A New Week | March 31st, 2025
The Felt Experience of Choice -- How we experience choice is how we lead
Two weeks ago, my family's home was hit by a severe typhoon that uprooted our entire land. Nobody was hurt, but seven towering pine trees—each over 50 meters tall and several decades old—fell around us. Two struck our home. In the face of devastation, my husband, Ted, and I had a choice. We could spiral into fear and overwhelm, or we could surrender to our practices, regulate ourselves and each other, and be present for our kids. We chose the latter. Not because it was easy (not by any means), but because it was the only way forward. This moment, raw and real, crystallized something I have long understood about leadership: true choice is not just a cognitive decision—it is a felt experience in the body. And in times of upheaval, this ability to feel choice is what allows us to move through uncertainty, trauma, and pain with clarity and presence.
Choice as a Somatic Experience
We tend to think of decision-making as an intellectual process, but in reality, our nervous system is the first to respond. When we feel trapped, overwhelmed, or powerless, our bodies constrict, our breath shallows, and our options seem to disappear. This isn’t just perception—it’s literal physiology. The autonomic nervous system shifts into survival mode, narrowing our ability to sense, discern, and act with agency. Choice, then, is not just about external circumstances; it’s about our ability to remain present and regulated enough to perceive possibility, even in discomfort.
This is why some of us can hold steady in uncertainty while others collapse. The ability to stay with ambiguity isn’t just a function of resilience or intelligence—it’s a function of embodiment. It’s about staying connected to ourselves, tolerating discomfort, and creating enough internal space to respond rather than react.
The Relationship Between Choice and Leadership
Leadership is navigating the unknown. It is standing at the edge of uncertainty, making decisions in the absence of guarantees. The leaders I’ve been able to witness and work with, who create real impact are not the ones who try to eliminate ambiguity (and they also understand that they can’t) but the ones who can hold it, metabolize it, and still move forward.
To lead is to hold paradox: to acknowledge fear without becoming it, to sense danger and still find possibility, to experience doubt and still act with conviction. A leader who does not feel choice in their own body—who is bound by subconscious fear responses, trapped in urgency, or disconnected from their nervous system—will struggle to inspire, guide, or withstand the pressures of leadership.
The Consequences of a Body That Does Not Feel Choice
A body that does not feel choice defaults to old survival patterns—fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Leaders caught in these states don’t act from wisdom; they act from outdated coping mechanisms:
Fight: Over-controlling, micromanaging, forcing outcomes.
Flight: Avoiding hard decisions, over-intellectualizing, numbing out.
Freeze: Getting stuck in analysis paralysis, deferring responsibility, going silent.
Fawn: Over-pleasing, seeking validation, abandoning one’s own values to maintain approval.
When choice is not felt, leadership becomes rigid, defensive, and brittle. Leadership, then, is not just about strategy or decision-making frameworks—it’s about creating the internal conditions that allow choice to be felt and embodied. The more years I am serving in this role, the more often I am asking myself “How do I actually define leadership?” In this very instance, I’ve come to a place of defining it as: “The (nervous system) capacity to remain relatively (depending on the degree of complexity) present, attuned, and responsive in the face of complexity, while also being aware enough when to step away for a moment or entirely and hand the moment, situation, legacy over to someone else.”
Cultivating the Felt Sense of Choice
Choice and creativity are deeply intertwined. When the nervous system is dysregulated, the mind contracts, seeing only the most immediate threats. But when regulation is restored, possibility emerges. Creativity—whether in problem-solving, visioning, or innovation—requires an internal state of spaciousness. Leaders who cultivate the felt sense of choice unlock new levels of creativity, allowing them to meet challenges with adaptability, originality, and insight.
If choice is a somatic experience, it must be cultivated somatically. Leaders who want to expand their capacity to hold complexity must begin with their own bodies. Practices that deepen interoception (the ability to sense internal bodily states), build nervous system regulation, and repattern old survival responses are essential. These include:
Breathwork and nervous system regulation to expand the capacity to stay present in discomfort.
Somatic inquiry and movement to disrupt habitual tension patterns and cultivate internal spaciousness. Try to remember past situations in which you were not able to create that space and feel back into it. What would it feel like to stay with the discomfort without trying to change it?
Relational work and attunement to strengthen the ability to stay connected while navigating complexity. I often lead group exercises in my women’s leadership groups to practice what it means to witness someone else in their sadness or ecstatic joy without formulating any opinion but feeling into what it does to you only. Very, very powerful. Try it out. Conscious witnessing and really seeing a person is a practice that will never get old, and one we will never perfect… but always get better at.
Reflective practice to track and name embodied responses to stress and uncertainty. To begin this from a very basic level, try to track your “charge“ at the beginning and at the end of a big meeting for instance. Can you name what you are sensing?
True leadership (or being human in that sense) is not about having the right answers. It is about standing in the unknown without losing access to oneself. It is about being able to access choice even in the presence of uncertainty, pain, or cluelessness.
Creativity flourishes - and, at its minimum, is more accessible - in the presence of choice. When we are stuck in reactivity, we default to predictable, habitual responses. But we they feel choice in our bodies, we open up to fresh perspectives, new solutions, and a more expansive way of leading.
While building this business ( and I witness it from many of my founder and exec clients in particular), the ability to feel choice is not a luxury or nice-to-have —it is a leadership imperative. When we do not feel choice, we become rigid, reactive, and incapable of leading with foresight and/or vision. When we cultivate the internal space to feel choice, we create the conditions for wisdom, adaptability, and courage to unfold.
Leadership is not about certainty—it is about attunement to ourselves and our impact on others. Attunement — in my humble opinion — is what allows choice to be felt, made, and lived.
ANNOUNCEMENT: I will be traveling across Europe for the month of April and May. So, the newsletters may come in more sporadic or there will be more given great amounts of inspiration. We will see how it unfolds. :)
Before I leave you with this essay:
We are starting the application process for another women’s leadership group starting in June 2025.
If you are:
interested in joining 9 other women for 6 months
would love to bring this into your venture fund (gender agnostic if preferred)
or into your organization (also gender agnostic if preferred),
please read more about our program here and schedule a call to explore fit.
Here are a few essays that talk about the importance of this peer-to-peer leadership environment:
October 2024 (includes the copy of our program)
October 2023 (includes insights into our onboarding process)
April 2024 Forbes Article
We are excited to bring another group of women and expand this offering into organizations and funds.
All the love, all the power,
Franzi