Discover how somatic leadership transforms the way we navigate pressure, relationships, and decision-making in both personal and professional settings in this conversation with executive leadership coach Thomas Rosenberg. He joins Janine Hamner Holman to explore the power of somatic practices in building self-awareness, fostering trust, and aligning with your vision and values. Thomas shares insightful anecdotes and practical strategies to help leaders respond intentionally to the many issues around them rather than simply reacting automatically. Learn how reconnecting with your body can unlock authentic leadership and improve your collaboration with the rest of your team.

GUEST: Thomas Rosenberg | LinkedIn | Website

HOST: Janine Hamner Holman | [email protected] | LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter | Subscribe to my Newsletter! | Book me to Speak!

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Somatic Leadership: Building Resilience Through The Body With Thomas Rosenberg

Introduction

Welcome to The Cost of Not Paying Attention. I’m your host, Janine Hamner Holman. I am super excited, you all, to introduce you to Thomas Rosenberg. I have known Thomas for five years through an organization that we both participate in, and I am so excited to have him be our guest. As an executive leadership development coach, Thomas works somatically, and we’re going to talk about what the heck that word means. Thomas works somatically to guide his individual and peer team clients to practice and embody the leadership they want to see and probably that they want to be. Thomas, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Janine. It is delightful being here.

Fantastic. I’m going to begin, as we usually do, please share with me what you have noticed, either inside your own business or working with your clients. What’s the big thing that we’re not paying enough attention to, and what is the cause of that inattention? What’s the problem that that attention is causing?

How Childhood Strategies Impact Leadership

For me, one of the biggest things, and this is true for every individual out there, is that when we’re little, we create wise adaptations to protect our fragile nervous systems from big energy. This happens in the first 2, 3, 4 years of life. They’re super protective of us. This is wonderful, and yet we carry these into life because this is how we practice dealing whenever we get triggered, whenever it’s intense, whenever we’re under pressure, this is what we default back to. What happens is that we forget that it’s the adult person in the room, whatever age you happen to be, having a conversation with this other person or in front of this group of people, however old they happen to be. You default, under pressure, to this younger self, and it becomes a challenge.

I’ll give you a brief anecdote just to illustrate this. A friend of mine, who is a strategy consultant, went into this organization. He was sitting down with the CEO, who’s been on site for six months, and he’s working to get some basic information so he can start crafting something, get the lay of the land, and move them forward. While he’s in that meeting, the SVP sticks their head in, and he was witness to what I would describe as two four-year-olds pulling hair and throwing sand on the playground. It was a verbal bloodbath. This is a CEO, granted, a new one, relatively new to the organization, and an SVP, and they’re just screaming at each other. They’re poking each other in the eye, proverbially.

It’s like, not interested whatsoever in any coaching, although he was trying to get me in, which is why he was sharing the situation with me. But it just was really astonishing. This is going to impact how well they can decide on a strategy, how they make decisions. Talk about the culture, I don’t know what it would be like to go to work in this organization on a daily basis. I can only imagine suiting up in armor and riding in with my lance because you’re under attack. It’s like, really? It’s like, how old are we? People ask, when we’re working somatically, how do you know how it impacts you? In this situation, how do you know what decision is right for you? That it’s in alignment with your vision and values?

What tells you that? Because if you’re just surfing, “That’s the right number,” it’s like, that’s not really where you make decisions from. You make decisions from the heart. You make decisions from an emotional place. What are we doing under pressure? That’s going back to my introduction that you so kindly gave. That’s what we’re working towards with somatic coaching.

 

That is so rich. There were so many different nuances in there. Let’s begin where you began, which is that we create these very wise adaptations. I loved your words around that, to protect our nervous systems, which are young and fragile and in development when we are very little, but then we don’t update that. It’s the same thing that happens with our amygdala and our limbic system that got created before humans had language, which is why we’re so fine-tuned to danger. That part of our brain, which is where fight, flight, and freeze live, thinks any kind of danger, a CEO and an SVP poking themselves, maybe, and each other in the eyes, proverbially, is a danger.

They are threatening maybe my safety and certainly the safety of the organization. Our triggering response is rooted in these very rudimentary, old strategies of behavior, whether it’s what got created when we were 2, 3, or 4, or whether it got created when we were all living on the Serengeti. None of these are particularly adaptive for 2024, 2025, 2028, 2030, whatever year it might be when you’re listening to this recording, strategies and yet we get stuck. With somatic work, what is it that you do? What does that word mean in this context?

We Are What We Practice: Somatic Insights

Etymologically, somatics comes from soma, the Greek, which means basically body, mind, and spirit in its wholeness. I’m working with the whole human. The living lineage that I belong to, the Strozzi Institute lineage of somatic coaching, teaches that there are two primary pillars, beliefs. We are what we practice. Think how you sit, walk, talk, breathe, the way you stand, the way you walk, the way you hold tension, the language you use with yourself and others. That shapes the range of emotions that you have accessible and the intensity of those emotions. It also shapes how other people perceive you. We learn through the body, thinking, reading, writing, walking, talking, driving a car, riding a bike. We have these old stories, and they’re in the body.

They’re generalized in our soma. It’s not a safe place. This is my tendency. I’m going to flee, or I’m going to appease, or I’m going to freeze, or I’m going to fight. I’m going to dissociate, like whatever it happens to be for you. Somatics, at its core, is really bringing people back to their own aliveness. Why is it important for us to be back in our own aliveness? It’s so that we can know what it feels like to be in alignment with our own vision and values under pressure. That’s what it goes back to what it feels like when you can say, “This is what I stand for.” My coach reminds me frequently, if we can’t feel into our legs and we can’t feel our feet on the ground, it’s really hard to take a stand for something.

We should go back to our own aliveness to know what it feels like to be in alignment with our own vision and values under pressure. Share on X

A lot of us grow up, and we stay here in the head, and so what I’m helping my clients do, both individually and in peer teams, is first just come back to themselves and build that self-awareness. You understand how you are engaging, and you can choose whether how you’re doing so and how you’ve practiced is in alignment with your vision and values, and it still serves.

Again, so much richness in there and so much to unpack. I want to start with this idea of bringing people back to their own aliveness, which is really about vision and values under pressure. It’s really easy to say, “This is how I show up when times are great and things are going well,” but that’s not when things get put to the test. It’s how we show up under pressure. That’s really key. Hopefully, when you’re working with your clients, they are not actually, at that moment, in a high-pressure situation. It may be in the long-term high-pressure situation, but how do you work with them to get them to reveal, probably to themselves, how they operate under pressure?

It’s really easy. If I were to say, “Think back to the last difficult conversation you had,” for instance, I was talking with a client just the other week, and we get into the session and immediately, “You would not believe what has happened six times this week.” She was still up here. It was pretty clear from the onset what was going to happen, but we have this felt sense. You could see in her body she was pulling up. She was constricting her ribs. She was squeezing her throat. This is how our young selves, our 2-, 3-, 4-year-old selves, cut off the intensity of the feeling in our body. What I’m doing with my clients is, when I’m talking about aliveness, it’s actually feeling fully whatever that emotion happens to be.

Anger, sadness, frustration, disgust, whatever the emotion happens to be, whatever it might be, but feel it fully and just be with it. Can you be with that more fully? Because then what you’re doing is, if you can feel it and allow it to run through your body, out your feet, then you’re just saying, “So I’m feeling this. This is really intense. I’m really uncomfortable, and I don’t like this very much,” but you’re not doing it like this. You’re not allowing the emotion to pull you off center. You’re able to still remain with your vertical alignment, which is your dignity. We need to feel our own dignity first before we can feel somebody else’s. That way, we can extend from center, from that honoring of that line of dignity. We can extend from there without being pulled off, and you have much clearer boundaries.

We need to feel our own dignity first before we can feel somebody else's. Share on X

You can say, “This is what is in alignment with my vision and values. This is what I can offer you. You wanted the report by Friday. I can get back to you Friday afternoon to tell you how far I’ve got along, but don’t expect it before next Tuesday.” I’m able to say that rather than go, “You can’t do that.” It’s a very different place to operate from, but that’s really what I’m doing. In the session, to answer your question about the exercise, we use the body because I’m working with the body, through the body, on the body. It’s like, I want you to go back to that felt sense of when you were having that difficult conversation and just notice what’s happening in your body, and we’re going to intensify that 15% to 20%.

Regaining Control Through Somatic Practices

Notice what that feels like. Notice what’s starting to happen. Get a little bit more, 30%, 40%, 50%. Notice, as we go up, how far your nervous system allows you to go and what gets cut off as we go up. We go up to 100%, and we count back down, and then I invite the client to see what happens. What’s the first thing that comes back online? Because usually, what comes back online first is their way out of that grab, which is what we call it, the activation. For some, it might be, “I need to feel my feet,” or “I need to touch my hands,” or “It’s my breath. It’s my breath. If I focus on my breath, then everything else relaxes, and I can drop into my legs again.” It’s really just that journey of self-discovery and co-creation, and so that’s certainly one way to work with this. There are other ways, but that’s one way.

I love that you are so precise in your languaging. It’s one of the things that I really enjoy and admire about you.

Thank you.

You’re welcome. What is the first thing that comes back online after the grab? It’s brilliant languaging because it is so descriptive. I often talk about how we get hooked, we get grabbed, and it can come out of nowhere. We’re not expecting it, and suddenly there we are in the midst of this hijack. Figuring out what the first thing is that comes back, as you said, it’s our way out.

By figuring out, like it’s something tactile, or which probably it often is, the feeling of our breath, or pressing our hands together, or pressing our feet into the ground, or tapping on some part of us, seen or unseen, it can be our knees underneath the table, that helps us ground and then get back to ourselves. This is where our best lives. Our hijacked self is that 2- or 4-year-old little human who doesn’t have the best skills, not so much with the communication and much more with the throwing sand and spitting.

That’s right, or whining, “See me. I want to be seen. Please. Why aren’t you seeing me?”

“Why are you being this way?” It’s such an effective tone of voice. Either we literally have that tone in our voice, and I have heard very seasoned CEOs of large companies, male and female, having that really whiny thing, which undercuts their credibility, and it undercuts their values, and it’s no bueno. Using our physicalness, our bodies, to help reground us in who we are, how we want to be, and how we want to show up is such an effective way of thinking. I don’t feel like I’m going out on much of a limb by saying that many things that you have said so far, I know are true, and they are still highly counter-cultural. We make decisions with our heart, not with our head. We still live in a world that says emotions have no place in the workforce.

You and I know, like, humans don’t get out of bed without a feeling. I spent decades helping organizations and human beings learn how to fundraise for nonprofit organizations, and the only way to move somebody to give of their time or give of their money, which are two of our most important resources, is to touch their heart. You and I are part of organizations where we specifically are working on connecting with other people, and having them like, know, and trust us in order to refer business opportunities to us. Most business happens because we like somebody, because we feel a connection to somebody, whether it’s an unconscious bias, “You’re like me,” or whether it’s the reverse thing, “You’re so different from me. This is going to be exciting.” Those are all emotion-based responses.

We do not make big decisions, who we’re going to marry, for instance, based on a logarithm. We do it based on our heart. My husband said to me the other day, we were in the middle of a fight, and he said, “Why do you even stay with me?” I said, “Because God damn it, I love you. I cannot tell you why at the moment, but I know that I do.” Twelve years I’ve been in this relationship with my husband because I love him. Even intellectually define how that works? I couldn’t begin to. And so who we spend our lives with, big, all-important decision, it is not made by our head. It is made by our heart. We still live in a world that believes in this myth that business is business is business.

 

We should be focusing on the hard stuff, on all these soft skills, or key skills, or transformative skills, or whatever we’re going to call them, all that other stuff, how people actually get along and what it feels like to work here. We’re just not going to worry about that. We live in a world where that stuff largely is coming to the fore. The work that you get to do in helping individuals and teams reintegrate themselves into the body, which is then going to enable them to make much better decisions, to be much more innovative, to be much more creative, it’s the flip side of the work that I do in working with the organizations on those things. I love the intersectionality between what you do and what I do.

There’s more than one way to approach the common issue. It’s also incredibly powerful to see the synergies when it comes together.

I look forward to finding an opportunity that you and I can collaborate on.

That would be fun.

I think working with a whole organization, and then with its key component parts and this transformation that you help people create, and as your tagline says, this title shift, I think can be such a powerful combo.

There are so many ways that people can benefit from somatic work. Just coming back to what you were saying about trust and just like, what does it mean to build that trust? Because if you’re just focused on numbers, then you’re not even honoring the common humanity, the shared humanity between any two people. If you disregard that, what do you have? If it weren’t for people, businesses would be a parking lot, a bunch of cubicles, some desks, and chairs. What would a company be if it weren’t for the people?

If you want greater collaboration, if you want creativity, if you want innovation, you need to have trust. The only way to do that is to honor another person’s dignity, and if you can’t feel your own, and if you can’t connect to your own, it becomes really difficult to connect to anybody else’s.

If you want greater collaboration, creativity, and innovation, you need to have trust. The only way to do that is to honor another person’s dignity. Share on X

I wrote down what you said, we need to feel our own dignity first, or we can’t extend it to anyone else. I love that focus, first on the internal before working on the external. One of the questions that I have about all of this, I can see working really well with people who are self-aware, who have been on some personal growth trajectory in their life. I can see it being super effective and relatively easy to grasp the concepts that you’re talking about.

Doing the real work always takes work, but understanding what it is that you’re dealing with. If you haven’t engaged yet with this kind of folk, I imagine at some point you will. I know that you’ve gone through extensive training. What happens when someone is not very self-aware and has not done much work on understanding themselves first?

Key Ingredients For Transformation: The Three C’s

I feel like there’s a question before that. The question is, what’s required for coaching to begin? For me, it’s simple. There needs to be an opening. Someone needs, like that SVP and that CEO, there is no opening. They’re just going to be the two four-year-olds on the playground, screaming and pulling hair and throwing sand. You probably have to separate them physically, But in terms of if somebody is open to recognizing, “The status quo for me is no longer working, and I am open to embarking on the journey.”

It might be scary. It might be unnerving because it’s something I’ve never done before. But if they trust me and my presence, and I can extend to them a strong, supple container for self-discovery, then if they arrive with curiosity about themselves and others, with interest in and commitment to doing their work, not to say it won’t be difficult, not to say it won’t be confusing or disheartening at times, because you’re like, “I thought I worked through that already, and yet here I am.”

That darn thing.

There’s commitment, there’s curiosity, and there’s collaboration, because we’re on a journey of self-discovery and co-creation together. I’m serving as the guide, and that’s true whether we’re working individually or in peer teams.

Talk about the three C’s that are probably critical in organizations, commitment, curiosity, and collaboration. I love that. I will often talk about that as there is a listening for it, or there is not a listening for it. I have had a number of people come to me and say, “My organization is so screwed up, and we need to do blah-di-de-blah.” I’m like, “Great. How committed are you to making the changes that are needed in order to do that?” “Can you come in and do a one-and-a-half-hour webinar?” “Yes, I can.” Is that going to make anything happen? No, it is not. Change does not happen that quickly. There are all these memes these days about getting comfortable being uncomfortable.

I was just talking with an organization right before, a very large international organization. They are going through a massive organizational change process. Pieces of the process are going well, and pieces of the process are not going particularly well, which is why they were talking to me. We were talking about that tendency of people to want the magic pill. We all want the quick fix. The reality is nothing that is meaningful happens fast. Even back to the original analogy, there may be a spark that happens in the moment in the falling-in-love process, but really, it is a process that happens over time, where we go from, “You’re interesting,” to “I can’t imagine my life without you.” This process is like any other.

As humans, we mostly don’t like change, even when it’s change for the positive. I have a colleague who does all my social media work, and she had a baby. She has wanted a baby forever. She did all kinds of things that she needed to do in order to have this baby. Having a husband or a partner was not critical to her. As life often happens, she was in the process of doing all these things to have a baby and met the perfect guy, and now they have a baby. It has been a challenging month for her.

This little wee one is only about a month old. She’s just a wittle bitty, which is what my dad used to call me because I was teeny when I was born, and she’s tiny and not gaining weight quite in the way that they want. It’s been a challenge. It’s a rich challenge, and I think that is what is so wonderful about the work that you get to do with people and with organizations. You are challenging them, and it’s a rich challenge.

Indeed. The one thing that I would add to that is, there’s a saying in somatics that we have 300 reps for muscle memory, 3,000 for embodiment, and 10,000 for mastery. For example, a client might say, “I’m doing this practice daily, but I’m not seeing a lot of results.” I’m like, “You’re doing it daily. How many days since we began working together or since I introduced it to you?” “I don’t know, about whatever.” “You’ve got 200 and X times more, and then you’ll get it into your body. We can start seeing how you move towards embodiment.” Not that it’s a linear process, but just to recognize it takes practice. That goes back to what I said earlier, we are what we practice, and we learn through the body. There’s a Papua New Guinean quote that says, “Knowledge is just a rumor until it lives in the muscles.”

 

That’s brilliant. I love that.

That is also counter-cultural, but it’s really important to keep that in mind. It’s like you have been practicing this way of being since you were 2, 3, 4 years old. It is generalized. It’s not just in your little pinky. It’s throughout your whole body. It’s what you respond to. I’m teaching, I’m guiding my clients, showing them ways where they can respond versus just do a knee-jerk reaction. It’s just like, “Can you feel that grab?” “That’s really strong.” Can I just take a breath here? Can I just allow that energy, if it gets stuck in your throat, if it gets stuck in your chest, wherever it gets stuck for you, can you just let it fall? Can you just breathe with it and take 3, 4, 5, 6 breaths until you can respond from a different place? Just like that.

Respond with choice rather than respond out of automatic programming that we got when we were 2, 3, or 4 years old. This is just brilliant stuff, Thomas. If people want to connect with you, obviously there will be links in the show notes to connect with Thomas. If you’re listening and just need it right this instant, what is the quickest way, the best way that someone can connect with you?

Closing Thoughts

The easiest way would probably be to go to my website, Regenerate.Coach, and above the fold, there’s a big button that says explore possibilities. Just click that button. It’ll take you to my scheduler. Find a time on my calendar. Let’s talk. It’s free. We can just see if we’re a good match. You have 45 minutes to an hour with me for exploring what becomes possible if we work together.

Great. Again, that is Regenerate.Coach. Is that right?

Yes.

Perfect. Thomas, I could just keep talking to you all day. I bet our listeners have some things to do, and you and I both do as well. This has been an absolute joy. Thank you so much for sharing with us about these wise adaptations that get created, and then the mischief that can get created if we continue to live that out. This idea of our vision and our values under pressure and extending dignity to ourselves before we can extend it out to somebody else, this has been a really rich conversation. Thank you so much, Thomas.

 

Thank you, Janine. It’s been delightful.

I am Janine Hamner Holman, and this has been The Cost of Not Paying Attention. Remember, great leaders make great teams. Until next time.

 

Important Links

• Thomas Rosenberg’s LinkedIn
• Regenerate Coaching’s Twitter/X
• Regenerate Coaching’s Facebook
• Regenerate Coaching

 

About Thomas Rosenberg

Thomas has over 20 years international experience guiding people and their organizations to become comfortable with change, to lead change, and to flourish. His approach blends deep intuition with extensive Integral and Somatic Coaching training. He has experience facilitating transformative group environments, and 10+ years as a management consultant aligning strategy and goals with business models. With over 450 hours of coaching since 2017, including more than 190 hours in the past 2 years, Thomas coaches leaders, teams and organizations to create conditions conducive to self growth, leadership development, and organizational resilience.

Underlying Thomas’ coaching is the core belief that everyone deserves to fully share their unique gifts. He cultivates that by holding a strong, supple container that facilitates clients reconnecting to themselves so they more easily connect with others. Working with clients in person and remotely, Thomas is passionate about supporting individuals committed to embarking on a journey of self-discovery and co-creation. He believes that when people thrive, the organization thrives.

Always passionate about supporting people’s growth, Thomas shifted to coaching full-time after recovering sufficiently from a traumatic brain injury suffered in a near-fatal bicycle accident in June 2014. Recognizing the wisdom held in the heart and body, his practice focuses entirely on a somatic approach. Thomas’ clients find him when they are struggling with leadership, delegation, team and culture building, or are spinning their wheels professionally. Working with him, clients encounter a strong and gentle accountability partner that cultivates deep, lasting, and measurable improvements in leadership, team building, and decision-making.