This post originally appeared on Forbes.
As leaders, our ability to respond to pressures like interdepartmental conflict and new governmental regulations directly affects how we work with subordinates, colleagues and other stakeholders. Yet our obliviousness to our own reactions means we don’t give ourselves the best chance to perform at optimal levels.
But we can proactively strengthen ourselves to handle workplace challenges, says Karden Rabin, an expert in the field of psychophysiologic disorders and the co-author of The Secret Language of the Body: Regulate Your Nervous System, Heal Your Mind. By integrating somatic practices into our daily routines, we can better manage both our bodies and our emotions and strengthen our ability to meet the moment.
Business leaders who recognize the needs of their bodies and psychologies can work much more easily with their teams, Rabin explains in a recent conversation—and by doing so, can ultimately drive better business results. This is in stark contrast to decades of workers and executives thinking they should check their personal baggage at the workplace door.
Don’t Mess With Your Stress
As with any other business issue, the first steps toward improvement are understanding what we’re dealing with and doing a gap analysis between current and optimal conditions. “We have KPIs for every aspect of our business, whether it’s the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, revenue, employee retention—all of it,” Rabin notes. “But when it comes to our own nervous system; when it comes to the things that are undermining our performance, our behavior, our management; when it comes to how we’re trying to actually work with our reactivity and our weaknesses, especially in an emotionally intelligent context which is vital in management—people have no clue what the KPIs are. They don’t know what to track at all.”
Leaders may not be aware of what’s causing their stress, even as they get near burnout. But studying your own reactivity can unlock the secrets of how you first learned to respond to difficult challenges and show you how to modify those responses. “Your brain is a pattern-recognition, habit-repetition machine,” Rabin explains. “It is not inventing responses to your life. It is repeating responses to your life that it used in the past.” These patterns may have been set by stressful experiences in childhood. “That moment of fear and shame was a survival lesson learned by your brain and nervous system 40 years ago.”
Learn About Your Own Triggers and Patterns
It’s essential to identify the consistent triggers of overreactive behavior, Rabin says, whether it’s a specific person or a project deadline. He encourages leaders to ask themselves: “In what other instances do I feel this same way? What is the throughline or common denominator of this feeling?”
Rabin recommends investing the time to see if “there are recurring crises or breakdowns that threaten the integrity of a project, a relationship or a team.” Noticing how these patterns affect your personal life—say, leading to venting or being short-tempered at home—provides valuable insights into your reactions at work.
Tap Your Somatic Superpower
But the real breakthroughs come from recognizing these patterns and using somatic techniques to interrupt them. More executives are beginning to understand how techniques like breathwork, bodywork and nervous system regulation can support leadership success just like regular exercise routines help sustain energy and strength.
“The most innovative and effective leaders,” says Rabin, incorporate somatic nervous-system practices into their daily routines “because they unlock blocks, barriers and, basically, areas of performance that you didn’t even know you didn’t know.” When you can “truly respond instead of react, when you can shift out of anger, irritation or a lock-up or disinterest, you all of a sudden have a superpower that your colleagues or competitors don’t have.”
Identify Your Bad Reactions to Bad Behavior
The survival-centric parts of the brain take over when stress or conflict reaches a certain level, hijacking higher-level cognition and causing us to regress into reactive behaviors—that’s why common workplace reactions include drama, withdrawal and manipulation. “Your brain is basically an adult duct-taped to a child bolted to an animal,” Rabin explains. Even leaders who know they’re wrong may persist in a conflict if their brain’s threat response has been triggered. “If you’ve reached a stress or conflict level that feels like a threat to you, it ruptures connection and synchrony,” says Rabin, and this can lead to behaviors like anger or blame.
But we don’t have to keep normalizing bad behavior. Recognizing anti-social and anti-collaborative behaviors is the first step toward addressing them. The good news is that we can modify these reactive forces.
Learn Self-Intervention
Once leaders perceive their own counterproductive behaviors, they can begin interrupting and redirecting themselves toward healthier responses. “When you start to learn the principles of nervous system regulation, which are relatively straightforward, you can practice interruption techniques,” Rabin says. These techniques include breathwork that stimulates the vagus nerve and cognitive practices that stop habitual coping patterns. The goal is to create enough space to make better choices in stressful moments.
Model Healthy Practices For Your Teams
Once leaders master these techniques, they can demonstrate them for their teams. For instance, when leaders are outside their windows of tolerance or overly stressed, they can acknowledge it, take a timeout, or call for a general break. “Investing in five or 10 minutes of regulation time,” says Rabin, “can save days or weeks of discordance and negative performance.”
Practicing somatic techniques isn’t just about personal well-being—it’s about intentionally becoming a more effective, empathetic leader. By understanding and regulating your stress responses, you can unlock new levels of resilience, responsiveness and effectiveness—creating a calmer, more productive work environment where both you and your team can thrive.
For Rabin, this means committing to somatic practices in the same way you might prepare for a presentation. “You can want to be a better leader,” he says, “but until you invest the time into the nervous system in somatic work to train and prepare your nervous system for emotional adversity, it’s not going to work.”
Onward and upward—
LK