The Body Doesn't Lie
My client's eye had been twitching for three months.
Sleep gone. Dreams about work. The body running a parallel conversation his mind refused to have.
We didn't talk about stress management.
Here's what I've noticed across 350+ executives: the body speaks first. Always. The jaw that clenches before the difficult meeting. The shoulders that rise when the CEO's name appears on the phone. The sleep that fragments the week before a board presentation — not from anxiety about the presentation, but from the identity question underneath it.
Am I the person they think I am?
The body knows the answer before the mind is ready to hear it.
With this client, we talked about who he was trying to be. The performer. The one who reaches. The one who never arrives. There was a part of him so fused with striving that stillness felt like death. Not metaphorically — his nervous system genuinely could not distinguish between rest and failure.
Three months of twitching. Three months of the body saying: this version of you is unsustainable.
He didn't want to hear it. Nobody does. Because hearing it means questioning the strategy that built everything. The reaching. The performing. The relentless forward motion that got him promoted four times in eight years.
Six weeks after he stopped asking "how do I get there?" and started asking "who do I want to be?" — the twitching stopped. Sleep came back. His kid noticed before he did.
That's the part that gets me.
Not the professional transformation. Not the leadership presence. His child noticed that dad was present at dinner again. That's the measure no 360-degree assessment captures.
When a leader tells me they're fine but their jaw is clenched, their shoulders are up, their sleep is wrecked — I don't believe the words. I believe the body.
This isn't soft. This is data.
The body doesn't do politics. It doesn't perform for stakeholders. It doesn't write emails at 11pm to prove commitment. It just tells the truth, over and over, until someone listens.
Most leaders I work with have spent decades training themselves to override these signals. Discipline. Pushing through. The badge of honour that says I can take more than anyone else in the room.
And then the twitching starts. Or the insomnia. Or the rage that doesn't match the situation. Or the strange flatness when something good happens.
These aren't breakdowns. They're breakthroughs trying to happen.
The body was speaking long before the mind was ready to listen.
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