What Does "Working With the Body" Actually Mean in Coaching?

And why it's probably not what you're imagining

Not long ago, I had a chemistry call with a potential client. The conversation was warm, easy — the kind where you quickly get a sense that there's something real to work with. And then, gently but clearly, they said it: I wasn’t the right coach for them; they weren't after anything esoteric.

My first reaction, if I'm honest, was a flicker of defensiveness. A quiet sense of being misunderstood. But as the call ended and I sat with it, something shifted — I moved closer to recognition.

Because I know that phrase — "working with the body," "somatic coaching," "body-oriented work" — lands strangely for a lot of people. And not without reason. In esoteric and new age circles especially, there is no shortage of tools and offerings that play on people's genuine hopes for change but aren't grounded in evidence, training, or any real accountability. It's a space where almost anything can be dressed up as transformational work. The scepticism that produces is entirely understandable.

That conversation stayed with me. Not because I lost a client, but because it reminded me how easy it is to describe this work badly — and how much that matters. If the language I use to talk about what I do is getting in the way of people finding something that might actually be useful to them, that's worth taking seriously.

So let me try again. What does working with the body in coaching actually mean?

The starting point: you already know this

Here's something that isn't mystical at all.

You've had the experience of walking into a meeting and feeling something shift in your chest before a word has been spoken. You've noticed the way your shoulders move up toward your ears when a particular topic comes up. You've sat across from someone and felt, without knowing why, that something was off — some incongruence between what they were saying and what was actually happening.

None of this is woo. This is just your nervous system doing what nervous systems do: taking in information, registering it, and signalling it through the body before the conscious mind has had time to form an opinion.

The body is already processing your experience. It's already holding something. The question is whether you learn to listen to it — or whether you keep running the conversation entirely in your head, which, if you're the kind of person who overthinks, often means running in circles.

What "working with the body" doesn't mean

It doesn't mean lying on a table. It doesn't involve touch. It's not breathwork, or yoga, or anything you need to wear different clothes for. You don't have to be particularly "in touch with your body" to begin with — in fact, people who feel quite disconnected from their physical experience often find it the most illuminating.

It's also not therapy. We're not going into the past to process what happened. We're working with what's present — right now, in this conversation, as you talk about the situation you're in.

And it is not, for what it's worth, something I impose on clients. If a session stays entirely in the conversational register and we do sharp, incisive work at the level of thought — that's a good session. The body is available as a resource when it's useful, not as an ideology to subscribe to.

So what is it, actually?

In practice, it often looks like this.

You're talking about something — a decision you can't make, a relationship that keeps snagging, a sense of being stuck — and I might ask: "As you talk about that, what do you notice in your body right now?"

That's it. That's the move.

What happens next is often interesting. Some people immediately notice something — a tightening, a holding of the breath, a heaviness somewhere. Others draw a blank, and that's fine too, because the attempt to notice is already something. We're just slowing down enough to let more information into the room.

What I'm looking for — what you're looking for — is the gap between what you're saying and what's actually happening underneath. Because these two things are not always the same. You can articulate a situation with great fluency and sophistication, and still be completely cut off from what you actually feel about it. And it's in that gap that most of the interesting work lives.

Sometimes what emerges is a sensation that, when you stay with it, turns into something more — an image, an impulse, a recognition. "Oh. That's actually fear, not confusion." Or: "I've been framing this as a practical problem, but my body is telling me something different."

This doesn't happen in every session, or in every moment. But when it does, it tends to move things in a way that more talking rarely does.

Why this matters for change

Here's the thing that I keep coming back to, with client after client.

Most people who arrive at coaching already understand themselves quite well. They've read the books. They've done therapy, maybe, or at least a great deal of self-reflection. They can describe their patterns with impressive precision. And yet something hasn't shifted.

The insight is there. The change isn't. (I've written about this more directly in a separate piece — on what's actually going on when we feel stuck.)

This isn't a failure of intelligence or effort. It's that genuine change — the kind that sticks — tends to involve more than the thinking mind. Patterns of behaviour, especially the stubborn ones, are not purely cognitive. They're embodied. They live in the way you habitually hold yourself, the way your breathing changes in certain conversations, the way your body prepares to respond before you've consciously decided anything.

You can understand a pattern intellectually and still be completely inside it. What the body offers is a different kind of access — not deeper in some mystical sense, but more direct. Closer to where the pattern actually lives.

Working with the body doesn't bypass thinking. It completes it.

A practical example

A client came to me stuck in a decision about their career. They'd analysed it exhaustively. They knew the pros and cons. They'd talked it through with friends, partners, colleagues. And still: paralysis.

In one session, I asked them to hold both options in mind simultaneously, and simply notice what happened in their body as they did. Not to evaluate, not to decide — just to notice.

One option produced a subtle contraction. Not dramatic — just a quiet tightening, something closing down. The other produced something that felt more like space opening, even though the person had been intellectually dismissing that option as impractical.

We didn't make the decision in that session. But something moved. The body had offered information that the head, running in its familiar loops, had been unable to access.

That's what working with the body looks like. You don't need a particular spiritual orientation to find it useful. You just need a willingness to pay attention to a source of information most people have been taught to ignore.

Why people get weirded out — and why that's understandable

There are a few reasons the somatic approach puts people off, and I think they're worth naming honestly.

One is simple unfamiliarity. We're culturally trained to privilege the rational mind. Analysis, strategy, logical frameworks — these feel safe and serious. Being asked to pay attention to a sensation in your chest feels somehow less rigorous, less professional, like it belongs in a different kind of room.

Another is that some practitioners of body-based work have, frankly, not helped. There is a version of this that is so steeped in a particular spiritual or esoteric worldview that it can feel like you're being asked to sign up to something — a belief system, a cosmology — before you've even started. That's not what this is. You don't need to be spiritually inclined to do this work. You don't need to believe anything in particular about the body, or about consciousness, or about anything else. A secular, sceptical, scientifically-minded person can engage with somatic coaching just as fully as someone with a rich inner spiritual life. The body doesn't ask about your metaphysics.

But the discomfort is also worth examining in itself. Because the impulse to stay entirely in the head — to keep everything clean and cognitive and manageable — is often exactly the pattern that's keeping someone stuck. The body is not a threat. It's just a part of you that's been waiting to be included.

Who this is for

Somatic coaching isn't for everyone, and I'd rather be honest about that than oversell it.

If you strongly prefer a structured, analytical approach — clear frameworks, measurable goals, step-by-step action plans — there are coaches who work in that mode and do it well. That's not what I offer.

But if you're someone who's already done the thinking, who understands themselves at the level of narrative but senses there's something more to access — if you feel stuck in a way that more analysis doesn't seem to touch — then working with the body might be exactly what's missing.

Not because the body holds all the answers. But because you do — and the body is often the most direct route to them.

If any of this resonates — or if you're curious but still not quite sure — I'd invite you to book a free 30-minute consultation. No commitment, no pitch. Just a conversation to see whether this kind of work might be useful for where you are.

Michael de la Bedoyere is an ICF Level 2 certified Somatic Coach and DCV-certified Systemic Coach, based in Berlin.