You’ve not failed. You’ve been working with the wrong instrument.
Earlier this year, I was named Global Transformational Leader of the Year.
I want to tell you what that morning actually felt like.
The email arrived before 7am. I read it in bed, and my body did what it has been doing since I was four years old.
Nothing.
The same nothing. Fifty years apart.
I had been speaking on international stages for a decade. I wrote the book that won Australia’s Best Entrepreneurship and Small Business Book of the Year. I ran the most awarded Vietnamese restaurant in the world for twenty-five years. I stood at the Sharjah Entrepreneurship Festival in front of four thousand people and held the room for the four hundred milliseconds before I opened my mouth.
On the morning the global award email arrived, I couldn’t receive a sentence of praise from my own laptop.
That’s not gratitude failing.
That’s a body that’s not been taught it’s safe to receive.
I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I’ve never been interested in sympathy. I tell you it because the awards didn’t unbuild the shape. The shape was built before the awards existed. The body that fled war-torn Vietnam as a toddler and spent a year in a Thai refugee camp had been holding that shape for fifty years before anyone called me a Global Transformational Leader.
The shape didn’t care what the certificate said.
The somatic instrument doesn’t care what the certificate says.
· · ·
You’re reading this because you’ve done the work.
The breathwork program. The ten-day silent retreat. Four years of therapy and the second therapist who finally got it. The Hoffman. The leadership coach with the assessment that came back exactly the way you knew it would. You read Gabor Mate twice. You went to Bali in 2023. Costa Rica in 2024. The plant medicine with the facilitator your friend swore by.
And the pattern came back.
Maybe not the exact one. Maybe it came back wearing a different jacket. The same fear underneath. The same shape in the chest. The same sentence that didn’t come out of your mouth in last week’s meeting. The same 11pm email with the apology you added that had no business being there.
The same Sunday night.
The work didn’t fail.
The work was being done by the wrong part of you.
· · ·
Why the pattern keeps coming back
The work you’ve been doing has been cognitive.
The pattern lives somewhere else.
It lives in the tissue. Before you had language, your body made a decision. A specific way to hold the shoulders. The held breath before the difficult room. A silence where the voice should have been. That shape became the default. Every decade of inner work since then has been your mind writing letters to that shape. The mind keeps writing better and better letters. The shape keeps replying in the same handwriting it has used since you were four.
This is why you can know exactly what needs to be said and still not say it.
Why you can give the speech to your team about boundaries and walk into your kitchen that night and not be able to ask the person you live with for the thing you actually need.
Why you can name the trigger in real time and still feel your hand tighten on the steering wheel.
Why the meditation works for a month and then stops.
The cognitive instrument has been arguing with the somatic one. The somatic one has been winning since the start.
· · ·
A founder I worked with last August lost her co-founder. The Series A had closed at thirty-eight million on paper. The conversation she needed to have had been named on her calendar in green for three months. Her body would not let her open the door to it. By October her co-founder had already mentally left. By November he had a new email address. The equity she could not protect was the equity her body would not let her ask for.
She had been in cognitive work for a decade.
The cognitive work was fine.
The instrument was wrong.
· · ·
What changes when the body leads
The patterns don’t disappear. The conversation about whether you are a healed person is not the useful one.
What changes is the gap.
Between the trigger and the response. Four hundred milliseconds to eight seconds.
Eight seconds is enough.
The founder I told you about didn’t have eight seconds in August. By November her co-founder had a new email address. She has them now. Not because the fear left. Because the gap opened.
The body always knows.
It’s been speaking in pain for years.
You have been calling it “busy.”
· · ·
Why has nothing held?
I have been asked a version of that question from a boardroom in Sydney. From a founder on the phone at midnight after the co-founder conversation didn’t happen again. From a managing partner who just received the highest performance review of his career and sat in the carpark afterwards and felt absolutely nothing.
This newsletter is built on that question. Each Wednesday, one more piece of the answer. Grounded in what is actually happening in your body this week, not in the idea of it.
Issue Two is the 400-millisecond window. What is actually happening inside it biologically, and why your sales close rate, your team trust score, and your marriage are all decided in that window.
Issue Three is the cortisol economy. You’ve been running on cortisol for eleven years. Issue Three is what that has been costing your prefrontal cortex on the Tuesdays you make decisions you wouldn’t make on Sundays.
Issue Four is the room. Your nervous system broadcasts to the people in front of you before you open your mouth. Every leader in that room is already reading you. Issue Four is what they are reading.
Issue Five is the home version. The work holds in the boardroom and dissolves at the dinner table. Issue Five is why.
Each issue is one move closer to the body underneath being trusted to lead.
With Love,
Pauline.
PS. You have not failed the work. You’ve been writing better and better letters to a part of you that does not read English. The founder I told you about worked this out in October. By then her co-founder had a new email address. The next conversation you are not having is already underway. The only question is who is in the room when it starts.
This first appeared in The Conscious Leader, my weekly LinkedIn newsletter. Subscribe on LinkedIn.
