As an executive coach, I’ve had the pleasure of working with highly talented CEOs, and I’ve found that the most effective leaders excel in getting various parts of the corporation to work together. They create peak performance because they listen carefully to all departments within the organization and integrate that information into wise and powerful choices.

You are, believe it or not, the CEO of “You, Inc.” If you abdicate this position, then other people and random events will dictate your circumstances. If you want to take control of your life, you can’t do it well without accessing information about yourself from all departments of your organization.

The task of accessing full information about yourself may seem daunting, which may be the reason so many of us still take those magazine tests promising instant insight into your personality. Overall, if you want to access your inner CEO, you’ll need to learn how to truly listen to your body. By doing so, all your inner departments will be available to you.

First off, you can’t figure out what you feel, or access your body’s wisdom, by thinking. The word feel implies physical sensation. Even the word emotion has in its letters the implication that feeling is e-motion (that is, energy in motion—found in physical movement).

Our language demonstrates how physically disconnected we are. We’ll say, “I’ve been suffering from this migraine,” as if the pain in our head is the result of evil exterior forces. We’ll complain about how our back goes out on us, as though our back muscles plotted mutiny. We describe our body symptoms as if they’re a foreign force because, for many of us, our body is alien and mistrusted territory. We also use the word it frequently to describe our body. If asked about our headache, we might say, “It has been making me miserable for days,” as if our head is a separate entity.

Disconnection from our body has a price. The anger we don’t feel turns into a headache; the grief we can’t express becomes a lump in our throat; the remorse over something we’ve done becomes a stomachache. On the other hand, if we identify and own these feelings, we can save ourselves a great deal of dis-ease, and at the same time become better communicators.