What does your body have to do with leadership? For many, this question is perplexing. Neuroscience is helping us understand that not only is our body relevant to leadership, but it’s often the missing ingredient.

In this training, you’ll learn foundational principles and practices related to Embodied Leadership. For example, you’ll learn to how to access your intuition and the wisdom in your body, both of which can guide decision-making. You’ll also learn how somatics can help you address leadership challenges such as navigating conflict, overwhelm, communication challenges, imposter syndrome, and more.

As a result, the goal of this training is to help you feel more empowered and authentic in your leadership at any scale, whether in your life, family, team, organization, and/or community.

Emotions are often bewildering for people. For some, it’s hard to discern their emotions or those of others; while for other people, the struggle is knowing what to do with emotions that arise. Exploring emotional intelligence through the lens of somatics can help people understand, simplify, and work with emotions in themselves and others.

In this training, you’ll learn that emotions are primarily a phenomenon of the body rather than a cognitive experience. For example, we connect to our own emotions through sensations in the body, such as tears in our eyes, a belly laugh, shuddering shoulders, an accelerated heart rate or a surge of heat that propels us to act. We receive information about the emotions of others through their posture, body language, movement patterns, and/or voice. Despite the importance of the body to identify and work with emotions, we often ignore the body when exploring this topic of emotional intelligence.

In this training, you’ll learn about the four primary emotions and how each emotion gets expressed through the body. While emotions are commonly labeled as “positive” or “negative,” the somatic perspective appreciates that all emotions are important and communicate useful messages. You’ll learn the key message of each emotion, how they connect to our values, and how each emotion influences behavior.

Knowing this insight can reframe how you work with your own emotions, so they don’t surface and override your best judgment, or get pushed down and suppressed in your body. Additionally, this training will provide strategies to communicate more effectively with others when their emotions are running high.

In any organization, there are pressures, competing priorities, and opportunities for conflict. As a result, stress in the workplace is inevitable. It’s important to understand how to navigate stress so it doesn’t take a toll on your effectiveness as a leader or on your wellbeing.

When exploring stress in the workplace, it’s helpful to frame stress in two distinct categories. First, there are stressors that are external to us. These are in the environment around us and include conflict, deadlines, limited resources, and more. Secondly, there’s the stress that’s inside of our bodies; this is how we respond to external stressors.

This distinction is important because this training will focus more on the latter: how our bodies respond to stressors. When we can learn to shift how we respond to external stressors and how we work with the stress that’s inside of our bodies, we have more tools and choice in how we move through stressful circumstances.

The goal of this training is to provide strategies to help you feel more poised, calm, and confident. This in turn can support your leadership presence and help you be less reactive and more responsive amidst uncertainty, change, and high-pressure situations.

Stress and elevated emotions make conflict challenging. Knowing key insights into these first two topics, as explored in an introductory training mentioned above, is foundational to navigating conflict with more ease.

The goal of this training is to offer an approach to simplify conflict conversations and help you embrace the positive outcomes that can arise through conflict. The somatic lens is useful to understanding conflict because in these situations, our bodies’ sympathetic nervous system gets activated. We experience this activation as fight, flight, or freeze. When our nervous system is triggered in this way, our rational thinking goes offline. This makes it harder for people to act in a way that’s aligned with their professionalism and values.

In this training, you’ll learn how to work with your nervous system in conflict situations. You’ll also learn how to work with the most common emotions that accompany conflict, including fear and anger. And you’ll learn tools to stay centered to have productive dialogue in these at-times heated situations. This way, conflict is not something to dread or avoid at all costs, but rather can be welcomed and even embraced.

That’s because conflict can be an opportunity to surface deeper issues that need to be addressed; can invite creative problem solving; can strengthen relationships; can be opportunities to learn new perspectives; and can help people move forward with a better understanding of the other person/people involved. When we collectively move toward embracing conflict, it can have profound ripples into the culture and organization.