Somatic intelligence for decision making isn’t taught in business schools or leadership programs. Yet it’s the most critical capacity a woman leader can develop—especially after trauma, crisis, or burnout fundamentally changes how her nervous system processes choice. I learned this the hard way, staring at an email I couldn’t answer for three days.
A simple question from a colleague: “Can you lead next week’s presentation?”
Before my brain injury, I would have responded within minutes—confident, decisive, already mentally outlining the slides. But now, staring at those nine words, I felt my chest tighten. My breathing shallowed. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, paralyzed.
I told myself I was being strategic. Thoughtful. Professional. That I was carefully weighing the opportunity.
But my body knew the truth: I was terrified. And my nervous system had already decided for me—no—before my mind even had a chance to participate.
This is what happens when trauma responses hijack your capacity for clear decision-making. And if you’re a woman leader navigating the aftermath of crisis, burnout, or any life-altering event, your body might be making your most important decisions while you’re still trying to think your way through them.
What Somatic Intelligence for Decision Making Actually Means
Somatic intelligence for decision making is the capacity to access and interpret the body’s wisdom when making choices. Unlike purely cognitive decision-making—which relies on analysis, data, and rational thought—somatic intelligence taps into the nervous system’s real-time assessment of safety, threat, and alignment.
Your body is constantly processing information your conscious mind hasn’t registered yet. That “gut feeling” isn’t mystical—it’s your nervous system detecting patterns, assessing risk, and signaling whether a situation feels safe or dangerous, aligned or misaligned.
For women leaders, especially those recovering from trauma, chronic stress, or significant life crises, developing somatic intelligence for decision making isn’t optional. It’s essential.
Because here’s what most leadership development won’t tell you: When your nervous system is dysregulated, your decision-making capacity is fundamentally compromised—no matter how brilliant your strategic thinking.
How Trauma Blocks Somatic Intelligence for Decision Making
After my brain injury, I believed my problem was cognitive. I thought the injury had damaged my analytical capacity, my strategic thinking, my executive function. I spent months trying to “fix” my brain—reading, researching, pushing myself to think harder, faster, clearer.
But the real problem wasn’t in my mind. It was in my body.
Trauma—whether from a health crisis, workplace collapse, loss, or burnout—rewires the nervous system. It teaches your body that the world is fundamentally unsafe. And when your body perceives threat (even when there is none), it activates survival responses that override your capacity for clear, aligned decision-making.
Understanding how trauma responses impact somatic intelligence for decision making is crucial for women leaders trying to reclaim their leadership capacity. Here’s what happens when unresolved trauma responses control your choices:
1. Hypervigilance Creates False Urgency and Compromises Somatic Intelligence
When your nervous system is stuck in threat-detection mode, every decision feels high-stakes. An email becomes a crisis. A meeting feels like a test. A business opportunity triggers panic. Your body interprets everything through a threat lens, flooding you with cortisol and adrenaline, pushing you toward fight-or-flight responses when strategic thinking is what’s actually needed.
This hypervigilant state directly interferes with somatic intelligence for decision making because your body is scanning for danger instead of discerning alignment. You can’t access your body’s wisdom when it’s in survival mode.
What this looks like in leadership: Rushing decisions to escape discomfort. Over-preparing to avoid perceived danger. Saying yes when you mean no because refusal feels unsafe. Making reactive choices that provide immediate relief but long-term misalignment.
2. Freeze Response Disguises Itself as Analysis Paralysis
Many high-achieving women don’t recognize freeze as a trauma response because it looks like “being thoughtful” or “doing due diligence.” But when you can’t move forward on decisions despite having adequate information, that’s not strategic patience—that’s your nervous system immobilizing you to avoid perceived threat.
The freeze response shuts down your access to somatic intelligence for decision making entirely. Your body goes offline, disconnecting you from the felt sense that could guide you toward clarity.
What this looks like in leadership: Endless pros-and-cons lists. Seeking one more opinion, one more data point, one more perspective before deciding. Remaining stuck in indecision while opportunities pass. Feeling numb or disconnected when trying to access your intuition.
3. Fawn Response Erodes Authentic Choice and Somatic Knowing
The fawn response—people-pleasing, over-accommodating, prioritizing others’ needs over your own—is one of the most insidious trauma patterns for women leaders. It masquerades as collaboration, empathy, or “being a team player.” But when your decisions are primarily driven by what will keep others happy, comfortable, or approving of you, you’ve outsourced your decision-making authority to your nervous system’s survival strategy.
Fawning prevents you from developing somatic intelligence for decision-making because you’re constantly overriding your body’s signals to accommodate others. You learn to ignore what your body knows in favor of what keeps you safe from rejection or conflict.
What this looks like in leadership: Saying yes to projects you don’t have capacity for. Making decisions based on others’ expectations rather than your values. Struggling to delegate or set boundaries because disappointing others feels dangerous. Chronic exhaustion from betraying your own needs.
4. Dissociation Severs You from Intuitive Knowing
Dissociation—the feeling of being disconnected from yourself, your body, your emotions—is a protective response to overwhelming stress. But when you’re dissociated, you lose access to the very somatic intelligence for decision making that could guide your most aligned choices. You’re making decisions from a cognitive framework alone, cut off from the felt sense that tells you what’s actually true.
What this looks like in leadership: Making decisions that look good on paper but feel wrong. Ignoring persistent unease or physical discomfort. Operating on autopilot, disconnected from your values and purpose. Feeling like you’re watching your life from outside yourself.
Why Traditional Decision-Making Frameworks Fail Trauma Survivors
Most leadership training teaches decision-making as if it’s purely cognitive: gather data, weigh options, choose logically, and execute confidently.
But this framework assumes a regulated nervous system—one that can accurately assess threat, tolerate uncertainty, and access higher-order thinking under pressure. For women navigating post-traumatic recovery, chronic stress, or nervous system dysregulation, this framework is not just inadequate—it’s harmful.
Because no amount of strategic thinking can override a nervous system screaming “danger.” And without cultivating somatic intelligence for decision making, you remain trapped in patterns that feel like personal failure but are actually physiological survival responses.
I learned this the hard way. In the months after my injury, I tried every cognitive strategy: decision matrices, pros-and-cons lists, seeking advice from trusted mentors, researching best practices.
None of it worked.
Because my body didn’t feel safe. And until my nervous system could regulate, my capacity for clear, aligned somatic intelligence for decision making remained fundamentally compromised.
The Path Forward: Embodied Decision-Making Through Somatic Intelligence
Here’s what changed everything for me—and what I now teach women leaders navigating similar struggles:
You cannot think your way into better decisions when your body doesn’t feel safe. You have to feel your way there.
Developing somatic intelligence for decision making isn’t about abandoning strategic thinking. It’s about integrating your body’s wisdom with your cognitive capacity so that decisions come from wholeness, not fragmentation.
This is what embodied decision-making looks like in practice:
1. Learn to Recognize Your Nervous System States
Before you can make aligned decisions, you need to know what state your nervous system is in. Do you feel safe, connected, and regulated? Or you are anxious and everything seems urgent? Maybe frozen, without clue what toa do next?
Practice: Before making any significant decision, pause. Notice your breath, your heart rate, the tension in your body. Ask yourself: “What state am I in right now?” If you’re not regulated, postpone the decision if possible, or use regulation tools first.
2. Create Safety Before Deciding
Your body needs to feel safe to access higher-order thinking and intuitive knowing. Safety isn’t just psychological—it’s physiological. It requires nervous system regulation practices that signal to your body: “We’re okay. We can think clearly now.”
Building somatic intelligence for decision making requires creating the physiological conditions where your body can actually access wisdom rather than just react to perceived threat.
Practice: Use bilateral stimulation (butterfly taps, walking, eye movements), grounding techniques (feet on floor, hands on heart), or vagal toning (humming, singing, deep breathing) to downregulate your nervous system before engaging with complex decisions.
3. Distinguish Between Fear and Intuition
Trauma survivors often can’t tell the difference between genuine intuitive knowing (“This doesn’t align”) and trauma-based fear (“This feels dangerous”). Both show up as bodily sensations, but they have different qualities.
Fear feels constricting, urgent, panicky, and often accompanied by catastrophic thinking.
Intuition feels clear, grounded, steady—even if uncomfortable. It’s a “knowing” rather than a “reacting.”
Developing somatic intelligence for decision making means learning to read these subtle differences in your body’s signals.
Practice: When faced with a decision, notice: Does this sensation in my body feel like a warning from my trauma history, or a clear signal about alignment? If you’re unsure, journal or speak it out loud. Trauma-based fear usually gets louder and more insistent. Intuition remains steady.
4. Honor Your Body’s “No”
One of the most powerful aspects of somatic intelligence for decision making is learning to trust your body’s boundaries. If your body is consistently signaling “no”—through tension, fatigue, nausea, or resistance—that’s information, not weakness.
High-achieving women are conditioned to override their body’s signals. We push through. We “should” ourselves into commitments. We rationalize away our discomfort.
But your body’s “no” is protecting something important: your capacity, your values, your well-being.
Practice: When your body says no, resist the urge to immediately rationalize or override it. Instead, get curious: “What is my body trying to protect? What boundary needs honoring here?”
5. Building Somatic Intelligence for Decision Making: A Step-by-Step Approach
If you’ve been operating from survival mode for months or years, your capacity for complex decision-making may be compromised. But this is a normal, adaptive trait of your nervous system. Your brain prioritized survival over executive function because that’s what nervous systems do under threat.
As you regulate your nervous system and rebuild safety, your somatic intelligence for decision-making will strengthen. But it requires patience and incremental rebuilding.
Practice: Start with small, low-stakes decisions. Practice noticing your body’s responses, regulating before deciding, and honoring your somatic wisdom. Build the neural pathways of embodied decision-making before tackling the high-stakes choices.
The Transformation: From Dysregulated to Discerning
Eighteen months after my brain injury, I received another email with an opportunity to publish my book abroad to a larger audience. High visibility. Significant professional impact.
I felt the familiar tightness in my chest. But this time, I recognized it: sympathetic activation. My body registering the stakes, the exposure, the possibility of failure.
I didn’t ignore it. I didn’t push through it. I didn’t rationalize it away.
Instead, I regulated. I breathed. I walked. I felt my feet on the ground. I asked my body: “What’s the fear? And beneath that, what’s the truth?”
The fear was: “What if I fail? What if I’m not ready?”
The truth—the somatic intelligence beneath the fear—was steady and clear: “This aligns. This matters. You’re ready.”
I said yes. And I showed up—not as the person I was before the injury, but as someone fundamentally changed. Someone who had learned to lead from my whole self: mind, body, and nervous system integrated.
That’s the gift of somatic intelligence for decision making. Not perfection. Not the absence of fear. But the capacity to distinguish between trauma responses and authentic knowing—and to make decisions from alignment, not survival.
Moving Forward: Your Body Knows the Way
If you’re a woman leader navigating the aftermath of crisis, trauma, or burnout, here’s what I want you to know:
Your difficulty with decisions isn’t a failure of intelligence, capability, or leadership. It’s your nervous system doing exactly what it’s designed to do: protect you.
The path forward isn’t thinking harder. It’s learning to trust your body’s wisdom. It’s developing somatic intelligence for decision making as a leadership capacity—one that integrates your brilliant strategic mind with the deep, embodied knowing your trauma taught you to ignore.
You don’t need to go back to who you were before. You need to discover who you’re becoming—a leader who makes decisions not just from your head, but from your whole, integrated, regulated self.
That’s not weakness. That’s wisdom.
And it might just be the most powerful leadership transformation you’ll ever experience.
Are you a woman leader navigating the intersection of trauma recovery and high-level decision-making? I’m hosting a workshop exploring how trauma responses shape leadership and how somatic intelligence gives us back our power. DM me “WORKSHOP” for details, or explore my work at [your website]. back our power. DM me “WORKSHOP” for details, or explore my work at [your website].
