A Neurodevelopmental View of Complexity
How does our neurobiology prime us to thrive in complex systems?
Over hundreds of thousands of years, human neurobiology has evolved to thrive in complex emergent contexts. By understanding our neurobiological design and development, we can learn new ways of enabling complexity from the inside-out, for more effective and fulfilling organisational cultures.
Madelanne delivers this 3-part online programme on request for coaches, leaders, and anyone who works at-depth with and for collaborative groups of people. It is delivered in three 1.5-hour online calls, with assigned readings between sessions.
The course provides an introduction to the anatomy, physiology, and developmental patterns of the human nervous system; the impact of relationship on nervous system development; what complexity means from a neurobiological perspective; and, integration as a key indicator of health in individuals and groups.
Being Here: Embodied Skills for Presence
Upcoming Program Dates: Autumn 2025
In today’s complex and dynamic world, presence isn’t just a personal asset — it’s a critical part of effective leadership in our work, families, and friendships. Being Here: Embodied Skills for Presence is a 1.5-day immersive workshop designed to help participants cultivate somatic awareness, authentic connection, and embodied presence in everyday life and professional settings. Through guided movement, breathwork, awareness practice, and relational exercises, participants will explore how the body can become a reliable anchor for their presence in the world. Whether you are a facilitator, leader, therapist, educator, or simply seeking deeper engagement with your own experience, this workshop offers practical tools for this foundational part of leadership.
Being Together: Embodied Skills for Collaboration
Upcoming Program Dates: Spring 2026
This yearlong programme is for purpose-driven leaders and coaches who know that the difference they want to make starts with themselves. They are seeking out the inner pathways by which they can better understand their relational patterns, weaknesses, and strengths; become more skilful in their practice of self-and-co-regulation, expression, listening, and presence; turn down the noise, listen to the field, and find the flow and integrity that only come from operating from the centre.
The workshop takes participants through the 3 Cultivations of Body-Informed Leadership: Safety, Embodiment, and Integration. Through experiential activities, theoretical frameworks and supported somatic practice, participants learn the importance of each Cultivation to their human neurobiology, as well as the role it plays in their leadership and teams. Each Cultivation helps participants anchor a different quality of presence within themselves, and provides a guidepost for creating more relational, connected, complexity-ready cultures.
Trauma, Connection, Culture
Upcoming Program Dates: Autumn 2024
Location: West Lothian, Scotland
This course is for people who work with and for their communities: social-sector leaders, policy-makers, and engaged community members who want to better understand the embodied dynamics of trauma and how they live and express in their organisations, institutions, communities, and cultures. The course incorporates up-to-date scientific frameworks with experiential practice to take participants on a highly personal journey with the course content (no sitting on the sidelines!). By the end of the program, participants will have an integrated understanding of trauma, connection, as well as the role of culture, which will inform how they see the communities they serve and reveal new intervention points for change.
Body-Informed Leadership Practitioner Programme
Upcoming Program Dates: Autumn 2023
Location: London (intensives) & online
This yearlong intensive program is for group facilitators, coaches, and culture-shapers of all kinds who want to engage an embodied relational skillset at the very heart of their practice. Participants take away a core embodied understanding and skillset that they can apply directly in their work, which enables them to partner with complexity, challenge outworn dynamics, and potentiate a more just, joyful, and interconnected world.
Upon successful completion of the course, participants will receive a certificate of Body-Informed Leadership Practitioner and will be included in the online database of practitioners.
Bodies of Power Project
Body-Informed Leadership for decolonising the bodies of our organisations and groups
Upcoming Program Dates: On request
What are the embodied dynamics at play in our group’s culture? What formulations of power and identity are they encouraging? What somatic tools and practices might we use to change our group culture at this foundational level, and how might this enable us to align with power and identity in a way that best supports our values and intentions?
This program is run upon request for organisations and groups that are actively engaging with power in their own internal culture and systems, who are experimenting to create more just, fulfilling, and effective forms of organising, and who want to learn some key somatic practices and frameworks to leverage their inquiry.