Executive Coaching · Melbourne & Online Worldwide

Somatic executive coaching for leaders under pressure

Your title walks into the room, and so does your nervous system. The team responds to your state before they respond to your strategy.

You can have the right plan and a clean deck, with your talking points lined up. If you walk in carrying urgency, the room catches it. Go flat and shut down instead, and the room catches that too. Senior people read state faster than content, and they make decisions about you based on what they read.

Most leaders try to manage this with willpower. They compose themselves at the door, control their tone, hold it together through the meeting, and pay for it afterwards. Composure of that kind has a ceiling, because the body underneath is still sprinting.

What pressure does to a leader's system

A nervous system under chronic load defaults to survival responses that were never designed for boardrooms. You'll recognise them by their workplace costumes.

• An email lands from a particular name and your heart rate is up before you've opened it
• Someone pushes back hard in a meeting and your mind goes blank, with the answer arriving twenty minutes later in the hallway
• You hear bad news and go straight to fixing, before anyone in the room feels heard
• Your recovery has stopped working: the weekend ends and you're still tired
• You're short with people you respect, and you watch yourself doing it

Each of these is a body answering a present situation as though it were an older threat. The reaction fires faster than thought, which is why understanding it has never been enough to change it. You can be brilliant at your job and still be run by these responses, because they operate below the level where intelligence works.

Regulation is a leadership capacity

The leaders people trust in a crisis are the most settled ones in the room. A regulated nervous system lets you hear bad news without flinching and hold conflict without escalating. Your decisions come from a clear head while the pressure is still on. Teams calibrate to their leader's state, so your regulation becomes the ceiling for the psychological safety of everyone who reports to you.

Grinding and grit look similar from the outside and run on different physiology. Grinding happens when a system operates on fumes, always on and quietly proud of how tired it is. Grit has recovery built into it. It can push hard because it also knows how to come back down afterwards. Leaders burn out when their systems have been in emergency mode too long, with no real chance to settle, and weakness has nothing to do with it.

What somatic executive coaching actually is

This work combines conventional executive coaching with direct training of the nervous system. The coaching layer covers what you'd expect from a senior engagement: goals, stakeholders, feedback, difficult conversations and career-defining decisions. The somatic layer works underneath it, using methods drawn 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. Embodiment arrives around 3,000. Most of the change happens between our conversations, in the practising.

Insight still matters here. It gets a partner.

The territories we work in

• Executive presence. Gravitas that's felt without being performed. Presence is what a settled system looks like from the outside, and it can be developed.
• Leading under pressure. High-stakes rooms where conflict and crisis are live. We train the response itself.
• Difficult conversations. Saying the hard thing without escalating or going quiet, and holding your ground without hardening.
• The intention and impact gap. When 360 feedback keeps surprising you, your system is usually showing up before you've said a word.
• Burnout and recovery. Rebuilding the capacity to switch off and perform without running on threat.
• Transitions. Bigger scope, new markets, relocation, separation. The moments when the old operating system stops being enough.

Who this suits

This work fits senior leaders whose performance is intact and whose cost of maintaining it keeps rising. Typical clients have already done leadership development, often quite a lot of it, and can describe their patterns fluently. Many arrive after a specific moment: a 360 that stung, a blow-up they didn't see coming, a health signal, or the quiet recognition that the 5am wake-ups with a racing mind have become 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.

How engagements run

Everything starts with a free 30-minute chemistry call, because fit decides whether this works. Engagements typically run three to six months of fortnightly sessions with daily practices between them, reviewed honestly at the midpoint. Sessions run online worldwide, with in-person available in Melbourne. Leaders in Singapore and across Asia-Pacific can find region-specific detail on the Singapore and APAC page, and organisation-sponsored engagements with three-way contracting are described there too. If it's the therapy side of the practice you're weighing up, the equivalent guide covers how many sessions the somatic work takes.

I'm an ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and a certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. I also hold the Executive Master in Consulting and Coaching for Change from INSEAD. I serve on the transformation faculty of Mobius Executive Leadership and coach executive presence and leadership communications with Stand & Deliver. Before any of that, I spent 15 years inside the corporate world, so I know the rooms you're in from the inside. More on the executive coaching practice and my background.

Common questions

Is this therapy?

No. The methods are body-based and trauma-informed, and the frame is professional development: how you operate and lead. Where therapy would serve you better, I'll say so and help you find it. If you're looking for the therapeutic work itself, that lives at somatic therapy.

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 awareness of your own body, and a screen carries that well. I coach leaders across Australia, Asia-Pacific and internationally via video, and online sessions are how most engagements run.

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

Previous coaching probably gave you insight and accountability, and they served you. This adds the layer those can't reach: the physiological response that fires before thinking starts. If you know your pattern and still watch it run, that layer is where the pattern 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