Honoring the Language of the Body

Why Being in "Conversation" with Your Body Is Essential for Reflective Leaders

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In “Executive Stress: 4 Key Strategies to Preventing CEO Burnout,” executive health coach Julian Hawes II writes of the critical importance of “prioritizing intentional exercise.”

“Regular exercise,” he explains, “not only improves your physical health but also improves your emotional resilience and mental health (and performance)”.

Hawes points out that for those looking to head off burnout and mitigate stress, putting your body through a system of regular exercise can help you blow off steam and leave you in a better position to “crush it” at work.

As a senior leader in the medical and healthcare industry, I wholeheartedly agree about the benefits of exercise and attending to our bodies.

But recently I’ve come to realize that there may be something more to this story.

Living in Partnership with Your Body

For some time now, I have been exploring the concept of the “self as instrument” as a new paradigm for reflective leadership, with a special interest in what I can learn from my own culture of Japan and from the Asian tradition, in general.

When it comes to our relationship with our bodies, Asian traditional practices tend not to separate the mind and body, but instead see them as existing together in some degree of harmony or dis-harmony.

Attending to this degree of harmony—watching it, listening to it and cultivating it—is an inherent part of developing one’s self. In short, becoming a better “self.”

Like many other senior leaders and those described in Hawes’ article, I too experience my own level of significant stress and have wondered how to respond to it. As a means of reducing it and dealing with my various aches and pains, I started to do a weekly private Pilates session here in Tokyo a year and half ago, and started a weekly personal gym session this year. I expected it would help, but what I didn’t know at the start was how quietly transformational it would be—though not in the way that Hawes suggests. Let me explain.

Capturing the Moment Your Body Speaks to You

For the first few months after I started my weekly Pilates sessions, I simply felt good since I hadn’t had much regular exercise for a while, and I had a sense of accomplishment through being able to do new movements.  It was similar to the feeling of joy we experience with our professional accomplishments—the satisfaction of achieving our goals.

However, after about a half year of doing Pilates, I began to realize that the real reason I was drawn to the session was not related to releasing stress or a sense of accomplishment.

It was my interest in capturing the moment when my body speaks to me.

For example, in a session one day, I felt difficultly moving my right arm compared to left arm, and my back felt a slight discomfort as I was rolling down my body in the classic Pilate move. This was something I hadn’t experienced  during my session a week prior. I thought it was just my imagination. But I asked my instructor what she saw and she pointed out that my shoulder’s range of motion was unbalanced with my right arm moving much less than my left. Also she saw an awkward twisting movement around my back during my roll-down. I then looked at myself in the mirror in the session room and saw that my right shoulder was, in fact, lower than my left. That was the moment it hit me: I need to trust what my body is saying to me.

On my way back home that day, I started to reflect on the past week.

• What was different since my last session?

• What I had I been doing, thinking, and feeling over the past week?

• And what was my body trying to tell me?

The first thing I realized was that I hadn’t taken time to stretch before going to bed since I had been extremely busy all week. Each day I had worked late into the evening in front of my laptop. During the day, my appointments were scheduled back-to-back, leaving me with no time to think. I was stressed out, my team was stressed out, and it was difficult to set priorities. I realized I was not functioning as I expected and, in fact, I was approaching burn out. What I needed to do was stop a moment, rest, and then think.

In short, what I gained from my Pilates session was not just a chance to “blow off steam” as Hawes suggested—though this did happen to some degree.

Rather what I gained by turning my attention toward my body and being in conversation with it was the ability to retrieve a fuller sense of what was going on with me—including things I had suppressed throughout the week.

This experience reminded me of the critical importance of honoring the language of the body. Being in conversation with our bodies allows us to learn—moment by moment—what we might need and what we might be ignoring. If as leaders we are to serve as instruments for change, we would do well to see our bodies as wise companions on this journey.

Embodied Self—Shift toward the Body-as-Instrument

In my first article, Leading Like Bamboo, where I focus on the “Self-as-Instrument Approach to Leadership,” I mentioned the important work of Tatiana Bachkirova. who outlined three essential conditions for effectively utilizing oneself as an instrument. They are:

1)    understanding ourselves as an instrument,

2)    looking after ourselves as an instrument, and

3)    checking ourselves as an instrument (Bachkirova, 2016).

In line with Bachkirova’s work, I would like to suggest that by capturing the moment that our bodies speak to us, we are making it possible to understand ourselves as an instrument from a physical and somatic perspective.

By capturing and understanding what our bodies tell us, we are in a stronger position to care for ourselves as an instrument that is comprised of both a physical body and a mind—the line between which is not so clearly drawn.

This might even be the point of departure for exploring the concept of the “body-as-instrument”. I will be returning to this thought in my future writings.  

Before I close, I would like to invite you to pause and consider:

• When was the last time you took a moment to reflect on what your body is trying to tell you?

• When you enter into a conversation with your body, what specifically do you notice?

• What are you beginning to learn through this conversation with your body?

In my next article, I would like to reflect on a recent, highly enriching dialogue with Gianpiero Petriglieri, Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviors at INSEAD and how it has sparked me to think further about leadership and the body-as-instrument.

Sources

Bachkirova, T. (2016). The self of the coach: Conceptualization, issues, and opportunities for practitioner development. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research 68 (2), 143-156. https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/file/82c015c7-f355-41ae-b95e-23f3ee46826d/1/bachkirova2016self.pdf

Hayes, J., II. (2024, April 1). Executive Stress: 4 Key Strategies to Preventing CEO Burnout. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/julianhayesii/2024/03/31/executive-stress-4-key-strategies-to-preventing-ceo-burnout/