By Martha Fernandez
The executive in the chair says the quarter went well. Her shoulders are up near her ears, her breath sits high in her chest, and her jaw is working on something she has not said. This is a composite, drawn from patterns common in work with executives, not a single person. For many high achievers, the body is the first honest report in the room, and the last one anyone has asked to hear.
Somatic clinicians know this already. What I want to offer here is a closer look at how this plays out with people whose job is to override discomfort and keep delivering, and a few ways of working that have helped me stay useful to them.
The story runs ahead of the body.
Executives are fluent. They can summarize a hard year in three clean sentences, name the stressors, rank them, and propose a plan. That fluency is a professional skill, and in session it can pass for insight.
The trouble is that the story is built to keep performing. It is edited for an audience, even when the audience is a therapist. The body has no editor. It keeps reporting the clipped breath, the tight stomach, the leg that will not stay still, whether or not the client mentions any of it.
If your best results arrive when your body is working hardest against you, the lesson you learn is to ignore the body. Years of that lesson are hard to undo in a fifty-minute hour, and verbal self-report alone can understate how bad things have become. I co-founded CEREVITY as a private-pay concierge network of independent licensed clinicians to work with executives, founders, physicians, attorneys, and finance leaders. In an internal 2026 review of 287 high achievers who sought therapy through the network, 67% reported that their peak professional performance came during their peak strain. This is self-reported information from the network’s own review. It has not been peer-reviewed or published, so I offer it as a pattern worth testing, not as an established finding.
To learn more about Martha’s work and four moves her team has found to work, please click here
Artist credit: Esrashaiban from Pixabay