Sandra Booth, Director of Policy and External Relations at CHEAD discusses the Creative Leadership Programme with Dr Catherine (Cat) Glover.
Cat is a design academic, eco-somatic coach and forest bathing guide trainee. Her specialist knowledge is fashion + nature mindset change, embodied leadership, inclusive strategic communications, social listening, and responsible organisational sense-making. She shares this distinctive skillset through teaching, researching, coaching, and guiding others through experimental ‘tracking’ practices of the body–mind, towards integrated meaning-making, balance, and resourcefulness. Cat brings to activities her pro-social values, lean purpose, and more-than-human mindset, actively illuminating a sustainable eco-system of common care and collective belonging.
Sandra Booth: What are your passions and purpose?
Catherine Glover: I'm an academic with a wide variety of interests, passions and purpose. I have trained as a somatic coach with The Somatic School, and as a forest bathing guide with the Forest Bathing Institute, prompted by a transitional period of change in the last 5 years or so, due to developing Long Covid. Reflection on the process of what rehabilitation could be has placing my health and wellbeing as core to self-care. The concept of putting on one’s oxygen mask first is central to how I now operate and determines what resources I have then available to offer to others.
What is somatic practice and somatic coaching, and how does this fold into your leadership practice?
Somatics has been on the periphery for me for a while, as an academic who conducts narrative research, where curiosity about lived experience, storytelling and subjective viewpoints are integral to my research methods. Training in somatic coaching has opened the world to me again, and I find it complements two years of my theoretical and practical training in forest bathing. Having been on a deeply self-reflective journey to find my own mental and physical form again, it has been an organic step to embed somatics holistically into what my studies, teaching and leading.
How do you practice ‘embodied leadership’?
The practice I've come to through forest bathing began with becoming oriented to mindfulness and meditation, breathwork and reading into philosophical wisdom, mainly rooted in non-Western teachings and practices. It is complementary to somatic training, where the notion of the body-mind is foregrounded in the desire to locate a deep understanding of the connected mind and body. When I am in the room with others, I practice being fully present, embodied (in that body–mind connection), while holding clear neuro-biological boundaries. I find it valuable as it means that I feel able to offer what is needed before the discipline conversation even starts. Embodied leadership then is about showing up in a manner that is authentically 'you', able to offer what you have available through your integrated self – constituent of head, heart, hands and body – and personal values.
What did you do during the two days of the week 1 session?
The first day was an opportunity for the Compass (The Compass for Creative Leadership, a values-based model for leading in context—rooted in community, care, cyclical wisdom, and craft) to be elevated from the page in a manner that was accessible and interpretative. A first step in sharing and co-regulating the framework content with the participants.
Day 1 took place in the Business School at Manchester Metropolitan University, which is naturally suited the framework, given its alignment with modern leadership ideas. To transform it from a theoretical model into something alive, debated, and dynamic, I designed activities to demystify leadership, make it tangible, and embodied. Exercises were ambitious and unconventional, challenging individuals to break free from conventional thinking and foster novel beliefs about leadership and leading.
A somatic constellation exercise offered a twist on a systemic constellation. Somatic constellations stem from my somatic coaching training. I adapted it to focus on individual relational sense-making rather than organisational mapping, prioritising outcomes that might feel 'right' for the individual person in that moment (rather than their organisation), designing the exercise to help participants to question their corporate mentalities and rigid systems conditioning.
On Day 2, we changed the contextual environment to the Whitworth Art Gallery, to keep the cognitive momentum and mindset nudges. This cultural institution has an art garden and educational studio, a bi-fold door connecting inside–outside. I delivered a keynote lecture, introducing 'body–mind' as an integrated working modality.
I guided three activities: forest Bathing principles in the art garden, planting values-based seeds of leadership and then casting our hands in symbols of leadership, the cast hands serving as legacy objects representing passages of time, life and experience.
What was most valuable to reflect on in Day 2, were the questions I asked at the beginning:
How are you feeling?
What are you sensing in your body, your mind?
Conversations rippled. Our collective experience over many years in education was allowed to surface and we gave each other the gift of sharing, hearing, listening, feeling and sensing. Meeting each other in a physical space for an experience that involves connecting with our full body–minds in real time, away from all the usual pedagogic noise, helps the process of separation, healthy compartmentalisation between human and worker bee.
I hope it has helped feed, nourish, and nurture the participants' creative practice, their sense of where and how to find balance and honour their own individual resources, to embrace and co-create a sense of togetherness, and through this, by giving this time and space, an embodied leadership.
How does your work contribute to policy?
HE is in a very challenging time. We must find a way that we can each survive, and sustainably offer time, energy, and skills to our sector without burning out; figuring out how we can do this first to honour ourselves as individuals, then to others, including our organisations. Policy must be part of this package.
If more people in HE felt empowered in this way, it could have a transformational impact on health and wellbeing in our sector. The sector seems to be functioning in ways that are neither sustainable for the self nor helpful to others. This is an important moment to prioritise our own well-being, sense of belonging and health, as much as – or more so –external KPIs, metrics, and objectives that are required of us also. If we can get a sustainable balance, then we will be able to lead from a healthy place centred around individual boundaries, which is an approach that can be influential to others.
Our workplaces should be sustaining, regenerative places for staff and students to spend time, so that when we are on campus in person, we find a warm environment within which all can learn and thrive.
How this approach affects policy will be how we can impact and support leaders in institutions to stay in academia, and retain the collective experience, talents and longevity of established, experienced academics, through prioritising their personal health, as integral to the broader health of our institutions. To put care at the centre of HE is as fundamental, I believe, as profit.
