Executive coaching · Melbourne & online worldwide

Somatic executive coaching for leaders under pressure

When you walk into a meeting, people pick up your state before they take in a word of your plan.

A good plan and a clean deck won't save a meeting if you walk in wound up. People catch urgency quickly, and they catch flatness just as fast. Senior people tend to read your state before they follow your content, and they form their view of you from it.

Most leaders deal with this through willpower. They steady themselves at the door and watch their tone through the meeting, then pay for it on the drive home. That kind of composure has a limit, because the body underneath is still running hot.

What chronic pressure does to the body

After months of heavy load, the body falls back on survival responses that were never meant for boardrooms. They turn up looking like ordinary workplace behaviour.

Say an email lands from a particular name and your heart rate climbs before you've opened it. Or someone pushes back hard in a meeting, your mind goes blank, and the answer arrives twenty minutes later in the corridor. Some leaders jump straight to fixing when they hear bad news, so nobody in the room feels heard. Others reach Monday still tired from a weekend that was supposed to recover them, or catch themselves being short with people they respect.

In each case the body is treating a present situation as an older threat. It reacts faster than you can think, which is why understanding the pattern rarely changes it. Plenty of brilliant people get run by these responses, because they operate below the level where intelligence does its work.

Why settled leaders get trusted in a crisis

In a crisis, people trust the most settled person in the room. When your body has learned to settle, you can hear bad news without flinching and stay in a conflict without letting it escalate, and your decisions still come from a clear head with the pressure on. Teams take their cues from the leader, so how settled you are sets how safe everyone reporting to you feels about speaking up.

Grinding and grit look alike from the outside. A grinder is running on fumes, always on and quietly proud of how tired they are. Grit has recovery built in, so it can push hard because it knows how to come back down afterwards. Burnout comes from being in emergency mode for too long without a real chance to settle.

What the work looks like

This work pairs conventional executive coaching with direct training of the nervous system. The coaching side covers the usual ground for a senior engagement, such as stakeholders, 360 feedback and the big career decisions. Underneath that, I use methods from Somatic Experiencing and Internal Family Systems to change how your body responds under load.

In a session, that might mean slowing down the moment your mind went blank and finding what happened in your body a half-second earlier. Between sessions, it means short daily practices that train a different response. Repetition does the building. Roughly 30 repetitions creates familiarity and 300 creates muscle memory, with embodiment arriving around 3,000. Most of the change happens between our conversations, in the practising.

Insight still matters in our sessions, and the body gets as much airtime as the thinking.

Where we spend our time

• Executive presence. Gravitas comes across when your body is settled, and it can be built.
• Leading under pressure. Rooms where the stakes are high and conflict is live, with the work focused on your response in the moment.
• Difficult conversations. Saying the hard thing when your instinct is to go quiet or to escalate, and holding your position when someone leans on you.
• The intention and impact gap. When 360 feedback keeps surprising you, it's often because people reacted to your state before you'd said a word.
• Burnout and recovery. Learning to switch off properly, and to perform without running on alarm.
• Transitions. A bigger scope, a new market, a relocation or a separation. These are the points where the old way of operating stops being enough.

Who tends to come

This suits senior leaders whose performance is intact but whose cost of maintaining it keeps climbing. Most have done a lot of leadership development already and can describe their patterns fluently. Many turn up after something specific, like a 360 that stung or a blow-up they didn't see coming, and some because they've noticed that waking at 5am with a racing mind has become their normal.

I've coached leaders at organisations including McKinsey & Company, Google, BHP, Rio Tinto, Roche, Deloitte, Capgemini, Oliver Wyman, Caterpillar, Becton Dickinson and East-West Seed.

Format and length

Everything starts with a free 45-minute chemistry call, because fit decides whether this works. An engagement usually runs three to six months, with fortnightly sessions, daily practices in between and an honest review at the midpoint. Sessions are online worldwide, and I also see people in person in Melbourne. Leaders in Singapore and across Asia-Pacific will find region-specific detail on the Singapore and APAC page, including how organisation-sponsored engagements with three-way contracting work. If you're weighing up the therapy side of the practice instead, this guide covers how many sessions the somatic work takes.

I'm an ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and a certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. I'm also certified as an Integral Coach through New Ventures West and trained in Internal Family Systems, and I hold the Executive Master in Change from INSEAD. I serve on the transformation faculty of Mobius Executive Leadership and coach executive presence and leadership communications with Stand & Deliver. I've also trained at Harvard Kennedy School and the Kansas Leadership Center, and with the World Institute for Action Learning. Before any of that, I spent 15 years as a technology consultant, so I know the rooms you work in. You can read more about the executive coaching practice and my background.

Questions people ask first

Is this therapy?

No. The methods are body-based and trauma-informed, but the focus is how you operate and lead. If therapy would serve you better, I'll tell you and help you find someone. The therapeutic side of my work is described on the somatic therapy page.

Will I have to talk about my childhood?

Only if you choose to. We start with present situations, like the meeting or the conversation you keep postponing. History enters when it's useful, at your pace.

Does this work online?

Yes. The work happens in your own awareness of your body, and a screen carries that well. Most of my engagements run on video, with leaders in Australia and across Asia-Pacific, and some further afield.

How is this different from the executive coaching I've already done?

Earlier coaching probably gave you insight and accountability, and both were useful. This works on what they can't reach, the body's response that fires before you've started thinking. If you know your pattern and still watch it run, that response is usually where it lives.

What does it cost?

Fees depend on the engagement structure, and we discuss them openly in the chemistry call once we both know what the work would involve.

Rudi Doku · Executive Coach (ICF PCC) · Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) · Melbourne, Australia · Coaching online worldwide