it for any logical flaw. She looks up at my slides with big brown eyes, breathing a little fuller, and I think I’ve got passed her scepticism.
I teach them both, and the rest of the management fast-track group, some simple centring, in non-hippie language of course, and all done sitting in chairs. We use examples like appraisals, email overload and giving presentations to help them apply it. They shift into another gear and start having conversations about ethics and the environment that I haven’t heard before. They connect and share emotions for the first time as a group. They have original new ideas now that the pressure is off. To them it’s a miracle just not to feel panicked by the speed of their world. To me it’s another day in the body/office.
TRAPS ON THE PATH
I’ve found there are some recurrent mistakes that I tend to make and traps that I see students fall into. I hope this section helps you to avoid, or at least not dwell on, some of them.31
WHAT WON’T HELP ON YOUR PATH TO EMBODIMENT
• Judging yourself
• Trying to be perfect
• Thinking that you’ve got it
&
nbsp; • Thinking that you haven’t
• A famous teacher
• Any old teacher (be selective)
• Flitting between shelves at the spiritual supermarket without committing to a path
• Getting stuck on a path
• Thinking that you can do it yourself
• Thinking that you can’t
• An expensive new yoga mat (or a self-consciously old one)
• Excessive strictness/too much flow
• A new name (see also “sticking spiritual feathers up your arse and saying you’re a chicken”)
• Unicorn leggings
• Being vegan/paleo
• Going to Bali/India/wherever
• Denying your own culture and idealising another
• Penetrating your inner dolphin blow-hole with a crystal dildo, while eye-gazing your tantra teacher
• Reading this list (see also, “being a postmodern wanker”)
STUPID THINGS THAT SMART PEOPLE DO
• Think being cognitively smart is what counts
• Overanalyse
• Turn wisdom into a performance or a status symbol
• Read all the books but don’t practise
• Confuse knowledge with wisdom
• Have good ideas, but don’t take action
• Not rest
• Believe they can plan their way out of hell
• Ruin relationships by being right
• Become “experts” and stop learning
• Write books on what can only be learnt by action
FIVE EMBODIMENT MYTHS
• You can do it on your own
• We must worship The East
• Becoming embodied is always fun
• “The body never lies”
• Yoga (or any other art) has everything that you need
I WONDER IF…
I wonder if we’re not generally a bit quick to jump into embodied practice. To fix ourselves with yoga or whatever. I wonder if first we don’t need to really mourn the grey years of numbness. To fully acknowledge the small tragedy of our own alienation. Perhaps, to be fully alive, we first need to attend our own funerals?
THE ARROGANCE OF EMPATHY
Today, I visited a new yoga class, as I often do when travelling. I found the teacher subtly irritating, especially the controlling tension in her voice. Afterwards, I had dinner and the waiter left a similar bad taste in my mouth, as I felt he was subtly intrusive. These assessments were triggered by very small details, neither person was abusive and neither instance was a disaster. Both situations were an opportunity to practise gratitude and equanimity, of course, but the evening highlighted a couple of things for me.
Sensitivity can become intolerance
The first is that we can become increasingly sensitive to the embodiments of others as teachers in this field. While there are obvious benefits to this, it does risk a type of intolerance. In fact, one can think of sensitivity and equanimity32 as two skillsets it’s worth growing in proportion to each other. There’s a risk we can get triggered by any little thing, otherwise!
The need for self-management and responsibility
The second thought is how, for me increasingly, subtle tones of voice indicate embodiment. An example of this is when listening to podcasts. There’s a way in which I like to “taste” others, by soaking up subtle body signals (some may call this energy). This can be great for empathy and understanding others generally. However, it’s also useful to turn this skill off, by self-regulating and reducing awareness of the embodiment of others. When people say, “I’m very sensitive”, what they mean is that they’re too sensitive in proportion to their ability to self-manage. Framing it this way brings back responsibility and takes some of the ego out of being “sensitive” as a special skill that means you can dictate to others.
It’s contextual
There’s also a risk of arrogance and projection in thinking one can reliably and quickly make assessments about others. When teaching embodied assessment to students (based on observation and empathy), I caution them to be aware of context and their own blind spots before jumping to conclusions. You may well be seeing or feeling the situation, not the person, and there is no “clean” place to perceive from! After teaching students The Four Elements typology, for example,33
I sometimes hear them say things like: “He’s so fire”, when it’s actually the fact that they have a strong water element, or the other person is just in a fierce mood that day. It’s contextual, it’s relative and we’re biased.
YOGA CRACK
In my youth, aikido took over my life. I sacrificed my time, money, social life and sometimes wellbeing to an unhealthy degree to study it. I hurt myself far more studying self-defence than any mugger could have done! After some years, it was my life. Such obsession is not limited to the martial arts. Many others also seem under the control of their art. I have seen meditators squander their inheritance on years of retreats, yogis choosing to live in poverty to maintain their regular stretch high, and conscious dancers ruin careers with endless workshops and ecstatic late nights. When you have to do something, it can no longer be said to be a mindfulness practice, it’s a compulsion.
Practices can be truly addictive. I don’t mean addictive as in “I really like and benefit from it, so I do it a lot”. I mean as in literally being reliant upon an internally-generated, drug-like high that ruins everything else you care about and colonises your life. It basically makes everything else smaller and smaller, resulting in the death of all that you love. I say this as an ex-addict/alcoholic, so I don’t make the comparison lightly.
Addictions are often defined by two criteria:
1. You do it compulsively when you say you won’t.
2. It negatively impacts the things that you value in your life.
While bodymind practices are, of course, enriching and beneficial too – hence this book (and are the basis of many wonders in my own life), it is worth asking if an art has parasitised your life. Not sure? Why not take a month off and see? You could quit any time, right? ;-)
TO SUFFER IS NOT TO BENEFIT
There’s a deeply held, implicit belief that we must suffer to grow. It’s Christian essentially but has made its way into most aspects of bodymind practice and personal growth. Today, extreme hot yoga, hardcore ultra-ultra-marathons and full-on ice training are some of the most popular methods of nobly torturing oneself. Much of this practice has an almost sadomasochistic quality34; and numb people get addicted to extreme sensation, so they can feel again. The notion that it must be doing some good if it’s uncomfortable is hard to shake! Gentler classic practices like Feldenkrais and The Alexander Technique remain somewhat obscure, even when they give demonstrable results.
This is the dark side of sacrifice. While there is often worth in giving something up (and I frequently see people benefit more from my courses when there is a greater time/energy/financial commitment), suffering doesn’t always create value! To suffer is not to benefit. I’m thinking of starting Hell Yoga™, where I pointlessly torture people to make some money and prove a point.
This is not to say, of course, that challenge is a waste of time. Intensity that’s carefully calibrated to people’s skill can create a “sweet spot” for learning self-regulation, discipline and the forging of one’s will. I have done this; it has value for the soft, liberal, coddled modern world especially. However, simply suffering is not helpful. Most people I’ve worked with use intensity to reinforce a narrative of low self-worth and punishment, to further disembody and avoid coming home. More often, what is helpful is a gentle, forgiving listening, a returning home to the abandoned lover of the body. Fuck, it took me 20+ years of martial arts, extreme sports and kinky sex to work this out, though! It’s deeply countercultural.
However, alongside the intelligently challenging, there is also a place for the occasionally unreasonable. I have a few “war stories” from extreme martial arts practices, for
example. I’m glad that, as a young man, I pushed myself to some seemingly insane edges, which exist far beyond where most people think they do. I would recommend this occasionally for the testosterone-driven and the very dedicated who wish to become professionals in the field of embodiment. A few of us must descend into hell to steal fire from the Gods, but this is not sustainable or a healthy bodily norm.
This exception aside, I’d encourage you to be a rebel: to not push yourself. Delight in the pleasure of your body. Be fucking kind to yourself. Gentle is the new extreme!
THE MANNER AND THE METHOD
How you do any embodied practice is at least as important as what you do to develop yourself.
The way you do something can undermine or enhance its potential benefits. The definition of “how” is actually close to a definition of “embodiment”, so this is hardly surprising.
How is often the manner in which our own habits reassert themselves and resist change. Rushing to yoga, obsessing and being controlling about free dance, even angrily doing kindness meditation are all traps I’ve fallen into!
Focus on the manner, as well as the method. The medium is the message!
STATE TYRANNY VERSUS STATE LEADERSHIP
We all learn to regulate ourselves (to a greater or lesser degree), by using both internal and external means. This is a good thing of course, but we can overdo this and become pseudo-calm centring robots, meditation control-freaks or fake yoga transcenders. Power over our feelings can become a type of tyranny, where we inhibit and dominate ourselves. The leash becomes too short and then often snaps, of course.
Another possibility is to lead our states, but only after first really listening to the message of our emotions (for example, if we’re angry because someone has violated us, or scared because we’re in danger, this is worth being aware of!). We can also allow ourselves to be human, give ourselves a break and just express how we are, freely – in a way that means we and others will not be harmed. This is not the same as just being a bloody baby that cries at every little thing and confuses being ill-disciplined and badly regulated with being free though. Balance is key as with most things.