"My intention is to support my clients to lead from their wisdom, not from their wounds."
Sonja Harvey Tweet
Sonja Harvey is the driving force behind The Expansion Practice, a coaching and consulting firm dedicated to transforming the way we lead. With over two decades of experience in leadership, primarily in management consulting, Sonja has honed her expertise in supporting mission-driven leaders and organizations to successfully scale their operations. However, her journey took a turn when she realized the toll the relentless pace of her work was taking on her health and well-being.
Inspired by her own transformation, Sonja founded The Expansion Practice, offering a unique blend of leadership coaching, emotional intelligence training, and somatic practices. At the heart of her approach lies the belief that true leadership begins with a deep connection to oneself and an unwavering trust in one’s intuitive wisdom.
To learn more, visit her website here.
Today, we sit down with Sonja to learn more about her journey as a business owner and coach.
Check out more interviews with entrepreneurs here.
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How did you get started with The Expansion Practice? What motivated you?
Sonja Harvey: I created The Expansion Practice because it was what I needed as a leader before I burned myself out.
I had been working in leadership for more than two decades, most of my career in management consulting, and I’d been burning the candle at both ends for far too long. I loved my job for many years but somewhere along the line and the unrelenting pace, I stopped listening to myself and started going through the motions on autopilot.
My body and my intuition had been sending up signal flares for some time before I was forced to stop and listen. Several years ago, a few days before the Christmas holiday break, I sat in a team meeting when I started to feel a strange, uncomfortable pain in my jaw. It quickly moved into my neck, then down my arm, and stayed there like a vice grip. I knew something was very wrong, but I was in active denial for the remaining 45 minutes of that meeting before doing anything about it.
This was such a massive wake-up call for me! Long story short, I had to make some significant changes to my life, and I ended up leaving my job early in the new year. I took some much-needed time off to heal and reflect on how I missed all the warning signs. As I dove deeper into my inner work, I learned more about the nervous system, how the body holds onto our stress, and somatic practices that can open us to a different conversation with ourselves.
Then I realized I wanted to be part of the solution. I didn’t want anyone else to find themselves in the same position I was in and that was the motivation behind launching The Expansion Practice. Today, I coach leaders to activate the full expression of their leadership potential, in a healthy, sustainable, and embodied way. My goal in doing so is that we transform the way we lead, away from perpetuating the push-through-at-all-costs, hustle culture that is churning and burning out far too many amazing leaders who still have so much more they want to do and contribute to their work.
Could you elaborate on how The Expansion Practice supports mission-driven leaders in moving away from hustle culture?
Sonja Harvey: So many of the leaders I work with tend to be highly analytical, logical, and rational. For many, that’s what got them into leadership in the first place. No question, our analytical intelligence is an asset. When we remain in our heads, however, we only have access to so much information and only so many internal resources.
There is a wealth of additional insight and wisdom available to us when we know how to access our emotional, somatic, and intuitive intelligence®, all of which begin with awareness. When we can appreciate what our body and nervous system are trying to communicate well before we are on the verge of burning out, we can make different choices about how we are showing up.
Practically, this can show up as setting boundaries around our time and commitments. It can look like supporting our team to take all of their vacation time to rest and recharge. We can set a new tone by modeling that after-hours emails and requests are unnecessary and will be discouraged.
When we can slow down enough to recognize what’s going on for ourselves, we can resource ourselves to make different choices. The fear that many organizations have is that if their people are slowing down and tending to their needs, organizational outcomes and performance will also be slowed. That’s just not the case and the evidence continues to support that finding.
When we are taking better care of ourselves and building an organizational culture that supports that, we slow down so we can level up. When we don’t slow down, we don’t have access to all our ways of knowing, we can miss important cues from our body and our intuition, and we can eventually burn out and, organizationally, lose talented people as a result. All of this begins with us. As leaders, we do our inner work first. Then we can support our teams and our organizations to follow suit. This is why coaching can be so helpful.
How do you integrate somatic practices into your coaching approach, and how do you find it enhances our ability to lead?
Sonja Harvey: The majority of my coaching clients are already in leadership roles, highly analytical, and performance-driven. They move and process things quickly, and because they do, they run the risk of missing information that they would otherwise glean if they were more in tune with how they’re feeling and what their body is experiencing. When we live from the neck up, we don’t have as much awareness of or access to these more expansive ways of knowing.
Somatic practices are terrific tools to help us slow down, get out of our cognitive brain, and learn how our emotions appear in the body. And they can be very simple. Breathwork is my go-to somatic practice, both for myself and with my clients. It’s simple but effective in supporting clients to come back into the body and the present moment, allowing them the opportunity to drop into themselves and their intuition more deeply.
When we slow down, we create space between the feeling and the doing that allows us to respond consciously and purposefully. Since leading is how we show up in the world, if we are not creating space to notice how we’re showing up and what may be impacting how we’re doing so, we don’t have the opportunity to course correct when we veer off track.
Here’s a simple yet common example of that. If we’re coming into work exhausted and cranky because of something that happened at home, and then on the commute to work someone cuts us off, we could be triggered to have a disproportionally large reaction to that event.
Instead of meeting with our team from an open, thoughtful, and resourced place, we’re meeting them with impatience, constriction, and little to no empathy for the challenges they may be experiencing. The result of that meeting may create a negative ripple effect through the team and possibly the organization. It definitely will if this is how we continue to show up to lead.
My intention is to support my clients to lead from their wisdom, not from their wounds. Because these are largely subconscious, that’s why somatic practices and a better understanding of how our nervous system works are so beneficial for leaders. Somatic practices allow us to discharge that energy and remove the stress load from our system. That’s not to say you aren’t still going to have bad days. You are. We all are. But we need to take responsibility for how we show up to lead and that’s an inside job.
What are some common challenges you’ve noticed among mission-driven leaders, and how does your coaching address these challenges?
Sonja Harvey: What I see most frequently in my coaching practice is the drive to achieve or perform outweighs our priority on our health and well-being. My story is a great example of this, and I continue to see it with many of my mission-driven clients.
When we are working towards something that genuinely matters to us, in particular when we feel it’s for a greater purpose, it’s not uncommon to push ourselves even harder. Unfortunately, in doing that, we can let our own needs be drowned out by the mission or the cause. The harder we push to achieve, the less we take care of ourselves, and this is not reserved for mission-driven leaders only.
The coaching work I do helps address these challenges by supporting my clients to have a better understanding of their nervous system – when they’re in dysregulation and how to move towards regulation and resourcing – and how to open to their innate wisdom. We begin by questioning the assumptions my clients have been living and leading from, which begins the process of expanding their awareness and opening their minds to new ways of doing so.
Traditional coaching is incredibly helpful but, for me, it was the nervous system education and awareness that was missing. Had I had this earlier in my career, I would have been in a better position to listen to myself and, even more importantly, trust myself to take aligned action.
I notice this with my clients as well. As they begin down this path of self-discovery, they let go of the need to prove themselves to others, to seek external validation or permission, and they move forward with decisions that feel aligned and congruent for them. In some cases, that has meant leaving the organization they were with. In others, it became an opportunity for them to be part of the transformational change from within their organization.
How do you balance the integration of analytical, emotional, and somatic intelligence in your coaching sessions to foster intuitive intelligent leadership?
Sonja Harvey: I use these different dimensions of our intelligence as a framework with my clients and it’s not a linear process. An easier way to describe how I work with them is to say that I meet my clients where they’re at.
Many of my clients are performance-driven achievers. They can live mostly in their heads. They’re overthinking and overanalyzing can be an unconscious strategy to avoid how they’re feeling. I will work with them from a trauma-informed approach, to expand their emotional intelligence. We’ll explore how they can better connect to how they’re feeling and how they can work with their feelings to discern what their deeper needs are.
Other clients are already emotionally intelligent and in tune with their feelings. They may be so much so that they take things personally when they have nothing to do with them. Others need to better understand what their body and present health are attempting to communicate to them. They may need grounding and the tools to feel into the sensations of their body in a safe way.
The nexus point at the center of our analytical, emotional, and somatic intelligence is our intuitive intelligence®, which is our highest form of intelligence and an embodied state of being. It is also something we can all cultivate or build like a muscle. As we deepen our understanding of our analytical, emotional, and somatic intelligence, the byproduct is opening more fully to our intuition, bringing us to a new level of trust in ourselves and our decision-making.
Being able to receive or tune into our intuition is only the first part. It’s when we act on it that we catapult our leadership expression to the next level, and more fully embody our potential. Having an understanding of our somatic intelligence, which is rooted in nervous system awareness, supports us to stay in that healthy, sustainable place as we show up to lead and move about the world.
In your experience, how do leaders typically respond to the idea of developing their intuitive intelligence?
Sonja Harvey: Most of my clients are already in tune with their intuition in some way, and those who work with me, are curious to know more. They want to deepen that relationship.
They may not fully appreciate how their intuition is available to them, so I help connect the dots. I help them gain awareness of that connection and how to strengthen it. I also help to reduce any stigma or myths around what our intuition is and isn’t (and just to be clear, it is not going to help us win the lottery).
Our intuitive intelligence® is going to guide us to evolve and to what is in alignment with both ours and the collectives greatest good. I’m not interested in helping clients who just want to achieve for achievement’s sake. I’m interested in working with mission-driven leaders and organizations who feel a larger calling to contribute to the greater good through their leadership. That’s what gets me excited.
Intuitive intelligence® is not yet well understood so I tend to do some education, and a lot of experiential practice so my clients have an embodied experience of their intuition. We bring it into the practical realm with respect to how it can support them even more with their decision-making, their hiring, and their ability to expand their creativity, innovation, and strategic prowess.
So much of this work is bringing awareness to all the ways we’ve been conditioned to block ourselves from receiving this deeper knowing. Often this awareness alone can be transformative for clients. Then we get to the root of the block so it can be released, and we can expand our capacity even further.
What advice would you give to aspiring leaders who are interested in developing a more holistic approach to leadership but may be hesitant to explore somatic or intuitive practices?
Sonja Harvey: The journey to embody the full expression of our leadership potential begins by being able to trust ourselves. In my experience, however, we take a lot of direction from outside of ourselves. Our intuition – that intelligence – is going to guide you better than anyone else ever could. Learning how to trust ourselves and our innate wisdom is the best leadership advantage any of us can have. And it’s an inevitable outcome of developing a deeper relationship with our intuitive intelligence®.
Here’s the caveat though. We cannot receive our intuition in a dysregulated nervous system. That is why somatic practices have become such an integral part of my work – both personally and professionally.
I believe that aspiring and emerging leaders already have this figured out. It’s those who are still entrenched in the existing paradigm that have not yet been taught this (the old guard, if you will). The language of emotional and somatic intelligence is so much more prevalent today than it ever was when most of us were coming into our leadership and I see this as incredibly encouraging about the future of how we lead. It’s already beginning to transform.
To stay up to date with Sonja Harvey, visit the Expansion Practice website or connect with her on LinkedIn or Instagram.
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Sonja Harvey for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.