Embodied Trust vs Mean Brain Gremlins
Last month, I put the type of leadership I wrote about last week to the test. I went outside of my comfort zone to co-lead a women’s backpacking retreat that required packing in over two miles to an off-the-grid gorgeous mountain hut at 10,000 feet.
I’ve led many things over my career, including study abroad trips, but this one pushed me. One of my responsibilities was leading our morning movement sessions. On the surface that seems easy and simple enough. It should have been an easy part to prep. And yet in the month leading up to the retreat all the brain gremlins came out.
Last week I talked about the importance of approaching leadership and learning from this creative emergence paradigm. It’s the magic that comes in the sweet spot of blending knowledge, embodiment, and trust. We are all aware of knowledge. We come by knowledge in many ways, often through some time of formal preparation and on-the-job training. And most of you are already well aware of the gremlins that compete with that knowledge to keep distract us from embracing the embodiment and trust components of leadership.
I’ve trained as a yoga teacher. I’ve had a breath and movement practice since I lived in India back in 2006. I’m training right now on exercise and health for the menopause body. I know my stuff. So imagine my surprise when these gremlins showed up, telling me:
You’re not good enough. You don’t have enough training.
People will have more advanced practices or training than yours.
What you offer won’t be what people want or need.
There’s no cell service or wifi, so you won’t be able to Google how to teach a certain pose. What are you going to do then?
People are paying money for this experience, not for your experimentation or bumbling.
These messages paralyzed me. At first, my plan was to have my own daily practice of yoga movements to get in the flow. I pulled out my yoga books and promptly left them on the table instead.
Knowledge requires embodiment as a partner - both your own embodiment as a leader and guiding others to reconnect to themselves. Without this partnership, there is great risk of missing powerful growth potential and personal agendas getting in the way (like forcing something that doesn’t fit anymore, which causes reactivity rather than responsiveness). Through this process, I relearned that when I was able to connect into my body, I could feel more of what I needed, which opened me up to sensing group energy, too. I showed up each morning with a movement script or outline and got us started. Then after a grounding and a few poses, I’d shift based on that embodied intuition and trusted it would take us where we needed to go.
At the end of the first morning, I invited each person to share a movement that felt good to their bodies at that time. This wasn’t planned, but that one little shift invited each person to show up, be seen, and lead. It was an important but small scaffolding moment that would allow people to step up to be in the lead on our hike the next day. It also shifted the understanding of trusting your own body’s needs rather than blindly following the leader’s instructions.
Trusting your own embodied choice is as important as trusting others' embodied choices. In order to invite creative emergence in, we have to trust others will take and create what they need out of an experience. This almost flies in the face of how educational programs are required to set up learning where we have set outcomes and learning objectives and rubrics or assessments that say what most people will get from an experience. Instead, this type of trust invites whatever each person needs - it trusts that they will gain what they need and then together we will create a group experience that will be unique and not be recreated in that exact formation again.
I’ve talked about embodied action a lot over these years so I’d sum it up in this context of allowing embodiment to guide you as a leader to that deep core intuition that allows you to know what to do next because it’s an embodied ‘hell yea’ sensation. It’s sometimes having a plan but then doing something different on the spot because it’s what the group needs or you know there’s something better waiting if you go that direction. But it’s not willy nilly or chaotic, there’s a different feeling there when it’s embodied shifts because it’s responsive not reactive.
Are you ready to step into embodied trust?