At work, we’ve learned to do everything with our heads.
As if the heart and the body had nothing to contribute.
Analysing, understanding, anticipating, arguing, deciding.
These are the abilities organisations value.
What do we draw on much less?
Emotions, often seen as unprofessional.
And bodily sensations, which we almost never pay attention to.
We’ve ended up confusing professionalism with being disconnected from ourselves.
And we lose out.
Because the heart and the body aren’t there to make work gentler.
They give access to useful information.
The heart can tell us what really matters.
What drives us, moves us, worries us, makes us angry.
The trust we place in someone. Or what has been damaged in a relationship.
The body can signal a tension before we’re even able to name it.
A disagreement the head is still trying to rationalise.
A sense of safety or insecurity.
An urge to move forward, to resist or to withdraw.
You can have a decision that’s perfectly argued on paper and sense, in the room, that no one is really on board.
You can claim a conflict is resolved while bodies close up as soon as certain topics come back.
By listening only to our brains, we don’t become more rational.
We simply make decisions with only part of the information available.
It’s one of the things that struck me most in my coach training.
Learning to work with the head, the heart and the body.
These three dimensions aren’t in opposition.
The head helps us understand and structure.
The heart helps us connect to what matters and to others.
The body makes perceptible what hasn’t yet been put into words.
It isn’t about replacing thinking with feeling.
It’s about widening the field of perception.
That’s also why, in team coaching, I don’t believe it’s enough to talk about cooperation, trust or leadership.
Because a team doesn’t function only on what its members think.
It also functions on what they feel, what they keep quiet, the space they take up and the way they react to one another.
A team can intellectually understand what it should do.
And still keep reproducing exactly the same behaviours.
Experiential work makes something else possible.
Experiential work isn’t about adding an activity to make a seminar more fun.
It’s about creating a situation in which the team can live and observe, in real time, the way it functions.
Making dynamics visible and tangible.
Experiencing a situation rather than just commenting on it.
Bringing reflexes, tensions and roles to the surface.
Seeing what the team does, but also what it avoids.
Trying out other ways of acting.
Often, the problem for organisations is no longer knowing what should be done.
It’s managing to do things differently.
Experiential work creates a space to try, feel, adjust, integrate.
Bringing the heart and the body back into work doesn’t mean giving up on reason.
It means no longer depriving ourselves of part of our intelligence.
What about you, when you have an important decision to make, how much room do you give to what you think, what you feel and what your body is telling you?