The Hidden Power Skill That Transformed My Leadership - and My Life
Why Real Leaders Listen with More Than Just Their Ears
What you will learn in this article - even if you only read this:
Most leaders think they’re listening, but they’re actually problem-solving. Listening to fix is different from listening to understand, and your nervous system might be running the show without your permission.
Somatic awareness is the leadership skill you were never taught. Sensing what is happening inside your body transforms how you show up, relate, and lead -especially under pressure.
Your nervous system determines the quality of your presence. Polyvagal theory explains why some conversations build trust while others silently break it.
Listening is not a technique, it’s a signal of leadership maturity. There are many invisible costs of not listening deeply: from team disengagement to missed innovation and burnout.
The future belongs to leaders who can hold complexity, not control it. The next evolution of leadership isn’t about doing more. It is about being more aware, more available, and more human.
Here we go
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” Stephen R. Covey
Years ago, I thought I was a great listener.
I had spent years in high-performing leadership roles. I was already a trained coach. I prided myself on being present in conversations, asking smart questions, tracking body language. I thought: I’ve got this down.
But the truth?
I was often listening to respond. To solve. To prove that I could add value quickly. Especially in pressure moments, like the tough meeting, the external crisis, the team conflict, I wasn’t actually listening. I was scanning for what needed to be fixed.
The bigger truth?
That’s exactly what my body had been trained to do.
The moment it clicked
There was a moment I will never forget. A senior leader I respected gave me some blunt feedback during a debrief:
“You are good at hearing. But I don’t always feel heard.”
That landed like a punch in the gut. Because he was right.
I was performing presence, not being really present. I wanted to fix and solve, fast, and was in my mind on the next decision to do, the next meeting to be at.
It was around that time I finally started to understand the neuroscience of change and I began to explore how the language, moods and emotions and body influence results we are or we are not getting in our lives. That is when everything shifted.
Why somatic awareness is the missing peace
Most people think of awareness as a mental skill. But somatic awareness is different. It’s the ability to sense what’s happening inside your body - your breath, tension, posture, emotions - and use that intelligence to choose your response, instead of reacting from habit.
This isn’t just a nice idea, it’s deeply rooted in neuroscience.
According to polyvagal theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, our nervous system is constantly scanning for safety and threat and it does that below the level of conscious awareness.
This “neuroception” shapes how we listen, how we speak, and whether we are even available for connection.
When you feel tense, rushed, or under pressure, your nervous system may be in a sympathetic (fight or flight) or dorsal vagal (shut down) state, even if your face is smiling. And that state shapes how you listen. You may appear present, but internally, you’re braced or gone.
The vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve in the body, plays a key role in this regulation. It connects your brain to your heart, lungs, and gut. And it is a huge part of why “gut instinct” is real. Your body is processing signals faster than your thinking mind.
We also know from neuroscience that interoception, your ability to feel and make sense of internal bodily cues, is directly linked to emotional intelligence, decision-making, and resilience. When you can sense what’s happening inside you, you gain more choice.
In other words:
Your body knows before your brain can explain.
And if you want to be present with others, you must first be present with yourself.
This is why somatic awareness is a prerequisite for relational leadership. Until you can notice what’s happening inside you - your biases, your reactivity, your tension -you will not be able to truly receive what is happening in them.
Want to know more about this? See below a very simple explanation by Polyvagal Institute and their resources here.
The leadership shift no one talks about
What I didn’t know back then is that I was stepping into a different level of leadership maturity. Some frameworks, like vertical development theory, call this a shift from managing complexity to becoming someone who can hold it.
“Vertical development, on the other hand, is about expanding your mindset — changing the way you think and behave. Your mindset refers to the mental models you engage when you are thinking, as well as your sense of identity. Vertical development isn’t about training a leader in skills; it’s about transforming the ways a leader thinks, which will impact what they do and how they behave. In vertical development, you pay attention to becoming more adaptable, more self-aware, more collaborative and able to span boundaries and networks.” (Forbes article by D. Henly, 2020, full article here.)
Instead of just adding tools or techniques, I was learning to expand the inner structure from which I lead.
It’s not just about what you do.
It’s about how you see, how you relate, and how you show up, especially under pressure.
It’s what conscious leadership teaches: that leadership isn’t just a role - it’s a way of being. And most of us are leading from automatic patterns shaped long ago.
To lead differently, we have to become different.
And that’s where second-order learning comes in.
Not just learning more information, but learning how to observe yourself, how to question your defaults, how to create new possibilities.
A story from the field: listening as an act of trust
With many leaders I coach, we eventually land here:
To truly build trust, especially when joining a new team, they have to let go of being the expert with all the answers.
Even when team members come to them expecting solutions.
One senior leader told me, “I realised that every time someone brought me a problem, I jumped in with advice. It felt efficient. But it wasn’t empowering.”
So we practiced a new move. Slowing down. Pausing. Noticing their own internal state. And instead of giving a solution, they began to ask open, curious questions first. But that was available to them only when their nervous system state was regulated as well.
And something shifted.
“It was like a test,” they told me. “The team wanted to know: Do you really mean it when you say you want our input? Or will you just tell us what to do?”
“When I listened, really listened, they started opening up.”
That’s the thing about listening: it’s not a technique.
It’s a signal of trust.
A commitment to co-creation.
And a radical act of leadership maturity.
What happens when we do not listen
When leaders don’t listen deeply, the cost is high and usually invisible at first:
Disengagement. People stop sharing. They stop caring. They don’t feel seen.
Missed innovation. The breakthrough idea never gets voiced.
Erosion of trust. People bring surface-level updates instead of truth.
Burnout. Without presence, everything feels urgent. And urgency is exhausting.
Reciprocal disconnection. Over time, people stop listening to you, too. Presence is mutual.
Shrunken possibility. When you only listen through the lens of your old assumptions, you reinforce your limitations. You miss the subtle shift. The quiet insight. The future emerging right in front of you.
This isn’t about a single communication technique.
It’s about creating the conditions for transformation in teams, organisations, and ourselves.
The leadership stance of the future?
Leaders of the future don’t just manage outcomes.
They cultivate the conditions for insight, creativity, and connection to arise.
And that begins with the simplest, most radical move:
Listening differently.
This isn’t just a competency. It’s a stance.
A way of meeting the world with curiosity, dignity, and power.
It doesn’t mean you never lead decisively.
It means you know when presence - not speed - is the most powerful move you can make.
Start Here
If you want to become the kind of leader who hears what others miss and creates the conditions for trust, innovation, and transformation start by building your capacity to listen.
To yourself.
To others.
To what’s not yet visible but already emerging.
Email me at anja.coach@proton.me and let’s schedule a short session. I’ll guide you through what it means to listen with your whole body and teach you simple tools how you to regulate your nervous system and lead under pressure and uncertainty.
Why? The future needs leaders who can hear what others don’t.
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