How Our Nervous System Impacts Our Leadership Capacity As Women: A Somatic Approach to Leading with Confidence
Overcoming Self-Doubt and Fear In Leadership with Somatic Approaches
The Leadership We Crave vs. What Feels Possible
Have you ever felt pulled to step into something bigger : a greater vision, a leadership role, or a new chapter of your life, but found yourself stuck between the desire to lean in, and an inner resistance that left you feeling stuck, hesitant or overwhelmed.
As women, the tension between ambition and the internal barriers that hold us back is so common, and can feel like an internal tug-of-war.
The idea of the ‘something bigger’ might feel exciting, but when opportunities to take that step present themselves, fear, self-doubt or self-sabotage seem to get in the way, leaving us frozen and unable to move forward.
The truth is, leadership isn’t just about ambition or skills; it’s about capacity - our ability to hold the emotional, physical, and mental ‘charge’ of being the leader we envision ourselves to be.
And that capacity begins with your nervous system.
Our nervous system determines how much expansion, visibility, and responsibility we can hold. It shapes whether leadership feels safe or whether it triggers resistance, self-sabotage, or overwhelm.
Without a regulated, resourced nervous system, stepping up can feel unsafe, regardless of how much we desire it.
In this post, I explore how our nervous system impacts our capacity to lead, why this is especially important for women, and how working with our nervous system can help us expand into leadership safely, powerfully, and sustainably.
Our Nervous System is at the Root of Our Capacity To Expand Our Leadership
Our nervous system acts as our body’s safety assessor. It constantly scans our environment for cues of safety or danger.
When we are considering stepping into a bigger leadership role - whether it’s launching a new project, taking a more senior role, or leading a team - our nervous system plays a key role in determining how safe that expansion feels.
If our nervous system perceives leadership as threatening, it will resist in subtle or overt ways, and often lead to self-sabotage.
This can look like procrastination, perfectionism, overthinking, or imposter syndrome.
This is a wise response from our nervous system who wants to keep us protected from the risk of being judged, of failing, or being seen as not meeting the expectations placed upon ourselves.
This means that our capacity to lead cannot exceed our nervous system’s capacity to hold the vision we have for ourselves.
I like to think of our nervous system as the roots of a tree.
Just as roots must grow deeper to support a taller, wider tree, our nervous system must expand to support our leadership growth. Without this foundation, the weight of leadership can feel really destabilising.
Why Leadership Can Feel Especially ‘Threatening’ for Women
When I deliver training and coaching to groups of women around Embodied Feminine Leadership, I invite them to drop the word ‘leadership’ in their body - and notice the sensations, feelings, images that arise naturally.
It always brings up a lot.
For some, it might be a sense of excitement and possibilities - but for most, it leads to fear, resistance, a sense that it isn’t for us, or that we simply don’t have what it takes to identify as leaders.
It is clear that for women, leadership often brings unique challenges, many of which are rooted in our societal conditioning. Here are a couple of examples:
As women, we are often caught between conflicting expectations. Be assertive, but not aggressive. Be confident, but not arrogant. Be ambitious, but not “too much.” These double standards can lead to a fear of stepping forward, even when we genuinely desire to lead.
Leadership means being seen : expressing ideas, holding authority, and making decisions. For many women, who have been conditioned to avoid conflict or prioritise harmony, visibility can feel like a threat to our safety.
These challenges aren’t just mental, they are somatic. They live in the body as tension, fear, or hesitation, which our nervous system might register as a reason to hold back.
Why a Somatic Approach Is Vital for Elevating Our Leadership
Traditional approaches to leadership focus on strategy, mindset, or skill development. These are, of course, incredibly valuable and important.
However, they often fail to address the root of the issue: the nervous system’s capacity to hold the experience of leading.
Expanding our capacity to lead powerfully isn’t about pushing through fear or “fixing” ourselves. It’s about partnering with our body and nervous system to create the inner safety and resilience we can lean on to lead.
A somatic approach works directly with our body to:
Stabilise our nervous system: Somatic practices help soothe our nervous system, stabilise the fight, flight or freeze response and meet challenges with more clarity and grounding.
Expand our resilience: Leadership often involves discomfort - visibility, responsibility, or having to make difficult decisions. Somatic work increases our ability to hold these experiences without becoming overwhelmed and pulling back.
Build self-trust: By learning to listen to our body’s innate intelligence, we strengthen our intuition and confidence, we make decisions that feel more authentic and aligned and we deepen our self-trust.
Support sustainability: Somatic practices help us to recognise and honour our limits and to prevent burnout, which means that our leadership growth is powerful AND sustainable.
When we work with our nervous system, we create a foundation for leadership that feels stable, sustainable and empowering rather than overwhelming and depleting.
Leadership is an embodied practice. And our nervous system is key to unlock our potential at a pace that feels safe.
What a Somatic Approach to Leadership Growth Can Look Like
A somatic approach focuses on building a partnership with our body. It helps us anchor into resources and cultivate the inner safety that will serve as the foundation to support our growth.
Here’s what it might involve:
Grounding in the body: Practices that help us connect with physical sensations, bring us out of our head and into the present moment, and anchor us in sources of support.
Stabilising the nervous system: Techniques like orienting and somatic tracking to help create a greater sense of inner stability.
Gradual expansion: The nervous system thrives on incremental growth. A somatic approach helps us stretch our capacity step by step, gradually increasing your nervous system’s ability to hold discomfort, visibility and responsibility.
Releasing the somatic residues that hold us back: Somatic approaches help us identify and release tension, fear, or resistance held in our body, which creates more space for freedom and ease.
This approach is about meeting our body where it is, step by step, and creating a foundation of safety that holds us through our leadership journey.
Leadership as an Embodied Practice
Leadership isn’t just about vision or strategy, it’s an embodied practice that requires us to expand our nervous system’s capacity to hold growth, responsibility, and visibility.
By reconnecting with our body and building the resilience of our nervous system, we can step into leadership with more clarity, confidence, and grounding. We can begin to move from fearing judgement to trusting our voice, from staying in the shadow, to taking authentic steps forward.
If you would like to explore how a somatic approach could support you in expanding your leadership, get in touch.
The Somatic Self-Doubt Remedy is a also great free resource to explore this further. This powerful 4 part mini-audio training guides you on a somatic journey from self-doubt, imposter syndrome and staying small to taking up more space and embodying self-confidence.
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Slow Change is Sustainable Change - Why Somatic Approaches Work Differently
