What Does Somatic Coaching Actually Look like?

A few months ago, I was sitting next to someone on a plane when she asked what I did for work. I told her I do somatic work, and she immediately lit up. She had recently done somatic work in Thailand and was over the moon about the experience—assuming, of course, that what she had done was the same thing I did.

I asked what kind of somatic work she had experienced, knowing that somatic can mean almost anything these days. She described what was essentially an energy healing session.

I was glad she loved it, but the Venn diagram between her experience of somatic work and what I actually do at State House was very small.

Did I mention the somatic pie is big?

Depending on the practitioner, somatic work can include movement, breathwork, bodywork, energy work, embodiment practices, nervous system work, trauma work, and approaches that are more spiritual or contemplative. None of those is inherently more somatic than another. They are simply different parts of a very large field.

In fact, I initially found my way into somatic work through the Enneagram and spiritual direction. I remember sitting in my first formal somatic training thinking, These are not my people. I wasn’t a yoga person. I knew nothing about my astrological sign, and I couldn’t have told you where my chakras were located.

And yet, the work felt powerful.

I couldn’t necessarily explain why. I just had a gut feeling that something significant, maybe even spiritual, was happening and that I shouldn’t ignore it. So I kept coming back.

There’s a joke in the somatic world that we’re part neurobiology and part woo-woo. There’s probably some truth in that. I had entered through the woo-woo door. Over time, I became increasingly fascinated by the physiology.

Which is part of why I understand the person who hears “somatic executive coaching” and wonders what exactly happens in a session.

It’s probably more familiar than you imagine. You sit on my couch. I sit in a chair. We have a conversation.

You can leave the yoga mat at home.

The setup can look a lot like talk therapy, but the focus is different. Narrative is welcome, but it isn’t required. You can tell me about the coworker you can’t stand, the conversation you’re avoiding, or something that happened years ago. But the bulk of our work is not analyzing the story. We’re listening to and tracking what is happening in your body as we sit together.

Talking and somatic work aren’t opposites. We’re simply paying attention to more than the words.

This becomes particularly relevant in leadership because knowing what you should do and being able to access that response under pressure are not always the same thing. You can know how to have a difficult conversation, give clear feedback, delegate, or make a thoughtful decision—and still lose access to that capacity when your system is under pressure. Leadership isn’t driven by knowledge alone. Physiology is in the room, too.

When I Say Physiology, I Mean Your Actual Body

At its broadest, somatic means body-based. In my work, that means paying particular attention to sensation: the physical experience happening inside your body.

There are sensations so universal that we’ve built them into our language. Butterflies in your stomach. A lump in your throat. A pit in your stomach. A racing heart. We know what hunger feels like without needing anyone to explain it to us.

Sensation can also be heat, pressure, tightness, tingling, buzzing, heaviness, constriction, or something you don’t quite have words for yet.

Anxiety is an easy example because anxiety has a physiology.

Your breathing might become shallow. Your throat might constrict. Your jaw might brace. Your chest might feel like someone put a ten-pound weight on it.

You will have your own version of it in your body.

And it doesn’t have to be anxiety. Maybe one coworker reliably makes your jaw clench. Maybe you become angry much faster than you want to. Maybe conflict makes your entire body brace. Maybe under pressure you start micromanaging, avoiding a decision, overfunctioning, or trying to control everyone and everything around you.

You may understand exactly why you do it. Your body may still do it anyway.

You can know exactly how you want to lead a difficult conversation and still find your body bracing the second someone challenges you.

And because leadership happens in relationship, that response rarely stays contained to you. It can shape how you communicate, make decisions, handle conflict, and how much room the people around you have to do their best thinking.

This is where somatic work gives us another way in.

If you bring a difficult interaction into a session, we can talk about what happened. But at some point, I may invite you to slow down and listen to your body. What happens as you talk about it? Where do you notice activation? What feels neutral or okay? What changes when we bring attention to it?

In most conversations, bodily sensations are evidence of what you’re experiencing. In somatic work, they become part of what we actually work with.

And if you read all of this and think, I have absolutely no idea what is happening inside my body, I know that experience well.

I came into this work with very little access to sensation myself. Some people can immediately tell you exactly what they feel and where they feel it. I was much more likely to find blank space.

That didn’t make me incapable of doing somatic work. It meant that learning to notice, track, and eventually develop more access to my internal experience became part of the work itself.

You don’t need to arrive already fluent in the language of your body. That’s something we can learn.

Nervous System Regulation Is Part of Somatic Work. It Isn’t All of It.

Nervous system regulation is a foundational part of my work. I teach grounding, orienting, movement, resourcing, and other practices that can help you work with your nervous system in real time.

Sometimes that is exactly what you need. If you’re activated before a difficult conversation, finding your feet and feeling the floor underneath you can help bring more of you back into the room.

But nervous system work has increasingly been reduced online to a collection of techniques: do this breathing exercise, activate your vagus nerve, ground yourself, calm yourself down.

To be clear, I’m grateful for TikTok and Instagram. A few years ago, telling someone I worked with the nervous system was a great way to get a blank stare. Now people come into my office already knowing words like regulation, grounding, and fight or flight. That expanded vocabulary has made this work much easier to talk about.

It has also given us “ACTIVATE YOUR VAGUS NERVE IN 30 SECONDS,” which is funny because your nervous system is not a button you push.

Those practices can be useful. They just aren’t the whole of the work.

My training as a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner allows us to work experientially with the physiological patterns themselves, not only give you another tool for managing them when they appear.

You can understand a pattern intellectually. You can know where it came from. You can know exactly how you would prefer to respond. And when the moment arrives, your throat can still close, your chest can still brace, or your anger can still be halfway out of your mouth before you have a chance to choose what happens next.

Insight matters. But insight alone doesn’t necessarily change physiology.

Somatic work gives us a way to include that part of the experience too.

The goal isn’t to force your body into calm or to become really good at manually regulating yourself. Regulation can help you access more capacity in the moment. The deeper work gives us an opportunity to work with the patterns that keep bringing you back to the same response—so you have more access to your leadership capacity when pressure is actually happening.

That’s the part of somatic work that’s harder to fit into a 30-second TikTok.

It’s also the part I had a gut feeling I shouldn’t ignore all those years ago.

You Don’t Need a Somatic Identity

It’s a broad field, and I’ve come to appreciate parts of it I never would have imagined when I first wandered in through the Enneagram and spiritual direction. But working somatically doesn’t require you to adopt an entire culture or identity along with it.

You don’t have to love breathwork or meditation. You don’t have to practice yoga. You don’t need to understand energy work, know your astrological chart, or be able to locate your chakras.

Those can all be meaningful parts of the somatic pie without needing to be your part of it.

You already have a body. You already have a nervous system. And whether you call it somatic or not, you already know what it is like for that body to tighten, brace, shut down, speed up, get angry, get anxious, or try to protect you under pressure.

Somatic work doesn’t require a somatic identity.

Sometimes you understand a pattern perfectly and are tired of your body continuing to run it. Sometimes you just want your shoulders to stop living underneath your ears.

Both are perfectly good places to start.

I still don’t know where my chakras are. But after all these years, I’m pretty comfortable with my particular piece of the somatic pie.