Listening to the Body - The Body Knows First
The body flags disruption long before the mind has words for it. This is about learning to listen to what it is already telling you.
We learn a lot about listening - listen to understand, listen with empathy, active listening. They share quite similar concepts and practices. This article is about something different. It is about listening to the body.
Our body actually flags disruptions. It gives us data. But disruptions rarely arrive as insights. They arrive as discomfort. Frustration. A sense of flatness we cannot explain. The feeling that we are doing the right things, but something essential is missing.
We might not call it a signal at first. It just feels like “one of those weeks.” Or months.
When we override the signals
I ignored the signs for a long time. The recurring stress at work and at home pushed me toward unhealthy eating. Snacks, burgers, pratas, and steak. They became a way to cope - something warm, something familiar, something that did not ask questions. I gained weight. My sleep and mood suffered.
At some point, it stopped feeling like a phase and started feeling like a pattern.
In Singapore, many of us were raised to push through difficulty rather than sit with it. So we work longer. We push harder. We optimise. Even rest becomes something to get right. We plan a holiday and treat it like another project - itinerary, timings, food spots all mapped out. We tell ourselves we are tired, not stuck.
And because life in Singapore moves quickly, it’s easy to blend in. From the outside, it feels like everyone is rushing for the MRT, rushing from place to place, rushing to queue for food. It feels normal to clear emails late into the night. Everyone is trying to keep up. So we assume what we are feeling is normal.
But the body is a more honest observer than the story we are telling ourselves.
A tightness in the chest.
A heaviness when we wake up.
A hesitation before a certain conversation.
A recurring dread before certain tasks.
These are not random. They are not inconveniences to suppress or explain away. They are the first vocabulary of something important trying to surface.
Noticing What We Have Missed
The challenge is that we often do not speak this language.
We are more fluent in explaining, justifying, and analysing. We can give very good reasons for why we are stressed, why we cannot slow down, why things have to be this way. But when it comes to simply noticing what is happening in the body, we hesitate.
It can feel unproductive. Even uncomfortable.
So we do what we know how to do. We override.
We push through the tightness.
We distract from the fatigue.
We scroll when things feel too quiet.
A bit like being at a buffet, already full, but still eating more because it’s what everyone else is doing. We don’t pause long enough to ask if we should continue eating.
As a parent of three, I am starting to pay more attention, especially to how I show up with my kids.
I notice that I can be physically present with my children while being entirely absent, my attention consumed by the very anxieties I am trying to outrun. When my child says, “you are always on your phone,” I could deflect with my work responsibilities. I could explain the the deadlines and the job expectations. But what’s underneath that complaint is often true.
Something in me has gone automatic.
Something in me has become so habitual that I can no longer feel it.
And it is often the body that reveals this first. Not as a clear thought, but as a subtle disconnection. A lack of warmth. A sense that we are going through the motions of something that used to feel alive.
We might notice it in small moments - sitting at the dinner table, hearing the conversation but not really being there. Walking beside someone we love, yet feeling a distance we cannot explain.
These are subtle but real signals.
Listening to Our Body as a Practice
The body is trying to bring us back. Back to what matters. Back to what we are avoiding. Back to what we have stopped noticing.
But listening to our body is not something most of us were taught.
We were taught to think clearly, to speak properly, to behave appropriately. The body, on the other hand, can feel like the stick holding the lollipop. The lollipop is the brain, and the body is just “a thing” to hold it up.
What might change if we related to our body sensations differently, as an ongoing practice?
Not as interruptions, but as invitations.
An invitation to pause, even briefly, in the middle of a busy day.
An invitation to notice what is happening without immediately fixing it.
An invitation to ask, quietly, “what is this trying to show me?”
Nothing dramatic happens. There are no big, visible breakthroughs. But something shifts within us.
We become a little more present.
A little less automatic.
And over time, this small shift changes the way we move through our days.
Like choosing to be in the moment instead of rushing off. While the environment and the people we interact with are more or less the same, but our way of being is now different because of the small shift. We start to experience what was always available, but rarely noticed in the past.
New possibilities now open up - possibilities to bless others with an act of service, to smile at someone, to acknowledge a colleague’s actions or to say something kind to a neighbour.
And perhaps this is what listening with the body can bring.
And for me, those possibilities open up a whole new world to breathe in.
Continue Reading — The Ontological Coaching Series:
Written by Victor Seet
Victor facilitates teams to leverage their collective strengths, get clear on ways of engagement and ways of working to strengthen team and interpersonal dynamics. Victor specializes in integrating strengths-based and ontological approach into his team coaching and leadership workshops.
The Way of Being - Why How You Show Up Shapes What Becomes Possible
Most leadership behaviour change does not last beyond a quarter. The reason is structural - the Way of Being. Here is what it takes to make change actually hold.
By Victor Seet — Ontological & CliftonStrengths Coach, Singapore
For years, leadership was something I did to influence others. The conversations I had with others. The decisions I made to effect change. The strategies I rolled out for the team. I optimised the doing relentlessly, and for a long time it worked.
Then I noticed something uncomfortable. The same type of conversations, held by me on a good day and a bad day, produced completely different results, even when the words were almost identical. My team was not actually responding to what I was saying. They were responding to who I was being while I said it. I noticed how my wife responded to me in different situations. Similarly, I noticed how my kids responded to me.
I started paying attention to Way of Being. And it remains, in my experience, the most overlooked variable in workplaces today. It is also, I have come to believe, the real reason most behaviour change does not last.
What Way of Being Actually Means
In ontological coaching, Way of Being is not a personality, a mood of the day, or a set of values you wrote on a slide. It is the structural coherence of three domains that have settled in every human being over time.
Language is how we speak, and what we say to ourselves when no one is listening. Mood is the emotions we carry, the ones so familiar we no longer notice them. Body is how we hold our shoulders, our jaw, our breath, our posture, the way our chest tightens before certain conversations.
These three are always operating. We just rarely notice them. As I shared in an earlier piece, most of what shapes us stays transparent until something cracks the lens. Way of Being lives in that same transparent territory. We are being someone right now as we read this article. We just are not paying attention to it.
And here is what makes it structural rather than situational. Our Way of Being did not get assembled this morning. It got built quietly over years, out of what was rewarded, what was punished, the survival strategies that worked when we were young and somehow stayed. By the time we are adults leading a team, our Way of Being is the deep coherence underneath every interaction we have. It does not change because we read a good article or attended a workshop.
Why This Matters More Than We Admit
At work, we are often very good at the what. We optimise. We restructure. We KPI. We send people for training. We create new processes and systems.
What we tend to miss is that two leaders with identical strategies will produce wildly different cultures, because they carry different bodies into the room, speak from different moods, and run different internal language. The strategy did not change the outcome. The Way of Being did.
This is also why so many leadership development efforts produce a short-lived high. The workshop teaches a new behaviour. The leader returns to the office. The body is the same. The internal language is the same. The mood is the same. Within two weeks, the new behaviour has been quietly absorbed back into the old Way of Being, and nothing has actually changed.
Behaviour change without Way of Being change will be shortlived. I believe I have done enough CliftonStrengths workshops to say that. And I say transparently that the workshop feedback I get is very consistent. The workshop feedback is fantastic. The check-in feedback a few months later says everything went back to normal.
Whatever insights learnt and applied from the workshop is sustainable for a quarter at most.
The Invisible Triad at Work
Let me make this concrete with two examples.
A senior manager says she keeps getting feedback that her team finds her intimidating. She does not understand it. She does not raise her voice. She does not scold. So we slow down. We examine her body. Her arms cross frequently. She leans to the front most of the time in our conversations as if she is ready to pounce. Her shoulders are pulled up. Her jaw is set. We examine her language. Her words tend to be corporate speak, and formal. She often begins with "actually" and "no" and uses a lot of “you”. We examine her mood. She is in a low-grade impatience most of the day.
She had no idea. Her team has been reading her body and mood long before they hear her words. None of this is what she is doing. It is who she is being.
Another example. A founder tells me he wants to build a more innovative culture. He runs ideation sessions. He sets up Slack channels. He buys whiteboards. Innovation does not come. So we look at his Way of Being in those rooms. His body disposition shows his energy is often channelled downwards, like roots going deep into the ground. His language is heavy with "but" and "the issue is" and often evaluative. His mood is suspicion dressed up as rigour. His team has learned, without anyone saying it, that ideas get torn down and punctured quickly.
Why Structure Matters: The Limit of Insight
Here is the part many coaching conversations skip past. I have done that often too.
In a good session, a client can have a moment of genuine seeing. “Oh! I have been intimidating my team. Oh! I have been shooting down every idea. Oh! I have been listening to respond rather than to understand.”
The lens cracks. Something opens.
But the seeing alone does not change anything yet. Because the structure that produced the old way of seeing is still intact. The body has not moved. The mood has not shifted. The internal language is still running its old loops. In a week, and sometime days, the structure quietly reasserts itself, and the insight from the previous coaching session feels like a memory.
This is why Way of Being work cannot stop at insight. The insight is the doorway. The work is the slow expansion of the structure itself - new bodily practices, new mood disciplines, new linguistic moves, until the structure can hold a different way of seeing as its new default.
This is also why ontological coaching takes time. I have stopped doing one-off or even a pair of coaching sessions. We can open a new way of seeing in a single conversation. We cannot install a new Way of Being in a single conversation. The structure is older than that and will not be hurried.
A Closing Invitation
The question is not, what should I do differently this week?
The deeper question, the one that takes time to even hear properly, is this. Who am I being at work, in my marriage, with my children, with myself? And is that who I want to be?
The answer rarely comes in one sitting. But the willingness to ask it, gently and honestly, is already the first crack in the structure.
In the next piece, I will explore what sits on top of Way of Being - the Observer we become because of it, and why shifting how we see is both the easiest and the hardest part of this work.
Continue Reading — The Ontological Coaching Series:
Interested in experiencing ontological coaching firsthand? To explore 1-1 ontological coaching, enquire here.
Written by Victor Seet
Activator • Communication • Strategic • Self-Assurance • Command