Disclaimer: This is a dense topic. Read in between the lines, stop and re-read, stay curious how it applies to your life and actually try to implement it to see how this feels and looks like for you. And thanks to my incredible husband for being my #1 supporter and editor when my big ideas and reflections for essays roll in.
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I’ve talked before about turning “awareness” into “choice.”
Cognitively, it’s obvious: when you know something, then you’ll have options as to what to do about it. This is as true about business decisions as it is about ourselves. When we have more self-awareness, we can begin to choose how we wish to change.
Most of my clients are founders, CXOs, investors, politicians or political advisors, and many are parents, too. They’re under high amounts of stress and pressure daily and have been for a long time: that’s how they’ve come to find themselves in these positions of influence. So, self-awareness is crucial for their ability to lead capably.
High-performers often struggle with chronic overthinking, an inability to choose themselves, and social anxiety around appearing flawed, imperfect, or performing sub-optimally. We want to be seen but don’t want to be seen as flawed. And we’re often uninterested in facing our shadows.
The work I do with leaders takes self-awareness to a much greater level than most are accustomed to. Of course there’s the standard exercises and questions you’d expect from a coach:
Guided meditation
How are you perceived by others at work and at home?
How do you perceive yourself?
How are you complicit in creating the circumstances you don’t want?
One can develop quite a lot of self-awareness through coached exchanges like these. But at some point, the self-awareness and the possibility of transformation will reach a ceiling. That is, unless you take self-awareness to the next level through somatic self-awareness and nervous system mastery, as I do with my clients. Today I’m going to talk about two specific types of deeper somatic self-awareness, which I’ll call Layer 1 and Layer 2:
Layer 1: The gap between who you are on the inside and how you show up on the outside. Becoming aware of the way certain situations make you feel in your body, and understanding scientifically what’s going on so that you can understand how your body is serving you and how you can—when triggered or knocked off balance emotionally—return to a regulated and capable state from which to act and lead, quickly and resiliently.
Layer 2: Understanding when an emotion or feeling is a contextually appropriate and immediately helpful response from your nervous system, or whether it’s a stored emotion from past trauma that’s being triggered and resurfaced by a present circumstance. Within layer 2, I’ll describe three distinct elements of an emotional response: contextual, personal, and somatic. When we cultivate a deeper level of understanding about our human emotional responses, we can trust ourselves as leaders more, and also understand when we need to lean on others more.
Let’s dig into layer 1 and observe the gap between who you are on the inside, and how you end up showing up on the outside:
What are emotional and sensational triggers that overwhelm you?
Can you feel into the moment (even the milliseconds) that makes you go beyond the point of calming down or shutting down (see the “Window of Tolerance” graphic below)? Tune that up by 30%. Breathe into that. Where do you feel it physically? How old is that sensation or wound?
What does it feel like to move into hyperarousal for you? Write that down.
What does it feel like to move into hypoarousal for you? Write that down.
Audit your day and week and notice the times and types of situations when states of hyper-and-hypo-arousal tend to show up. Why they show up. Write that down. Now look at it. What’s the pattern you can observe? What does this pattern say between the lines?
You want to feel the awareness in your bones. You want to be able to see in front of you the choices that you are making and understand the cost of continuing to make them.
This will become the point of no return.
Commit to re-wiring your nervous system responses.
A counterintuitively easy place to start is to start doing things the opposite way. Like literally. You want to rewire by choosing opposites to your daily habitual behavior and explore what that does to you.
For example: if you grab your phone every morning as the first thing and read email and it leaves you irritated or overwhelmed, do the opposite. Turn on some nice music (you can use your phone :) ), and then just sit, take a breath, make a cup of tea, or work out.
The goal is simply stop feeding the old patterns, triggers, and emotions and gradually replace them with new ones.
Let me highlight it again: this is a gentle approach. This is a curious approach. This is a practice, not a challenge or a sprint. This is a zone of no judgment; it’s a zone wherein we are letting ourselves fall in love with deeper levels within yourself. It’s not about going fast; it’s about going deeper.
Our somatic self-awareness in our life is a muscle we need to train so that we can make the choice to lead better. It’s like conversing with ourselves and our nervous system so we can return to the driver’s seat and stop feeling like we’re being hi-jacked, especially in stressful situations.
You have to become your own compassionate witness for the change you want to make.
Now, let’s dig into layer 2 and understand when an emotion is a contextually appropriate and immediately helpful response from your nervous system, or whether it’s a stored emotion from past trauma that’s being triggered and resurfaced by a present circumstance.
A rule of thumb is that if a stressful situation brings up an emotional response inside of you that feels hysterical and deeply ungrounding and that this destabilization happens very quickly, then it is a stored emotion, not necessarily an appropriate contextual response the situation. If you pause mindfully in that moment and can “rationally“ declare that nothing in the situation actually merits an acute stress response, it is most likely an emotional trigger response from within.
Let’s look at the different types of emotional responses in more detail.
Examples:
Contextual:
A “Contextual” emotional response is one that’s situationally appropriate and often helpful.
Here’s an example:
Your co-founder is yelling at you because you made a mistake. Your instinctual fight-or-flight sensation is turning on. This should feel deeply inappropriate. Let your nervous system inform the situation. Of course, a situation like this could be coupled with a personal and somatic response. Nevertheless, if you were somewhat calm and regulated before this happened, try to stay grounded, set clear boundaries, and remove yourself from the situation or clear up the air. Let someone else’s dysregulation and trigger not be yours, and teach your nervous system that you are permeable enough to absorb other people’s emotional states. Be aware, be open, and be compassionate, but not permeable.
Remember that body posture in those kinds of situations is crucial to signaling both yourself and your nervous system, as well as the other person that this is a personal non-negotiable.
Personal:
A “Personal” emotional response is one in which you somatically take someone else’s situation personally.
Here’s an example:
A colleague appears triggered by something that’s happening in their work right now, and you—in an attempt to help—immediately immerse yourself into their state of mind so that you can empathize. In choosing empathy instead of compassion, you actually embody their emotions and your own nervous system becomes triggered. Instead of being able to help, you lose perspective and become too emotionally charged to actually help your colleague.
Take a deep breath, acknowledge that their emotional response is not yours, and ask your colleague to zoom out with you. Imagine yourself as the one holding space but not carrying it. You’re present but not involved. Emotional distancing is not a bad thing here; it helps you to remain in a place of authentic connection.
These experiences happen more often than not because we tend to mirror each other’s energy. It’s a safety mechanism that our body uses to build rapport. The neurons responsible for it are called mirror neurons. With the load of information and impressions we assemble throughout the day, our mirror neurons have never been so busy in the history of humankind:
people
email
family dynamics
social media and comparing yourself to other people’s highlight reel
grocery store
watching the news and trying not to get sucked into identity politics
having an opinion without alienating someone else
trying to build a trusted rapport in your home office on zoom
This also means that our nervous system sometimes gets sucked into emotions, behaviors, and atmospheres (expanded energy over time) that we don’t like.
I always recommend doing a nervous system cleanse for a while to bring more awareness into who and what soothes and calms you, vs. what activates you and bring that back into a balanced place.
Returning to my favorite saying: You are the 5 nervous systems you surround yourself with.
This is the personal element to improving your leadership.
Somatic:
Here is where it gets juicy.
Most of our reactions and triggers in life are somatic. Soma means body, and the body (including the nervous system) informs us about how we are experiencing the world (that is because of the communication between brain and gut via the vagus nerve).
Interestingly though, some somatic triggers tell us more about ourselves than others.
In somatics, we often talk about “qualities“ of certain sensations.
Here is an easy way to start your somatic inquiry:
Let’s take the example from above because the personal and somatic side of things is often blurred.
When you realize that you often get sucked into other people’s emotions or that they don’t affect you (the other side of the spectrum), lean into that sensation. Which part of your body tightens? Which body part is “on high alert“ when you see someone else agitated?
Then move onto tracing it:
One of the most significant qualities to identify early on in your somatic leadership journey is understanding how old a certain sensation is. Imagine walking your physical quality back in time until it walks back home - aka the moment it “first” occurred. Any memory that matches that idea works, it doesn’t need to be the first one.
Stay there for a moment and observe it (don’t become it). The idea of tuning up sensations by 20-30% is often helpful in allowing ourselves to sense things, but not become them and thus unleash the trigger. Then ask yourself: What would I have done in this situation back then if I had the knowledge, awareness, and love for myself that I have today?
See what comes up. Heal the moment and come back to yourself.
Keep integrating this new feeling of softening throughout the next few days and weeks by taking some time to appreciate that you worked on it.
There have been hundreds of moments like this for me in my journey. Some small, some big, some very small, some so big that it took me time to actually feel ready to release the trigger and heal it because they were such an important protective mechanism for so long.
How does all of this support leadership?
MIRROR NEURONS. If we understand ourselves, have more capacity for ourselves, have a better understanding where certain agitations come from, we increase our capacity to hold the same space for others without taking their reactions personal.
Uff, what a dense topic. I feel like this is one of those essays that I and you have to read a few times to really understand what’s in there for us. To stop at certain sections and reflect for a moment. Don’t just inhale the content, work with it.
I am here to give you the tools to design your own journey toward radical self-inquiry, and somatic intelligence allowing new levels of leadership embodiment.
And it all starts with embodying choice.
All the love, all the power,
Franzi
I just went through this exercise and it was really helpful. Thanks!
Beautiful and insightful piece, Franzi! Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us.