“Behind.”
That was the word a client gave me when I asked how he was feeling at the beginning of our session.
He had more work than time, a growing list of things demanding his attention, and that familiar pressure to get everything done.
And I could relate.
I’d just come from a slightly chaotic morning myself. Guests staying at our yurts had lost their hot water, I was running between things, and we’d started our session a few minutes late.
Two humans arriving with rather full heads.
So before we got into anything, I invited us to breathe.
To feel our feet on the ground, notice the chair supporting us, and give ourselves permission to be exactly where we were.
No performance required.
When I asked where he felt the pressure, he pointed to his stomach. Even taking a full breath felt difficult.
But as we stayed with it, something began to change.
He described each breath as slowly winning back territory. Creating space where, just moments earlier, everything had felt restricted.
I asked what he was winning that territory back from.
After a little reflection, he recognised it.
The need to perform.
And there it was.
Before we’d even begun exploring the decisions he was struggling with in his work, we’d already uncovered something about the pressure he was carrying.
I’ve been sitting with that moment since.
Because I wonder how many of us are walking around with that same invisible weight, particularly those of us whose minds never seem to stop.
When your greatest gift becomes your biggest obstacle
My client has an incredibly creative and analytical mind.
He can see possibilities from multiple perspectives, connect ideas and think through situations in extraordinary detail.
But when it comes to making decisions for himself, that same ability can leave him completely paralysed.
He explained that he’s often afraid of making the wrong choice. Not knowing how things will turn out. Wondering whether he’ll regret the decision later.
So he keeps thinking.
Researching, weighing up options, imagining what might happen.
Trying to arrive at certainty before committing.
And when the thinking becomes too much?
His body goes numb.
I recognise shades of this in many of the founders and leaders I support, particularly those navigating ADHD, autism and other forms of neurodivergence.
People with wonderfully creative, curious and sometimes relentlessly analytical minds. Minds that can spot opportunities others overlook but can also become overwhelmed by the sheer number of possibilities.
Of course, neurodivergence looks different for everyone.
But something I keep noticing in my work is how many people have spent years trying to make their minds operate according to expectations that don’t necessarily suit them.
And somewhere along the way, they’ve stopped trusting themselves.
Which brings me to something I find fascinating about how we make decisions.
Our minds are largely working with information gathered from the past.
I call it our legacy data.
The times we succeeded, failed, felt rejected or were made to feel that something about us needed fixing.
The expectations we absorbed from parents, teachers, employers and the wider world.
The moments we learned that getting something wrong wasn’t safe, or that disappointing someone meant risking their approval.
All of this can influence how we interpret what’s happening today.
Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with learning from experience. It’s essential.
But when our past becomes the main reference point for our future, we can unknowingly narrow our choices to whatever feels familiar.
And familiar doesn’t necessarily mean right for us.
You might think you’re making a perfectly logical business decision, when underneath it sits an old fear of being judged.
Or a belief that you aren’t capable of following through.
Or a need to prove that you’re doing enough.
That’s why I increasingly find myself asking clients not just what they’re thinking about a decision, but what happens in their body when they consider it.
Because sometimes there’s an entirely different conversation happening beneath the one we’re having in our heads.
What happens when we stop asking the mind to do everything?
One of the frameworks I bring into my somatic coaching is Human Design.
I don’t see it as an absolute truth or something that should define a person. It’s a framework for self-exploration, not a scientific assessment of neurodivergence.
But I find it a fascinating map for becoming curious about how we naturally operate.
Two elements are particularly useful to explore: your Type and your Authority.
Your Type offers a perspective on how you interact with the world, while your Authority suggests a process for making decisions that you can experiment with in your own life.
My client, for example, is what Human Design calls a Generator with Sacral Authority.
Within that framework, the invitation is to notice his immediate gut response to something, rather than asking his mind to endlessly construct the perfect answer.
So that’s what we practised.
I began asking him simple yes-or-no questions. Some ordinary, others connected to his creative work.
And rather than thinking his way towards an answer, I invited him to notice what came up first.
At one point, something interesting happened.
His immediate response was a no.
But almost straight away, his mind wanted to change it to a yes.
Why?
Guilt.
He felt he should want to do something because of what it might mean to someone close to him.
And in that tiny moment, he could actually distinguish between what he wanted and what he thought he ought to want.
We carried on.
When we explored a real decision about working on his portfolio, there was no immediate response at all.
His mind wanted to jump in and figure out what his schedule might look like several weeks from now.
But this time he noticed it happening.
He didn’t need to force an answer.
He could leave the question open.
I loved watching that realisation land.
Because he’d spent so much of his life believing that if he just thought hard enough, researched enough or considered enough possibilities, he’d eventually reach the correct decision.
And now he was experimenting with something different.
Not abandoning his intelligence or ignoring the practical realities of his work.
But allowing his mind to inform his choices without demanding that it control every single one of them.
He eventually put it beautifully himself.
Mind for research. Gut for the decision.
For him, that distinction felt liberating.
And perhaps the most important part was that he’d experienced it, rather than simply hearing me explain it.
There’s a world of difference between understanding something intellectually and beginning to recognise it in your own body.
The voice that wasn’t his
Towards the end of our session, the conversation went somewhere deeper.
My client reflected on something we’d uncovered in our earlier work together.
An old voice telling him that he couldn’t really change.
A belief he’d carried from childhood.
For years, whenever he tried to change something in his life, that familiar doubt would appear.
Would it last? Would he really follow through this time?
And here’s what I found so moving.
The voice hadn’t disappeared.
He could still hear it.
But he now recognised that it was something he’d learned to believe, rather than an unquestionable truth about who he was.
And that had changed his relationship with it.
He no longer felt compelled to follow it.
He was beginning to discover that change didn’t have to be the enormous struggle he’d imagined.
He could simply show up, make a different choice and learn from what happened.
I think about how much energy we can spend trying to silence these old voices.
Trying to overcome fear, eliminate self-doubt or become someone more confident, more disciplined, more decisive.
When perhaps the work isn’t always about getting rid of those parts of ourselves.
Perhaps it’s about recognising them, understanding where they came from, and realising that they don’t have to run our lives.
This is where the somatic work becomes so meaningful for me.
Because these patterns aren’t always experienced as thoughts.
Sometimes they’re the heaviness in your shoulders.
The tightness in your chest when you’re about to make an important decision.
The exhaustion after another day spent second-guessing yourself.
Not every physical sensation points to an emotional pattern, of course. Anxiety, fatigue and persistent physical symptoms have many causes and deserve appropriate support.
But becoming curious about how our experiences affect our bodies can open a different kind of conversation.
One that doesn’t begin with asking how to fix ourselves.
But with understanding what we’ve been carrying.
And whether we still need to carry it in the same way.
At the end of our session, I asked my client for one word to describe where he was.
He said:
“Enthusiasm.”
There was something beautiful about that.
He’d arrived feeling behind, pressured and struggling to take a full breath.
Ninety minutes later, he was curious and energised by what he was discovering about himself.
We hadn’t solved every problem in his life.
And there was still plenty of work ahead of us.
But he’d begun experiencing what it felt like to relate to his mind, his body and his decisions differently.
That’s the part that stays with me.
Because I see so many intelligent, sensitive and creative people quietly accepting exhaustion, anxiety and that constant sense of being behind as the price of building a successful life.
Especially those who’ve spent years trying to fit themselves into ways of working and living that never felt particularly natural.
And I wonder what might become possible if we stopped asking how to make ourselves perform better for just a moment.
And started asking how we actually work.
What supports our energy?
What helps us feel grounded enough to make a choice?
Which of the stories influencing our decisions are genuinely ours, and which did we pick up along the way?
Human Design is one tool I use to explore these questions. Somatic work helps us investigate how those patterns show up in our lived experience.
But underneath both is something much simpler.
Learning to trust ourselves again.
Not blindly. Not without thought, responsibility or consideration for others.
But enough to recognise that our past doesn’t have to determine every decision we make about our future.
So if your mind can see a hundred possible ways forward, but choosing one leaves you exhausted, perhaps there’s something worth exploring beyond another productivity strategy.
And maybe the question isn’t whether you can think your way to the right answer.
Maybe it’s whether you feel safe enough to trust yourself when the answer begins to appear.
I’d love to leave you with this:
How much of your life today is being shaped by who you genuinely are, and how much by who you once learned you needed to be?
With love from the mountains of Portugal,
Dan
The Freedom Path