The Story of Running Your Leadership Without Your Permission
Maíra Flores works with executives whose success has come at the cost of their body, the same tension, the same wall, the same pattern, no matter how much they've 'worked on it.' She helps them see what their body's been trying to tell them.
Have you ever watched a magic show and known, somewhere in the back of your mind, that what you were seeing wasn’t real, and felt the wonder anyway? That’s the trick. Not the disappearing coin, not the card that finds its way back into your hand. The trick is attention. The magician doesn’t need you to believe in magic.
He only needs you to look exactly where he wants you to look. Everything else, the sleight of hand, the misdirection, happens because your attention went where it was pointed. That’s how the story runs, too: it keeps your attention fixed so you miss what else is happening. The point is simple: what you focus on shapes what you experience.
Life works the same way. Not with a magician standing in front of you, but with something older and far more familiar: your own nervous system, running a story it built a long time ago to keep you safe.
Everyone has one. We call it different things, a pattern, a coping mechanism, a personality trait we’ve grown attached to, but underneath, it’s a story: the specific way you learned, early and without ever choosing it, to stay safe, stay loved, or stay in control. That story is not who you are. It’s where your attention has been living, and that is the thing you can change.
For leaders and executives, especially those who’ve built real success and look the most in control, that story often runs quietly enough to be mistaken for personality. We call it “being driven.” We call it “just how I am.” We rarely call it what it actually is: survival mode still running long after the circumstances that created it have passed.
I know this because I lived it. Over a short span of years, life handed me more grief than I knew how to hold, loss I didn’t see coming, fear I couldn’t do anything about, moments when all I could do was stand beside the people I loved and wait. I didn’t fall apart in any way people could see. I kept functioning, kept showing up, kept performing. What nobody could see, what I couldn’t see for a long time, was that I’d been living in a state of quiet alert for years. Not panic in the dramatic sense. Just a nervous system that had learned the world wasn’t safe enough to fully exhale.
I’m writing part of this from a hospital chair beside my son. A few years ago, a moment like this one would have sent me straight back into that old alert state, with my mind racing and my body bracing for the worst before anything had even happened. Today, I notice something different. I’m here. Present. Doing what needs to be done, without the old story hijacking the moment. That difference is the work. Not the absence of hard moments, but presence inside them.
Here’s what I want leaders and executives to understand: you don’t kill the story. You don’t erase your history, your triggers, or the old alarm system your body built to protect you. You change your relationship with it. You learn to notice when it’s running the show, and you learn, slowly, through the body and not just the mind, that you can choose to look somewhere else.
So, back to the magician. He isn’t the one with the power. You are. The moment you notice where your attention has been going and choose, deliberately, to look somewhere else, you stop being the audience of your own life and start directing it. That’s not a metaphor. It’s physiology. It’s nervous system work. It’s available to you, whether your story was built by something as loud as loss or something as quiet as a childhood you’ve never thought twice about.
The question isn’t whether a story is running you. Everyone has one. The question is: are you ready, as a leader or executive, to find out what yours is and choose where you look?
Read more from Maira Flores Xavier
Maira Flores Xavier, Embodiment Coach for Executives
Maíra Flores is an embodiment coach working with high-achieving professionals and executives who look after their bodies on the surface, the gym, the routines, while staying disconnected from what those bodies are actually signaling underneath. Combining ontological coaching, somatic medicine, and movement, she helps leaders recognize the patterns, often shaped by old trauma, quietly running their decision-making and leadership presence. She is the creator of The Five Masks framework, a diagnostic identifying the survival identity the nervous system has organized itself around, and works with clients internationally from her base in London.
