My main insight from 2025 was about how my body enabled (and sometimes limited) my learning and growth in every area of my life.

A silly example is learning rope flow. I was intrigued when Nsima Inyang described a technique called rope flow on the Tim Ferriss podcast (here’s an example video of him demonstrating it). The main benefit is creating more flexibility and movement capacity, and he noted that it provides instant feedback because you smack yourself with the rope if you get it wrong. I bought a rope from Inyang’s store, and started playing with it. It’s been fun to learn new tricks (mostly from this video) and start to string them together, although I’m a long way from Inyang’s improvisational fluidity.

One thing I love about rope flow is the tangible experience of my body learning a new skill. When I try a new movement, I typically fail, often hitting myself in the head. I would slow down the video, and try it again. And after a few minutes (or days) of trying, I would figure out how to do it slowly while paying close attention. And once I did the move correctly, I would see how it felt so much easier to do it that way as there was a flow to it. And then as I continued to practice, it would start to feel more and more “natural” so that I could trust the flow rather than thinking about each movement. Practicing rope flow was a regular reminder of what it feels like to progress a skill from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence.

Beyond rope flow, I made a greater commitment to going to my local gym, Functional Lifestyles, which offers group weight lifting classes. These full body workouts have spotlighted the muscles that are weak and holding me back (especially my core and stabilizing muscles) so that I can strengthen them. It’s been great to see and feel the progress of getting stronger, and I’ll admit that I have enjoyed looking better too (I have something resembling a beach body for the first time in my life!).

One particular benefit has developing my kinesthetic sense of what’s going on in my body. I can now feel when something doesn’t feel correct in a lift, a warning I should use less weight and go ask a trainer to watch me and see where my technique is off. There’s a flow when everything is aligned that makes the lift feel easy except for the muscle exertion, which is the right kind of hard, not the strain that leads to injury. It’s like the feedback from rope flow – when the move is done correctly, everything feels easy and natural, but when it’s not quite right, I hit myself with the rope.

A further benefit is that I’m becoming more aware throughout the day when my body is out of alignment. I am noticing more quickly when my body doesn’t feel in that natural flow state, and can correct it before I get hurt. It also means my body feels better more of the time, because I am spending less time in a bad posture. I’m still far from perfect, though, as the lifting revealed a shoulder issue from previous bad habits and too much time hunched over computers, and I’m in physical therapy to resolve that.

Beyond these concretely physical uses of the body, I’ve been exploring other ways the body can learn.

Those of you that read my newsletter know that I have been restarting a meditation practice. What’s different this time is that I am treating it as a bodily skill, where I am building the skill of noticing when my attention wanders and bring it back to my intended focus. As I practice that noticing, I am growing more aware throughout the day when I am agitated or otherwise not in the calm and grounded stance I am practicing in meditation.

In a nice bit of synergy, this awareness builds upon my improving kinesthetic sense. I don’t have to notice my emotions if I can feel the tension in my shoulders as they hunch up towards my ears. While I still lose my temper more than I’d like, I am quicker to recenter myself and offer amends. And by treating this noticing and recovery as a bodily skill I am in the process of learning means that my inner critic is less loud in passing judgment on my moral failings when I do lose my cool.

This is what Carol Dweck described as the growth mindset, the belief that any skill can be learned and improved through deliberate practice and feedback (check out my summary of Anders Ericsson’s book Peak for an overview). And while I understood the growth mindset in theory, I’ve felt like this year has provided a somatic reminder of how it works in practice. It helped to have a baby, as watching her learn to crawl and then walk has been a daily illustration of the value of persistence through failure.

A greater learning has been this trust in my own awareness. I know when something feels right, whether it’s learning a new rope flow trick, or doing a lift at the gym, or a meditation session. I often need coaching, as even a tiny misalignment in technique can make it impossible to do it right, but once I feel how it’s supposed to work, I can imprint on that and seek to reproduce that experience.

And sometimes that imprinting can be more literal; with my meditation coach, my nervous system mirrors his calm and groundedness so that I learn how that feels in my own body, and I can then practice it on my own. In particular, he has been teaching me to process some of my past traumas by letting my body naturally work through the frozen reactivity left by the trauma. This initially sounded “woo-woo” and metaphorical for me, but as I have worked with him, I have learned to more consistently identify and process these “stuck” sensations, freeing myself incrementally from lifelong patterns. It’s been fascinating to realize that these more subtle bodily activities can be learned the same way a sport or a movement skill can be learned.

Something similar happened in witnessing the coaching of Thomas Hübl in the trauma class I took last year. Hübl describes his approach as learning to use your whole nervous system to sense another person, so they can feel you feeling them, creating a sense of safety that they are being held and fully seen, as a loving parent nurtures a child. By learning to process my own traumas with my coach, I am developing more of that sensory awareness where I can feel the energy of others more directly.

One other observation on how the body underpins these physical and emotional and cognitive skills is that my ability to do any of these activities is impaired when I’m tired, stressed or otherwise under-resourced. If I haven’t slept well, I’m more impatient and more likely to fall back to childhood patterns of anger and frustration when I don’t get my way. If I haven’t eaten enough, I run out of energy to lift weights at the gym, or I get hangry with my family. If I don’t calm myself before meeting somebody, I will be distracted and unfocused and not as effective as a coach (and not as supportive as a friend).

I used to believe that once I knew the right way to do something, I would execute on it going forward. But I have learned that responding in the way I intend depends on practicing it enough to ingrain it into my nervous system through repetition. Otherwise, my body will respond in its customary way before my brain can even remember that I wanted to do something different. This is why coaching takes more than one session to be effective; I can share a new idea in the first session, but it takes time and deliberate practice to train the body and the neural pathways to do something different, especially when the existing reaction had brought previous success aka “what got you here won’t get you there”. And we often have to identify and address previous traumas that were the genesis of those reactions.

I’m writing this post as a reminder that while we may think we are rational and cognitive beings, we are embodied animals in reality. We might think we need to study and read and think to learn to do something new, but what we really need is to deliberately and consistently practice the new behavior we want to embed it in the nervous system of our body. We work on positive reinforcement, which is why James Clear’s Four Laws of Behavior Change are effective: Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying.

What is satisfying for me is signs of progress, so having coaches who can give me positive reinforcement and celebrate my small steps in the right direction is critical when learning something new (hence the need for a meditation coach and coaching supervision). Journaling can also be effective for me if I celebrate the behaviors I want each day, like staying present with my kids rather than staring at my phone. Otherwise, a feeling of progress can come from quantitative evidence such as Strava for biking and running, or tracking my weight lifting. I also am more committed when somebody holds me accountable, so having a coach or an accountability partner is effective for me. As I look to the year ahead, I’m considering how to apply these ideas to writing and to marketing my business – I wonder how I can make those more satisfying and attractive so they happen more consistently.

What is effective and satisfying for you in building new behaviors? If you have a New Year’s resolution, don’t depend on willpower or grit (which will fade), but think about what would make doing the new behavior fun or easy for you. Design around what works for your body, rather than depending on your conscious mind to do all the change work.

P.S. This post is influenced by David Bessis’s book, Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity, where he makes the case that mathematical skill is also a bodily skill, developing one’s physical intuition to solve mathematical problems. He believes that “Learning math should be like learning any other motor skill, like learning to swim or ride a bike, and it should be accessible to everyone.” If math is a bodily skill, then it would follow that pretty much anything we do is also a bodily skill.

Another influence is Jeff Hawkins’s work, which I first discussed in my summary of his book On Intelligence 20 years ago. I also liked his follow-up book, A Thousand Brains, which made the case that our brains work relative to reference frames and mental maps (I connected that idea to leadership here). But Hawkins’s thesis that the brain is a pattern-matching machine is a foundation of my post; at the neuronal level, it doesn’t know whether the inputs are inputs from physical senses, cognitive ideas, or bodily movements. The neurons just learn to connect a set of inputs to a set of outputs. So learning a skill is the same at the neuronal level whether it’s a cognitive skill like math, a bodily skill like rope flow or weight lifting or a sport, or a “woo woo” skill like trauma processing or energy awareness.