Leadership development starts in the body

Why your best thinking depends on things that have nothing to do with thinking

By Chris Coghlan & Dr Jutta Tobias Mortlock

Think of a decision you regret. Not a bad strategy, but a bad moment. The reply you fired off at six in the evening. The conversation you handled clumsily after a long day of them (I have done this plenty of times). The decision you made in the last ten minutes of a meeting that had already run over.

You knew better. You have the experience, the judgment, the self-awareness. And you still got it wrong.

Most leadership development would explain that as a skills or capability gap. Perhaps you needed better questioning technique, or more emotional intelligence, or a framework for difficult conversations (which can all be impactful). So we teach those things, and leaders dutifully learn them, and then at six in the evening when they want to go home they do exactly what they did before.

We think the gap is usually somewhere else. Not in what leaders know, but in the state their body is in when they need to use it. The brain’s first job is not thinking. Lisa Feldman Barrett, Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, makes an argument that reorders how we can see all of this. The brain, she says, did not evolve for rational thought. It evolved to run a body.

The body's main task is to keep you alive by predicting what the body will need next and budgeting accordingly. Heart rate, blood sugar, hormones, inflammation, the signals coming up from the gut. All of it running beneath conscious awareness, all of it constantly shaping what you notice, what you feel, and what you decide. Thinking is something the brain does on top of that work, with whatever is left over.

Which puts your 6pm email reply in a different light. It was not a failure of character or technique. Your brain was running a depleted body and making the best prediction it could from poor data. Barrett’s point is that this happens constantly, and that we almost always misread it as personality.

So we often make bad decisions not because we lack understanding, but because we are tired, or hungry, or have spent the day in a state of low-grade threat.

What this changes

Once you take that seriously, a lot of received wisdom about leadership looks different. Self-awareness has a floor. You cannot reflect your way out of a depleted state. A leader who has not slept properly in three weeks does not need a journaling exercise. Insight requires a brain with the resources to generate it.

Consistency is physiological before it is behavioral. Leaders are told to be predictable, fair, even-handed. Most who struggle with that are not inconsistent people. They are people whose internal state swings more than they realise, and who have no visibility of it.

The body is not separate from the work. Movement, sleep, light, nature, what you eat. These usually get attention under wellbeing, as the nice extra that follows the real development. We think they belong in the development itself, because they are the conditions under which judgment is even possible. A growing body of research in metabolic psychiatry is pointing the same way, linking inflammation and metabolic health to mental resilience and cognitive function.

Not mind and body. One system, which wants to be in harmony (consciousness away from the body is for another time!).

Time outdoors is not a reward for having worked hard. It is one of the few reliable ways to step out of cognitive overload. Something changes quickly when we have time in nature. Leaders notice the narratives they have been running on, sometimes for years, and get enough distance to ask whether those narratives are still true.

At Black Olive we build it in time in nature deliberately, not as a break in the programme, but as part of it. The best thinking rarely happens in a ‘delivery room’.

What we do differently

Most leadership development treats the leader as a mind to be trained. We treat the leader as a whole human being whose thinking depends on conditions for success, and we work on both.

In practice that means we start with the physiological foundation rather than bolting it on at the end. We help leaders see their own patterns, where their energy goes and what it costs them (in work and play). We then build the skills on top of that, so leaders have a chance of spending less time in survive and more in thrive.

It is less tidy than a competency framework and traditional leadership development. It is whole person development that helps leaders start to set the conditions for success in themselves and their teams.

What you can do next

You do not need a programme or coaching to begin.

For the next fortnight, when you catch yourself handling something badly, drained, overwhelmed step back and write down the time and what the day had been like up to that point. Not the behaviour, the conditions. Most leaders find a pattern within a week or so.

Ask yourself the question that really matters….. not how do I get better at this, but what state was I in when it happened.

If you would like to explore leadership development that steps outside what has come before get in touch

Is this about wellbeing rather than leadership?

No. Wellbeing asks how your people are feeling. This asks how well they think and decide when it matters. The practices overlap, but the purpose is judgment and performance, and that is what we look at.

We already run resilience training. How is this different?

Resilience training teaches leaders to cope with the load. This looks at what creates the load and what restores capacity, so there is less to cope with. Less time in survive, more in thrive.

Does this mean skills training is a waste of time?

Not at all. Skills still matter. But a well-trained leader with nothing left in the tank is not a leader anyone experiences as well-trained. We build the skills on top of the foundation rather than instead of it.

Who is this approach for?

Senior leaders and leadership teams carrying sustained pressure and complex decisions, usually in organisations where the cost of a poor call is high.