Find Your Leadership Flow: Evolve how you lead with trauma-informed and embodied leadership training.

What if you and your leadership team could lead from a place of calm and certainty, instead of feeling that you’re constantly treading water? (or possibly even, under water?)

Leaders and teams are dealing with unprecedented levels of change.

You’re not imagining it and it’s not just you. In less than a decade, the average rate of change in organizations has increased 400%.

The way we lead and operate is insufficient for this level of change and uncertainty. There aren’t best practices yet for some of our biggest challenges — like AI, effective hybrid environments, or increasing sustainability — and it’s making it impossible to know what to do next.

Employees are juggling 10 change initiatives on average per year; up from 2 per year in 2016.

— GARTNER 2022

We’re solving brand new problems, plus carrying the weight of past stress and emotional wounds, which makes daily work life challenging.

Uncertainty can feel overwhelming and paralyzing. As leaders, we’re taught to dig into our existing skillset to be decisive and quick as we move from issue to issue, even if we aren’t quite sure if it’s the right answer.

The dynamic within our teams starts to show the strain, with an increase in agitation, confrontation, and team members becoming withdrawn to avoid further conflict (the classic stress response of fight, flight, or freeze).

Overwhelm and burnout often follow, sometimes without us realizing it. All of us — likely you and your team too — are also carrying emotional wounds from our past, creating unexpected stress responses. We don’t need to know what they are, but we need to act accordingly, in order to minimize their impact on how we respond to workplace challenges.

It’s a lot. .

Traditional leadership development programs teach new skills without helping you solve the underlying stress responses that happen, often outside of your conscious control.

Until we learn the practices that help us stay calm in stressful situations, no amount of skill building will help us meet the changing needs of our leadership work.

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We need a new set of leadership skills, ones that help us adapt to meet the level of change and uncertainty that continues to increase.

What if you could … 

  • Stay calm and even-keeled as you respond to urgent or unexpected issues?
  • Bring your team back to equilibrium quickly so they could handle difficult situations more effectively?
  • Establish boundaries that helped you manage the expectations others place on you?
  • Stay grounded during turbulent times?
  • Have difficult conversations with your team that lead to change without leaving everyone feeling exhausted or being on the defensive?


This is what embodied leadership feels like. You’ll move beyond emotional intelligence to develop somatic intelligence, by using your nervous system to create a new level of calm and intuition. 


In addition to horizontal development (which is focused on learning more concepts), you need vertical leadership development, which focused on integrating the mindset and behaviour shifts needed for more complex problem solving.

Just like sometimes your phone needs an operating system upgrade to work better (not more apps), your new leadership capabilities will feel like a reset of your leadership operating system, instead of only being taught a set of skills that don’t help you solve the real challenges you’re facing.​

The best way to stay calm in stressful situations is to work in partnership with your nervous system. It will become your leadership superpower.

By learning the embodied leadership practices that keep you calm, in work and in life, you’ll develop an integrated approach to quickly see what needs to happen and guide your team towards getting it done.

Connect with Carolyn.

A former leader at a multinational company, Carolyn Swora, is now a trauma-informed leadership consultant specializing in leadership and organizational culture, after having gone through life-altering events and realizing the impact of unsolved trauma on her life.

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When you lead from a place of calm, everything falls into place. Welcome to Evolve Leadership™

It’s not about “going faster”; it’s providing support during your change transformation to help you and your team work more effectively, by creating practices that remove the blocks keeping you from solving the deeper issues blocking the change from happening.

With Evolve Leadership Development, you will:

  • Learn personal and team practices designed to help reduce nervous system responses to change/stress while working effectively as a team

  • Build skills to facilitate critical team discussions that create buy-in and engagement, not simply intellectual understanding and surface-level agreement

  • Create spaces of belonging where people no longer exhausted from masking/fitting in and can be more impactful in their role

  • Build a somatic toolkit, the physical and mental practices that help leaders and teams stay in an optimal state (this is science, not psycho-babble)

  • Understand the physiology of stress and learn skills to manage reduce your stress responses, to become less disruptive and more effective in difficult or antagonistic situations

  • Learn how to lead and work from all 3 centres of intelligence — head, heart, and body — to create more opportunities for new ideas and effective solutions to be identified and implemented.

Until we learn the practices that help us stay calm in stressful situations, no amount of skill building will help us meet the changing needs of our leadership work.

Topics and format for all of our programs are customized for every company, typically falling initially into one of three approaches:

Workshop

Team Development & Coaching

Executive Coaching & Advisor Support

Sets the vision for the changes needed for today’s leadership with actions and personal practices for creating daily impact that leaders can integrate into their work. 


Workshops are customized to meet your company’s needs. We work with groups ranging in size from 5-500+.


Topics can include (but aren’t limited to):

  • Understand the importance of courage and vulnerability in navigating rapid change.

  • Learn how past experiences shape daily work life and leadership behaviours.

  • Explore mind and body shifts needed to lead effectively through change and uncertainty.

  • Identify key practices for maintaining calm, centered leadership in high-pressure situations.

Helps leaders and their teams build new skills for reducing chaos, increase connection, and improve their team dynamics needed for implementing successful transformation projects.


Team programs are typically 3-6 months, with options for a mix of workshops, individual practices, and group or team coaching. 


Customized programs typically include:

  • Learn team strengths and growth opportunity areas through team assessment and diagnostics

  • Define the collective team vision and why it’s important

  • Understand how team work styles and past struggles impact team dynamics and performance, and what’s needed to foster a resilient team culture.

  • Learn frameworks for situation-specific conversations 

  • Co-create team practices to ensure a sustainable change.

Guides executive leaders to embody new skills and mindsets to lead through the next phase of company evolution (e.g.,growth, mergers, new product offers, etc.).


Exec programs start for 3-6 months (can be in parallel to team programs) and can extend beyond 1+ years, depending on the needs of the team.


Tailored coaching support executive development:

  • Gain insight into your leadership style with assessments that highlight your strengths and growth areas.

  • Uncover patterns that limit your effectiveness and learn how to shift them for greater impact.

  • Blend mind-body techniques to develop a more grounded, adaptable leadership approach.

Leverage proven strategies to strengthen relationships, increase influence, and drive team engagement.

Meet Carolyn, trauma-informed leadership consultant and practitioner, author and founder of Evolve.

Workplace change is similar to learning a new sport or new level of play—it can happen faster with a great coach.

As a former corporate leader, I understand the stress and challenges you and your team are in. I’m not bringing platitudes and unworkable options to our training sessions.

I’m a certified Dare To Lead™ facilitator and deliver impactful learning programs that help leaders embrace vulnerability, a key element for creating both psychologically and physiologically safe spaces.

As a leadership facilitator and coach, I’ve expanded my programs to integrate embodied leadership practices, such as breathwork, nervous system regulation, and polyvagal exercises.

These additions stemmed from my experience that learning vulnerability is challenging without somatic tools to help remove barriers to deeper integration.

I am also certified in trauma-informed coaching and consulting, and I’ve completed the Polyvagal Certificate Course: Safety, Connection, and the Human Experience.

This training allows me to recognize how past stress and trauma can continue to affect us in the present. Our work together isn’t therapy — I won’t diagnose your emotional wounds. Instead, I create a space where all experiences are acknowledged, without being triggered by any stress or difficult conversations that arise.

We can address the deeper issues together and explore the skills you need to strengthen your mind-body connection, cultivate embodied resilience, and navigate any challenging situations with greater ease and confidence.

The learning and somatic practices I teach are also woven into my daily life—I’m living this work alongside you.

Wondering how trauma-informed and embodied leadership can solve your team challenges?

Topics and format for all of our programs are customized for every company, typically falling initially into one of three approaches:

Let’s Talk.

Wondering how trauma-informed and embodied leadership can solve your team challenges?

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From the Evolve Podcast with Carolyn:

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Embodying Conscious Leadership with Merritt Minnemeyer
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How Soul Health Transforms Leadership with Pam Buchanan
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