Embodied Relational Leadership course
A pioneering training programme for individuals or groups of individuals responsible for leading people and teams.
The training focuses on developing three embodied and relational leadership skills - REGULATION, RESILIENCE, and RANGE - to create the conditions for people in your organisation to thrive.
Regulation - remaining present and responsive under pressure
Resilience - the ability to reset following challenge, NOT to simply endure
Range - being able to think, feel, and respond to the situation in front of you
These are deeply relational capacities that shape how we lead, communicate, make decisions, and respond to uncertainty.
The course
The course is designed to be delivered online for two hours per week over ten sessions (two blocks of five weeks with an integration week in the middle). The pacing and length of the programme have been refined over the four years it has been running to reflect the depth of this embodied work, in which we are aiming to resource people to change both their states and traits rather than just having a conceptual understanding of the topics .
A rough outline of the course content is included below:
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The perks and perils of leadership - different forms of power, building awareness of how it feels to be in different positions of power, understanding the benefits of power differentials, why we reject power, why leaders can feel disempowered, and how power changes us.
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Being led - understanding their relationship with control, what capacities and virtues do people really need from leaders in these times, what is empowered followership and how (and why) to nurture this in ourselves and those we lead
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Regulation - understanding how their own individual nervous system responds to different scenarios and what helps them to regulate. Exploring different types of regulation and how leaders can support others to access these.
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Resilience - what do we really mean by this? Why traditional ideas aren’t working so well, and what leaders need to know and do instead.
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Your range as a leader - introducing my Dials framework, grounding this in experience of what it looks like when each dial is over- or under-used, embodied practice in each dial
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Attunement - understanding the role of the central capacity underpinning all of this, and practicing attuning to self and others
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A deep-dive into each of the four “dials” of range over the remaining sessions covering the role that each dial plays in leadership, embodied practice using posture and practical application to case studies.
This programme can also be delivered in-person or as a hybrid course.
Learning Outcomes
A deeper understanding of power-conscious leadership and the relevance of embodied relational skills for leading others and self-leadership.
Greater awareness and choice around embodied states and traits, which can be used to increase their range and effectiveness as a leader.
Practical skills to support regulation and resilience in themselves and within the groups and teams that they are leading.
Who is this for
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Individuals who are responsible for managing or leading people and teams in your organisations
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Leaders of all experience and seniority levels
Learning Methods
This is an embodiment-focused training, meaning that we go beyond building conceptual understanding into creating lived experiences of different states in the body.
The course includes a mixture of learning through theory, group discussion, self-reflection, embodied practices, and practical application in pairs or small groups.
The topics of boundaries and consent have (rightly) been getting a lot of attention in the media and beyond in recent years, usually within the context of someone touching somebody else without their consent. One side effect of this is that people are starting to have conversations around touch and physical boundaries, which is great (and much-needed) but there’s still a much broader discussion to be had around boundaries and consent in a workplace setting.
This is about exploring what needs to be in place in order for individuals to feel able to thrive in the workplace.
We keep the group sizes small for this course - usually no more than 12 people per group - so that everyone's voice can be heard.
It's also possible to create custom versions of this training for your workplace. Get in touch if this is something you'd like to weigh up.
