Realize your unique potential for leadership

At the Presence & Leadership Institute you will learn how to operate in the “flow” and become the leader you want to be.

  1. Develop authentic Leadership
    Be fully yourself at work ; learn to cultivate an open, stable and aligned presence to cut through obstacles while inspiring others.
  2. Manage stress more easily
    Become more resilient by changing your relationship to stress and learning how to deal more easily with pressure.
  3. Discover the power of embodiment
    Reconnect to your body and transform your daily work life – learn practices that will increase your self-awareness, help you grow and become more whole, more fully alive.

The Institute offers the richest mix of science based, highly effective embodiment principles and practices. We are connected to the best embodiment teachers in the US and Europe and maintain a close partnership with Wendy Palmer’s Leadership Embodiment International.

Develop authentic Leadership

Being fully yourself at work is not only a source of profound satisfaction but the key to achieving and sustaining powerful leadership. Operating from a state of being that is whole and aligned, in other word embodied is key to using your unique combination of talents in a lasting way. By his or her example, the authentic leader inspires others to behave likewise. But staying true to yourself, especially in difficult situations, requires training.

Leading others demands that we lead ourselves first. Self-leadership is about choosing to grow our potential beyond limiting conditioning and learning how to operate from our best self to achieve meaningful goals.

Authentic leadership is based on 3 leadership capabilities that we teach in all our courses

  • Inclusivity: the ability to make others feel included.
  • Centered Listening: the ability to listen to the whole without taking things personally
  • Speaking up: the ability to express your vision and what’s important with clarity and impact.

An embodied leader is immediately recognized by his/her open, stable, relaxed and aligned state. By aligning head, heart and body, we align thoughts, words and actions. Learning how to act from a centered state of being, infused with a clear meaningful intention, is the best way to create trust and act with power.

Manage stress with greater ease

Become stronger, more resilient ; learn to deal more easily with pressure and make a greater impact on others.

Obstacles are part of life, any relationship and any project. We can tell a leader by the way that he/she behaves in difficult situations.  At the Presence & Leadership Institute you will learn how to treat stress like a training partner, to know yourself and grow. Our training will help you cultivate openness, stability, relaxation and agility in relationships and actions.

Everyone has their own automatic reaction to stress. Some of us double our efforts in the face of difficulty, exhausting ourselves, some get aggressive, others block things out or get confused and some of us give up.  Most habitual behaviors are driven by a search for control, security and appreciation.

Before, however, becoming visible behaviour, our first reaction to stress is physical. Neuromuscular tensions release hormones that inhibit access to the neo-cortex and stop our brain from functioning at its best. Our automatic physical reaction to stress is designed to launch our conditioned behavioral patterns.

The quicker we notice our first physical reactions, the quicker we can shift our state of being and regain our ability to choose a more appropriate response to the situation. By learning to shift our state of being in real time, we gain access to self-confidence, big picture thinking, intuition, creativity and the capacity for inclusive interaction.

Presence & Leadership trainings are designed like a laboratory that may remind you of the Dojo in martial arts. Working in pairs, we simulate ordinary work situations through progressive exercises.  Everyone can examine their habits and limits before experimenting with wiser ways to respond to the situation.

The first stage is all about discovering your reactive patterns ; becoming aware of your unique signature stress pattern.

The second stage teaches you how to shift your state, in other words, how to recover and center yourself in real time. How to find your ‘flow’ in any situation.

Our programs teach you powerful ways to shift the quality of your presence so you can respond skillfully in the face of daily work challenges.  Our centering, shifting and realigning techniques involve posture, movement, muscle tone, relationship to space, intention and attention, in short, embodiment.

Discover the power of embodiment

Succeed while taking care of yourself

Our state of being (mental, emotional and physical) determines our ability to perceive and act wisely. It directly affects performance and impacts everyone around us – our collaborators, colleagues, clients and partners.

We cannot change our state of being withour mind alone. Saying to oneself “stay calm”, in a meeting is simply not enough to change the state of someone who has been triggered and is prey to the toxic hormonal mix that affects neuronal connections and shuts down access to entire areas of the neo-cortical brain.

“The way we sit and stand affects the way we think and speak”, says teacher Wendy Palmer.

Embodiment practices, starting with the way we sit, stand and move are the most direct way to change our state and access flow. Your body is the key to well-being, short and long term performance.

At the Presence & Leadership Institute you will learn how to use your body and its many resources more skillfully at work and in everyday life.

Until recently, the body has been the missing link in education and training, where the main focus has always been on acquiring intellectual knowledge or competences. Many of us use the body as a taxi that takes our brain to work, ignoring the central and constant role of embodiment. Cognitive science shows how the body shapes all our activities: perception, relationships, ability to speak and listen, abstract thinking and creativity, decision-making and commitment.

Intellectual knowledge about the body and the latest findings of neuroscience are insufficient to allow us to use our body differently. This is why we have designed a kind of laboratory to help participants learn about themselves and reprogram their automatic nervous system.

Learning comes from first discovering one’s automatic body reactions when facing ordinary triggering situations and secondly addressing the same situations from a different and wiser body state.

Integrating fully one’s body and embodying leadership requires practice. You will be able to choose, test and adopt the set of practices that work for you.

We view embodiment as the most simple and direct path to self-awareness, transformation and wise action.

This new multifaceted discipline studies the functioning and living experience of the individual as a mind-body unity.

  • Embodiment is the way each individual relates to the world and shows up. It’s the way we express who we are, through our character, behavior and posture.
  • Embodied Cognition is an emerging, trans-disciplinary academic field and one of the most advanced forms of cognitive science today. It studies the role of the body in human activity and particularly the way high level mental constructs (such as concepts and categories) and the performance of various cognitive tasks (such as reasoning or judgment) are shaped by aspects of the body.
  • Embodiment also describes an ensemble of somatic practices – i.e., practices that consciously use the body to help us know ourselves, grow as a person and respond skillfully to the call of each situation.
  • Embodiment techniques draw their inspiration from a large range of disciplines
    • Movement arts, sports, martial arts, theater, body therapies and body-psychotherapies
    • The ancient practices of mindfulness and holistic wisdom.

The Presence & Leadership Institute is a school of awareness and choice. You will learn to be aware of what you do and develop your ability to choose to operate from “flow” ; a state of performance and well-being.

You will learn to

  1. be mindful of your state of being, conscious of your feelings and aware of your reactive patterns ; in other words, learn to ‘be in your body’.
  2. shift your state in real time ; in other words, ‘use your body”.
  3. develop the qualities and state of being you want ; in other words, learn to ‘embody what counts for you’.

F.A.Q

No, all our exercises can be undertaken by anyone and all are appropriate in a professional context. Each participant works in complete freedom and is not asked to do any exercise they find too challenging, whether it be physical or psychological. In reality, this happens rarely and we have worked with all sorts of special needs and handicaps, (sight, mobility, etc.).

In fact, Presence & Leadership practices often generate significant physical benefits. Numerous participants testify to the reduction of headaches, chronic tension and, in particular, back aches.

Yes, our seminars are made for you. Ok, it may not be usual for you to think about posture, so the first hour might feel a bit unorthodox.  Many of us, though, come from an intellectual culture and are disconnected from our bodies. If you have developed intellectual faculties and a solid base in management, learning how to use your body gives you a development edge. Therein lies your potential for discovery and real progress. Every step taken towards operating directly from an aligned state of being will extremely stimulating.

The speed of learning varies according to each person, but it isn’t a race and everyone gains from the experience. We call it progressive learning.

Our curriculum has been perfected over 20 years and helps even those who say that they don’t feel much and live in their heads.

Mindfulness is one of the fundamentals of Presence & Leadership. Wendy Palmer is an internationally recognized mindfulness teacher and all our trainers have practiced meditation for years. We include meditation in the intensive seminars and retreats. Mindfulness helps us become aware of sensation in the body and is an excellent foundation for embodiment work.

The Presence & Leadership Institute focuses deliberately on work life and leadership. We fully take into account the specifics of work in organizations where people are faced with issues such as power, pressure, judgments, time constraints, etc. As a result, we provide tools that allow individuals to center in a very short time (e.g. 3 seconds) and you will practice changing your state under mild stress and in a large variety of potentially difficult situations (receiving feedback, expressing your point of view, facing opposition,…). 90% of the exercises are done with a partner.

In addition, the Institute gives a very large place to the body and our techniques go beyond body scan and observation of sensations. We use the body as a path toward self-discovery, self-regulation, self-unification; it is both a developmental path and a tool to influence our environment.

Mindfulness practitioners and trainers regularly tell us that the Presence & Leadership principles and techniques gave them unique insights and also helped them to live their aspirations more fully in their daily life.

You don’t, however, need any prior knowledge of mindfulness to undertake the Leadership Embodiment training cycle.

The day starts with a short presentation of the teacher’s personal background and the theory behind the Presence & Leadership approach. Then, we listen to the personal and professional development goals of each participant. From that point on, learning progresses rapidly and is exclusively experiential.

The first exercises are individual. Then, work is done is pairs and partners are changed constantly to vary the experience (some exercises involve up to 3 or 4 partners). After debriefing with your partner, those who wish can share discoveries and highlights with the group. We then move on to the next exercise. Throughout the training, everyone is encouraged to drop anything that doesn’t make sense for them and keep what they see as meaningful insights.

Each experience

  • correlates to ordinary, everyday situations and challenges
  • engages the entire person – head, heart, body and is undertaken either sitting or standing.
  • builds on the previous one, progressively raising the level of complexity without you being aware of it.
  • allows you to learn something about yourself, your conditioned habits and the correlation between your physical patterns, your psychological habits and your behavior.
  • teaches you how to transcend your limiting habits and how to operate from a state that is more open and powerful

In this case, you are most welcome. You will find yourself in an environment that recalls the dojo but in an everyday guise. At the Institute, learning is based on attention and repetition ; it’s about studying oneself and not about performance achievement.

Presence & Leadership will add new energy to your current practices and will help you develop you own embodiment as a professional.

One of the advantages of our seminars is that individuals from all levels, ages and backgrounds work and learn from one another.  Our courses deliver as many benefits to those who are teachers in martial arts (or theatre or meditation) as to those who take no physical exercise. Everyone learns from from where they are at and grows at their own edge… a little like martial arts.

Our bodies aren’t taxis that take us to work everyday and leave us there. We work permanently in and with our body whether we’re aware of it or not. Without the body, we have no perception ; we can’t make decisions, take action or even communicate. The body has a place at work by default.  It’s the center of all our lived experience, good and bad. It is the responsibility of each person to learn how to live in one’s body and care for it throughout the day.

Work today seems less physical than in the past as it relies less on muscular strength. Yet, the new type of pressure experienced in the corporate world and in our digital information society is extremely taxing on our bodies.The increased number of burn-outs is an equivocal sign of the price our bodies have to pay. While the individual is responsible for learning how to manage his/herself, it is the employer’s responsibility to create a healthy and balanced working environment. It’s up to them, therefore, to create conditions that have a positive influence on their employees’ state of being, knowing that this will impact both their health and their performance.

It is crucial that employers offer the training that gives employees the new tools of self-management needed for them to survive and thrive in today’s world. In parallel, it is also important that employers question and improve the organization, its culture and processes, to make it more livable for the individuals.

Do you have any questions?

→ You can email us here.