Embodied Leadership: Bringing Your Evolved Identity into Action - EP 047

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What does it really mean to lead from your whole self—not just from your mind, but also your body, heart, and spirit?

In this episode, I dive into the heart of embodied leadership and explore what it looks like to bring your evolved identity into real-world action. I share my personal experiences navigating the gap between knowing a concept and actually living it, especially as an entrepreneur. We’ll unpack the principles of presence, authentic expression, and energetic boundaries—and how these help create a leadership style that’s not only effective but sustainable. This episode is an invitation to lead from a deeper place—one that honors both your well-being and the people you’re here to serve.

Episode Takeaways:

• Embodied leadership brings mind, body, heart, and spirit into alignment.
• Leadership is not just about doing—it's about being.
• Presence helps us lead more effectively and intentionally.
• Authentic expression fosters deeper trust and connection.
• Vulnerability is powerful, but oversharing can undermine leadership.
• Energetic boundaries support healthier relationships in business.
• Boundaries aren’t walls—they’re clarity for you and your team.
• Simple practices can help you stay grounded and aligned.
• Sustainable leadership requires an inner shift, not just outer strategy.

Key Insights:

“Embodied leadership is about leading from your whole self—your mind, body, heart, and spirit. It recognizes that your body carries wisdom that your mind doesn't have access to.”

“Alignment is not about being perfect. It's about being present. It's about leading from your whole self and creating a space for others to do the same.”

Resources I Mention:

• Alignment Tracker
• Episode 44 - Identity Alchemy: Becoming The Person You Need To Be
• Episode 45 - Identity Evolution: Learning From The Masters

Connect With Me:

• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: @RachelAnzalone
• Facebook: Rachel.Anzalone
• LinkedIn: RachelAnzalone

Question for Your Reflection:

How can I bring more of my full self—mind, body, heart, and spirit—into my leadership?

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Episode Transcript

Think about this for a minute. Have you ever been in a meeting or in a conversation where someone is saying all of the right things and yet something feels really off? Like their words are perfect, but their energy is telling a different story. Well, the reason for that is that the body doesn't lie. The body is always broadcasting the truth of what's happening internally. This is something I came to understand in a really tangible way.

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Hello and welcome to Pleasure and Profits. I'm your host, Rachel Anzalone. Over the past few weeks, we've been exploring how to evolve our identity as entrepreneurs, from recognizing limiting beliefs in episode 44 to actively stepping into our upgraded selves in episode 45. Today, we're taking that evolution into action because it's not enough to mentally understand who we're becoming. We need to embody that new identity and how we lead, how we show up, and how we create impact in the world. 

Maybe you've had experiences yourself where you learned something and you knew it or understood it intellectually, and yet embodying it and bringing it to life in a very real, tangible, tactical, practical way was really challenging or was really sort of just like a whole different experience of it. 

I know I had this experience myself when I had studied holistic wellness, something that I've been interested in a long time, and in my twenties in particular, and was practicing in varying degrees for myself. And then when I decided to start a business in that realm, you know, I fully immersed myself in studying. And when I left my job to start a holistic wellness business, of course, I thought I will build this business based on these holistic principles. And yet I had never operated in a business following holistic wellness principles. 

And so I just automatically defaulted to operating in the way that I knew businesses were meant to operate in order to be profitable. And so I immediately just fell back into all these patterns of the businesses, the companies that I had worked for in the past that weren't energetically sustainable, that weren't focused on wellness, and very quickly found myself having built a wellness business where I wasn't living the principles myself because I didn't have a fully embodied experience of what it meant to be an owner or an operator of a business operating within those holistic wellness principles. 

The business and the wellness stuff were two separate categories for me. And while I had an intellectual understanding of the holistic wellness work, and I was able to incorporate that in certain aspects of my life, I hadn't fully embodied it yet. And so I didn't even notice that I was showing up to work in a way that didn't align with those values until I reached a point where it was so bad, where I just felt I have built this thing that I really, really don't like. That really doesn't feel aligned, that doesn't feel sustainable. And it wasn't until I hit that point that I realized that the principles that I had intended to bring to the business, they were concepts that I understood, but I didn't fully understand how they integrated into the practical applications of running a business. 

And this is something I've seen in conversation with people often, many of the things that I have done in my life, many of the jobs I've had are things that I wasn't necessarily trained to do. I didn't go to school for them. I just sort of ended up in them. It's sort of the story of my life is like being invited into something and being given a lot of responsibility and then just working it out and figuring it out for myself. 

And so many times I have found myself in conversation with individuals who have gone to school for a particular step subject or did train in a way where they have a really strong mental understanding of the work and yet they've never actually done the work. So for example, having spoken to someone who went to school for hotel and restaurant management, and got a degree in hospitality management and yet had never actually been a manager in a restaurant. In the meantime, I had 10 years of experience of managing restaurants and hotels and working in resorts and the very practical tactical hands-on experience of that to such an extent that to this day, I could walk into a restaurant and I'm 100% certain that I could increase profitability, that I could improve customer satisfaction, that I know exactly what needs to get done and how to get it done.

I have to restrain myself when I walk into restaurants from not defaulting into like, what are the things I would do if I was the manager in this moment, right? Because it's so ingrained in my body, but I didn't learn that intellectually. I learned it through embodied experiences, like practical hands-on, just get in, get your hands dirty and get it done. 

And that's very, very different from someone who went to college and knows all the terminology and has understands all the concepts and has passed the exams but hasn't actually done the work. And often what that person finds when they get into actually do the work is it could be like a holy shit moment of like, did not know what I was getting myself into and how do I now take these things that I understand in my brain, in my intellect and apply them to the actual circumstances that are happening. 

I've had this conversation with people in that space and also with people who've gotten, you know, who have their MBA, who have studied marketing at a college level, often there's a really big disconnect between the intellectual understanding of what you learn in those circumstances and what the practical application is of just being in the business, being in the hands-on stuff and getting the work done. And there is something really powerful in that embodied experience of actually doing it and feeling it in the cells of your body to such an extent that you know you can solve a problem no matter what comes up. 

And so that's what we're going to explore today is embodied leadership, what it means to lead from your whole being and not just from your head. And so many of us have understandings of what it means to be a leader. We can have these conceptual ideas and we have all these experiences of having been led by others, of having been the recipient of leadership styles that maybe some we liked and some we didn't like, or there were aspects that we appreciated or understood. And that's very different than being the one in the leadership position and learning to trust in your own body and your own being and not just deferring to the story in your head of what you think you're supposed to do or what you've seen someone else do or a piece of advice that you've been given that maybe doesn't fully resonate with you. 

So we're gonna get into that in a lot of layers. We're going to look at why this matters right now more than ever in our evolving business landscape and in this world where we are working so diligently to bring feminine leadership principles to the forefront because the feminine operates in the body and not just in the head.

And as I said, there's this practical aspect of like, how do you actually do this, how do you actually bring this to life in your own business? And so we're going to get into those practical tools as well.

So let’s start by examining what embodied leadership actually is. So traditional leadership models tend to be very heady, very mentally centered. They're about strategy and logic and metrics, which are all really important things. I never discount those aspects, but they're not the entire picture. And so much of what traditional leadership does is focus entirely on them and leave out these other aspects that are critically important for the kind of businesses and the kind of impact and the kind of world that we're working to create. These traditional business models emerged from patriarchal structures that valued thinking over feeling and doing over being. 

Embodied leadership, on the other hand, is about leading from your whole self, your mind, body, heart, and spirit. It recognizes that your body carries wisdom that your mind doesn't have access to. Think about this for a minute. Have you ever been in a meeting or in a conversation where someone is saying all of the right things and yet something feels really off? Like their words are perfect, but their energy is telling a different story. Well, the reason for that is that the body doesn't lie. The body is always broadcasting the truth of what's happening internally.

This is something I came to understand in a really tangible way. Again, back in those restaurant days where in my role as both a restaurant manager and then as a director of operations running multiple locations. So they interviewed a lot of people for positions and when I say a lot, I mean hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. I have conducted hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of job interviews.

And there was a point that I started to realize that the better, and I say better with, you know, air quotes, the better people's answers were to the questions, the less likely they were to actually show up and do well on the job. And that was because often people knew the right things to say in an interview. They had studied and practiced and they’ve been in enough interviews by the time that they were interviewing, particularly for management positions, that they knew all the right answers. They knew what to say.

And yet they would show up and not be able to deliver. And more often what I found was that the people who were maybe didn't say the right thing, but who were really genuine and present and seemed motivated and enthusiastic that they actually performed way better on the job than people who had all the right answers. It was almost like they were just saying what they thought they needed to say to get by and to get the job. 

And maybe it had served them in the past, but they would get into the role and it was like, but that's not actually who you are, it doesn't actually align with your beliefs. This is actually just a story you were telling me in order to get the thing that you wanted to get. And I started to learn to identify that in the interviews and in the conversations of like, who was just saying what they thought I wanted to hear versus who was showing up and being really genuine and you know, sometimes someone's genuine and you can tell they're not the right fit. And other times someone's genuine and you can tell that even though they don't know the right answers to all the things, that they're going to be a great fit and they're going to work really hard and they're going to feel enthusiastic and motivated and that they're ultimately going to be a great asset.

And the same is true of us as leaders. What we embody as truth isn't lost on the people around us just because the words coming out of our mouth might be saying something different. When you walk into a room and you're tense or contracted, or stressed or anxious, people feel it. And I say walk into a room, it could also be through Zoom, it can be through a phone call. We can all feel that energy. 

On the other hand, when you're grounded and you're present, that ripples out too, and it has a calming, grounding effect that brings your team or your clients to be present with you as well. Your nervous system state literally influences the nervous system of your team and your clients.

And neuroscience proves this. Our mirror neurons are constantly picking up and reflecting each other's states. So embodied leadership isn’t lip service. It's not just nice to have. It's actually essential for creating the kind of impact that we want to make because when we are not embodied, when we are not present and grounded, that energy that we bring to every interaction, that affects everybody around us.

To help us learn how to be embodied in our leadership, I've identified three keys that I want to share with you today. 

So the first key is presence. Presence is about leading from grounded awareness rather than scattered thinking. It's the difference between being in your body versus being in your head.

Here’s a simple practice you can do. Before any leadership moment, whether it's a client call, a team meeting, or even if it's just creating content or sitting down at your desk to start work for the day, you're leading yourself in those circumstances, just take a few breath, feel your feet on the ground. Feel your bottom in the seat of your chair. Drop into awareness in your belly and just take 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds to bring yourself into a state of presence before you dive into the thing that you're getting into. This is a great habit that can have a huge impact on everything that you do. And you can do this practice before you get on a Zoom call or before you enter into a meeting or before you, you know, do something really specific. And also I think it's one of the bravest acts for leaders to do this type of exercise in the presence of their team or their clients or anyone.

As things are happening, it's not a circumstance of like you have to ground yourself and be present before you start or you have lost that opportunity. If you find yourself in a meeting, if you find yourself in a conversation, if you find yourself in any kind of a circumstance, and you're feeling your mind racing or like an intensity of energy or things happening, just pause for a minute. I think it's the most beautiful example as a leader that you could set for your team that it is okay to pause and just take a moment right now, no matter what the circumstances are that are happening and be an example of grounding and presence. It gives them permission to do the same thing too.

The second key is authentic expression. And this is about alignment between what you say and what your body is communicating. When these things match, then people will automatically trust you. It'll be instinctive for them. When the words coming out of your mouth and the energy that your body is communicating don't feel aligned, then often people feel confused or unsafe, even if they can't articulate why specifically.

And authentic expression also means being willing to be vulnerable. Like I said a minute ago, to be vulnerable, to say, you know what, I just need a minute to ground and take a breath and think about this instead of feeling like you have to be on and you have to deliver and you have to perform at an intense level. Then you set the expectation that everybody else has to do that too. When in fact, what most of us need is to just pause for a second, collect ourselves, and then we can find the right words. We can find the right solution and move things along in a way that feels better for everyone.

Now, this is a really important note. Being vulnerable does not mean oversharing. It does mean letting people see your humanity and letting people see your humanity creates safety for others to be human as well. I think this is a really important point to make. I have seen it. I certainly have experienced it where a leader in a space has been in a dysregulated state and in that dysregulated state, overshared and or unloaded their personal vulnerability challenging experiences on the group. And that's not what I'm talking about here.

I think there's tremendous value in sharing when you have something valuable to add to the conversation, which means you've learned something from it. And that doesn't mean that you can't ever share that you're in a difficult situation or you're having a challenge or you're working through something. That just means that you're not vomiting all of your drama on people while you're in the middle of the drama.

You know, an example would be to say, I'm working through something really difficult right now with a family member versus unloading all the details of that challenging experience on people.

To do that shares your humanity. It shares your vulnerability. It shares why maybe your mind isn't in the right place or you're not, you're having a hard time being present or what some of the circumstances are that might be leading to, you what's happening in terms of your communication without turning it into a therapy session for you about whatever it is that's going on when you're meant to be in a leadership role.

The third key is energetic boundaries. As embodied leaders, we need to hold space for others without taking on their energy. This is especially important for empaths and highly sensitive entrepreneurs, which I'm pretty sure if you're listening to this podcast that you probably are one or both of those, or maybe they're the same, right?

And so your body is your first boundary. When you're grounded and you're centered, you naturally create a safe container for others while protecting your own energy. So it's not about building walls up and keeping people out. It's about being sovereign in your own system. And it's empowering for you, but it's also empowering for others because it shows that you trust that they can handle themselves. 

One of the things that we often don't realize when we allow ourselves to be energetically affected by everyone around us and then we're responding to their energetic needs, like what feels like maybe they're not okay and we're responding to that is effectively what we're saying is that we don't trust that they can take care of themselves. And therefore, we must throw all of our energy at them in order to help them to handle the situation.

And so it's incredibly disempowering to both parties to take your energy and completely disperse it and try to wrap it around somebody else and protect them and take care of them and respond to them. And it may feel like, you know, there might be some theories or thoughts around this that would say, well, that person then is the one who is, you know, has the power in that moment and you're losing your power because you're giving it to them or you're responding to their energy in some way, at the end of the day, what you're doing is neither one of you is taking responsibility for your own energy, your own stuff. It's actually disempowering to both people. Learning to set your own energetic boundaries is also a great example for other people to do the same.

So now let's get practical with this. How do you actually implement embodied leadership in your business? Well, the first thing that I would say is that you need to learn for yourself what it means to be in alignment and in an embodied state. 

And so I have a tool, I've shared it in the past, it is an Alignment Tracker, and this tool will help you learn to identify what alignment feels like in your own body. As you work through the questions in it, it's gonna help you assess like,  when I feel aligned, what do I feel? Maybe I feel calm, I feel present, I feel alert. When I feel out of alignment, what do I feel? I feel in my body, feel scattered, I feel butterflies in my heart or in my stomach, I feel anxious, right? And then helping identify what practices support your alignment and how and when you can integrate those practices into your day. And then bringing awareness to how you feel and how you are, how you actually show up when you focus on those practices and when you don't.

So how I use this tool for myself is that I've learned to identify what alignment feels like in my body. And I've identified what some practices are that help support me in that alignment. And so for me, those are things like making sure I get enough sleep, meditating in the morning, if I'm in the middle of the day and I'm feeling out of alignment or feeling sort of agitated or disconnected, it might mean like doing some heart breathing for a few minutes. It's writing in my journal. Sometimes that's morning pages. Sometimes it's, you know, pulling cards from an Oracle deck and just sitting and reflecting and being present. For me, it involves exercise and food and water and spending time in nature.

These are all practices that help me to be in alignment. And when I build my days so that they include all of those things, then I'm able to show up in a more present, embodied, and aligned way in everything that I do. And what I notice for myself is that when I start to fall off of those practices, often because I've gotten you know what, I think I'm too busy, I have something else I'm gonna prioritize and I end up not doing that stuff for some period of time, is that everything shifts. I start to feel anxious, I'm in my head a lot, I can't make decisions, I'm not showing up in my best capacity in any space. And that the thing I need to do then is to just go back to those practices. 

And so the Alignment Tracker will help you. There are suggestions in there to help learn to identify what alignment feels like in your body. There are suggestions in there for identifying what practices might help you in supporting in your alignment. And then there is a tracking sheet for you to keep track of how much, how often you're doing these things. And the purpose of the sheet isn't to score you, you're doing it 100% of the time or 80% of the time, anything like that, but just to help you bring awareness to when I do these things, here's how I feel. And when I'm not doing things, how does that then affect how I feel or how I show up and how I am in my capacity as a leader? Am I showing up the best way that I can?

And so that Alignment Tracker is a fantastic tool for learning and making this part of a practice that you're doing on a monthly, weekly, daily basis. Like what are the practices that help you to be embodied and present on a regular basis? And I’ll put this link in the show notes, but you can get the Alignment Tracker at rachelanzalone.com/alignment.

And then also making a point before you make major decisions or you have important conversations to check in with yourself, to check in with your body and ask, what am I feeling leading into this? Where am I holding tension? What does my body need right now? And maybe you'll start to recognize that before those major decisions or important conversations, just taking a walk for a few minutes or doing a few heart breaths or just taking a few quiet breaths, doing a body scan, feeling yourself settle for just a few seconds even, can have a tremendous impact on your ability to show up in an embodied way anytime.

And then once you've done that, you can start to pay attention to what's going on in the room around me, or the room or the Zoom, right? What's going on around me? And am I aware and present to the feedback that I'm getting from other people? And how can you bring these same embodiment practices to those people, to your family, to your team, to your clients?

When you're about to lead a meeting or a workshop, can you feel the energy of the room and assess, are people leaning in or pulling back? Are people feeling anxious? Are they feeling relaxed? And then how can you adjust in real time by doing something like having everybody stop for a moment and just take a breath?

Often in a work environment, we're jumping from one thing to the next to the next. We go from one meeting into the next meeting, and we're just bringing all that energy with us from meeting to meeting, from conversation to conversation. And what we really need to do at the start of a meeting is just take a few seconds to kind of clear energy, take a couple breaths before we dive into the next thing.

And so reflecting on how are you creating experiences for your team and your clients that honors the whole person, making a point of honoring transitions with centering practices,  building in movement breaks, just get up and stretch in the middle of a meeting, or explicitly inviting people to trust their own body wisdom. You know, if you can in a moment notice that you're feeling overwhelmed or your mind is racing and maybe you don't have the right words, you don't have the right answer and trust for yourself to say, just a minute, let me pause and take a breath before you answer, can you recognize when other people are doing it too? Can you recognize when you have team members who are in a busy brain like frantic state trying to answer something for you and offer the invitation to them to also take a pause and get present and get into their body before they carry on with that conversation.

Take a look at where you're already embodying leadership in this way in your own world. Maybe you're naturally good at grounding yourself before you speak. Maybe you intuitively read a room and adapt to it. Acknowledge for yourself what you're already doing really well. And then also reflect on what's your growth edge. Maybe it's overriding your body signals. Maybe it's getting caught in your head during challenging conversations. Maybe it's that you're taking the time to ground and be present yourself, but you're not offering or inviting or expecting for your team to do the same. So pick one of those areas to focus on in the coming week and really pay attention to where your opportunity is for improvement.

As you do this, remember that embodied leadership is not about being perfect. Alignment is not about being perfect. It's about being present. It's about leading from your whole self and creating a space for others to do the same. As we move forward in this new paradigm of business, embodied leadership becomes not just valuable, but essential. It's how we create sustainable impact while honoring our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of the collective in a way that is nourishing and supportive and allows for even greater expansion and growth.

In the next episode, we're going to take this embodiment into decision-making, specifically exploring how to use your body as your most reliable business advisor.

Until then, I invite you to notice one leadership moment this week where you can drop from your head into your heart, where you can shift from maybe a racing mind into a grounded and centered body and see what shifts when you lean into prioritizing these embodiment practices and leading from your whole being. Until next time, remember that your pleasure is your power. Take care.