Chapter 3: Hope and Communityship: Women’s Ways of Engaging in Embodied Somatic Leadership

The phenomenon of leadership is often viewed as an individual and cognitive process as though the world we live in is separate from ourselves and each other. This model of rational leadership has been promoted as the pillar of an idealized paternalistic organization (Fambrough & Kaye Hart, 2008). Within this model, leader and leadership performance are often measured in terms of productivity and cost-efficiency. Thus, the leader’s relationships are often ignored (Lemmergaard & Muhr, 2013), as if humans are not integrated physical, social, and emotional beings with an inherent connection and interdependence between self and others. In contrast to the rational model of leadership and countering the illusion of separation, the inherent connection and dependency on one another is a premise of embodied somatic leadership (Ladkin & Taylor, 2010).