How I learned that self-leadership isn’t about outsourcing your power to someone else—it’s about trusting your body’s intelligence when every external system fails you.
This is Part 2 of the Patterns of Aliveness series. If you haven’t read Part 1: Broken Doesn’t Mean Beyond Repair, start there.
“I can prescribe you medications for epilepsy,” my neurologist said, barely looking up from my chart.
I sat across from him, temples throbbing with the kind of pain that makes you wonder if your skull is actually fracturing from the inside. Seven months post-brain bleed, and the headaches were still debilitating—sharp, relentless, stealing hours and days and any sense that I’d ever feel normal again.
“But I don’t have epilepsy,” I said quietly.
“I know.” He clicked his pen. “But that’s all I can offer you. Otherwise, I can’t help you.”
And just like that, I was alone.
The medical system—the system I’d trusted, the system that was supposed to have answers for someone like me, someone with a documented brain injury—had just told me: You’re on your own. Good luck.
I walked out of that office feeling something I’d never felt before: a strange mixture of terror and clarity.
Terror because: What if I can’t figure this out? What if I’m stuck with this debilitating pain and no one can help me?
But also clarity because: If no one else is going to lead my recovery, then I have to.
This is where embodied self-leadership actually begins. Not in a moment of empowerment or inspiration. But in the moment when every external authority fails you, and you realize: I am the only one who can listen to this body. I am the only one who can become its advocate, its researcher, its most trusted guide.
I didn’t have the language for it then. I just knew I couldn’t wait anymore.
The Moment Self-Leadership Stops Being a Choice
Here’s what I need you to understand about that moment: I didn’t choose embodied self-leadership because it sounded empowering or aligned with my values.
I chose it because the alternative was abandoning myself the way the medical system had just abandoned me.
And I refused. With the same stubborn, unreasonable persistence that had kept me showing up to that punching ball every day, that had kept me breathing through panic attacks, that had kept me alive when my body wanted to shut down entirely—I refused to give up on myself.
But I also had something most people in my position don’t have: the training to be my own researcher.
As a scientist, I knew how to read papers, evaluate evidence, design experiments. I could look at my symptoms, cross-reference studies on neuroplasticity and brain injury recovery, and piece together my own protocol.
I know this is privilege. Not everyone has research skills, access to scientific databases, or the analytical capacity to parse complex medical literature while their brain is still healing from catastrophic injury.
But here’s what I learned that anyone can access: Your body has intelligence that no external protocol can replicate. And learning to listen to it, trust it, and act on it—that’s the foundation of embodied self-leadership.
Embodied Self-Leadership: What I Didn’t Know I Was Practicing
Looking back now, with years of distance and the language I’ve since gained through embodiment training, I can see it clearly:
I wasn’t just trying to survive. I was practicing trauma-informed embodied self-leadership. I just didn’t have the words for it yet.
Every choice I made—every micro-adjustment, every experiment, every moment of honoring my body’s signals instead of overriding them—was an act of leadership.
Let me show you what I mean.
Compassion as Embodied Self-Leadership
When I stopped punishing myself for not recovering faster, for needing more time, for still being unable to handle a normal workday nine months post-injury—I wasn’t just being nice to myself.
I was practicing the first principle of trauma-informed leadership: meeting the system where it actually is, not where you think it should be.
Every leadership book will tell you to set ambitious goals, push your limits, stretch beyond your comfort zone. And in a stable, regulated system, that might work.
But my system wasn’t stable. It was post-disaster. And treating it like it should be performing at pre-injury levels wasn’t ambitious—it was violent.
Embodied self-leadership meant asking: What does this system actually need right now? Not what do I wish it needed, not what it “should” need, but what does it actually, somatically, desperately need?
And the answer, most days, was: gentleness. Rest. Permission to be exactly this broken, this slow, this limited.
That’s leadership. Not the Instagram version. The real version.
Creating Safety as Leadership
When I started scouting environments before entering them—checking lighting, sound levels, crowd density, exit routes—I felt pathetic.
Normal people don’t have to do this. Normal people can just go to a concert. Just show up to a party. Just exist in the world without all this calculation and preparation.
But now I see it differently.
I was doing exactly what a good leader does: assessing risk, managing limited resources, and creating conditions where success was actually possible.
I had a nervous system with a very narrow window of tolerance. Unpredictable stimuli could send me into shutdown for days. So I learned to control what I could control: preparation, pacing, knowing my escape routes.
This is embodied self-leadership. It’s not about never being afraid or limited. It’s about respecting your actual capacity and working strategically within it, instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.
Trust as Somatic Authority
The biggest shift—the one that changed everything—was learning to trust my body’s signals over external metrics.
Before the injury, I’d spent my entire life overriding my body. Pushing through exhaustion to meet deadlines. Ignoring hunger because I was too busy. Dismissing the tightness in my chest as stress I should just manage better.
I treated my body like a machine that occasionally malfunctioned, rather than an intelligent system trying to communicate with me.
But after the injury, I couldn’t do that anymore. My body was screaming too loudly to ignore.
So I started listening. Really listening.
That tightness in my chest? It wasn’t something to power through. It was my nervous system saying: “Capacity reached. I need rest, not more input.”
That flutter of desire to go somewhere, do something? It wasn’t just a whim. It was my system saying: “I have energy available. This is a window of opportunity.”
That sudden wave of exhaustion in the middle of the afternoon? It wasn’t laziness. It was accurate data about my system’s actual state.
And when I started making decisions based on that data—resting when my body said rest, engaging when my body said I had capacity, retreating when my body said threat—everything began to stabilize.
This is what embodied self-leadership actually is: trusting your somatic intelligence as much as (or more than) you trust external authority, productivity metrics, or other people’s expectations.
Experimentation as Self-Directed Research
I became obsessed with tracking patterns.
What happened when I ate certain foods? When did my headaches worsen? What time of day did I have the most capacity? How did different types of movement affect my nervous system state?
I wasn’t just “trying things.” I was treating my recovery like a research project, and my body was both the laboratory and the data source.
As a certified plant-based nutritionist, I understood the interplay of blood sugar, cortisol, and inflammation. So I designed nutrition protocols specifically to stabilize my system. I tracked what worked. I adjusted based on results.
When I started simple movement practices—stretching, breathwork, gentle coordination exercises—I wasn’t following a physical therapy protocol someone else designed. I was experimenting with what my body responded to, what created coherence, what sent feedback signals of safety and capacity.
This is embodied self-leadership in action: becoming your own researcher, trusting your own observations, and making decisions based on what you can actually sense and measure in your lived experience.
Not what a book says should work. Not what worked for someone else. What works for YOUR body, YOUR nervous system, YOUR specific constellation of symptoms and capacity.
The Truth No One Tells You About Leadership
Here’s what I eventually realized, and why this matters far beyond my personal recovery story:
Most women leaders are doing the exact opposite of what trauma forced me to learn.
They’re neglecting their body’s signals, not listening to them.
They’re pushing through exhaustion, not honoring actual capacity.
They’re trusting external metrics—revenue targets, productivity standards, hustle culture mandates—over their own internal knowing.
They’re waiting for someone else to give them permission to rest, to slow down, to say “this pace isn’t sustainable”—instead of claiming that authority for themselves.
They’re abandoning themselves in slow motion, the same way the medical system abandoned me in that neurologist’s office.
And the cost? Burnout. Chronic dysregulation. The slow erosion of trust in their own bodies. The collapse that I experienced catastrophically, they’re experiencing incrementally—over months, over years, until one day they can’t get out of bed either.
But here’s the radical truth I learned: You don’t need a brain injury to practice embodied self-leadership. You just need to start before your body forces you to.
What Embodied Self-Leadership Actually Looks Like (When You’re Not in Crisis)
Because here’s what I want you to understand: embodied self-leadership isn’t just a recovery tool. It’s a completely different operating system for how you lead—your business, your team, your life, yourself.
It looks like:
Noticing the tightness in your chest during that “great opportunity” conversation—and trusting that sensation as data, not something to ignore while you say yes anyway.
Recognizing when your nervous system is dysregulated—the scattered thinking, the irritability, the sense that everything is urgent—and choosing to regulate first, decide later.
Making strategic decisions based on your body’s capacity, not just your mind’s ambition. Asking: “Do I actually have the bandwidth for this?” and letting the honest answer guide your choice.
Creating safety and sustainable pacing for yourself, instead of waiting for your environment to become less demanding. Because it won’t. The world will take everything you give it. You have to be the one who decides what’s sustainable.
Trusting your own sensing—your gut knowing that something isn’t right, even when you can’t logically explain it. Your body’s wisdom that says “not this” or “not now” or “not at this cost.”
Taking your health, your energy, your capacity into your own hands. Not as self-optimization. As self-respect.
The Metamorphic Process of Becoming Your Own Authority
Just like rocks exposed to intense pressure and heat, emerge transformed—not back to their original state, but into something more stable, more resilient, more integrated?
That’s what this process was.
The pressure: being abandoned by the medical system, having to figure everything out alone.
The heat: the daily confrontation with my limitations, the grief, the fear, the uncertainty.
The transformation: learning to trust my own body’s intelligence more than I trusted any external authority.
I didn’t become who I was before the injury. That version of me—the one who could override her body indefinitely, who equated productivity with worth, who trusted systems and protocols over her own sensing—she’s gone.
I became someone who leads from the inside out. Someone who trusts somatic data as much as cognitive analysis. Someone who knows that regulation isn’t weakness—it’s the foundation of everything else.
This is what trauma-informed embodied self-leadership gave me: not just recovery, but a completely different relationship with my own authority.
Why This Matters for You
If you’re reading this and you’re a woman leading anything—a business, a team, a movement, your own damn life—I want you to ask yourself:
When was the last time you trusted your body’s intelligence over external expectations?
When was the last time you made a decision based on your actual capacity, not your perceived obligation?
When was the last time you practiced compassion toward your own system, meeting it where it actually is instead of punishing it for not being where you think it should be?
When was the last time you led yourself the way you’d want to be led—with respect for your limits, attention to your signals, and trust in your own knowing?
This is what embodied self-leadership offers: the capacity to lead from a regulated, resourced, internally-referenced place, instead of from depletion, override, and borrowed metrics of worth.
Trauma forced me to learn it the hard way. But you don’t have to wait for collapse.
You can start now. Today. This moment.
You can start asking: What is my body trying to tell me that I’ve been too busy to hear?
And then—this is the leadership part—you can actually listen. And act on what you hear.
What Comes Next
This is the second piece in the Patterns of Aliveness series. In Part 1, I shared the story of my nervous system collapse and the first fragile steps toward recovery. Here, I’ve shown you how that recovery process was actually embodied self-leadership in disguise—I just didn’t have the language for it yet.
In Part 3, I’ll share the specific framework and practices that transformed this lived experience into a methodology—a map for trauma-informed embodied leadership that you can use whether you’re recovering from crisis or simply ready to lead differently, more sustainably, more aligned with your body’s actual wisdom.
But for now, I want you to sit with this question:
What would change if you became your own most trusted authority?
Not in an isolated, self-reliant, “I don’t need anyone” way. But in a deeply embodied, somatically-grounded, internally-referenced way.
What would you do differently? What would you stop doing? What would you finally give yourself permission to feel, sense, and honor?
Your body already knows. It’s been trying to tell you.
The only question is: Are you ready to listen?
About This Series
This is Part 2 of the Patterns of Aliveness series on post-traumatic growth and trauma-informed embodied leadership for women.
Read Part 1: How I Learned That Broken Doesn’t Mean Beyond Repair
Subscribe to receive Part 3, where I’ll share the framework and practices that can help you develop embodied self-leadership before your body forces you to.
If you’re a woman leader ready to explore embodied self-leadership in your own life and work, you can learn more about private sessions here.
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