Why High Achievers Lose Connection With Their Bodies – An Interview with Maira Flores Xavier
High achievers are often praised for their discipline, ambition, and ability to perform under pressure, yet many remain disconnected from the body carrying that success. Through her work in Pilates, embodiment, and nervous system awareness, Maira Flores Xavier explores why leaders can appear highly capable while still operating from patterns of tension, control, and survival.
In this interview, Maira shares how survival identities influence leadership behaviour, why burnout is often a result of deeper patterns rather than simply too much work, and how reconnecting with the body can help leaders make more conscious choices and create sustainable success.
Maira Flores Xavier, Embodiment Coach for Executives
What first showed you that high achievers can be physically active yet still deeply disconnected from their bodies?
This goes back to my early years working in Pilates. I kept working with high achievers who were extremely active in their minds but disconnected from their bodies: constant tension, racing thoughts all day, and no real sense that rest was even available to them, let alone chronic pain that stayed the same for years. From the outside, their lives looked more than fine – good income, good work, constant travel. On vacation, things would often ease. But as soon as they came back to the same routine, the same house, the same daily problems, everything returned with it.
What changed my understanding was seeing the same pattern across very different people: successful, capable, physically active, and completely unaware of what their bodies were signalling until they broke down in some way. Some of them had the best training routines, the best diet, everything dialled in physically, and they still couldn't feel free or strong in their own bodies. They couldn't explain what was missing. That gap between physical activity and body awareness became the starting point for everything I do now.
How do you recognise when a leadership strength is actually an old survival strategy still running the person?
The clearest sign is what happens outside of work. Someone who can't stop thinking about work on holiday, who collapses or gets ill the moment they finally rest, or who feels tension and excitement building at the thought of going back, even pain in the body, is not resting on a strength. They're running a survival strategy that only knows how to operate.
Underneath it, people are often chasing something they can't name. In ontological work, we see this constantly: someone spends years chasing money, but what they actually want is attention. They cycle through relationships, but what they want is to be seen. The chase repeats endlessly because the real need underneath someone’s focus was never achieved, only substituted.
Practically, I look at delegation, trust, and boundaries. Someone who hands over responsibility but keeps checking, who can't trust their team, who can't set a boundary or stay present without slipping into the past or future, is showing survival, not leadership. So is snapping at people below them, or bringing work problems home. The body confirms it: tension, bracing, a shift in breath the moment the pattern is questioned.
What does your Five Masks Quiz reveal that traditional mindset-based executive coaching can miss?
Traditional mindset coaching works with the story a person tells about themselves, their goals, their blocks, their beliefs. The Five Masks framework works with something underneath that story: the nervous system pattern that built it in the first place.
Each of the five masks formed in childhood, shaped by our environment and whatever we experienced as safe or unsafe. If someone grew up with controlling parents, perfectionism became the way to avoid being told off. That pattern doesn't disappear once they become a company president. Their nervous system is still waiting for a parent to walk in and criticise them, even though there's no parent there anymore, just their own conditioning running the show.
Mindset coaching can miss this entirely because it works at the level of thought, not the level of the nervous system that generates the thought. The masks reveal how someone actually relates to life, not what they believe about themselves. They don't disappear. They form in childhood and stay with us for life. What changes isn't the mask itself; it's our relationship with it: whether it's still running us unconsciously, or whether we can recognise it and choose differently.
Why do workplaces sometimes reward patterns like control, perfectionism, and over-responsibility until they become damaging?
I have a joke I tell clients: in big business, we don't manage human beings; we manage nervous systems. Most workplace complaints aren't really about the work. It's about something underneath the work, something the environment is triggering.
Our nervous systems are still largely running on primal wiring, built for a threat that hasn't existed in millions of years, yet still on alert. Modern workplaces, with their pressure to perform and their constant low-level threat to what we believe is safe or in our control, activate that same system. Control, perfectionism, and over-responsibility are the patterns that make someone look most capable of handling that threat. Someone who controls every detail looks reliable. Someone who's a perfectionist looks high-standard. Someone who over-functions looks dedicated. So these patterns get rewarded directly: promotions, praise, more responsibility, precisely because they're mistaken for competence instead of recognised as a nervous system in survival mode.
It gets worse with long hours, poor food, no real rest, the same routine day after day. All of it keeps the system locked in survival, running the old story instead of actual judgment.
Where do you think current conversations about burnout and resilience fail to address what is actually driving executive behaviour?
Most burnout conversations treat it as a resourcing problem: too much work, not enough recovery, so the fix becomes more rest, better boundaries, a wellness stipend. Resilience gets framed the same way, as a skill to build so someone can withstand more pressure without breaking. Both miss the actual driver.
Burnout isn't the problem. It's the output of a mind and body that have been wired to stay in survival for years, sometimes decades, often since childhood. Rest doesn't resolve that, because the pattern isn't about lacking recovery time; it's about not understanding what survival someone is actually living in. Give that person a vacation, and they'll come back to the same pattern, because nothing about the underlying relationship to survival has changed.
Resilience training often makes this worse. It teaches people to tolerate more of the exact conditions activating that survival state, which delays the breakdown rather than preventing it. What's missing from these conversations is the recognition that once someone understands the survival they're living in, they stop letting it race ahead of them and run their life. They can start making different choices and relating to life differently, rather than just enduring more of the same pattern.
What signals can tell someone that a familiar way of performing is no longer a conscious choice?
The clearest signal is knowing you shouldn't be doing something, and doing it anyway, because you don't know how not to. There's a pull that feels impossible to stop, your whole mind and body pushing you into the same behaviour. Then, after the task, the conversation, the message is finished, comes the recognition: I've done it again.
Another signal is the pattern of "fixing" itself. The same problem keeps returning, in different forms but with the same shape, and each time you try to solve it from the same place you've always solved it from. You get the same result, because you're using the same strategy that created the problem to try to fix it. That loop, trying to fix something with the very pattern that's causing it, is one of the strongest signs that what looks like a choice is actually automatic.
When performing is a real choice, there's a pause available, a moment where you could do it differently and sometimes do. When it isn't, the behaviour happens first, and the awareness comes after, as recognition rather than decision.
How can a leader begin using the body as information instead of overriding what it is communicating?
Most leaders don't realise they're overriding their body, because they're already disconnected from it. So the beginning isn't a technique; it's a pause: before making a decision, before responding to an email, noticing what's actually present physically – tension, contraction, expansion, a tightening in the chest, a held breath.
The next step is treating that sensation as data, not noise. Instead of pushing through a tight jaw or an uneasy stomach, a leader can ask what that sensation is responding to, then act on the decision anyway. This doesn't mean stopping every time the body signals something. It means building the habit of checking in first, so the body's input is part of the decision, not something the decision bypasses.
Left unchecked, override eventually leads to numbness; the body stops signalling because nothing has ever changed in response. So starting early matters. The practice is small and repeatable: pause, notice, name what's there, then decide.
Over time, that sequence becomes automatic, and the body becomes a working source of information instead of something managed around.
How did your own shift from living mainly in your mind to becoming more embodied change the way you work with others?
For most of my career, I was in physical contact with my own body through the work itself, at the studio, moving alongside clients. That made it easier to stay out of my head. That changed after the pandemic, when I moved to online sessions. Sitting still, facing another person through a screen, was when I discovered how unable I actually was to sustain that stillness. I'd shake my leg through entire sessions, thinking about the future, the past, and my son's shopping list, while a client worked through something deep.
Seeing that in myself was uncomfortable, and it was also the beginning of real change. I couldn't keep guiding people toward embodiment while living almost entirely in my mind myself. So I did the work I now ask of my clients, not as theory, but as my own practice, my own discomfort, my own slow return to my body.
That's the difference in how I show up now. I'm not offering a framework I learned and teach. I'm offering what I had to earn in myself first. When I read tension in someone's breath or a shift in their face before they've said a word, it's not a technique. It's a perspective built by someone who did this work on herself.
What do you hope a high-performing leader starts noticing differently after understanding the survival identity behind their success?
I hope they start noticing how much they've been bracing, how much tension they've been carrying as if it were simply normal, just part of being high-performing. I hope they see what they're actually chasing underneath the achievement, because once that becomes clear, performance doesn't drop. It sharpens.
Without the constant undertow of an old survival strategy, energy and focus go directly toward what someone actually wants, instead of being split between the goal in front of them and whatever unmet need is quietly driving it. I want them to notice the moment before they'd normally react, a tight jaw before a sharp email, a held breath before agreeing to something they don't want, and find a beat of space there that wasn't available before.
That space is where sharper decisions come from, clarity instead of urgency, and where peace becomes the baseline instead of the fear and tension they'd mistaken for drive.
That's the shift I hope for: not a leader who performs less, but one who finally performs from a place that isn't costing them their body to sustain.
Read more from Maira Flores Xavier
