The Body Knows: Somatic Intelligence and the Leadership Superpower You Were Never Taught

What EQ was to the early 2000s, somatic intelligence is to now — and the leaders who get ahead of this curve will lead differently than everyone else.

“It’s not about the problem, it’s about how you react to it.”

“It’s not about the situation, it’s about how you show up to it.”

And when it comes to your company, “It’s often not about the business. It’s about how you lead it.”

I’ve been saying versions of this to clients for years. It’s the premise underneath everything I teach, write, and believe about leadership. And yet, even for those of us who intellectually embrace it, there’s a gap between knowing it and actually being able to live it — especially when the pressure is on.

Right now, the pressure is very much on.

Founding and leading a company has always been one of the most demanding things a human being can take on. But something about this particular moment feels different. The economic volatility is real. The political noise is relentless. The market speed is breakneck. And then there’s AI, which a client very aptly described to me as a bullet train that arrived while most of us were still reading the schedule.

In times like these, the instinct is to look outward. Fix the strategy. Control the narrative. Change what’s happening around you. That instinct is understandable… and also it is mostly useless. The variable that actually determines how you navigate this moment isn’t what’s happening out there. It’s what’s happening in here.

Specifically — it’s what’s happening in your body.

Which brings me to something I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time. A form of intelligence that most leaders have never been taught and rarely develop intentionally. Yet, once they discover it, they describe it as one of the most transformative things they’ve ever worked on.

It’s called somatic intelligence. Together with nervous system regulation, it represents the leadership edge of our time.

The Buzz and What’s Behind It

If you’ve been paying attention lately, you’ve probably noticed these terms showing up more — in wellness articles, leadership podcasts, and therapy circles. Somatic this. Nervous system that. If you’re like many of the executives I work with, your first reaction might have been something between mild curiosity and mild eye-roll.

I get it. When a concept starts trending, it’s easy to dismiss it as the latest self-help flavor of the month. We did the same thing with mindfulness for a while. And before that emotional intelligence.

Which is actually exactly the point.

Not long ago, emotional intelligence, the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions and attune to others’, was considered soft. A nice-to-have for people-pleasers, not a must-have for serious executives. Today, EQ is table stakes. It shows up in hiring criteria, performance reviews, and leadership development programs across every major industry. The science caught up. The results spoke. And the leaders who had been quietly doing that inner work were already operating at a different level.

Somatic intelligence is at the same inflection point. The science isn’t emerging — it’s here. The results aren’t anecdotal — they’re documented. And the leaders who get ahead of this curve won’t be the ones who waited for it to become consensus.

The Problem: Heads on Sticks

“Mr. Duffy lives a short distance from his body.” –  James Joyce, The Dublineer

Let’s start with an honest assessment of where most leaders actually are.

You are smart. Driven. Probably more self-aware than most people in your orbit. You may meditate occasionally, see a therapist or coach, and have read enough psychology to know your patterns — at least intellectually. And yet, when the pressure spikes — when the board meeting goes sideways, when a key leader quits, when the market shifts overnight — something else takes over. You get sharper, more controlling, more reactive. Or you go quiet and withdraw. Either way, you’re no longer choosing your response. Your nervous system is choosing it for you.

This is the gap nobody talks about enough. Not the gap between knowing and doing. Leaders are familiar with that one. This is the gap between knowing and feeling. Between understanding something in your mind and having it actually land in your body.

Most high-performers are extraordinarily attuned to external dynamics. What’s happening in the market, on the team, in the room. They are quick to fix, control, or change anything out there. Far fewer have developed that same acuity inward. And of those who have, most are observing from the neck up — tracking thoughts, stories, mental patterns.

Indeed, most of us are walking around like heads on sticks.

What somatic intelligence adds is the next layer: learning to extend that observation into the body. What is actually happening inside you right now? What are you feeling? What does your body know that your mind is too busy to register?

What Somatic Intelligence Actually Is

Let’s define our terms — because somatic intelligence is one of those concepts that sounds esoteric until you understand what it actually means, and then it sounds like the most obvious thing in the world.

Somatic comes from the Greek soma, meaning body. Somatic intelligence is simply the capacity to tune into the body’s signals — sensations, tension, ease, contraction, expansion, gut feelings — and use that information consciously. It’s the ability to read and work with what your body is telling you, in real time, rather than overriding it or ignoring it entirely.

Which, if you’re honest, is probably what you’ve been doing most of your career (and life).

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a cultural one. Western culture, and the tech and startup ecosystem in particular, has long placed cognitive intelligence on the highest pedestal. We grew up in systems that rewarded analytical thinking, logical reasoning, and intellectual output. We bought into Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” and built entire leadership models on top of it. Emotional intelligence was a later addition — and as we just established, it took decades to be taken seriously. Somatic intelligence hasn’t even entered most leadership conversations yet.

And yet the science has been here for a while.

Here’s a fact that stops most of my clients cold: we tend to assume that our brains send information down into our bodies — that the mind is in charge and the body follows orders. But according to Polyvagal Theory, developed by neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges, the reverse is actually true. Up to 80% of the information in our nervous system flows from the body to the brain. Our bodies are not passengers. They are primary. They are constantly processing data, sending signals, and shaping our perceptions and responses, whether we’re paying attention or not.

Doctor and author Bessel van der Kolk took this further in his landmark work The Body Keeps the Score. His decades of research showed that stress, unprocessed emotions, and past experiences don’t just live in our minds, they are wired into the body itself. Stored in our tissues, our posture, our breath patterns, and our chronic tensions. As van der Kolk writes, physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.

Richard Strozzi-Heckler, one of the pioneers of somatic leadership development, spent decades bringing this understanding directly into the domain of leadership and human performance. His work established something that is now central to how I coach: the body is not separate from leadership. It is leadership. How you inhabit your body, how you hold tension or ease, how you breathe under pressure — these aren’t peripheral details. They are your leadership, expressed physically.

And then there’s the phrase I come back to again and again, borrowed from somatic work: our issues are in our tissues. The stress you’ve been carrying since the last fundraise. The grief you didn’t process when a co-founder left. The fear that spikes every time revenue dips. It doesn’t just live in your thoughts. It lives in your jaw, your shoulders, your chest, your gut. And it shapes how you show up — in the boardroom, in difficult conversations, with your team — whether you know it or not.

This is why developing somatic intelligence isn’t a wellness project. It’s a leadership project. When you learn to read your body’s signals, you gain access to layers of data that most leaders are completely blind to. You start catching the tension before it becomes reactivity. You notice the contraction before it becomes a closed-minded decision. You feel the dysregulation before it becomes a conversation you’ll regret.

You go from being run by your body to being informed by it.

Over time, with practice, with patience, and with the kind of work we’ll get into later in this essay, something deeper becomes possible. You stop relating to your body as a vehicle you occasionally check in with and start inhabiting it fully. Present. Grounded. Integrated. This is what it means to become embodied and it is, I’d argue, one of the most profound shifts a leader can make.

The path to embodiment works similar to the path of growth and change. You cannot think your way into it. As scholar and author Father Richard Rohr puts it, “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living; we have to live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”

Too often, leaders try to change from the neck up — intellectualizing their way into transformation. Reading the books. Understanding the frameworks. Building the self-awareness. All of it is valuable, but none of it is sufficient on its own. Because our bodies have been conditioned to respond in certain ways, and lasting change requires both un-conditioning those old patterns and reconditioning new ones. That means engaging the body directly. Not just thinking about it.

I know this not just from working with hundreds of leaders. I know it from my own journey.

What It Took to Get Out of My Head

I am someone who has been genuinely committed to my own inner work for a long time. Years of therapy. Coaching. Internal Family Systems. The Enneagram. Positive Intelligence. I have read the books, sat with the frameworks, and built real self-awareness around my patterns, my parts, my stories. And as an Executive coach of nearly a decade, that personal commitment has shaped everything about how I show up for the leaders I work with.

But for a long time, most of it was happening from the neck up.

I could describe my Hyper-Achiever part with precision. I could trace its origins — the childhood wiring that learned early that achievement earned love and that doing more meant being more. I understood it intellectually. What I couldn’t fully do was feel it. More accurately, I couldn’t yet access what was underneath it. The emotions and energy that had been stored in my body for decades while I stayed busy, stayed achieving, stayed safely in my head.

Talk therapy helped with awareness. It fell short on shifts.

This is not a criticism of therapy. It is one of the most important tools we have, and I recommend it without hesitation. But for those of us who are wired to live in our minds (and if you’re reading this newsletter, there’s a good chance you are) talk-based approaches have a ceiling. Because the parts that keep us in our heads are often the very same parts keeping us out of our bodies. My Hyper-Achiever and my Perfectionist had been doing their jobs since childhood. They were not going to stand down just because I could name them.

It wasn’t until I read The Body Keeps the Score and Hillary McBride’s The Wisdom of Your Body that something cracked open — not emotionally, but intellectually first. I finally understood why the body had to be part of the work. Why awareness alone wasn’t enough. Why I could know something completely and still feel unchanged by it. The insight that landed hardest: you cannot think your way out of what the body is holding.

Excited by the prospect of tapping into my body and making a shift from awareness to actual change, I sought out a somatic experiencing therapist. And that’s when things actually started to move.

Somatic Experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, is a body-oriented approach to healing that works directly with the nervous system, gently helping it process and release what it has been holding.

What I learned early on is that this work has two dimensions: self-regulation and co-regulation. Self-regulation is the practice of using your own body and breath to shift your nervous system state — techniques you can use alone, in the middle of a meeting, before a hard conversation, at the end of a long day. My therapist has taught me many of these, and we’ll get into them later in this essay.

But for me, the most powerful work has happened in co-regulation, which means another nervous system is present with yours. There is something that occurs in the relational field between two people, when one is a skilled, attuned practitioner, that simply cannot be replicated alone. Science supports this: we are wired for co-regulation from birth. Our nervous systems learned safety, or the absence of it, in relationships. And they can relearn it there too.

In practice, this looks nothing like what most people imagine when they think of therapy. I lie on a table. My therapist places her hands gently underneath different areas of my body — my abdomen, my shoulders, the base of my skull. And we wait. We might talk about something that’s been present for me. Or we might simply be quiet. And then something shifts. A release of tension so physical you can feel it happening. A warmth that spreads. A breath that goes deeper than it has in weeks.

The first time I experienced this, I wasn’t prepared for what happened. I’d been on the table for maybe twenty minutes. And then, out of nowhere, I started crying. It was like something that had been waiting a very long time had finally found a door.

I felt lighter when I left. Genuinely, physically lighter.

I’ve since learned that my stomach growling during sessions is actually a literal, audible signal that my parasympathetic nervous system has taken over from my sympathetic. Rest and digest, overriding fight or flight. My body announcing, in its own language, that it feels safe enough to let go.

What I’ve also discovered is that these modalities — talk therapy and body work — don’t compete. They compound. The deeper I drop into my body, the more I can access my emotions and felt senses. And the more I can access those, the richer and more impactful my talk therapy, which is rooted in Parts work becomes. The somatic work creates an opening, a kind of internal spaciousnes, that allows everything else to go further than it could before.

They feed and fuel each other. And together, they have brought me to a place that feels more embodied, more integrated, and more whole than anything I accessed working from the neck up alone.

I share all of this not because my journey is the template, but because I spent years assuming that understanding something was the same as integrating it. It is not. And I work with too many brilliant, self-aware, deeply intelligent leaders who are making the same assumption — doing extraordinary cognitive and emotional work, and wondering why certain things still feel stuck.

This work is not finished for me. It never will be. The nervous system doesn’t have a finish line — it has a practice. What I can tell you is that the shifts I’ve experienced through somatic work have been qualitatively different from anything I accessed through insight alone. More embodied. More lasting. More real.

And that’s what I want for the leaders I work with.

Reflection

These questions aren’t meant to be answered quickly. Slow down, grab a journal if you have one, and notice what arises.

1. When you’re under pressure, where does it show up in your body? Tight chest, clenched jaw, shallow breath, tension in your back or shoulders? If you struggle to answer, that itself is worth noting.

2. When did you last feel genuinely at ease in your body — not just mentally calm, but physically settled and grounded? How often does that happen?

3. Where are you trying to change from the neck up? What might it look like to bring your body into that work?

4. How might your team experience you differently if you were more present and embodied?

5. What has your body been trying to tell you that you’ve been too busy (or too afraid) to hear?