How Some of the Most Successful Leaders Make Good Decisions — And it’s Not What You Think

“Pragmatists act on evidence. Heroes act on guts,” says a 2006 Harvard Business Review article. We would argue that a third sentence could be added to that. Leaders act on intuition too.

Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Sri Sharma, a highly successful entrepreneur and investor, have all confessed to relying on instinct when it comes to decision-making. As our understanding of the link between the body and the brain grows, there’s increasing evidence to support the theory that body intelligence (BQ) is just as important for leaders as intellect (IQ).

What is body (or somatic) intelligence (BQ)?

Somatic awareness is having an understanding of your body and its sensations, reactions, and responses. Somatic intelligence comes from cultivating bodily awareness and the ability to make body-informed decisions. Rather than focusing on cognitive processes to help with challenges or big decisions, somebody with a high BQ can trust what their body knows without trying to rationalize the answer in their mind. You might call it tapping into your intuition, using gut instinct, or having emotional intelligence.

The benefits to everyone, including leaders, of cultivating BQ

Tuning into BQ gives you the ability to consciously decide how to react to situations instead of falling into automatic patterns. Emotions live and linger in the body, and their occurrence is out of our control. What we can control when we cultivate somatic intelligence, however, is our reaction to the emotion.

Consider two people having an argument, both of whom are feeling frustrated. One yells while the other chooses to go for a walk to calm down before continuing the discussion. The latter has a higher BQ: they understand that nothing productive will be achieved in their current bodily state and that physical movement in nature will create the necessary shift.

Which person would you rather have as your boss?

The more a person practices this observe-reset-act trio to strongly felt emotions, the higher their BQ becomes and the better they get at noticing what their body is telling them in all situations.

A proven link between the brain and the body

One of the ways we believe organizations go about leadership development the wrong way is by assuming that learning is a purely cognitive exercise. In fact, scientists have proven that our brains don’t function in isolation from the body. In her book Your Body Is Your Brain, Amanda Blake, a Master Somatic Leadership Coach and Human Biologist, says: “[W]e tend to think of the brain as a top-down command center, but this is about as outdated as thinking the world is flat. The brain in your head receives vastly more ‘bottom-up’ input from your visceral organs than the reverse. In fact, in many instances, it makes more sense to say the body leads the brain … Eighty to ninety percent of vagal nerve fibers … send signals to the brain rather than receiving signals from the brain.”

In the same book, Blake explains the importance of changing our perceptions about how learning happens and reducing our dependence on brain-based decision-making. “We rarely think about the body as a domain of learning, “ she says. “But the truth is our most important personal learning inherently involves the body.”

Successful leaders have always relied on somatic intelligence

While body-led leadership may feel like a new concept, research shows that top leaders have been relying on their gut all along. In 1996, Harvard Business School student Jagdish Parikh surveyed 1,342 executives from nine countries on their decision-making processes. Respondents said they used their intuitive skills as much as their analytical abilities, but credited 80% of their successes to instinct.

Henry Mintzberg, an academic who pioneered research into the use of intuition by managers, supports these results, believing that strategic thinking cries out for creativity and synthesis and thus is better suited to intuition than to analysis.

Throughout history, humans have relied on somatic intelligence when making decisions, so it should be no surprise that this is a leadership trait that gets results. As Amanda Blake points out, “Embodied self-awareness is a first step toward developing more courage, compassion, composure, and all manner of personal qualities that support your success.” These read like a Top Ten list of qualities that people desire in a leader.

How to develop trust in your intuition as a leader

Our somatic coaching (supplemented by Human Design) delivers practical exercises to help entrepreneurs, business leaders, professionals, and teams create sustainable results. Whether you’re already a leader or you’re aspiring to be one, our professional transformation coaching services will help you tune into what your gut is telling you, letting you get more out of your work and your team. Get in touch to find out more.

The Rework Sessions offers Professional Transformation Coaching to help you and your team map your innate professional skills and strengths and improve the quality of your working style and culture. To learn more about how The Rework Session can help you or your team, send an email to info@reworksessions.com or book a call here.

This article was originally published on reworksessions.com