Want to come to a free online workshop on using somatics and body movement to expand your vision and behavior?
Well first, listen to this: On August 22, Dr Wendy Allen and I are leading a one-day workshop in East Hampton, New York called The Dance Of Leadership. Click here and scroll down to read about it. Part of what we will be teaching is the subject of this post.
As for the free Zoom workshop, we are inviting people who expresses even the smallest interest in coming to the workshop in Long Island to come to our free Zoom workshop. Please go here to express interest and we will send you an invitation.
Your Body May Be Stopping You Before You Even Know It
You know, there’s a way in which we always think that when we resist doing something we really want to do, we’re supposed to go back and understand what happened in our childhood or psychology, or ask ourselves, “Why is it hard for me to do this?”
But what’s interesting is that we can use our bodies to actually short-circuit all the whys—the things from childhood, the “I got rejected when…” and all of that—and actually use our bodies to move past the discomfort we have in imagining a life for ourselves, visioning widely, and acting differently in our leadership situations.
How Your Body Protects You From Change
So first, to give a little background about how our bodies regulate us: suppose you need to have a conversation with somebody who works with you because you have a vision for your organization to move forward in a certain way. And the only way you can move forward is if you actually change the culture in your organization. But to change the culture, you’re going to have to start having some hard conversations with people that you might be scared to have.
So there are ways in which your body wants to stop you from having conversations or behaving in certain ways. What will happen is that, at a pre-conscious level, you have the idea to have a conversation with someone, and your body becomes, on a microscopic level, uncomfortable with that idea. It causes you to suppress the idea almost before you even become aware of it.
So what we might find ourselves thinking is that we have to figure out why we become uncomfortable in those situations and kind of deal with all of that. Or what we can actually do is change our body state so that we are comfortable.
⏸️ Take a Moment To Reflect Here
What conversation have you been postponing—not because you don’t know what to say, but because your body doesn’t yet feel safe saying it?
Tell me what came up for you by leaving a comment.
Why Most People's Vision Is Too Small
I find this with my clients. The first thing I ask clients when they come is, “What do you want from your life?” And often, their visions for themselves are very tame. They’re things like, “Oh, I’d like to spend more time with my kids.” And that’s great, of course, to want to spend more time with your kids. But we’re vastly creative as human beings, and we can come up with bigger things than just, “I wish I had a little bit more time.”
But people have a hard time moving into creation. “I want to travel around the world with my kids” can be very difficult for some people to say. And that is because those ideas are there, but as soon as they start to arise, our bodies become tense and push them back down again.
The LSD Exercise
So here is an exercise using the body for coming up with visions and vast possibilities for your life. My coach, Steve Chandler, calls this LSD—laughing, singing, and dancing.
Before sitting down to visualize your life, before coming up with a big vision for what you want from your life—in fact, if you’re saying, “I’m not sure what job I want,” or “I’m not sure where I want to live,” or any of that kind of stuff—what’s happening is not so much that you don’t have great ideas. It’s that your body is regulating you out of having the ideas because it’s trying to keep you safe.
So the trick is to make your body feel safe. And once your body feels safe, then you can have more ideas.
You should actually try this. Sit down and make a vision for your life. Just do it, and you’ll notice tightness and discomfort. Then try this second thing: the technique given to me by my coach, Steve Chandler, who says that whenever he’s having a hard time, he uses LSD: laughing, singing, and dancing.
This may sound trivial, but try it, because it’s not trivial. Before sitting down to vision, put on some music that you really like and dance. Really enjoy yourself—by yourself, by the way. Really dance until you feel relaxed and happy.
Then, while the music is still going, sit down and create a vision for your life: where you want to live, who you want to date, whatever it is. Your vision will be more expansive.
So that’s one way, among many, that we can use our bodies to expand our view of possibilities, expand our ways of behaving, expand beyond our habits, and make our lives bigger.
Let’s Talk
When was the last time you allowed yourself to imagine a life bigger than the one you think is realistic? Tell me what came up for you by leaving a comment.
Oh, and don’t forget to express interest in our Dance Of Leadership Workshop to get invited to our free Zoom workshop.
With love,
Colin
