A couple of weeks ago, I went to Gayasan, a national park about four and a half hours from where I live. I didn't plan this trip. It just happened on a whim, the way the important things often do.
Life has a funny way of taking you where you need to be. Sitting on the rocks in the valley, I realized I needed to be here. Somewhere between the beautiful peaks and valleys, I was reminded that I am an organic, living, breathing thing that came from the earth and still runs on its energy. I’m not a human doing, a head full of calendar agendas, goals and spreadsheets that’s trying to survive, but I’m a human being that needs wind and water and green that is meant to enjoy life and thrive.
MIND-BODY CONNECTION
I've been trying to take better care of my body lately. I went back to yoga and started walking to the office whenever I could. These are clumsy attempts to put movement back into a life that had been fixed at the desk, realizing that my mind cannot do good work for long without a healthy body, and vice versa. I think we all know that theoretically.
there ain't nuthin wrong with being a tree hugger
But the thing is this whole mind-body connection thing is related to common coaching topics I address with leaders across very different industries, functions, and levels of seniority. One is decision making. two is giving honest, constructive feedback. On the surface, they look like separate skills, one about judgment and one about communication. But both ask you to show up with conviction. Both take courage. Both come down to whether you can stand in what you believe and lead from there, instead of waiting to read the room first, or seeking others’ approval.
The people I coach are not short on brainpower. No one comes to coaching because they can't keep up. Coaching is for people who are already performing well and want to go further. These are sharp, accomplished, genuinely capable and brilliant leaders. So if clear thinking and sound logic were the whole game, why do so many of them keep running into the same ceiling?
The answer is something I’m guilty of myself.
WHEN OVER-LEVERAGING YOUR MIND
We were raised in a world that rewards competence, intelligence, and rationality, and we learn the lesson well. Know your stuff. Know more than the person next to you. Test well. Get your degrees. Bring the data. Perform and prove yourself. The mind becomes the favorite tool, then the only tool in this system. And granted, this system has a high merit because it drove collective progress as a humanity in many respects.
But a mind running the entire show comes with side effects. Lean hard enough on logic and you can overthink yourself into a corner. The options multiply, the analysis loops, and a decision that felt obvious on Monday is somehow foggy by Thursday. Overthinking often paralyzes us in the state of inactivity in the mask of hard work and due diligence.
There’s more. When getting it right becomes what matters the most, the same sharp mind that spots the flaw in the plan starts spotting the flaw in everything. You become really good at focusing on what’s lacking and wrong. This is the lens through which you see everything, eventually yourself, too. This can easily lead to the space of underplaying your strengths, undisclosing your efforts, being passive and even distant.
WHAT LEADERSHIP CIRCLE PROFILE SAYS
The Leadership Circle Profile, my favorite 360 assessment tool, has a name for this tendency. It calls it Protecting: the belief that you stay safe by staying rational, a little distant, a little above it all. It looks like intellectual rigor from the outside. Underneath, it is a way of keeping yourself out of reach from opportunities, visibility and impactful influence. The model breaks it into pieces that will feel familiar to anyone who has over-trusted their own intellect: a critical streak that finds what is wrong before it finds what is possible, and a cool distance that keeps relationships strictly professional and safely logical.
In LCP, the Protecting dimension includes reactive tendencies like Distance, Critical & Arrogance.
Turned all the way up, it turns inward. The critic you point at the work starts pointing at you. That is where self-criticism sets in, and then the holding back, the playing small, the waiting for more certainty, more information before you move. (The profile is honest about this: the rational armor that was meant to protect you ends up shrinking the very creative, innovative contribution you were capable of making.) You start leading from the outside in, reacting to what you want to avoid instead of creating from what you actually want. A strange place for a high performer to land, but an all too common one.
WAY BACK
In coaching, we hold a firm truth about people: that we are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole, already, with far more available to us than we are currently using.
And most of what goes unused is not in the head. After all, you are not just a brain. You’re mind, body & soul.
The body knows things the spreadsheet does not. and the body NEVER lies. The tightness in your chest as you say yes to the project you meant to decline. The ease, the actual physical loosening, when you finally name the thing nobody in the meeting wanted to name.
The heart beats fast to tell you about what excites and matters to you. When you anger or tear up, it tells you something important to you is being violated.
And we havethe intuition that speaks to you energetically through your senses. You know what's right because you feel it in your gut.
What’s unfortunate is that we tend to treat all of these as noise to manage. It is closer to a second set of instruments if at all.
The nature reminded me of this beautifully, gracefully and boldly. It does not care how much I know. It responds to whether I show up, breathe, pay attention, feel and connect.
None of this is a case against the mind. The mind is a gift, and we should cultivate it, of course. I’m just saying we need to know when it’s dialed up too much.
So I'll end with a question I ask myself often.
Am I fully showing up, or only the part of me that is good at being right?
I always gotta remember the rest of me is even more powerful and always ready to support me with truth and humanity.
Joonyoung Kim is an executive leadership coach and founder of Mindesign. She works with leaders on resonant productivity and creative leadership, the kind that sustains rather than depletes. Based in Korea, working with people everywhere.
THE LESSON FROM THE NATURE
A couple of weeks ago, I went to Gayasan, a national park about four and a half hours from where I live. I didn't plan this trip. It just happened on a whim, the way the important things often do.
Life has a funny way of taking you where you need to be. Sitting on the rocks in the valley, I realized I needed to be here. Somewhere between the beautiful peaks and valleys, I was reminded that I am an organic, living, breathing thing that came from the earth and still runs on its energy. I’m not a human doing, a head full of calendar agendas, goals and spreadsheets that’s trying to survive, but I’m a human being that needs wind and water and green that is meant to enjoy life and thrive.
MIND-BODY CONNECTION
I've been trying to take better care of my body lately. I went back to yoga and started walking to the office whenever I could. These are clumsy attempts to put movement back into a life that had been fixed at the desk, realizing that my mind cannot do good work for long without a healthy body, and vice versa. I think we all know that theoretically.
there ain't nuthin wrong with being a tree hugger
But the thing is this whole mind-body connection thing is related to common coaching topics I address with leaders across very different industries, functions, and levels of seniority. One is decision making. two is giving honest, constructive feedback. On the surface, they look like separate skills, one about judgment and one about communication. But both ask you to show up with conviction. Both take courage. Both come down to whether you can stand in what you believe and lead from there, instead of waiting to read the room first, or seeking others’ approval.
The people I coach are not short on brainpower. No one comes to coaching because they can't keep up. Coaching is for people who are already performing well and want to go further. These are sharp, accomplished, genuinely capable and brilliant leaders. So if clear thinking and sound logic were the whole game, why do so many of them keep running into the same ceiling?
The answer is something I’m guilty of myself.
WHEN OVER-LEVERAGING YOUR MIND
We were raised in a world that rewards competence, intelligence, and rationality, and we learn the lesson well. Know your stuff. Know more than the person next to you. Test well. Get your degrees. Bring the data. Perform and prove yourself. The mind becomes the favorite tool, then the only tool in this system. And granted, this system has a high merit because it drove collective progress as a humanity in many respects.
But a mind running the entire show comes with side effects. Lean hard enough on logic and you can overthink yourself into a corner. The options multiply, the analysis loops, and a decision that felt obvious on Monday is somehow foggy by Thursday. Overthinking often paralyzes us in the state of inactivity in the mask of hard work and due diligence.
There’s more. When getting it right becomes what matters the most, the same sharp mind that spots the flaw in the plan starts spotting the flaw in everything. You become really good at focusing on what’s lacking and wrong. This is the lens through which you see everything, eventually yourself, too. This can easily lead to the space of underplaying your strengths, undisclosing your efforts, being passive and even distant.
WHAT LEADERSHIP CIRCLE PROFILE SAYS
The Leadership Circle Profile, my favorite 360 assessment tool, has a name for this tendency. It calls it Protecting: the belief that you stay safe by staying rational, a little distant, a little above it all. It looks like intellectual rigor from the outside. Underneath, it is a way of keeping yourself out of reach from opportunities, visibility and impactful influence. The model breaks it into pieces that will feel familiar to anyone who has over-trusted their own intellect: a critical streak that finds what is wrong before it finds what is possible, and a cool distance that keeps relationships strictly professional and safely logical.
In LCP, the Protecting dimension includes reactive tendencies like Distance, Critical & Arrogance.
Turned all the way up, it turns inward. The critic you point at the work starts pointing at you. That is where self-criticism sets in, and then the holding back, the playing small, the waiting for more certainty, more information before you move. (The profile is honest about this: the rational armor that was meant to protect you ends up shrinking the very creative, innovative contribution you were capable of making.) You start leading from the outside in, reacting to what you want to avoid instead of creating from what you actually want. A strange place for a high performer to land, but an all too common one.
WAY BACK
In coaching, we hold a firm truth about people: that we are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole, already, with far more available to us than we are currently using.
And most of what goes unused is not in the head. After all, you are not just a brain. You’re mind, body & soul.
The body knows things the spreadsheet does not. and the body NEVER lies. The tightness in your chest as you say yes to the project you meant to decline. The ease, the actual physical loosening, when you finally name the thing nobody in the meeting wanted to name.
The heart beats fast to tell you about what excites and matters to you. When you anger or tear up, it tells you something important to you is being violated.
And we have the intuition that speaks to you energetically through your senses. You know what's right because you feel it in your gut.
What’s unfortunate is that we tend to treat all of these as noise to manage. It is closer to a second set of instruments if at all.
The nature reminded me of this beautifully, gracefully and boldly. It does not care how much I know. It responds to whether I show up, breathe, pay attention, feel and connect.
None of this is a case against the mind. The mind is a gift, and we should cultivate it, of course. I’m just saying we need to know when it’s dialed up too much.
So I'll end with a question I ask myself often.
I always gotta remember the rest of me is even more powerful and always ready to support me with truth and humanity.
Joonyoung Kim is an executive leadership coach and founder of Mindesign. She works with leaders on resonant productivity and creative leadership, the kind that sustains rather than depletes. Based in Korea, working with people everywhere.
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