How this work actually works

Most approaches to leadership development ask you to think differently. This one starts somewhere else.

The patterns that hold senior leaders back — the hesitation before a difficult conversation, or conversely the gung-ho straight in without pause, being visible but not quite in contact with the room or the people in it, the effort it takes to simply be present without having to over manage your impact — these don't live in your thinking. They live in your body.  In the way you hold yourself under pressure. In the bodily tension you've carried so long you've stopped noticing it.

Thinking more carefully about them rarely shifts them. Something else is required.

What's happening in your body that you've probably stopped noticing?

Soma is the Greek word for the body ‘in its living wholeness’, a wholeness that includes not just the physical structure, the thinking and the emoting, but the life energy that animates all of it. The quality of aliveness itself that makes a body more than a structure. Soma impacts how you interpret a room when you walk in, how you are perceived in that room, the breath you hold before you speak, the posture that communicates something your words don’t intend.

Working somatically means bringing careful attention to these things — not to analyse them, but to make them available for change. Over time, the body learns new ways of being in the situations that used to trigger the old ones. The shift, when it comes, is visible to other people before it's fully explainable to you.

Julie had recurring headaches in the days before every board meeting. She'd tried massage, medication, managing her schedule more carefully. Nothing shifted. What we discovered, working this way, wasn't a tension problem. It was a story she'd been living in for years about who she was allowed to be in that room. As that story changed, so did the headaches.

This is what somatic work makes possible. Not symptom management — change at the source.

What the systems you've moved through are still doing

You didn't arrive in your current role as a blank slate. Every organisation, team, family and culture you've been part of has left something in how you lead — in how you read a room, how you respond under pressure, what you assume is expected of you.

Some of that shaping has served you well. Some of it is no longer relevant to where you are now, and may be quietly working against you. The difficulty is that these influences are largely invisible — they feel like simply the way things are, rather than patterns that could be otherwise.

Working systemically means making those influences visible and precise, without blame and without drama. When something in the system settles, something in your leadership can settle with it.

What's sitting just below what you can currently think your way to?

There's often a layer beneath what thinking can reach — a felt sense of something that hasn't yet found language, a persistent pattern that analysis alone hasn't shifted. Some of the most significant change in this work happens at that layer.

The approaches I draw on here — including EMDR and Focusing — work with the intelligence that lives below cognition. They're not mysterious, but they do require a different quality of attention than most leadership development asks for. Slow, patient, specific. Trusting what arises rather than trying to direct it.

For some clients, deeper bodywork becomes part of this — working fully clothed, supported by breath and gentle attention, with patterns of tension the body has held for years. Not every client chooses this. For those who do, it often opens something that conversation alone cannot reach.

The disciplines I draw on include somatic coaching, systemic constellations, ontological coaching, EMDR, and Focusing — accumulated over fifteen years and chosen for their capacity to produce lasting change rather than managed symptoms.

If something here resonates, even quietly, the next step is simply a conversation, no pitch, no pressure.

“I have learned a huge amount and have a new self-awareness that I make better use of. I can recommend coaching sessions with Beverley as a wholly positive and enriching experience!”

Founder and Director, Not for Profit