CHRIS PARKER: Hello, this is Chris Parker with the Business Simplicity Podcast. I just had a conversation with Konrad Wiesendanger and Simon Brod about Konrad’s method, ESM, Embodied Stress Management. We get into where it came from, how it evolved out of Feldenkrais, and how you can bring these ESM methods directly into your life to help you deal with stressful situations. So Konrad, why would this be valuable for people to listen to?

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Well, I think it has to do with motivation. When are people motivated to do something about stress? Usually they are in a stressful situation. When they are not stressed, they know they should do something for it, but who actually does it? I don’t. So I noticed there is a big demand for tools that really help people do something under acute stress. A kind of first aid kit for stress. That is what I created.

CHRIS PARKER: Welcome to the Business Simplicity Podcast, where Chris Parker explores how leaders cut through complexity to accelerate strategy, execution, and growth with calm, clarity, and confidence.

CHRIS PARKER: And welcome back to the Business Simplicity Podcast. This is Chris Parker, and I’m having a conversation with Konrad Wiesendanger and Simon Brod. Konrad, we’re going to find, has an interesting background, somewhere far away from this in architecture, but he is an expert on Embodied Stress Management, ESM, and we’re going to dive into that. As I understand it from the free ebook I’ve read and the conversations I’ve had, ESM is an evolution or adaptation of the Feldenkrais method. Both Konrad and Simon are practitioners of Feldenkrais. Simon Brod, joining us, is someone I’ve worked with in various contexts in our normal professional life, and I’ve been following his Feldenkrais journey for many years. I’ve even attended a Feldenkrais session. I’m just delighted to have these guys here.

Before I hand it over to them, the reason this is so relevant to me is that stress impacts all of us. I’ve recently joined a new mission, a new assignment as a technology executive. Three weeks in, I was already talking to my wife like, wow, okay, how do I care for myself while I go into this system of people and not get lost in it? So I can keep the mental perspective, zoom out, and work on the system without becoming part of the problem in the system too soon. My ability to self-regulate and manage stress consciously in that system is exactly what I need. So I’m really curious what I discover about ESM. Konrad, can you share a little about yourself, and then Simon, before we get into ESM, share a bit about how you found yourself here. Then we’ll figure out what this ESM thing is all about.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Yeah. Well, I started out as an architect, which is already quite a stressful profession. After 12 years I stopped working as an architect because I had an accident, and through rehabilitation I came into contact with the Feldenkrais profession. I became a Feldenkrais professional, but I didn’t stop my contact with corporations. I was dealing mainly in ergonomic consulting, helping people find their way at their workspace. I was always in touch with corporations, and I noticed that many of the physical pains and aches people have are somewhat related to stress.

Later I also did a master in coaching and supervision, so I was in the communications field as well, still dealing with corporations. I noticed that many people who came to see me knew stress management methods, but those methods were usually based on a daily practice of meditation and self-reflection. I didn’t find anybody who actually did that. So I noticed there is a problem of motivation around stress. When are you motivated to do something about stress? In the moment when you have stress. That is how I stumbled upon this solution, together with the Feldenkrais embodied way. How can you do something in the moment when things are already flying around your head? When you’re really in trouble, how can you do something right then, so you don’t need several years of experience to be resilient against stress? How can you get a quick fix, a first aid kit for stress? It evolved out of my work, and finally I put it all into a book.

CHRIS PARKER: It resonates with me because I am a meditator, and I can literally see that my meditation path matches my stress path. It probably should be the other way around. When I’m not stressed, I should be leaning into the meditation to strengthen that muscle. But it’s often like, oh, I’m stressed, I need to reflect. I’m excited about it. So, Simon, would you like to jump in with a little introduction? And on the tail of that, can you explain what Feldenkrais is, as a foundation for this ESM conversation?

SIMON BROD: Yes. Maybe I’ll start with how I came to the Feldenkrais method myself. I suffered for many years with all kinds of chronic pains, especially in my shoulder and lower back, and a lot of this was stress related. I was in stressful jobs. I was a commodities trader for a while. I was a manager of international teams, flying across Europe daily. I was running an innovation program for a large company. Different jobs with different kinds of stress. Throughout all that, these pains kept coming back. I tried all the usual things people try. You go to the gym, you do the yoga, and so on, and this didn’t really sort it out.

When I came across the Feldenkrais method, I found very quickly, within a couple of sessions, a sense of connection. The pains didn’t go away within a couple of sessions, but I already felt that something was changing inside me. I got very excited about it and soon decided I wanted to become a Feldenkrais practitioner, so I could share some of this with other people who might be suffering the same kind of situation. I’ve now been practicing Feldenkrais for 10 or 11 years. I still have echoes of the way I used to be, but I am so much better in control of myself physically. I literally have more range of motion in the way I move my body, but I’m also more in control of myself in difficult situations. If I face a difficult conversation, or I’m in a meeting with a lot of people I don’t know, or any of those situations that might cause stress, I’m much better equipped to get on with it. It’s been an all-round positive experience for me, and of course I love teaching the Feldenkrais method.

Maybe a word about what it is. Feldenkrais is a movement method at its core. But it’s not movement for strength or flexibility. Those things you go to the gym for, and they’re great. Feldenkrais is movement for improved coordination, improved self-use. We deliberately go slow. We make small, gentle movements. We guide our attention while we’re doing the movement, giving our sensory system information it gets starved of in daily life. If we’re busy with work or whatever else, we’re not really paying attention to ourselves enough. By having this regular practice where we direct our attention to the details of what we’re doing, and try to map out what we’re doing very precisely, that sensory information gets absorbed into our subconscious system. It’s like a reset. The brain is very capable. It knows how to move us. But we tend to get in our own way, because we get set in patterns, and then because of stress we get stuck there. Feldenkrais is a wonderful way to get ourselves out of that and reset. That’s the quick introduction. I’m sure Konrad will say a lot more.

CHRIS PARKER: Before we transition to Konrad, I remember in the session I attended that some of the movements were unnatural or counterintuitive. Moving different arms and shoulders in different ways, out of sync, looking different directions. The experience I had was that it forces you to be more conscious about your movement, because you’re not simply acting instinctively. Is that an essence of it? The consciousness of it?

SIMON BROD: For me it’s absolutely about awareness and consciousness. The lessons are designed to do unfamiliar things, because we’re trying to wake up the sensory system. One of the best ways to do that is to give people very unfamiliar things to do, because then they have to concentrate on how they do it. They don’t know how to do it. If you ask somebody to do something they already know how to do, chances are they’ll go into autopilot and do it the way they always do. Here we’re trying to break into those patterns and habits, to give our subconscious a chance to go back and ask, oh, what do I actually do? Putting ourselves in those unfamiliar situations, in a totally safe environment, and allowing the system to explore a little: oh, that’s weird, how do I achieve that? If I need to move that way, what options do I have? This is great training. Not so much for the muscles, but for the brain. You’re using the neuroplasticity of the brain, and doing that regularly is a great way to keep your mind sharp. It’s not only for movement. It keeps you fresh and sharp and able to respond to situations in the best possible way.

CHRIS PARKER: Great. Konrad, moving over to the concept of ESM and the book. The subtitle of Embodied Stress Management is “escape the stress trap with agile mindfulness.” I love that the word agile is used there, different from how I use it every day from a software development perspective. The way this has been described is as a first aid kit for those moments of stress. Where Simon was talking about movements, what I read in the ESM book is micro-movements. So I’m curious, can you continue the story from Feldenkrais? How did that evolve into ESM, and what is it?

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Yeah. Thank you, Simon, for your explanation of Feldenkrais. That’s one of the most beautiful ones I’ve ever heard. I really like it. I’d like to add something. You said it already helped you deal with your own stress with the Feldenkrais method, but it’s more of a high-threshold approach, because Feldenkrais is quite a large modality. It’s a way to deal with stress, but with ESM I started to focus on stress exclusively, because Feldenkrais is not designed to deal with stress. It can be used for that. So I made an evolution out of Feldenkrais, mainly with a focus on stress. It’s not the Feldenkrais method anymore, but it is an application of it. You don’t become a Feldenkrais practitioner by practicing ESM, but you start to learn something about Feldenkrais.

What I’d like to add to what Simon said is this. When people have a problem, they usually do everything they know to solve it. You can think of it as all the knowledge they’ve already used, but they don’t have access to their blind spots. Feldenkrais, or ESM, helps you fill in those blind spots, so you get new experiences about yourself. You get to know yourself in a new light, and you get new possibilities to deal with your problem. You get broader and wider in your range of possibilities to find solutions. That’s the way I see the Feldenkrais method and the base of ESM.

A movement-based method in the corporate world is not exactly easy, because the corporate world doesn’t have much affinity to movement. When you look at people in meetings, they have a poker face, they sit, they face each other. It’s a reduction of movement. So when I introduced movement to deal with stress, I ran into a problem. It’s not accepted that somebody would suddenly start to play with their tongue, or make weird movements, without a lot of explaining. The thing about the Feldenkrais method is that the imagination of a movement and the actual movement are neurologically pretty much the same. So when you practice a movement, you’re able to reduce it to an invisible range. You can apply the movement without anybody seeing you do it. That’s the trick. I can use a movement-based method to deal with stress right in the moment, while you’re present with other people, and you can apply it without anybody noticing.

CHRIS PARKER: Can you connect the dots on movement and stress management? I was talking to a colleague yesterday who was very stressed. She hikes, she runs, she exerts herself. I still play volleyball. There’s physical movement and exertion, and also mental focus, because when you’re competing I’m not worried about the budget cycle or whatever else. I can comprehend how movement helps stress, but I feel you’re talking about something else altogether.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Yes. Movement and exercise also help deal with stress. If you have a fit body, if you’re in good shape, you’re able to deal with stress more easily. But when you do sports, you’re not interested in the process of the movement, more in times, in which time you reach something, or whether you win a game. It’s more outcome oriented and less process oriented. ESM is mainly in the process orientation.

Just imagine when you want to do something. Doing something actually means you make a change with your body. You change something in your world, and you do that with your body. You can do that on the keyboard, on the mouse, in very little movements, but you’re always involving your body in action. Any kind of action. Coding is also movement. When you want to do something and you notice you can’t, because of some reason, then you get stressed. So stress is the inability to fulfill an action, to do what you want to do. You notice you can do something but it doesn’t help, and that causes stress. At the beginning of any action in your life, there is a physical movement, something your body is involved in, and you have to get acquainted with it. I have a little experiment you can use, if you want. I can show you.

CHRIS PARKER: I was a little stressed for you. I was just thinking, oh, wait, because I have enough stress. But sure, let’s jump in. I think that would be great for myself and for people to experience this. Then I want to follow up with how this can land in reality, in the workplace, for me. Let’s experience this.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: It’s a little thing. First, you have to look at me, or listen to me, and don’t do anything, because you only have one chance. Of course, it’s stress. You have to do it right in the first moment. What you’re going to do is take your hands and you… no, lower the hands again. You only have one chance.

CHRIS PARKER: Oh, you got me all stressed. I’m like, yeah, okay, I’ve got to do this thing. Some stress.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: It’s harmless stress, though. Don’t worry. You take the two thumbs, the two little fingers, and the two middle fingers, and you put them together at the same time, in one moment. You only have one chance. You do it once. They have to touch exactly at the same moment. Your thumbs, your little fingers, and your middle fingers. Just try that. That’s the whole exercise.

CHRIS PARKER: Can I try it now? It’s like some sort of Star Trek thing. You put it together.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: That’s right. You only have one chance. Thumbs, middle fingers, little fingers, at the same time.

CHRIS PARKER: And what’s the penalty for failure here?

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: No penalty. Just seeing how much stress there is. At some point you just have to go.

CHRIS PARKER: Yeah. Okay. But did I pass? Can I stay?

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Lower your hands and tell me, how did you breathe?

CHRIS PARKER: I don’t know if I did breathe.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: And how did you sense the support of your chair?

CHRIS PARKER: Not at all when I was in the moment. I did sit up beforehand, so I got prepared, but no, I’m not conscious or aware of that at all.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: You see, those are two of the main resources we need when we have stress. We need access to our breath, for oxygen, and we need the support of where we are. It can be our feet, or sitting on a chair, for orientation. We have to know where we are in order to know where we’re going. We need the resource of oxygen. When we have stress, we lose both main resources. We lose the orientation of our standpoint, where we are, and we lose access to our breath. So stress is a very physical experience, and we want to recreate access to our breath and our support.

There are methods that deal with stress. Perhaps you’ve heard it: when you’re stressed, people say, okay, breathe. The problem is that breath gets lost in the first moment of stress. So you’re dealing with the largest problem when you try to find your breath again. In ESM we use the breath as a reference. When we notice we get access to breath again, then we’re fine. But the exercises don’t deal explicitly with breath, because dealing with breath under stress is difficult. We make an easier approach. So that was the experience, and I hope you survived it.

CHRIS PARKER: We’ll see if we get to the end, because the stress level is high. In my past I’ve been fortunate to receive some world-class presentation coaching. Keynote presentation coaching. One of the pre-performance reminders I still carry is three questions to ask myself before going on stage. Am I present? Am I grounded, am I here, feet on the ground? Am I breathing? And the third one is, am I elegant? Am I flowing? For me this mental checklist of be in the body, okay, I’m here, I’m nowhere else, let the breathing flow, and then be authentic, be myself in my skin, really works. So I can imagine if you’re doing this on a micro level, maybe not standing on stage, but on anything. I’ve never really thought about applying those concepts to another moment.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Yeah. It’s interesting that you talk about elegance. What’s your definition of elegance?

CHRIS PARKER: As I just said, for me elegance is real. Am I there myself? That for me is elegant. I’m not talking about glamour. If I’m showing up in my strength, not physically but in my presence, that for me is elegance on stage.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Yeah. I can feel it’s not easy to define elegance. Moshe Feldenkrais had a beautiful definition of elegance: a functional movement with no additional, unnecessary movements. If you just do what’s necessary, then you become elegant. When you look at athletics, for example, these athletes don’t have the capacity to do any unnecessary movements when they do their job. That’s why it appears so elegant, and it looks easy. You think, oh, I can do that. So that’s an aesthetic approach to movement. You don’t think about achieving a movement. You don’t look at the solution, where it leads to, but you sense the process of the movement. You get an aesthetic sensation, a felt sense of satisfaction, as you’re doing things. You don’t wait for satisfaction until you’re successful, until you end the action. You’re already in flow, in accordance with the sensation of what you’re doing, no matter the outcome. That’s the mood, the atmosphere, we do the ESM work and the Feldenkrais work in. That’s the sense we’re looking for.

CHRIS PARKER: Thanks for those three ideas, because that’s close to Feldenkrais, and I think it’s a good way to prepare people. For exams, students who have to defend their PhD, for example, or if you’re on stage or in a meeting. Sense your breath. Are you breathing? Where are you? And does it feel elegant? Does it feel satisfactory?

I can apply it to another case, and then I’m going to ask you more about breathing, because ESM seems more of a micro-movement practice than a breathing practice. Mindfulness and meditation go much more into the breathing space. When I’m playing competitive volleyball and you’re receiving the serve, the other side is about to serve you, and there’s a tough serve coming. You know this is going to be a jump serve, screaming at you. Many people lock up, hold their breath, get rigid, and it just ricochets off them. Something I have to do consciously is this little dance. I get down, I flow my body a little, to make sure I’m not locked up, make sure I’m breathing. Then I have this other definition of elegance, which is a wanting. I get into a state of, that serve is mine. Instead of fearing the serve, I’m like, come on, come on, give me the ball. That freaks the server out sometimes, because they’re like, wait, what’s happening? But that is also about consciously not holding the breath, not locking the body. So if I understand correctly, ESM is not about breathing. It’s about awareness of the importance of breath. Can you reconcile that for me? How do these worlds connect?

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Yeah. I think breath, as I said, is a reference. When you have access to breath, you’re calm. Anything like fear, for example, the scene you described of the ball coming, when you’re looking forward to meeting that serve, then you can breathe. When you’re afraid of it, you can’t. So we use breath as a barometer to find out how we’re doing. Fear is an autonomous reaction. We don’t have much control over fear, but we have an ability to change our perception of the world, which lowers that fear, and then we get more access to breath.

When you’re looking forward to that serve and you tell yourself, I have to return it and it has to stay in the field, then you put pressure on yourself, and that’s a sort of fear. When you’re looking forward to meeting that serve and doing something with it, you might fail, you might have a grandiose miss, but you can still enjoy it. When you free yourself from the possibility of mistakes, you’re much more free, and you actually make fewer mistakes.

CHRIS PARKER: There are so many patterns here, but I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. Organizationally, when I’m managing large groups of people, if people are calm, they have space for creativity. If people are anxious and fearful, one of the patterns I see a lot from leaders is hammering people: do more, more, more, you must innovate. That organization is not breathing. But that’s more of a macro level.

Maybe before I invite Konrad to bring me into an ESM practice, Simon, is there a way to connect this to the workplace, as you’ve seen it? How can this meaningfully improve the life experience of people at work? Set that up, and then I’ll ask Konrad to apply one of these methods to me in this conversation.

SIMON BROD: Sure. As Konrad said, ESM is designed to be a very easy, low-threshold technique. You don’t need to be a Feldenkrais expert to learn it. But he was sticking his tongue out at me earlier, and I’m not sure I can do that at work. The tongue sticking we can keep for separate individual practice, but these are techniques you can apply while you’re talking to your boss, or whatever, at work. Especially in those moments when you find your self-regulation lacks a bit. Everybody has different situations they find particularly difficult, and different reactions.

The reactions we have are perfectly natural, but I know for myself, if I get aggressively confronted, my tendency is to shut down rather than react with aggression. Somebody else might react with aggression. All of these reactions are not optimal. We want to be able to self-regulate, even though something may have come at us very quickly and surprised us. Having a quickly accessible technique that can help bring us back into ourselves, and get back to that place where we have access to breath, can be very useful. It’s not about practicing the breath. It’s about doing something else that brings us back into ourselves.

Depending on your workplace, these are all techniques people can pick. There are 10 or 12 different ESM techniques, and you don’t need all of them. You can pick and choose the one, two, three, or five that work for you, once you’ve practiced them. So there’s something there for anybody. The more you do it, the better you get at it. It’s definitely something people can integrate into how they behave in daily life at work. We’ll hear at the end of this conversation that in November there’s a three-day workshop for people to really get into it, but we’ll talk about that later.

CHRIS PARKER: I can imagine there are people who work in a company where nobody irritates them for any reason, where their manager never causes them stress, and there are never escalations or incidents or crises caused by external forces. If you’re one of the people for whom that’s all true, then I guess hang up now. But for everybody else, this could be helpful. So, Konrad, I know the name of what you’re about to do to me, but that’s all I know. I’m coming in unknowing. You said you’re going to run the jellyfish hand practice with me, and I’m just so curious right now.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Yeah. First, to introduce it, I’d like to say something about what movement means here. As I said before, when you try to do something and it doesn’t work, then you have stress. For your brain, it’s not really important what you do. So when you see yourself blocked, unable to continue, you have to first reestablish contact with your body, your movements, your ability to act. These movements you can always do, because you always have your body with you, and you can always change something in your body. It’s the highest reduction of action. You do the tiniest action, which is not related to your problem. The cause of your stress is not touched, but you find a way to be able to act. You can make a difference, and making a difference is the first step to overcome stress.

The jellyfish, for example, is one of the exercises. It’s a little difficult to show here, because my hands are not in view. Think of your hand as a jellyfish.

CHRIS PARKER: Konrad, as you’re going through this, not everyone will be able to see it when they’re listening. So maybe describe it in a little more detail.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Yeah. Okay. In the book it’s introduced a little differently, but here’s the way I do it. Think of your hand as a jellyfish. The fingers are the tentacles, and the center of your palm is the inside of the body of the jellyfish. Jellyfish propel themselves by pushing out water. So, slowly and very loosely, bring the tips of your fingers closer together, without bending your fingers. Keep your fingers limp and straight, and come a little closer together, and sense how you close the center of your palm a little. Then you open your fingers, as if it were a parachute, and you can lower your hand, as if it were landing like a parachute. Then you lift again, from the center of your palm, and you let your tentacles, the fingers, just trail behind your hand through the space. When you come back, you open your hand a little and you land like a parachute. Just do that really slowly, and think of this image of elegance. Make it beautiful. Think of this jellyfish that quietly moves through the water and pushes itself away, trailing its tentacles behind it. Then when it lets go, it comes back, spreads the tentacles, and lands like a parachute, really softly.

I can see in your face that something’s happening already. Now think of yourself in a stress situation, doing that. You will notice that when the stress is really high, you won’t be able to get that aesthetic sensation. So if you find access to your body, you won’t be able to have that much stress.

CHRIS PARKER: So in a stress situation, you can do this practice to reset yourself, in a way. Is that the idea?

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Well, you tell me what happened as you were doing this.

CHRIS PARKER: A number of things happened. One, I saw that my fingernail has this white stuff on it, and that’s sourdough dough I was making this morning. So I was distracted by that. I was also thinking, I’m not sure this is better in a boardroom than sticking my tongue out at the chairman. I had all these rational things going on. But once I got past all that mental monkey-mind stuff, my hand felt light. There was a little tingle, a buzz, and almost a fluid feeling, like the universe was trailing a little jet stream behind it. You’re pushing, but all very soft. I feel the palm of my hand when you’re closing it.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Yes. Simon, what did you experience? What happened in you?

SIMON BROD: Yeah. I got very interested in the palm of my hand, leading from that point. As I was doing it, my mind got interested in that place. After two or three repetitions, I did feel my face relaxing, and I was sitting a bit more evenly on my chair. So that was a pretty quick effect.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Yeah. How did you breathe?

SIMON BROD: Quite smoothly and easily, I found. Very easily, effortlessly.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Okay. And you’re right, Chris, in the boardroom I wouldn’t recommend doing this. Except, well, maybe if we invite you into the boardroom and it’s a training. If you’re leading the board meeting and you know ESM, you can have the whole team doing this, and that might help the whole team. But then you have to have the position on the board to do that. There is also the micro-move. I know it’s not possible in every situation. The micro-move is, when you have the experience of this jellyfish, when you really get this elegant, smooth movement, it’s enough to think of the tips of your fingers and move them closer to each other only half a millimeter, and let go of it. But in your imagination, you still do the whole jellyfish. You do the first tenth of a percent of the movement. You can have your hand wherever you want. It can be lying on the table. You can have your arms crossed, your hand on your shoulder, on a pen, wherever, and think of doing this jellyfish. In your mind, you do the whole jellyfish, but you only do the very beginning of it, the tiniest change of movement. It’s an invisible movement that you can sense and nobody can see.

CHRIS PARKER: As you’re speaking, I’m doing it with my hand down, because I’m connecting it to my stage performance, the keynote dynamic. I can imagine, when you first walk out, in that moment of pause before the performance, just standing there, and it gives my hands something to do. A lot of people put their hands in their pockets, or do all this stuff. But if you’re just there, elegantly present, breathing, and then do a little jellyfish… it’s interesting that even though I’m barely moving my fingers, I still feel the palm of my hand.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: You feel the palm, the sensation. And then you can also visualize the whole jellyfish movement.

CHRIS PARKER: Yeah.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: What I’d like to mention here, especially in the beginning, when you’re not very proficient with these movements yet: when you do the micro-move and you concentrate on it, you might get a little glassy-eyed, a slightly strange look. But that will disappear after a while, when you get more routine with it.

CHRIS PARKER: Where do the glassy eyes come from?

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Because you’re concentrating. When you concentrate, you don’t only restrict your breathing, you also block your eyes. Many people do that. But the more routine you get with these movements, the freer you are with your eyes. There is also an eye lesson in ESM, so you can practice with your eyes too.

CHRIS PARKER: I felt that, because when we were doing the first jellyfish, and you said, oh, your face is changing, I had to re-engage my eyeballs, like, oh, wait, I’m here, refocus. So definitely, I don’t know if I was glazed, but my eyes were certainly offline.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Yeah. I say it’s an easy method, low threshold, but it is complex. It’s not complicated, but it’s complex. It really goes into your whole system. It’s based on three foundations. One is support, the relationship to the ground that I’m looking for. The second is slow rhythms, which also calm down your nervous system. The third is activating brain nerves that are critical for engaging the parasympathetic nervous system. These lessons are chosen to engage that parasympathetic nervous system and calm down your autonomic nervous system. That’s how I chose these nine lessons. They all have this contact, this effect. The eyes, the tongue, the fingers, support, and the calming of the nervous system.

CHRIS PARKER: You’re not flooding your body with adrenaline and cortisol and all these other things. Is that the point? Is it just to bring more calm to the whole system?

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Yeah. Well, it still happens to a certain extent, because usually you remember ESM when you’re already under stress. Then you already have all that inside you. But the best way to get rid of adrenaline and cortisol is movement. You have to be active. Perhaps you read it in the ebook already: there are moments when stress can be overwhelming, and even this doesn’t work. In those moments, I usually recommend stopping what you’re doing. The best way to stop what you’re doing, especially in a meeting, is to tell them you’re going to the toilet. You’re always free to say that. You get up, you walk down the hall, you go to the toilet, and you can move there. When you’re alone in the toilet, you can even scream, or do something. Be active, let the muscles get active again, and then you come back. That’s also part of a reset. So ESM doesn’t help in every situation, but it also helps you be aware of when you need that protection. There are times when it can be overwhelming, and that’s when you have to do something completely different.

CHRIS PARKER: You’re triggering me on this “do something different.” In one of my communities, the Enablers Network, we have these concepts of the value-building behaviors. They were created by Didier Marlier and someone named Chris Parker who is not me. He was a professor at INSEAD. They studied many high-performing organizations and came up with these 10 value-building behaviors. Active listening, open questions, summarizing, support, challenge, clarifying, timeout, and then review and feedback. When I present these to leadership teams, all of these words are relatively common and can be easily dismissed. Oh, of course I ask open questions. Then you have to give examples of what works and what doesn’t. But one we really build into this is timeout. When someone, or you, or the context needs a break, because it’s getting too heated, too stressful, too anxious, and the environment is no longer conducive to the outcome you’re seeking, then stop. So I think there’s a direct connection with leadership team and boardroom dynamics, provided by INSEAD and applied research on high-performing teams.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Yeah. Really nice. You can see ESM as a connection. It’s the private, personal timeout you can do in the presence of everybody else. And if that doesn’t work, you can still pull yourself out and excuse yourself to the toilet. But many times it might be possible to just go back to one of these exercises, one of these micro-moves, and you can center yourself to be present again.

CHRIS PARKER: And in doing this, I guess you can, over time, train yourself to exist or operate in conditions that would normally have stressed you out more. For me, it’s not a way to cope with unhealthy or unsafe environments. Okay, I can just do more in a horrible place. That’s not it. But in a normal circumstance, this is a way to be more self-regulated, more healthy. And then at some point, if it gets too much, you have to take a timeout.

I’d love to turn the page slightly and go to the November three-day workshop. If this is about helping people deal with stress, I want to know, how do you put them under extreme stress in those three days, so they have something existential they need to survive? Is this like an escape room with live ammunition? Is that what people can expect, that they may or may not survive?

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: No. Everybody knows stress. I haven’t met anybody who doesn’t know stress. So that’s a prerequisite they bring with them. They all have the experience of stress. But the three-day workshop is not mainly focused on stressed people. It’s for coaches, therapists, HR people, communicators, people who work with people, to learn this method and present it to their clientele. It’s an instructor’s workshop, an instructor’s training. What I want to do is spread ESM. Right now I have about 40 ESM instructors, mainly in Switzerland, two in Germany, and I want to spread it more, so people can benefit from the method. I want trained facilitators who teach this method to their clients. That’s what this workshop is for.

In the workshop, everybody does the whole workshop for themselves, of course, but they also learn the background and some of the teaching methods, taken from the Feldenkrais method, for how to teach these exercises, and what to look for. It’s a training to teach this method. The special thing is that whoever comes to this training will receive an unlimited license to teach this method, and it doesn’t have any additional cost. The license stays with them. There will be a contract, but they pay for the workshop, and after that they’re free to teach in their own field. That’s how I want to spread the message.

CHRIS PARKER: And in that intention of spreading, Simon, you discovered Konrad, you discovered the potential of it, and you’re co-hosting this in-person workshop in the Netherlands in late November. So I’m curious, Simon, as we start to wrap up, what is your intention? What is your motivation? How is this benefiting the Netherlands? What’s the goal here?

SIMON BROD: Well, as I mentioned earlier, my first reason for becoming a Feldenkrais practitioner was all around my own stress-related pains and issues. One of the challenges with the Feldenkrais method is that it requires quite a lot of commitment from people. When I heard Konrad’s description of this method, and started doing some of these micro-moves, I realized this is a much more effective way of getting at that particular aspect, that part of the benefits of the Feldenkrais method. I think this is very relevant. I would certainly have found it useful to have this 20 or 25 years ago. I think that’s true of a lot of people who get stressed in their daily lives for lots of good reasons. So I would certainly like to spread it. It’s something I can use as a great addition to my Feldenkrais practice. But I also think anybody who’s coaching people who are concerned about their ability to self-regulate, or anybody managing teams under stressful situations, should be interested in knowing more about this. I’m looking forward to the three-day training. I think it’s going to be a great occasion, and to having more people use this and spread it.

CHRIS PARKER: Is this an “and” thing? It’s not Feldenkrais or ESM. Is ESM maybe an entry level toward the world of Feldenkrais? How would you connect these two?

SIMON BROD: It could be. Some of the principles, as Konrad explained, are the same. I don’t think you ever need to become a Feldenkrais expert. If you learn the ESM method and have the three-day training, I think you’re then good to go. I would find it wonderful if people come to discover there’s something more they want, and then they get more involved in the Feldenkrais method. That’s my passion. But it’s not necessary to practice ESM.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: In fact, that’s the experience I have when I teach this method to corporations, or in my private practice. People ask me, where can I get more of this? Then I give them a list of Feldenkrais practitioners in their area and say, connect with one of them, and there you get more of it. So it’s also a way of entry. It’s good for Feldenkrais practitioners who learn ESM to have a connection to a certain field of clients, so they can pass clients from ESM into their Feldenkrais practice. It’s a way of expanding the Feldenkrais practice into the corporate field.

CHRIS PARKER: Great. It sounds super interesting. And if people are interested, Simon, to find more information, your website is bodymind.space, and I’ll include this in the show notes. If you’re interested in finding the ebook, that is at esm-stressmanagement.ch. You can change the language to your preferred language and then click on the download. You need to register, and you can download the book, which is the first couple of chapters and about 58 pages. It’ll really get you started, and then you can order the book and pursue more. So, lovely. I’m just curious, is there one last thing from either of you that you’d like to share as we wrap up?

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Well, I’d like to tell a little story that happened to me since I created ESM. As a coach, and also a Feldenkrais practitioner, I used to be a little shy of conflict. When I did team development sessions, I always tried to stay out of conflicts. With ESM, I noticed I wasn’t afraid of conflict anymore. If a conflict came up, I was able to moderate it. It even got so far that I got into mediation. Now I do mediation at the corporate level, and also in relationships. I’m working a lot with conflict. It changed something in my view of the world about conflict, because I had been afraid of it, and suddenly I’m not afraid of it anymore. I’m calmer, and I can use some of these exercises, not only for myself, but also when people get really heated up in a conflict. I can tell them, okay, stop here, I’ll show you something. I give them just a little glimpse of ESM, and then we continue, and it calms down the communication.

CHRIS PARKER: That’s a fundamental change. What shifted? Can you comprehend what shifted within you, through this practice, that gave you the confidence or comfort to step into these places you avoided before?

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: I think it had to do with my past. When somebody started to disagree, and not give in, and not find a compromise right away, I started to get stressed, even as a moderator. I know now, because I do a lot of supervision with coaches and therapists too, that many people shy away from conflict. They think conflict is something that shouldn’t happen, and the reason they think that might be out of fear. ESM really helps you stay centered, even if people are starting to argue. You don’t have to stop it right away. You can get a smoother way through the disagreement or the conflict. So it doesn’t only help when you’re overworked, or when you have to deal with 100 emails at once. It also helps in difficult communication.

CHRIS PARKER: Incredible. Simon, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I always get hopeful when talking about this stuff. There’s so much that we humans can do, more than we think we can, or more than we actually do in our daily habits. So, really great. I’m looking forward to the three days at the end of November. And thank you very much, Chris, for hosting this.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Thank you very much, Chris, for hosting this.

CHRIS PARKER: Absolutely my pleasure. As I shared when we first started, I have some very selfish reasons for being interested in this. The context I choose to work in at the moment can be very stressful. I’m consciously aware of that, and making those decisions consciously as much as I can. I know a lot of our behavior is unconscious. But more widely, when I talk to people about AI and the impact of AI on our lives and our work, I often start with, how do you remain calm? How do you remain self-regulated? Because if you want to hold my hand and walk into the space of AI with me, I am frequently confused, concerned, fearful of some of the things I experience in AI, mostly because it’s so unknown. You look at the superpowers at the fingers of people who are not wise, and you’re like, oh dear. And the humanity, we’re walking down that path. So I think one of the most beneficial things anyone can do right now is learn methods, mechanisms, and mindsets to self-regulate and keep themselves calm. As we said, when you lock up and that ball’s coming at you, you will make a mistake. So as we’re walking into this unknown as humanity, I think any method like this, ESM, Feldenkrais, will benefit you and those around you. So check it out. You can find the links to Konrad and Simon in the show notes. It’s bodymind.space for information about the November workshop, and esm-stressmanagement.ch for the ebook. So, Konrad, Simon, thank you so much for joining.

SIMON BROD: Thank you.

KONRAD WIESENDANGER: Thank you.

CHRIS PARKER: Thank you for listening to the Business Simplicity Podcast. If this conversation resonated, please share it with a fellow leader navigating complexity.