What if Leadership starts in the body…
Make it stand out
What if leadership starts in the body, not the mind?
In a world that often prioritises intellect and strategy, we frequently overlook the profound wisdom our bodies carry. This reflection delves into the concept of embodiment and why it's time we stop taking advice from collagen ads.
Embodiment in Leadership: Honouring the Body Behind the Role
The Body Holds the Resistance
My neck carries my brain. It turns toward people I care about. It holds tension when I’m holding space. It has survived hours of Zoom, nodding off on the sofa with a baby in my arms, years of ambition, and it will survive those targeted collagen ads.
Recently, I’ve found myself looking at it, not critically, but curiously. Noticing the way it tilts when I’m listening. The way it locks when I’m holding back. The way it carries, quietly and consistently, the weight of thinking, planning, wondering, becoming.
It deserves more than an algorithm telling it to be smoother or tighter. It deserves respect.
The Psychology of Embodiment
Embodiment is the lived experience of having a body, how your body and mind shape each other. How your posture impacts your confidence. How your nervous system responds before your brain can form words. How your physical presence in a room is a kind of communication.
As Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma and emotional experience live not just in memory, but in the body. The body, he says, “keeps the score” — it records, remembers, responds. And sometimes, it resists.
I think of this when I notice how often women are taught to shrink themselves, to edit their appearance, to constantly adjust and upgrade. Not just in how we look, but in how we lead.
Leadership in the Body
Leadership, in many traditional models, is still head-heavy: it’s about strategy, cognition, control. But the most impactful leaders I know, especially women, lead with presence. It’s how we listen, how we breathe through difficult moments, how we stay grounded when we’re not certain of the outcome.
Recent research backs this up. A 2023 article in American Psychologist titled “Women Leaders Make Work Better” highlights how women’s emotional attunement and embodied confidence contribute to more inclusive, resilient organisations, and the psychology into embodied cognition underscores that self-awareness in the body isn't fluff; it's foundational.
Space for Reconnection
This kind of noticing, of coming back into relationship with your body, is something I see again and again in coaching. In small shifts: the sigh of recognition. The straightening of the spine. The softening of self-criticism.
Clients often arrive talking about productivity or self-doubt, but underneath that? There's a body trying to be heard. A self trying to be met with kindness.
A space where we stop trying to think our way out of feeling wrong, and start building a more compassionate relationship with ourselves, including the parts that carry tension, emotion, and effort.
Because what I’m certain of is this:
Collagen has very little to do with my impact as a woman.
But my ability to appreciate myself, to love this “perfectly imperfect” body I lead from, work from, care from?
That has everything to do with it.
The Quiet Rebellion
The neck that carries my brain around is doing just fine.
And if it’s starting to show the years of carrying so much?
it’s a record to celebrate.
Ready to Lead from Within?
If you're feeling quietly exhausted, gently unraveling, or just ready for a pause you don’t have to explain, let's connect.
I'm offering free 30-minute coaching consultations for those doing meaningful, identity-rich work.
Here’s to the space between where you are and where you're going.
With encouragement,
Leila