Laura Cincera is the founder of Paradox Praxis, a leadership consultancy at the intersection of embodied practice, organizational transformation and strategic facilitation. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30, she has led large-scale programs at Google and collaborated with global institutions including the UN, OECD, and the European Investment Bank, reaching over 13 million people across EMEA through strategic partnerships and community-driven initiatives. She now partners with forward-thinking leaders and organizations to create meaningful transformation through innovative leadership development.
A certified Executive Coach, IFS-certified practitioner, and qualified yoga and mindfulness teacher, Laura brings the question of how to flourish in high-pressure environments into direct contact with the body. Her training spans Internal Family Systems, Hakomi, Neurosomatic Trauma Integration, and somatic leadership – a combination that informs both her practice and her conviction that sustainable change requires the body, not just the mind.
You’ve done the work. You’ve read the books, hired the coach, attended the offsite in the mountains where something genuinely shifted. You saw yourself more clearly. You named the pattern. You meant every word of the commitment you wrote in your journal that night.
And then you went back to work.
Three weeks later, the old version of you sent the reactive email. Shut down during the critical meeting. Said yes when the body was already saying no. Not because you weren’t committed. Not because the insight wasn’t real. But because insight and change are not the same thing.
The Map Is Not the Territory
The insight was real. But insight lives in a different part of the brain than the patterns it’s trying to change.
Here is what the science of embodied cognition has been establishing for decades, and what most approaches to leadership growth have been slow to integrate: the structures that store behavioral and relational learning live not in the thinking brain but in deeper, older layers of the nervous system – the limbic system and the brainstem. These regions govern threat response, emotional memory and relational behavior. These are the parts that govern how we actually show up under pressure, in conflict, in moments of genuine uncertainty.¹
This matters enormously in practice. Trying to shift a behavioral pattern – the tendency to over-control or to collapse under high pressure, for example – through cognitive reframing alone is like trying to retrain a reflex by thinking about it. Shifting a behavioral tendency requires social, emotional, and somatic learning. You simply cannot get this kind of learning through bullet points on a slide. You cannot even get it through personal insights and genuine aha-moments alone.
This is the gap that neurosomatic work addresses. It is not an add-on to leadership development, but should be the foundation for it. The patterns we carry in the body: the chronic tension, the places where breath doesn’t quite reach, the reflexive constriction in the throat before a difficult conversation – these are not personality quirks. They are the accumulated intelligence of a nervous system that learned, at some formative moment, that certain states required defense. These patterns don’t dissolve in response to insight. They shift in response to new experiences – repeated, felt, relational, embodied.²
Paradoxes Can’t Be Solved — Only Inhabited
The hardest problems facing leaders today are not only complex. They are paradoxical. How to hold conviction without becoming rigid? How to lead with authority while remaining genuinely porous? How to make decisions without foreclosing on what you don’t yet know?
These are not questions with correct answers. They are questions that demand a particular kind of capacity – the ability to hold contradictory truths simultaneously, without collapsing into false resolution. In an era of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, a growing body of research converges on one urgent need: developing leaders’ capacity for paradoxical thinking – the ability to act from a “both/and” orientation rather than reaching for simple answers to complex tensions.³
But here is what the research also shows, and what most approaches to paradox miss: a paradox mindset is not typically developed by observing a persuasive role model alone. Recent empirical work found that cognitive mechanisms – like making paradoxical tensions visible – are necessary but not sufficient on their own. It is the behavioral experience of actually navigating competing demands that mediates the development of a paradox mindset.⁴ You cannot solely think your way into the capacity to hold contradiction. You have to feel it.
And yet paradox is still mostly taught as a thinking skill. What if the difficulty is not conceptual but structural – located not in the mind alone but in the internal system itself?
We Contain Multitudes
Sometimes the most useful lens comes from outside the field entirely.
This is where Internal Family Systems (IFS), originally developed as a psychotherapeutic method, offers one of the most generative frameworks in leadership development. IFS, developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz and now supported by a growing evidence base,⁵ proposes that the mind is naturally multiple. We are not one thing. We are a system of parts – each with its own logic, its own history, its own legitimate need – held together (or not) by what Schwartz calls the Self: a core state of clarity, compassion, and equanimity that is available to everyone, and that can be learned to lead from.
From an IFS perspective – something I encounter constantly in my practice – what prevents us from holding paradox is almost never a lack of conceptual understanding. It is the activation of a part that cannot tolerate the discomfort of an unknown way of behaving. A protective part, usually a very loyal and very old one, that would rather have a wrong answer than sit in the vertigo of not knowing.
Consider the leader who knows she should delegate but finds herself redoing her team’s work at midnight. Or the executive who has committed to listening more but consistently fills every silence in a meeting. These are not failures of willpower. They are the activation of protective parts – often formed long before the boardroom – that equate letting go with losing control, or silence with invisibility.
These protective parts are not enemies to be managed. They are protecting something real, and they carry a message worth hearing. The skill is not to eliminate them or the tension between them – it is to lead from a place that can hear both, hold both, and act from somewhere larger than either.
This is fundamentally linked to expanding the body’s capacity to stay present inside the tension – to widen what somatic psychology calls the Window of Tolerance: the zone of arousal within which a person can experience and integrate emotions without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down.⁶ When we exceed this window – tipping into hyperarousal (anxiety, reactivity, fight-or-flight) or hypoarousal (numbness, collapse, disconnection) – our capacity for paradoxical thinking collapses with us. This is physiological work. It is also relational work. It usually takes longer than we would prefer. But it is the work that makes insights sustainable, embodied, integrated.
The Work Beneath the Work
Belief and cognitive work still matter. The cultivation of awareness is an essential first step towards transformation. And it is not sufficient. The frameworks, the reflection, the naming of patterns – they are maps. But sustainable change requires actually walking the territory.
The leaders I work with are not lacking insight. They are operating with a partial definition of it. What becomes possible when we expand that definition – when we bring the body, the nervous system, the internal system of parts, the somatic reality of leadership into the development process alongside the mental models – is a more coherent, more present, more durable way of leading.
The integration gap – the distance between insight and sustained, embodied change – lives in the nervous system. It is in the holding patterns of the body, in the parts of us that learned, long before we had language for it, what was safe to feel and what had to be managed away.
Closing that gap is more than a weekend offsite. It is a practice. Slow. Sometimes uncomfortable, always relational – and genuinely transformative in ways that last.
Because presence is not purely a mindset.
It is what happens when all parts of ourselves are finally telling the same story.
Notes
- Brendel, W. & Bennett, C. (2016). Learning to Embody Leadership Through Mindfulness and Somatics Practice. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 18(3), 409-425.
- On the broader science of interoception and decision-making, see Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. See also Critchley, H.D. et al. (2004). Neural systems supporting interoceptive awareness. Nature Neuroscience, 7(2), 189-195.
- Miron-Spektor, E., Ingram, A., Keller, J., Smith, W.K. & Lewis, M.W. (2018). Microfoundations of Organizational Paradox: The Problem Is How We Think about the Problem. Academy of Management Journal, 61(1), 26-45. See also Smith, W.K. & Lewis, M.W. (2022). Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems. Harvard Business School Press.
- Boemelburg, R., Zimmermann, A. & Palmié, M. (2023). How paradoxical leaders guide their followers to embrace paradox: Cognitive and behavioral mechanisms of paradox mindset development. Long Range Planning, 56, 102319.
- IFS was listed on the U.S. National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices (NREPP) in 2015. For the foundational text, see Schwartz, R.C. & Sweezy, M. (2020). Internal Family Systems Therapy (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press. For a recent review, see Redfern, S. et al. (2025). Exploring the evidence for Internal Family Systems therapy: A scoping review. Clinical Psychologist.
The concept of the Window of Tolerance was developed by Daniel Siegel. See Siegel, D.J. (1999). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. New York: Guilford Press.