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What if your company culture wasnāt just an HR buzzword but the secret weapon to scaling your business?
Welcome to Kan Talk Kulture, the podcast that dives deep into how remarkable company cultures are intentionally built and how they can transform your team, your business, and your bottom line.
Hosted by Kylie Anne Neal, founder of Kan Kulture and a passionate expert in people, culture, and leadership, this show is designed for business owners, CEOs, HR professionals, and anyone who believes that empowered people are the key to long-term success.
Each episode features real conversations with inspiring CEOs, business leaders, and culture champions who share how theyāve shaped their team environments alongside case studies, practical tips, and bold questions that challenge the status quo.
Whether you're looking to boost employee engagement, create a high-performance team, or align your people with your vision, this podcast will help you connect the dots between culture and growth.
At Kan Kulture, we believe in Kindness, Understanding, Learning, Trust, Uniqueness, Respect, and Evolving, and this podcast brings those values to life.
If you're ready to turn your team into your biggest brand ambassadors and create a workplace people love, this is the podcast for you.
Find out more at www.kankulture.com
āHi, I'm Kylie Anne Neal, founder of Kan Kulture, and welcome to Kan Talk Kulture. In this podcast, I sit down with some of Australia's most progressive founders and CEOs to explore the heart of their company cultures, what drives them, what they value, and what it's really like to work for the companies they lead.
You'll also find occasional episodes packed with practical HR insights to help you build s- safer, stronger, and more trusted workplaces. So whether you're a new team member getting to know your workplace, curious about creating remarkable company cultures, or just wanting to know more about implementing HR best practice, you're in the right place.
Let's dive in
Hello, and welcome to
the Kan Talk Kulture Podcast. I'm Kylie Neal, and today we're going somewhere that's a little less conventional, but something that I'm very passionate about. We're going to talk about the body. Um, we're going to talk about the signals it sends that we're actually trained to override. We're gonna talk about the information that's encoded in our nervous system that no spreadsheet or strategy deck will ever capture.
So this isn't a wellness conversation. This is actually a performance conversation. It's a leadership conversation as well, because understanding your body's intelligence is one of the most underutilised leadership tools in any organisation. So let's talk about the, the split that we've built. There is a belief embedded so deeply in professional culture that we barely notice it anymore.
It goes something like this: leave your feelings at the door. Stay rational. Don't let emotions drive decisions On the surface, this might sound like discipline. It sounds like professionalism, but neurobiologically, it is actually friction. There's a, a neuroscientist called Antonio Damasio, and he spent decades studying patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain associated with emotional processing.
And what he found turned the rational decision maker model completely on its head. Damasio's research, which was published in his landmark work, Descartes' Error, found that patients who lost the capacity for emotional response became profoundly impaired in decision-making, not because they were too emotional, but because they actually weren't emotional enough.
So without somatic markers, the bodily gut feelings that anchored judgment, they couldn't decide. The body is not interfering with your thinking. It's actually part of your thinking. So let's talk about the somatic signals of information. What are somatic signals? So the word comes from... It's a Greek word, soma, meaning body.
Somatic signals are the physical sensations that ar- arise in response to our environment. It's the tightness of the chest before a difficult conversation. It's the, the shallow breathing in a meeting where something doesn't sit quite right. It's the, the jaw that won't unclench after an interaction with a particular colleague.
Um, most of us have learned to dismiss these signals as inconvenient and to push through them. To override them in service of productivity. But those signals are actually data. They're your nervous system's real time read of your environment, and we shouldn't ignore that. There was a study from the HeartMath Institute, and they found that the heart generates an electromagnetic field that responds to emotional states and communicates to the brain through afferent neural pathways.
Meaning, the heart sends more signals to the brain than the brain actually sends to the heart. So physiologically, your body is informing your thinking and not the other way around. When you walk into a room and something feels off, even when you can't name it That's not paranoia, that's y- your nervous system processing thousands of data points about tone, proximity, eye contact, micro expressions, and energy at a speed your conscious mind cannot access.
Leaders who learn to read those signals have an edge. Leaders who suppress them are flying partially blind. What about the cost of disconnection? What's it, what's it costing you as a leader? What's it costing the business? Here's where this gets relevant to the organizations we work in. When we build cultures that stigmatize emotional experiences at work, where feeling something is a sign of weakness, where admitting that a decision feels wrong, uh, and it's treated as irrationality.
We train people out of their most powerful navigational tools, and then we wonder why we keep making the same mistakes. There was some research that was done from the NeuroLeadership Institution, and what they found was that organizations with high emotional suppression norms, and that's cultures where negative emotion was in, was discouraged or even punished, what they found was that it showed significantly slower error recovery.
So people who can't signal discomfort early can't prevent escalation. The body whispers before it shouts. A persistent sense of unease about a project, a physical reluctance before a meeting, fatigue that feels out of proportion to the workload, listen to that because these are early signs And in organisations that have normalised suppressing them, they t- the, those situations, they tend to escalate, and what they look like is resignation, it's burnout, it's conflict, and sometimes it's even organisational failure.
There's a concept that I want to introduce here, and that's the concept of interoception. It's the technical term for your brain's ability to sense the internal state of your body, your heartbeat, your breathing, your hunger, your tension, your warmth. It's considered the eighth sense by some researchers, and it's foundational to emotional intelligence.
In 2022, there was a study from the University of Sussex, and what they found was that leaders with high interoceptive awareness, those more attuned with their own physiological states, were rated significantly higher on adaptive leadership, empathy, and crisis decision-making by their teams. So that shows that leaders who know what their body is doing are better at reading what other people's bodies are doing.
Empathy is actually not a soft skill Empathy is a neurological one, and it starts with internal awareness. And, uh, the good news is, is that this is actually something that you can develop. It's not fixed. But it does require you to slow down enough to notice. And unfortunately, organizations run people at a pace that leaves no room for reflection, and they're actually degrading this capacity in their leaders.
So what are some of the practical implications that we can look at here? What does this all mean practically? So for leaders, I would say start paying attention to your body in decision-making context, not as a replacement for analysis, but as a complement to it. So when something feels off, sit with it before dismissing it.
Ask yourself what specifically feels uncertain, 'cause often the body has flagged something the conscious mind hasn't yet articulated. And for organizations, build in the conditions that allow somatic intelligence to function, and that means pace. That means psychological safety. It means not punishing people for saying, "I'm not comfortable with this direction."
'Cause someone saying that, those are not obstruction tactics. They are actually early warning systems. Suppress them at your peril. And for HR and people and culture professionals, this is actually your wheelhouse. The language of nervous systems, of somatic experience, of emotional data, this is the vocabulary of the work that we actually do.
So I'd really encourage you to start naming it explicitly. Start building frameworks that legitimize it. So to, to close this off, we have spent decades in professional culture trying to outthink our bodies. We're treating them as inconvenient containers for our brains. But the science is really clear.
Body and brain are one integrated system, and the organizations that understand that- The ones that build cultures where the full human being is welcomed to show up, those are the ones that are going to retain people. Those are the ones that are going to develop real leadership and make better decisions.
The body knows, and it's time that we started listening. This is something that I'm really, really passionate about. So thank you for joining me on this podcast. Uh, you will hear me talk a lot more about how we show up as human beings in the workplace because it is really something that we absolutely ignore, and we do need to start listening to it.
So if you would like to hear more about what the psychosomatic process looks like in leadership, please feel free to get in touch. You'll find my details on the website of Kan Kulture, K-A-N K-U-L-T-U-R-E .com. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Thanks for joining me on Kan Talk Kulture.
I'm Kylie Anne Neal. I hope today's episode gave you a clearer view into the values driving your workplace or sparked new ideas about building a remarkable company culture. If you're a founder or CEO interested in sharing your culture story, or if you're looking to build a safer, stronger, and more trusted workplace, let's connect.
Visit kanculture.com, that's K-A-N-K-U-L-T-U-R-E .com to learn more. Please hit that subscribe button to hear more real conversations with founders and CEOs and hands-on episodes full of people first culture advice. I look forward to connecting with you on our next episode.