I was recently referred to Dr. Melissa Peet's work on embodied questions, which finally helped me put into words something I’ve been practicing in leadership and coaching conversations for a while.
Consider this: When you ask your team "What makes a great team?" you'll likely get a list of attributes that sound right, lofty. But also conceptual and theoretical.
But ask them "Tell me about the best team you've ever worked with," and suddenly the energy shifts.
Stories emerge. Real experiences surface. People come alive.
Traditional leadership often relies on abstract questions that prompt analytical responses. It’s often because we want to keep things professional and objective, and avoid subjective interpretations or (messy) personal feelings.
We ask about best practices, success factors, and key performance indicators. While these have their place, they often miss the complexities of lived experience – the difficult and hard-won terrain where real insights live.
How many times have you heard someone say to you “this is business, not personal”?
Well, business is 100% personal. Until all markets and corporations are run by AI algorithms, business is still run by humans. Embodied beings, who don’t think linearly, and don’t operate like computers or machines.
And yet, our default approach to organizational change is usually with stepwise plans, frameworks and processes. We believe that if the change makes sense, if people understand it “rationally”, they will adopt it. Then we spend hours talking about concepts, discussing numbers, strategies and models, while the real wisdom and energy — stored in people's actual experiences — all too often remains untapped.
Many years ago, when I was building a coaching team, I needed to attract the right kind of people to do the work. But no-one in the company had had the opportunity to do that type of work yet, and I didn’t have the time or the budget to hire outside. I needed to focus on potential, on mindset, so that they could learn to do the work- quickly. I needed to see their ways of thinking, and their values in action. So, instead of a typical process of asking candidates standard behavioral interview questions about their approach to coaching and facilitation, we created what I called a Selection Party. We hosted an internal event that was fun, and more informal. We got a chance to see how these candidates worked with real people, how they showed up with clients and peers.
The energy was completely different from a traditional interview, and we were able to see candidates as real people, not just resumes. In fact, we never talked about their resumes. Armed with our observations, and a short cycle of rapid conversations with candidates to fill in the blanks, we selected our future team members in just 24 hours, something that usually took weeks or months. All of this culminating in a happy hour.
This embodied approach revealed far more (and faster) than conventional questions ever could. It showed us not just what people knew, but who they were, and how they showed up in the world, in unexpected situations, beyond the curated responses and stories they had prepared to say what they thought we wanted to hear.
How to Make Your Conversations More Embodied
We want to ask better questions as leaders. We want to get to the heart of the matter and dig deep with the teams we’re solving hard problems alongside. So here's how to shift from abstract to embodied conversations:
Instead of: "What qualities make a good leader?"Ask: "Tell me about a leader who changed your life. What did they do?"
Instead of: "How do you handle conflict?"Ask: "Tell me about the last time you felt not seen or misunderstood??"
Instead of: "What's your leadership philosophy?"Ask: "Take me back to a time when you felt most alive"
Instead of: "What's not working well with this change?"Ask: "What was the lowest point for you this week?"
Why does this matter? When we ask embodied questions:
People respond from experience rather than theory
Answers have more detail and energy
We get communication, not just information
Engagement increases naturally
Authentic insights emerge more readily
The conversation becomes more collaborative and exploratory, rather than evaluative or performative
This approach is all about actively noticing, and creating spaces where people can go beyond knowledge, and can access a deeper knowing. It’s like the difference between seeing photos of a vacation and actually going on a vacation.
When we invite people to connect with their real, textural, lived experiences, we tap into a different kind of wisdom – the difference between knowing something intellectually and understanding, feeling it in your bones.
A Practice to Try
Next time you're leading a team discussion or one-on-one conversation, experiment with this:
Start with actual experiences instead of abstractions
Listen for energy in responses - where do people light up?
Follow up on specific details rather than generalizations
Create space for stories to unfold
Notice when conversations shift from intellectual to experiential, and vice versa, and what happens to the level of engagement and insight
One thing organizations miss out on over and over is using stories to realize transformation. More often than not there are concepts, frameworks, reflections and discussions about what those concepts mean, goals expressed in metrics on profitability. What if companies produced films or TV shows about the change they aspired to, with characters people cared about going through challenges together, with emotions front and center, hurdles and victories? Or engaged artists to write songs, so that music and poetry translated the vision into something our hearts and bodies want to move to. Stories and music are powerful mechanisms for communication because they capture our whole selves, including the non-verbal parts of ourselves that so powerfully move us to pursue our dreams.
I believe that organizations need to hire more artists. There is a lack of soul, of rhythm, of heartfelt desire in most corporations. Those are the things we need the most for real change to happen. And the things we neglect when our focus is on competing for resources and extracting a profit.
What would change in your organization if you started having more embodied conversations? How might your team meetings transform if you moved from abstract discussions to shared experiences? How can we set the right goals for the organization if we cannot understand viscerally, with our bodies, what it is like to be a customer, beyond the focus group data or the metrics our country affiliates report back to HQ?
The goal isn't to eliminate analytical thinking or fall into an overly emotional zone – it's to access the vital wisdom from flesh-and-bones, lived experience. When we balance both, we create richer conversations and deeper insights.
Try it this week: Instead of asking "How can we improve our team's collaboration?", ask "Tell me about a time when our team worked together brilliantly. What were we doing? Saying? Feeling? " Notice what changes in the quality of response and engagement.
The answers you need might not be in the theory – they're often buried in the stories and experiences your people carry with them every day.
(Big thanks to Maryann Bell who pointed me to Melissa Peet’s excellent work! And to Kai Stowers who introduced me to Maryann. Two beautiful, embodied humans. The world is a generous web of connection.)
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