Discover how to harness the wisdom of your own body to become a more effective leader with Amanda Blake, acclaimed author of "Your Body Is Your Brain." She is a Master Somatic Leadership Coach who holds a degree in Human Biology from Stanford University and a PhD in Management from Case Western Reserve University.
Our conversation with Amanda is a journey through the mind-body connection, offering listeners a fresh perspective on leadership and personal growth. By emphasizing present-moment awareness of sensations, movements, and emotions, Amanda illustrates why her approach to coaching can often surpass traditional methods.
Prepare to rethink what you know about self-awareness as Amanda delves into the nuanced art of embodied coaching. Learn how physical metaphors and intuition play crucial roles in understanding our experiences, and how the sensory experience of intuition is essential in coaching practices. This episode is filled with strategies and stories that promise not only to inspire but to provide practical steps for those ready to integrate these ideas into their lives. As we express our gratitude to Amanda for her passionate contributions, we're reminded of the profound impact coaching has on improving both personal and professional relationships. Join us for an episode that will leave you with a deeper appreciation for the body's role in shaping our leadership and life choices.
Watch the full interview by clicking here
Find the full article here: https://bit.ly/BTP2024-AB
Learn more about Amand Blake here
Learn more about Embright.org here
Amanda has a special gift for our listeners. Please click here to find out more
Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com/
In this episode, I talk with Amanda Blake about his article published in our January 2024 issue.
Discover how to harness the wisdom of your own body to become a more effective leader with Amanda Blake, acclaimed author of "Your Body Is Your Brain." She is a Master Somatic Leadership Coach who holds a degree in Human Biology from Stanford University and a PhD in Management from Case Western Reserve University.
Our conversation with Amanda is a journey through the mind-body connection, offering listeners a fresh perspective on leadership and personal growth. By emphasizing present-moment awareness of sensations, movements, and emotions, Amanda illustrates why her approach to coaching can often surpass traditional methods.
Prepare to rethink what you know about self-awareness as Amanda delves into the nuanced art of embodied coaching. Learn how physical metaphors and intuition play crucial roles in understanding our experiences, and how the sensory experience of intuition is essential in coaching practices. This episode is filled with strategies and stories that promise not only to inspire but to provide practical steps for those ready to integrate these ideas into their lives. As we express our gratitude to Amanda for her passionate contributions, we're reminded of the profound impact coaching has on improving both personal and professional relationships. Join us for an episode that will leave you with a deeper appreciation for the body's role in shaping our leadership and life choices.
Watch the full interview by clicking here
Find the full article here: https://bit.ly/BTP2024-AB
Learn more about Amand Blake here
Learn more about Embright.org here
Amanda has a special gift for our listeners. Please click here to find out more
Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com/
In this episode, I talk with Amanda Blake about his article published in our January 2024 issue.
Welcome to the choice Magazine podcast, Beyond the Page. choice, the magazine of professional coaching, is your go-to source for expert insights and in-depth features from the world of professional coaching. I'm your host, Garry Schleifer, and I'm thrilled to have you join us today. In each episode, we go beyond the page of the articles published in choice Magazine and dive deeper into some of the most recent and relevant topics impacting the world of professional coaching, exploring the content, interviewing the talented minds behind the articles, like Amanda here, and uncovering the stories that make an impact.
Garry Schleifer:choice is more than a magazine. For over 21 years, we've built a community of like-minded people who create, use, and share coaching tools, tips, and techniques, say that 20 times, to add value to their businesses and, of course what we all want, make an impact with our clients. In today's episode, I'm speaking with award-winning book author Amanda Blake, who's the author of an article in our latest issue "Neuroscience and Coaching: Separating Myth from Reality." Her article is entitled "Applied Embodied Cognition for Coaches ~ Why Embodied Coaching Beats Yoga and Mindfulness. Don't we want to know more about that? A little bit about Amanda. She is the author of the award-winning book "Your Body is Your Brain." She is a Master Somatic Leadership Coach who holds a degree in Human Biology from Stanford University and a PhD in Management from Case Western Reserve University. Her work helps influencers and idealists expand their leadership capacity and make a more satisfying and meaningful contribution. Amanda Blake, thank you so much for joining me today.
Amanda Blake:Thank you for having me, Garry. It's a pleasure to be here.
Garry Schleifer:Okay, I really have to ask how did you go from human biology to management in your studies?
Amanda Blake:So it's actually not nearly as far of a leap as you might imagine. So my undergraduate education was premised. The human biology at Stanford is premised on the idea that you can only understand human beings by looking at them through the lens of both the natural and the social sciences. So I studied in my undergraduate education the relationship between psychology and biology, and developmental psychology from a biological perspective, that's on an individual level, and then on a community level, I studied ecology and anthropology. How do culture and nature interact over time to shape landscapes and to shape human communities? So all of that is a particular lens, a very integral way of looking at being human. And as I sort of traveled forward in my career, or stumbled forward, as the case sometimes, fall forward, tripped forward.
Amanda Blake:I actually had long had in my mind, particularly when I started to get interested in the neurobiology of embodied coaching, I thought I really would like to do a PhD on this. I would really like to focus on this. And I went and talked to one of my professors from Stanford, Robert Sapolsky, a name some may know. He's done a lot of work in biology of behavior and I said what do you think I should do? And he said skip the PhD, write the book. He said you won't find a program that it's gonna support your bizarre interests, so don't bother, just go and the book. That was the genesis of "Your Body Is Your Brain. And I wrote "Your Body is Your Brain, which I finished and got it into the publication pipeline prior to joining a PhD program which I wound up finding at case Western Reserve. I wasn't looking, but I happened to meet one of my mentors, a man named Richard Boyatzis.
Amanda Blake:Some may know him from the book "Primal Leadership" popular book, "Resonant Leadership." So he's a big name in the leadership space and because I was writing about emotional and social intelligence and he has a lot of understanding there, we were both presenting at a conference and I invited him to coffee and I said, " take a look at this book.
Amanda Blake:And he said, "ot only are you not gonna fall on your face, I'd like you to come study with me. I have this program, this doctoral program, for mid-career professionals who are seeking to develop work and contribute to knowledge in a whole variety of domains. And, as it happens, Case Western Reserve is not only the home of the coaching research lab, it is also the home of The Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, a place where I was a fellow. It is one of the leading voices, in fact, was the first university in the United States to have an organizational development department in their management program. So there's just leadership on all the levels that I was interested in.
Amanda Blake:It was an incredibly amazing fit. There's also some great work being done there in neurobiology consciousness. I know my colleague, Tony Jack. I believe he also has an article in this issue of choice magazine, and so, anyway, all of that is to say it was not planned. I kind of, as I said, tripped into it and it was an amazing opportunity to really do deeper research into body-oriented coaching, which is probably what listeners really want to hear about.
Garry Schleifer:It's always interesting to know what brings you to our pages, right? So thank you for sharing that because I like to know that too, and there's no surprise that you would write this. So let's, like you say, let's get into it. What is this embodied self-awareness, and why does it matter?
Amanda Blake:So in the research literature, embodied self-awareness is defined as present moment, non-judgmental attention to sensation, movement and emotion, and particularly focused on sensation and movement and how those impact our emotions. So that's the basic definition. Present moment, right now, non-judgmental, not making ourselves bad or wrong, nor are we like puffing ourselves up, making ourselves great, attention to sensation and movement. So that's what embodied self-awareness is. What it produces,
Amanda Blake:One way is kind of a functional way. So, for example, if you feel your seat in the chair, if you have a _____ thing, or if you hold your phone in your hand, or if you pick up a cup or a mug, that is a functional set of sensations that is tied to activities that you're doing. There are also sensations that inform us about our emotional life, right? So if you use the basic valence of approach or avoid, we determine whether to approach or avoid a situation largely based on our physical sensations. So in the same way that you might stub your toe, you might stub your heart, and that feels a particular way, right? That contains a whole set of sensations and physicality.
Amanda Blake:Embodied self-awareness is paying attention to that aspect of our physical experience, and in body oriented coaching, which we might refer to as embodied coaching, body oriented coaching, somatic coaching it goes by a number of names. That approach to coaching involves the body as a source of intelligence, as a source of information and then as a domain of learning in the context of our life, our cares, our concerns, what it is we're trying to move towards or create in the coaching relationship.
Garry Schleifer:Wow, that's amazing. So thank you for explaining all that. I did want our audience to have a reminder of what embodied coaching, somatic coaching was. It's using that awareness and the keyword there is self-awareness. So very much so, and you really have me thinking about how routine my life is. You know you're talking about picking up a mug and moving through space but you did have me stop and feel about what it was like to sit in this chair right now. So I've got a bit of awareness going as a result of our conversation and you know what's it informing me? Be present. It's what I'm kind of getting out of that one.
Garry Schleifer:In your article you mentioned that, and well, article, never mind, the title that body self-awareness outperforms yoga and meditation as a strategy for building greater resilience. Okay, break that down for us. Why? How'd you find that?
Amanda Blake:Right, yeah, crazy, crazy. So this was something that I didn't anticipate in the research that I conducted. This was research. The basic sort of arc of the research was to first speak to about two dozen coaches about their experiences of embodied coaching or not, and I sort of set it up to be able to draw contrast between those who had had a lot of experience with the body oriented coaching and those who had not. And then I went on, based on what they told me to survey. I think we actually got over almost 600 responses to a survey of coaches about their experiences of coaching, coach training, embodiment and also their own experiences of aspects of their lives like resilience or flourishing or how they manage conflict.
Amanda Blake:So a number of factors that we measured. And among those things that we measured, in terms of their training, their experience, we measured training and regular practice around a number of body oriented things you might do in life, like yoga, like mindfulness, which often focuses on the body, although not always like martial arts, like dance, and what we found and I want to say at the outset, there's tremendously powerful research about the positive benefits of a regular yoga practice, of a regular mindfulness practice. We know that these are incredibly beneficial for all kinds of aspects in life. What I did was I kind of compared okay, if you do yoga regularly, if you meditate regularly, if you dance regularly, if you regularly receive hands on touch oriented body work like certain kinds of massage, if you experience those kinds of embodied things regularly, what happens in your life in terms of things like resilience and conflict management? These kinds of things that we were measuring? And then, as well, we asked that same question. If you have training in some kind of body oriented coaching approach, what happens in your life in terms of resilience, conflict management, connectedness, empathy and all of these elements that we were measuring? And what we found was, this was both a surprise to me and not a surprise, and I'll explain why. What we found was that body oriented coaching for those who have engaged in it in a deeper way, so at least 50 hours of training, that's at least a week or more of deeper training and for most people, going well beyond that. The impact, the positive impact on flourishing, resilience, adaptability, empathy, conflict management, connectedness, the positive impact was four times as great as the already known positive impact from yoga and from mindfulness. Now the other things we studied we didn't see that they were even necessarily having much of an impact at all. We had pretty small samples of people who did martial arts or regularly dance, for example, so we dropped those. We said, okay, we can't really see whether there's an impact there but we had plenty of people who were doing yoga and mindfulness and we could see a clear difference.
Amanda Blake:Now, the way that I came to understand and explain that difference. So the fact that there was a big difference was a bit of a surprise. On the other hand, in my experience, before I ever got into body oriented coaching, I was an athlete. I had done yoga for almost two decades by the time I started body oriented coaching. I had been meditating for, I would say, from my early 20s onward. I found this approach to coaching far more powerful and impactful in my own life. It changed me more than those other experiences that I had had. So while on the one hand, I was surprised, like hundreds of coaches are pointing to the fact that there is a big difference here. That was surprising to me, but it also kind of validated the experience that I personally had had, which is this is really impactful. So why? If you'll permit me, just one more sort of obvious n ext question is, well, why? I'm going to respond to that.
Garry Schleifer:Yeah, why go ahead, Amanda? Why?
Amanda Blake:Her is my explanation for that, at least so far, and we can always do more research and dig in and try and understand these matters much better. But my hypothesis is, and I think this is born out by conversations that I've had with others who've had these experiences, there is a difference in the way yoga and mindfulness are taught in mainstream ways. And in many ways, there was a deliberate attempt to extract those from the kind of complex and comprehensive spiritual traditions that they came from, as a way to make them more palatable to western audiences. One of the things that coaching in an embodied way does is it takes all of this capacity to pay attention to your physical experience. How you are sitting in the chair right now as you're listening, and it sets that in the context of what do you want in your life? Why are you in this coaching engagement? What is the change you're trying to make? What are you moving towards?
Amanda Blake:And when we set paying attention to our embodied experience in the context of our whole life, all of a sudden a whole bunch of new information arises that we couldn't see before, and so, instead of going to a yoga class as a way to sort of relax, it's an hour out of your life to kind of strengthen and relax yourself. That would be one way to approach a yoga class. What we're doing in embodied coaching is we're contextualizing the way we're paying attention to our embodied experience. Now there are yoga and meditation teachers out there who do that contextualization. But broadly speaking, in very mainstream ways, people use these, I'll call them tools. They were, I don't think, ever intended to quite be that, but use these tools right as kind of a performance enhancer, that's sort of a bolt on, add on to their life, instead of really fully integrated. And so it is that integration, I believe, that makes the difference, and you could use yoga and meditation that way.
Garry Schleifer:Wow, thank you very much for explaining that. And you know still it boggles the mind to think that is embodied coaching, but the contextualization sounds like the key factor in all of this.
Amanda Blake:That's what I believe to be the case, yeah.
Garry Schleifer:Yeah, now I'm also a coach. What's a common way this comes up in a coaching conversation, and how do you phrase it in an embodied coaching self-awareness way as a powerful question?
Amanda Blake:Yeah. So I would say there are two or three different streams possible here. One is to tune your own listening radio channel to listen for embodied language. So thinking about a recent client conversation, somebody talking about being in a river between one shore and another, or somebody talking about experiencing themselves in a particular context as jittery and agitated, or somebody talking about themselves as I just feel really stiff. So people will very automatically use embodied language.
Amanda Blake:Linguists have studied this and they tell us, we actually don't have any other way to understand the world. Our only option for understanding the world is how we move through it in physical space, and so we'll talk about in a relationship, for example, I just don't feel as close to that person as I used to. There's distance between us now. Closeness and distance, that is a physical property, right, but we understand our emotional relationship with someone in physical terms. We will describe it in physical terms. It's so embedded in what we do and say that we don't hear it, right.
Amanda Blake:So one thing that you can do is to start to tune yourself as a coach to really listen for the embodied ways people already speak about their own experience and out of that interesting questions can emerge.
Amanda Blake:So, for example, if we're talking about closeness and distance, you could set up a situation where you have something physical in the room that represents this person that you either feel close or distant to and put your body in relationship to that. What happens if you physically move closer? What might happen in the relationship? What happens if you move farther away? What happens in your body? So that would be one way is to really tune to embodied metaphor. All of these, by the way, take practice and training, but these are sort of approaches you can use. Another way would be to train yourself to be able to feel your seat in the chair as you're listening to your client. And not only feel your seat in the chair, but feel how you might be getting more tense or softer, feel a flush of warmth that might come over you as you're listening to your client.
Amanda Blake:Notice that your eyebrows knit together or your shoulders kind of pull up and out of that we can also generate questions. So the way that we might use our own embodied experience to generate a question is to say, "what's going on in your stomach right now, if you're feeling something in your own belly right, or what's going on in your neck and shoulders right now as you talk about this. So you're using your own body as a clue or a cue to what you might ask your question, your client. You don't have to say, wow, I feel really nauseous, do you?
Amanda Blake:That actually doesn't help, but we do know because of the way bodies impact and mirror one another through space, so even if you coach over Zoom or on the phone, our bodies will still be responding to one another's words, one another's presence or thereof. So we can use our own body and what's happening inside our own body as a clue or a cue for what questions we might get curious about. I wonder if there's anything similar going on for my client over there.
Amanda Blake:Let me just ask them what's going on, and then you can be very specific. The one thing I'll say that drives me absolutely batty, this is a pet peeve of mine, is to just ask well, what's going on in your body?
Garry Schleifer:What's going on in your body?
Amanda Blake:Because most people actually don't know how to answer that question. For most of us, we don't pay enough attention to be able to answer that with any sort of specificity. So it helps to be able to ask your client what's happening with your shoulders and they might say nothing or they might say, gee, now that you mentioned it" and come back with something that really surprises you. So I'll leave it at that and let you ask something else, Garry. But those are two possible ways that you can use this in very practical terms.
Garry Schleifer:Wow, thank you so much, and I'm gonna refer our listeners to your article. When it comes to working and supporting yourself, you've put in there three keys to cultivating embodiment, and I'm suggesting this for yourselves as coaches. Number one find a qualified guide. I see one right beside me. Pay close attention to sensation and movement. And number three engage in relevant embodied practice.
Garry Schleifer:And, Amanda, when you were telling that story, I remembered the early days of coaching and I was coaching two separate clients I think it was even within a month of each other, so I think I was really in the embodied mindset. One of them on the phone and I said my hand is on my heart and there was this gasp on the other end and she's like and mine's on my heart, and we went from there.
Garry Schleifer:And then another time I was coaching a client on the phone, so I couldn't see them, and I said I have a feeling like you're in a dark place, like a closed room, not dark place mentally but a closed room. Okay, the client said, "eah, I'm in my kitchen under my table with the lights out" and we went from there. So I, you know, and I hear your advice to get some specific training. I've got tons more questions but unfortunately not tons more time, so I'm gonna ask you, in the spirit of this getting support on that, what would you like our listeners and audience to do as a result of your article in our conversation?
Amanda Blake:That's a great question. Can I just comment on what you said very briefly and then answer that question?
Garry Schleifer:Of course. We've got time for that. Okay, we definitely do.
Amanda Blake:Okay, good. So what I just want to say is intuition is a sensory experience and the research that's been done on intuition. Intuition comes to us through, usually, sight, sound, so some image, some sound, some felt physical sense, maybe like putting your hand on your heart. And so I guess, in answer to your question, one of the first things that I would say is dialing up your sensory awareness will dial up your intuition. Trust that intuition. So, while I absolutely recommend that you find a qualified guide, and I am hardly the only one out there, to help you develop embodied self-awareness. I really recommend that because most of us don't have a lot of experience doing this and it doesn't easily lend itself to kind of a self-guided study, unless you have someone kind of saying like pay attention here, pay attention here, things that you wouldn't have paid attention to before. So that's why I recommend getting a qualified guide. But even if you're not prepared to do that, you're not ready to do that right now, trust your intuition not as though it's 100% right, your intellect isn't 100%, but as though it has something valuable to offer you and really tune into your sensory experience as a way to activate or tap into your intuition. So that's the first thing. A second thing, obviously, yes, find someone to support you in this kind of learning.
Amanda Blake:One of the things that I said in the article that you pointed out is like pay attention to sensory experience. Here's a really simple way you can do that. Make a list of sensory words. Words that describe sensation. We don't have a really wide vocabulary, but as you start to construct your own list and deliberately go well, what are all the words that I could use for an experience of heat or cold? Those are two words, but there's like also, I'm sweating, also I'm shivering, also I'm flushed, also I'm. So try and get as specific as you can with language around sensation, and then just stop a few times a day and circle a couple of the words on your list that you're experiencing right now. That'll help you tune into your sensory experience. I also really recommend listening to podcasts, for example and paying attention to your sensory experience while you listen.
Amanda Blake:That will help you get more comfortable and familiar paying attention to your own sensory experience while you listen to your client. So that's another sort of thing that you could go and do and then engage in embodied practice. We haven't talked about that very much, but one really easy thing that people can do is go to the Embright website. I'll spell it out for you if you want. But on the Embright website is a tool called the Stress to Serenity Guide and it's totally free and it takes you through a way of paying attention to your sensation while you're in action, while you're in movement. It goes over, I think, a couple of weeks that you get to kind of practice this and get used to paying attention in a particular way while you're doing other things, and that's one of the practices that I highly recommend. So those are some possible things that people could go and do.
Garry Schleifer:Awesome. Thank you so much, Embright. E-M-B-R-I-G-H-T, you've got it and it's Embright. org. Thank you for that clarification. We'll put that in our show notes as well, so you have access to that after this call. Oh, my goodness. And thank you for adding in that about intuition, because I don't work with that enough and it's a good reminder to honor it and to take it a step further. So thank you for that reminder.
Amanda Blake:Yes, yeah, you bet, and it sounds like in your experience that really opened up new avenues in those coaching conversations for you. So, it is very powerful. Yeah, it's great.
Garry Schleifer:And not just in coaching, in life as well. If it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck, and it sounds like a duck, it's probably a duck, but you don't have to go that far folks., Just honor your intuition. Amanda, thank you so much for joining us for this Beyond the Page episode. Oh, what's the best way to reach you? I'm guessing it's something Embright. org.
Amanda Blake:Yeah, the probably the easiest way is to just support@e mbright. org. Again, E-M-B-R-I-G-H-T, and either I or my assistant will get back to you.
Garry Schleifer:Awesome. Thank you, and thanks again for not only writing the article and for being here for this podcast, but for all the work that you do. You're well known in the coaching profession and thank you for your authenticity, your integrity and your great work.
Amanda Blake:I appreciate that. Thank you, yeah, it's a joy that I get to do this, and I am really passionate about bringing this work to coaches, because it's made me a better, nicer person and it's made life better for all the people around me as well, including my coaching clients.
Garry Schleifer:Well, there we go. Well, you've succeeded. You're a great person. That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. For more episodes, subscribe to your favorite podcast app. I know we're highly sought after in the Apple and Spotify space. If you're not a subscriber yet, you can sign up for a free digital issue of choice Magazine by going to choice-online. com and clicking the Sign Up Now button. I'm Garry Schleifer. Enjoy the journey of mastery.