The Body has been sending memos
by Gentry Doane
Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
There’s a moment I keep encountering. I’m working with a leadership team, capable, well-resourced, genuinely committed to doing things differently. We introduce something that asks them to arrive in their bodies. A grounding breath. An exhale with sound. A moment of noticing what’s actually happening in the room rather than what’s supposed to be happening.
And the reaction comes. Sometimes a polite smile and a redirect. Sometimes the eye roll. Occasionally it’s spoken aloud: what is this? Are we really doing this?
Here’s what strikes me every time. These are people who fill rooms with their voice for a living. They give keynotes, run all-hands meetings, and communicate strategy through sound, through presence, through the physical fact of being in a room with other humans. And yet the idea of exhaling audibly in a group setting, of letting the body make a sound on purpose, feels genuinely threatening, often characterized as stupid or unnecessary.
I don’t say that with contempt. I say it because I’ve come to understand it as a signal about what we’ve agreed to leave off the table. And I think it costs us.
Professionalism has another name
My perception, grounded in years of facilitation and coaching work, is that much of the professional world has quietly organized itself around the cognitive. Frameworks, models, assessments, strategy come first and are often genuinely useful. But the body tends to be the last thing we get to, if we get there at all. And when we do, it gets dosed carefully, almost apologetically, calibrated to stay within what the room can hold without flinching.
We’ve built a fairly elegant cover story for this. We call it professionalism.
I want to be careful here, because I’m not dismissing the real function that professional norms serve. And yet I do think that professionalism, in many organizational contexts, has become a socially acceptable name for something else: not being in touch with yourself, not honoring the full range of signal and wisdom your system is already generating. In many organizational cultures, self-disconnection gets dressed up in a good suit, is given a seat at the table and called “composure.”
It shows up in the reflexive apology when an emotion breaks through in a meeting, the quick “sorry” before anyone has even reacted, as if feeling something requires advance forgiveness. It shows up in the gap between what someone’s body already knows and what they feel permitted to name out loud. The signals are almost always there. What’s missing is a culture, and often a practice, of treating them as information rather than interference.
Harvard developmental psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey argue that most people are effectively working two jobs: the one they’re hired to do, and an exhausting, invisible second job of protecting themselves from anything that might reveal their limitations, including, often, simply being human.
The society that commissions leadership development is the same society that has spent generations learning to function from the neck up. For understandable reasons, often survival reasons, many of us learned to treat the body as a logistical vehicle for the brain rather than as a source of intelligence in its own right. That got a lot of people through a lot of situations where feeling things fully was not safe or welcome.
The problem is that some survival strategies outlast their usefulness. And we end up with people in positions of authority navigating some of the most complex, high-stakes human systems in history with limited access to their own sensing equipment.
The body has been sending memos
I think about these people often:
The executive director who sensed something was fracturing in the coalition three months before it did but had no language for what her body already knew.
The team lead whose chest kept tightening every time the conversation circled around the same unspoken thing, who never named it, and watched the initiative quietly die.
The senior leader who felt the room go flat the moment the new strategic vision was introduced, smiled through it anyway, and wrote it up as a success.
These weren’t failures of intelligence or commitment. They were failures of access and permission. Signals were being sent, yet nobody felt that they could read them out loud.
Here’s the organizational metaphor that helps me understand why. Imagine a company where one department, the cognitive one, responsible for analysis, language, logic, and planning, received full funding, full attention, and a permanent seat at every decision table. Every other department was technically still running, still sending reports, still flagging bottlenecks, accumulating information, registering what was actually happening on the ground. But those running the organization had stopped reading those emails, stopped attending those meetings, and had, over time, stopped being aware those departments existed.
That is what it looks like to operate entirely from the head.
The gut that registers something is off in this team before anyone has said a word. The chest that tightens when a particular dynamic enters the room. The nervous system reading the situation in real time and filing detailed, accurate reports that many of us have learned to ignore. These are not metaphors for intuition. They are actual sensing infrastructure. Somatic research has spent decades documenting what embodied practitioners have long known: the body holds information the mind hasn’t processed yet.
The body has been sending memos. Many of us were never taught, or have long since forgotten, how to read them. For some, the signals are there but it doesn’t feel safe to name them. For others, the neck-up conditioning runs deep enough that access itself has been lost. Both are real. Both carry costs, to the individual, to their teams, and to the organizations depending on their full presence.
What becomes possible at a higher dose
Outside of my paid work at KONU, I lead and participate in embodied men’s work, circles where people come actively seeking this. I want to be clear: those spaces are not necessarily a model for what a leadership program should look like. What happens there is different in kind, not just degree. People arrive having chosen to go toward the thing they’ve been avoiding. The container is built for it. The dose is higher.
But those spaces have given me something I carry into every leadership engagement: evidence. I’ve witnessed what becomes available when someone follows the tension in their chest rather than managing it, when they let the sound out rather than swallowing it, when they breathe into what they’ve been holding at arm’s length and arrive, on the other side, not at collapse but at clarity. Insight. A different relationship to something they thought they fully understood.
These are not small moments. They are some of the most significant shifts I’ve witnessed in anyone, in any context.
I think of Johannes. He arrived at one of our circles describing himself as numb. Blocked. Unable to reach what he could sense was underneath. At some point he said he wanted to feel more, wanted to feel anything, really. The facilitator invited him toward it rather than around it. What followed was intense, a wave of emotion that had been waiting behind the numbness for a long time. And when it moved through him, something shifted. He came back to the room more present. We felt him in a way we hadn’t before. He felt himself. He may not be able to access that depth every time. But he now knows it’s there. That it’s possible. And that knowing, once found, doesn’t leave.
What these men’s circles have shown me is that the reluctance toward embodied experiences I often encounter in organizational and leadership development work is not a character flaw. It’s the same human being, just in a different room, with a different set of permissions. The hunger to be more fully themselves is usually there. What’s missing is a container that tells them it’s safe enough to try.
In leadership development work, we are often still building that container, which means we dose carefully, which means people get a taste, leave with a question they didn’t arrive with, and hopefully start to wonder what else might be available. It is, honestly, frustrating to know what is possible when people work with their full system and yet to hold back in my facilitator role because the room isn’t yet ready.
But that frustration points somewhere important.
The real argument
We are living through a period that is asking people responsible for our institutions, our organizations, our communities to address extraordinary challenges. Climate change. Systemic inequality. Political fracture. These are not technical problems with clear solutions. They are adaptive challenges, the kind that require people to change not just what they do but how they see, how they relate, how they sit with complexity and uncertainty without reaching prematurely for the familiar answer.
That quality of practice cannot be built from the neck up alone.
Someone practicing leadership without a relationship to their own internal system, who has learned to override their gut, manage their nervous system into silence, and perform composure rather than embody it, is working with a significant handicap when it comes to reading and holding the outer systems they’re responsible for. Not because they lack intelligence, but because they’ve systematically defunded the departments that would give them the most accurate information.
What would happen if the executive director felt the tension gathering behind his eyes, that particular pressure that arrives just before grief, when the news came that a major funder was pulling support, and instead of the composed handshake and the knot carried home alone, he named it? Said, out loud, that he was scared. That this mattered. That the people depending on this organization deserved that honesty in the room. What would happen if the team lead, heart quickening, cheeks flushed, took a breath and said calmly that she didn’t have the answers her team was asking for, and that she didn’t know yet, and that was the truth? Not as weakness. As data. As the most accurate information available in that moment.
We don’t know, because we rarely find out. The signal gets managed. The moment passes. And the memo goes unread.
I’m not arguing that leadership development should necessarily look like a men’s circle. I’m arguing something both simpler and more demanding: that people who have genuine access to their own full system, who can read their own signals, sit with discomfort without collapsing or defending, and act from a wider bandwidth of intelligence, are better equipped to navigate complexity, build trust across difference, and hold space for the kind of change that actually matters.
The body is not a wellness amenity. It is a resource that remains largely untapped in how we approach leadership development.
We cannot keep asking people to drive progress in unsustainable systems while they’re running on half their own.
A question worth sitting with, not just thinking about
The challenges we’re asking people to hold right now are adaptive, systemic, and deeply human. They require the full operating system, not just analysis and language, but the gut that knows before it knows, the heart that tracks what matters, the nervous system that is already reading the room and waiting to be heard.
So here’s what I’d invite you to notice, not analyze, notice:
When did you last make a significant decision and genuinely check in with your full system before making it? Not just your head. All of it.
What’s already available to you, if you listened?
This post reflects my own perspective as an adaptive leadership facilitator and embodied work practitioner. These are not the views of KONU as a whole. They are one practitioner’s honest account of what I see, what I know, and what I’m still sitting with.