As it does every month, the executive committee starts at 8.30 a.m. One of those round the table has barely slept. Two skipped breakfast and are making up for it with the mini pastries laid out in the middle, while a colleague pours herself her fourth espresso since waking. The financial reporting is dealt with at speed, half the team glancing more or less discreetly at their inbox, and then comes the first strategic decision of the day. Others will follow, until the meeting closes as scheduled at 6 p.m., with a boxed lunch and two fifteen-minute breaks duly planned. Since the agenda will be running late, those breaks will be cut short: a choice between the pressing need and the urgent phone calls.
Nobody asks a mundane but crucial question: will these decisions be made by leaders at their best?
A reality left unspoken
Executive coaching deals at length with strategy, with how leaders show up, with relational intelligence. It is beginning to ask questions about mental health. The body, though, stays outside its scope — as if a leader could function independently of their physiology, or as if this ground belonged to private life, or to medicine.
Yet decisions are made by human beings in whatever organic state they happen to be in: a day started on autopilot, the post-lunch slump, a nervous system running at full throttle with its train of irritability, hypersensitivity and lapses of attention. These are not extreme cases. For many leaders this is the ordinary state of things within three weeks of their last holiday. And these are the situations that, step by step, take a number of them to burnout.
A study by the consultancy LHH, reported in June 2026 by the French business daily Les Échos, found that 66% of executive committee members felt exhausted. In France, a BPI France study published in June 2025 reported that 82% of the mid-sized and smaller-company leaders surveyed were living with at least one physical or psychological disorder — and that only 25% of them dared talk about it.
Physical energy, where emotional steadiness and clear thinking come from
Physical energy, emotional regulation and mental clarity do not work independently of one another. Physical activity switches on the brain areas involved in learning and memory; the state of the digestive system bears directly on levels of anxiety and on depressive states. The body does not merely carry the mind: it sets the terms on which the mind works.
An exhausted leader loses judgement before losing competence. Irritation takes the place of analysis, the impulsive reaction takes the place of the considered decision, self-absorption means weak signals go unnoticed or a team member’s contribution is waved away. None of it looks serious at first, because technical competence masks the slide for a while, sometimes for a long while. And yet…
What it costs the organisation
A leader’s state never stays confined to them alone. It spreads through the pace of the meetings they set, their capacity to listen or simply their availability for a conversation, the way they pass their stress on to their teams, or do not.
Working on this lever with a leader therefore acts on a whole organisation, not on their personal comfort.
It would be easy to file the question under quality of working life, or under the prevention of psychosocial risk. Those schemes exist and they are necessary, but they rarely target leaders, whose vulnerability remains taboo.
Leaders’ physical condition also reaches well beyond psychosocial risk: it is a performance lever, on a par with strategic vision or the ability to make a team work.
A simple example
A leader I worked with this year wanted to improve cooperation within his team. We did not work on values, on each member’s personality profile, or on the team’s ground rules. We worked on his physiological state and that of his colleagues, before and during meetings. Engagement, the quality of the exchanges and the value the team drew from its time together improved radically, without his changing anything in the way he reasons.
Bringing physical energy into an executive coaching engagement means working on precise, measurable mechanisms: breathing, the quality of recovery, the broad business of how you live — sleep, blood sugar, cortisol, to name only a few.
It means pulling levers that fit a leader’s diary and that call for no particular belief and no esoteric vocabulary. Waiting an hour after waking before the first coffee lets the natural cortisol peak do its mobilising work, whereas caffeine taken too early flattens that peak and makes the mid-morning slump worse.
Five minutes of breathing exercise produces better energy for the meeting that follows. A quarter of an hour’s walk in morning light prepares the coming night’s sleep.
A regulated body, a sharper mind
Physical energy shapes the quality of a leadership, structurally. Listening to your body means improving, in cascade, your emotional condition and your mental sharpness.
This is not merely adding a layer of wellbeing, legitimate as that aim already is. It is recognising that a well-regulated body produces a mind that performs better.
That leaves the question of how many professional coaches are trained in these approaches, and when companies will build them into the way they develop their leaders.
