All week I’ve been re-introducing myself to the few thousand of you who are new here. This is the thesis underneath everything I teach.
You don’t have a strategy problem. You have a nervous system your whole company can feel.
The night I understood this, I was standing at the pass in my restaurant at the end of a long service. A table of eight had come in late and loud, with extensive dietary requirements they hadn’t mentioned. I handled it the way you’re meant to. Warm. Professional. Absolutely, not a problem. Then I walked back into the kitchen, and something in me tightened.
Nobody saw it. But the wok master felt it. The garnish section felt it. A dessert went out three minutes late that no guest noticed. A correction got called twice when once would have done. I traced every bit of it back to the exact moment I stopped holding myself.
I ran Red Lantern for twenty-five years. The most awarded Vietnamese restaurant in the world, and one of the small fraction that survive past fifteen. Two bestselling books, two decades coaching leaders, entrepreneurs and executives. And the most important thing I learned in all of it is on none of those certificates.
You don’t have business problems. You have personal problems that show up in your business.
I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I’ve never been interested in sympathy. I’m telling you because the same mechanism is running in your company right now, and almost no one is naming it.
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What your team is actually reading
The state you lead from is not private. A braced body leaks. Before you say a word, the people around you read your nervous system, and they borrow it. Calm is contagious. So is fear.
I coach a powerhouse of a woman, Emma, who heads the small business division at Optus. Effectively she runs a billion-dollar business. On paper she was winning. In her body she was not far from burning out, with the gut and joint problems that always arrive before the crash. What turned it wasn’t a new framework. It was learning to lead herself first. Two promotions followed. Her health came back.
The regulation was the strategy. It usually is.
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Why we get this so wrong
We were trained to treat the body as the thing that carries the leader around. An inconvenience with deadlines. So we override it, push through it, and call the overriding discipline. Then it sends the bill. The 3am wake-up. The short fuse in a meeting that didn’t deserve it. The relationships bruised.
Your body is the first system you lead. Lead it badly and everything downstream, the hires, the negotiations, the culture, inherits the dysregulation.
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What to do with this tomorrow
Before the first hard thing on your calendar, take two minutes. Make the exhale longer and slower than the long, deep inhale, which tells your nervous system it’s safe. Put your weight into the ground and feel your feet. Unclench your jaw, relax your hands and drop your shoulders. Free, and more reliable than any pep talk.
With Love, Pauline
PS. The tightening I felt at that pass took me years to learn to catch. Emma learned it in months. The difference was never talent. It was practice, and knowing where to look.
This first appeared in The Conscious Leader, my weekly LinkedIn newsletter. Subscribe on LinkedIn.
