Body = Brain

Body = Brain ®

Six months to “practical fluency”

Your work offers a tremendous gift: the opportunity to help people make profound positive change in their lives. When it goes well, it’s magical. You see that recognition in your client’s eyes — that soul satisfying, deep inner knowing. It’s what lasting learning looks like. Valuable change takes place. Life tangibly improves.

But, um…it doesn’t always go that way, right?

It happens. Clients get stuck. It frustrates them, and frustrates you even more. Especially when they resist — even though you know (and so do they) that the methods you’re offering are incredibly powerful.

Do you ever ask yourself why it’s challenging? Or wonder what’s getting in the way? You see possibilities they’re unable to grasp for themselves. How do you bridge the gap?

You’re good at what you do and you long to make a bigger difference. You know you can. How do you help more people realize the change they desperately want? Do you ever wonder what’s missing?

The missing piece is this: no matter what modality you’ve trained in, the underlying principles can seem hidden or mysterious. You practice what you’ve been taught. But, until you embody the learning, and make it yours, it’s hard to consistently reproduce the extraordinary transformational experiences you’ve been trained to create.

When you learn the principles that link body, brain, and behavior – you develop a deeper, in-your-bones understanding so it all becomes clear in a new way:

• You own the knowledge and the practice
• You gain confidence
• You develop a simple, sensible way to explain what you can do for your clients
• Clients get swiftly on board
• You become bolder in your work
• Everyone gets better results

Body = Brain is the course where you’ll learn how to put these powerful new insights into a simple, useable framework. Connect the dots between embodied practice and social and emotional intelligence… and help your clients achieve remarkable breakthroughs in their lives and in their work.

You’ll develop hands-on tools you’ll use to:

• Consistently help your clients achieve their best results
• Boost your confidence and your competence
• Make even the most challenging clients easier and more fun to work with (that alone…..!)

Sharpening your own saw and staying current on the fast and furious pace of research in applied neurobiology allows you to step even more boldly into what is yours to do. It grows your impact and enhances your reputation… all in service to building your practice while helping people transform their lives.

How Body = Brain Was Born

I’m Dr. Amanda Blake, your host and “Lead Learner” in our Virtual Salon. Full disclosure: I actually originally created this course for myself. After having my life turned upside down in the most positive of all possible ways by an in-depth adventure in embodied learning, I wanted to understand what the heck had happened.

After an exhaustive search I couldn’t find a single program that offered the learning I wanted at the nexus of science, somatic learning, and leadership. It was in my quest for that learning that this course was born.

Part 2: Embody Social + Emotional Intelligence

Developing new social and emotional skills relies on the same non-cognitive, body-oriented, biological process we explore in Part 1.

Part 2 becomes a rich learning laboratory where you can experiment and apply simple neurobiological principles and powerful experiential practices that create lasting breakthroughs.

Month 4: Take Purposeful Action

Self awareness is the foundation of social and emotional intelligence. Did you know there are two kinds of self awareness? Embodied self awareness happens along different neural pathways than conceptual self awareness. Research shows it heavily impacts decision making, intuition, and commitment.

If your work touches on transitions, strategic direction, or making tough choices, here’s where you’ll develop a whole new set of tools to support your clients in taking purposeful action.

Month 5: Strengthen Personal Qualities

The qualities you embody have a huge impact on your success and satisfaction in life. Do you – or your clients – embody the capacity for resilience, courageous action, grace under pressure, and the ability to take a strong and principled stand?

This month we’ll explore how emotional regulation actually happens, and how you can leverage that understanding to build genuine resilience.

Month 6: Build Interpersonal Dexterity

These are essential skills for leaders, teams, communities, and families:

• Clear communication
• Collaborating effectively with others
• Resolving conflict harmoniously
• Using disagreement to generate better results

These are learned skills, and sometimes our lessons have been spotty. Discover what it takes to embody the direct, grounded, credible, and trustworthy communication that the most inspiring among us share.

Celebrating You

We complete the course with an overview of all of the big-picture ideas, from start to finish. Invariably, people are shocked by how much they have learned in six short months, how much their self-compassion and their understanding of others has expanded, and how deeply touched and inspired they are. I love every single one of our sessions, but this one always brings tears to my eyes!

Why I Do This Work

A while back, I read an article about a yoga teacher who was struggling to bring her work to wounded war veterans. She knew what a gift yoga could be to returning soldiers, and yet the Veterans Administration was proving a hard sell.

The article brought tears to my eyes. And it made me long for a day when what seems so obvious to me becomes obvious in the farthest corners of the world: embodied learning is one of the most transformative, most valuable, most healing forces on the planet.

This course is for that yoga teacher.

But more importantly, it’s for all the veterans that I trust she will one day reach.

And, it’s for you – and for all of the people you work with everyday – who will be profoundly impacted by the power of embodied learning. Because when practitioners are empowered to bring this cutting-edge approach into their own work, meaningful change just naturally emerges.

There’s another reason I created this course. Before it was published, my colleagues were insistently asking for information about my book, Your Body Is Your Brain. I couldn’t seem to write fast enough to satisfy their eager curiosity, so I turned to talking to them by phone instead. And thus, Body = Brain was born. It’s been both a delight and a geeky obsession to build it for them and for you.

Who I am and How I Got Here

(the quick take)

My favorite book when I was two and a half years old was a detailed photographic essay of pregnancy and childbirth called A Child Is Born. (You might rightly guess that my mom was pregnant with my brother at the time.)

Thus began my fascination with the human body, and so far it hasn’t let up. That fascination led to a degree in Human Biology from Stanford University, some pretty cool experiences competing for the US as a synchronized swimmer, and my own journey of embodied learning, which took me farther along the path of personal development than any of my previous accomplishments combined.

Pile on top of that years of intensive study in somatic leadership development and psychobiological science, and you could say that I know the body inside and out.

Plus, as a certified Master Somatic Coach with over two decades of yoga practice under my belt – and now as a researcher studying the role of the body in leadership development – I have a fervent desire to see the power and value of embodiment spread more widely in our society.

I have witnessed time and again that as people become more deeply embodied, they also become kinder to themselves and others, more committed to what matters to them, and better equipped to take action that serves the world. My intent is for this course to support the leaders of this sorely needed transformation with the scientific grounding they need to reach more people and make a bigger impact.