The body knows: where yoga meets leadership

Recently I listened to a podcast on leadership with a former commando. In his view, the one component that sets leadership apart from management is ‘emotion’. A manager can work through a challenge from the head, technically and rationally, but a leader has to go one step further and listen to their own gut feeling, to their body too. That is how they carry a team through a crisis or a period of drastic change. In those moments what counts is the ability to stay clear and humane when everything invites reactivity. In an era of constant change, the AI revolution, relentless pressure on health systems, leaders are asked, more and more, to listen to their body and their emotions. The encouraging part is that this is not a fixed trait you either have or lack. It can be trained. And from my perspective, this is exactly where yoga can help leaders.

I have practiced yoga for over twenty years, and it is not just a hobby. It is part of who I am, how I show up in life and how I lead. In the beginning of my yoga journey it was mainly a physical practice: the asanas, the good feeling of moving on my mat and focusing on challenging poses. These days it is  about checking in with my breath, my body, dealing with emotions and finding, in the end, a kind of clarity. That same clarity is what I try to bring to the decisions I make as a leader.

—

Yoga is more than the poses

A lot of people picture yoga as the practice of poses, yet this is only one of the eight limbs described by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras. The other seven concern how you direct attention, how you steady the mind, and, before anything else, how you behave. Long before the sutras mention the body they set out the yamas and niyamas: ten ethical commitments covering honesty, restraint, contentment, letting go of what you cling to, and the honest study of yourself. Practising the poses is how you begin to live those guidelines: it opens new ways to tune in to your body, recognising your patterns and especially the blind spots.

These are a few of the lessons the mat first taught me, and how they now shape the way I lead.

Presence when it would be easier to leave

Some poses are simply intense. For example, in a deep backbend, the mind wants to flee, to rush, to come out early, to be anywhere but here. The breath is what keeps me on the mat. Slow, steady breathing tells my nervous system that intensity is not the same as danger, and so I stay a moment longer than felt possible. Over the years that moment has stretched, and staying has become a skill rather than an act of willpower.

I have come to rely on the same move in leadership. When a conversation gets difficult, when the numbers are bad, when a colleague pushes back, my instinct is to defend, to fix, or to leave the room emotionally. The practice has taught me a different response: stay. Stay present, stay curious, keep listening to the people in front of me. The discomfort is information, not a threat. Some of my better decisions have come from staying in a hard moment one breath longer than felt comfortable. Presence under pressure is not passivity. It is the deliberate choice to remain available when every instinct is telling you to flee.

Decisions that cause pain without causing harm

For years my tendency was to push myself on the yoga mat. I found it confusing that one day a pose came easily and the next it felt like a struggle. I used to give at least 100% every single day, until that forcing led me to injure myself. Straining your body until it breaks down is not yoga anymore. The principle I was missing is what Patanjali calls ahimsa, usually translated as doing no harm, or in the Buddhist phrasing, “cause no harm.” This is one I find hard as a leader, because leadership sometimes asks for decisions that hurt. A reorganisation, perhaps merging teams or closing a service, may be the only way an organisation survives or grows into its next stage, and it will still be painful for the people it touches, even when it turns out to be in their favour.

Here I lean on an idea from Lloyd Field’s Business and the Buddha (Field, 2007): intention is everything, all else is consequence. The point is not that a caring leader avoids difficult decisions. It is that the same decision carries a different weight depending on the intention behind it and the care taken in carrying it out. A reorganisation driven only by the numbers, by cost-cutting for its own sake, tends to harm both the organisation and its people. A Buddhist perspective does not reject the aim to optimize ROI; it asks you to add responsibility, integrity, and care to it. Holding that intention is, to me, what ahimsa means in a leadership seat.

Flow like a river

Once I saw that I was harming myself, I learned to stop forcing. When I let go of how the pose was supposed to look from the outside, when I stopped clinging to the result and let my breath lead the way, like water finding its path, something surprising happened. The posture I had been straining toward simply opened. The impossible became possible, not because I pushed harder, but because I stopped pushing. Patanjali has a name for this too: aparigraha, non-attachment, the art of holding your aim lightly.

Autry and Mitchell make the same point in Real Power, their reading of the Tao Te Chin. Their recurring image is water. Water asks for nothing and yields to everything, and given enough time it wears down stone. Its strength is patience with a direction. I recognise it in my own work: I cannot command the perfect timing of a hire, a service redesign, or a product launch any more than I can force my body into a pose on a stiff morning. What I can do is prepare, so that when the moment truly arrives I can act without hesitation. The discipline is not in the pushing. It is in learning to tell apart a situation that needs force from one that needs time, and having the patience to honour the difference.

The confidence to be incomplete

So does yoga make you a perfect leader? No, I do not believe it does, and any practice that promised as much would be worth distrusting. In the end we are all human, and making mistakes is part of that. What the practice offers instead is the ability to accept your own incompleteness. As the Tao Te Ching reminds us, when we truly recognise that fact, we become more complete.

Let me end with a question rather than a claim: how do you think yoga, or any practice that brings you back to your breath and your body, could inspire the way you lead? I would love to hear where it takes you.

—

References

Autry, J. A., & Mitchell, S. (1998). Real power: Business lessons from the Tao Te Ching. Riverhead Books.

Field, L. (2007). Business and the Buddha: Doing well by doing good. Wisdom Publications.

Patanjali. (2009). The yoga sutras of Patanjali (E. F. Bryant, Trans.). North Point Press. (Original work published ca. 400 BCE)