What Is Somatic Coaching? (And Why It Keeps Finding Women Who've Already Tried Everything Else)
Maybe you already know your patterns.
Maybe you've journaled about them. Tried to reframe them. Maybe at some point you've had therapy, done the course, read the book - probably more than one book. Perhaps you can even name the inner critic. And the socials you've scrolled at some point searching for answers have probably told you exactly where it came from.
And still - in the big meetings, the hard conversations, the pitch you've been preparing for all week - something tightens. Your heart starts racing, your tummy drops, and the version of you who was ready to speak goes quiet somewhere behind your ribs. You watch yourself hand the floor back to someone less right who is more certain. And on the drive home you're already running through everything you should have said.
If any of that sounds familiar, somatic coaching is probably what you've been circling without having a name for it. Here's the plain-language version - no jargon, no mysticism. What it actually is, why it works, and what a session genuinely feels like from the inside.
What is somatic coaching?
Somatic coaching is a body-first approach to change. It works with the nervous system and the body's felt sense - not just thoughts - to shift patterns that mindset work alone can't reach. Used well, it helps people access confidence, clarity and decisiveness when it matters, especially under pressure.
The word somatic just means of the body. That's the whole mystery, demystified.
A somatic coach works with you to notice what your body is doing as you move through your life - the tightening across your chest before a hard conversation, the hollow pit of anxiety before you walk into that particular room, the dread in your stomach that causes you to overprepare.
Rather than coaching you around those responses, the work happens at that layer. In the body. Where the pattern actually lives. Most coaching approaches start with thoughts, goals, or behaviours - addressing the mind first and trusting the body will follow. Somatic coaching reverses that: regulate the nervous system first, and then watch what becomes available in your thinking and your choices.
Why it works where mindset work alone doesn't
Here's what most coaching content won't say plainly: insight isn't change.
You can understand a pattern completely - think you know where it came from, possibly know why it runs - and still repeat it. You can know the theory behind your own holding-back and still watch yourself hold back in the next meeting. This isn't weakness and it isn't insufficient effort. It's just how the body works.
Under pressure, your nervous system scans for threat faster than your thinking brain can keep up. If it reads the stakes as dangerous - and for a lot of women working in male-dominated environments, it does, because those rooms have historically cost them something - it runs a protective response before your conscious mind gets a word in.
Maybe your shoulders rise. Your voice might land higher than you meant it to, or soften just slightly without you choosing to soften it. Maybe your mind blanks, the sentence you had ready, practised over and over just disappears, and you're stuck mid-thought while trying to look like you're not.
And it runs the same calculation in the quieter moments too - the thoughts that spiral after a conversation you thought went fine, the yes you heard yourself say before you'd registered the question, the email drafted and deleted and drafted again and still not sent.
So when you try and reframe it, that reframe has to bypass the body to land - and the body doesn't always listen to reframes. Somatic coaching works at the layer that mindset reframes skip over.
'Somatics is the study of the self from the perspective of one's lived experience, encompassing the dimensions of body, psyche and spirit' ~ Thomas Hanna
The bind most women arrive carrying
There's a particular place most of the women I work with have reached, and it's worth naming because it's usually what finally brings them here.
They're done shrinking - starting to notice the moments when it costs them. Maybe they forgot to pick the kids up once because they stayed late, only for no one at work to even notice the sacrifice. Maybe they missed dinner with the family for a meeting that could have been an email. They're done with softening the ask so as not to ruffle emotional men's feathers, and done with going quiet in rooms where their opinions and insight could create meaningful change for the very people the system wasn't built with in mind.
And deep down, they're also worried about what happens if they stop shrinking.
What if I take up space, say the thing, push back, hold the line - and it costs me? Gets me taken off the project. Makes me the difficult one. Loses me the relationship. Confirms what they already suspect about me.
That bind is not irrational. It's not a mindset problem. It's pattern recognition based on real experience - experience that likely started well before the boardroom, in the specific ways the world teaches women to manage themselves carefully in rooms that weren't designed for how they lead. The boardroom is just the latest room where the old pattern gets activated.
Somatic coaching doesn't try to talk you out of the bind. It works at the layer where the bind actually lives - in the nervous system, in the protective responses that haven't yet been shown the room is different now.
What sessions give you - and why it's rarely what’s expected
"That's not what I thought was holding me back" is one of the most common things I hear after a first session - and it almost always lands as a relief.
Because the thing they walked in naming wasn't wrong. But underneath it, something else had been waiting - something the body had been holding for a while, that the mind had been quietly filing under the wrong "I just need to work on this" folder.
More often than not, sessions don't tend to go where my clients think they will. They tend to go somewhere more alive than they realised.
There's a concept called the felt sense that sits at the centre of why this work reaches places insight alone can't. It's not quite a feeling - it's more a pre-verbal knowing, a whole impression held somewhere in the body before it's been broken into language or logic. Slightly murky, slightly hard to pin down at first. That's exactly what makes it useful - because the felt sense carries information that thinking doesn't have access to. When something surfaces from it, it has a quality of "oh - that's what that is." Not an insight you reasoned your way toward. Something that was already in you, waiting to be heard.
What surfaces looks different every time. Sometimes it's recognising that a dynamic you've been navigating at work is a version of something much older - and suddenly the intensity makes sense in a way it didn't before.
Sometimes it's the pattern that's been showing up all week - the 3am replay, the way you already knew walking in which conversations were going to cost you, the tension that arrives when a particular person's name comes up in the calendar - finally having a logic to it, rather than feeling like something that just keeps happening to you. Sometimes a version of yourself you'd forgotten about turns up in the space, and you remember what it felt like to be her before you started managing quite so carefully.
None of it is dramatic. More like a quiet click. Something settling into place.
There's a parts-based layer to this work that changes things for most people. Under pressure, what shows up in the body isn't a malfunction - it's a protective response, a part of you doing a job it took on in rooms that were genuinely risky. The question is never how do I get rid of this part? It's what is this part protecting me from, and what does it need to ease up a little? When a client lands on that reframe, the whole room shifts - the tension in her face, the set of her shoulders, the pace of her breath.
Most of the women I work with aren't naturally disconnected from their bodies. They've been trained out of it - in environments that rewarded speed, performance, and certainty, and quietly penalised the kind of noticing that slows you down. That awareness can be rebuilt. It usually comes back faster than people expect.
Is somatic coaching the same as therapy?
Therapy can be focussed on talking - often around earlier life experiences or clinical conditions - and is delivered by clinically trained practitioners. If that's the work you need, therapy is the right room. Somatic coaching is focused on how you show up in the situations you're actually in and in the moments that matter. The work can be deeply therapeutic in nature but sits between therapy and transactional coaching, and for women who have already done a lot of one or both, it tends to be exactly the layer that was missing. I've been told "I've done more with you than in a couple of years of talking about it in therapy" - and while that's not a criticism of therapy, it points to something this work does differently.
Who benefits from this work - and what becomes possible
Maybe you're working in sport, or in an industry that still, in some rooms, treats your presence as a surprise. You're capable and experienced. You also carry, quietly, more than the job description covers - the invisible load of being the one who notices what's about to fall over, the one who smooths, the one managing the room's emotional temperature alongside her own, before the day has technically started.
Here's what tends to shift when that changes.
One client had something sitting on her to-do list for months. Something that could have really put her out there, made her more visible to the industry. It would get to the end of the week and she would add it to next week's to-do list - not because she didn't want to do it... it just, well... kept getting unconsciously missed. After one piece of work together, she just did it. Didn't deliberate, didn't keep imagining the best way to do it. Had a kind of "I don't care" attitude - not that she stopped caring about it (she cared a lot), just that she wasn't bothered by the risk of it anymore. What she was unconsciously afraid of never happened and she achieved what she set out to do without overthinking it once. This is what becomes available.
What the shift feels like for most women is less noise. The headspace that was being eaten by overthinking, prepping, replaying - it comes back. The transformation isn't confidence, you already have that. It becomes about capacity. You say the thing you wanted to say and don't think about it beforehand and don't replay it after. You stay in the hard conversation instead of going quiet or over-explaining your way through it. You finish the week with something left in the tank for your actual life - not because you stopped caring about the work, but because it no longer runs the show.
You don't rise to the occasion. You respond from the level of safety your body believes is available.
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If you're like 'yes please, I want to know more'…here's a couple of invitations:
Self Aware Women Leaders is my mailing list for women working in sport and male-dominated environments who are looking for the under-the-surface work to understand more than just mindset reframes - you're totally welcome to join.
Join Self Aware Women Leaders →
1:1 Somatic Coaching - If you're an individual intrigued enough to find out about working together, more information is on my Work With Me page. Have a read and then book a call so that we can chat. Don't wait til your mind tells you you're completely ready - it's just a chat with a vibe check - I won't pressure you into anything, promise!
Organisations - If you’re an amazing company looking to support your women in a meaningful, impactful way via 1:1 coaching, click here
Jenni Schanschieff is an International Coaching Federation trained Executive Somatic Coach working with women in sport and male-dominated environments. She is the Oceania Network Lead for the Women's Sport Collective and is based in Auckland, New Zealand, working online with clients around the globe.
