By Nettie Owens, CPO-CD · The Sappari Group

Originally explored on Wake Up Women Leaders — Episode 25

Managing Proprioception as a Woman Leader: Why Looking Where You’re Going Actually Works

You’re driving a motorcycle and someone tells you: look where you want to end up, not down at the handlebars. Your eyes are above your arms right now. Your arms are above your pelvic floor. Your body already knows exactly where every part of itself is in space, without you having to think about it once.

That sense has a name. It’s called proprioception. And in Episode 25 of Wake Up Women Leaders, Victoria Whitfield and I used it to explain why so many women leaders feel like they’re working hard and going nowhere.

This episode follows directly from Episode 24, where we talked about sunk cost bias and the trap of staying committed to things that stopped serving us. This week we get at the flip side of that problem: managing proprioception as a woman leader means understanding that your body already has a built-in system for moving forward. Most of us just aren’t using it.

What Proprioception Actually Is

“Proprioception is your body’s internal sense of where it is in space in relationship to itself,” Victoria said. It’s one of somewhere between 16 and 23 senses humans actually have, well beyond the five we learned about in grade school. Thermoception, your sense of temperature, is one. Proprioception is another.

“So proprioception in your body is, in this moment, can you tell that your eyes are above your arms, and that your arms are above your pelvic floor if you’re sitting up,” Victoria said. You don’t have to gather up your limbs and tell them where to go. They already know, because your eyes are looking in the direction you intend to move.

“That is the most perfect metaphor for moving forward in your life and your business,” I said. “The first thing we need to do is to see, literally see where we are going. Our limbs, our body will follow naturally. We don’t have to gather them up.”

Managing proprioception as a woman leader starts with the same principle. Your business, your team, your next decision will follow your line of sight. The problem is most of us aren’t looking where we want to go.

Why Looking Behind You Makes You Stumble

I brought up a word for what happens when your focus is in the wrong place: stumbling. Not the physical kind, the financial and emotional kind.

“When we are looking behind and trying to move forward, we stumble,” I said. “I actually feel like this is the place where past success can actually be a hindrance to future success.” You see it in athletes and performers who had a great run, then can’t figure out why they’re suddenly struggling. You judge your current numbers against the numbers from three years ago, and the comparison itself becomes the problem.

Victoria described what happens at networking events when people talk about their business. “They’ll tell me about amazing stories of what they’ve achieved in the past. And then that focus on the past becomes a judgment on the current, that because where they’re at is not where they were, then that means where they’re at is therefore behind where they were. That’s an emotional drain.”

Managing proprioception as a woman leader means catching that comparison before it drains you. Your now-goal numbers are the only ones that matter for where you’re headed next.

The Third Trap: Looking Up Into Thin Air

Victoria named a third place people get stuck, one that isn’t the past or the present. It’s comparison to an idea that has nothing to do with your actual goal.

“Maybe because Susie over there did a thing, well, now I need to do a thing because Susie did that,” Victoria said. “So it’s not even looking behind or down, it’s looking up into thin air.”

The fix, in her words: “Focus on your goals. Your goals matter. Your goals are what drive the business forward. Your now goals, not the ones from 2023 or 2020 or 2017.”

She also named where the resistance to looking forward actually comes from. “That’s why we don’t look where we’re going, because instead of trusting that where we’re going is the priority, instead we’re allowing what is the disaster right now to be the priority, and it steals all of the momentum.”

Two Ways to Actually See Where You’re Going

If seeing your future clearly isn’t a skill that comes naturally to you, both of us shared how we build it with clients.

Mine is something I call the Rearview Vision ™. “Imagining that what you want is your current reality,” I said. “Pick a date, time, and place. What are you wearing? Who are you with? What does it feel like? What things have now become true?” You play in that space until the challenges bogging you down right now aren’t there anymore, and notice your energy shift while you do it.

Victoria’s approach works through identity. “If you’re getting caught up in the past, or caught up in being the fixer for what’s broken right now, it’s because of an identity,” she said. Her exercise, called Journey to Million Dollar Me (TM), has you sit across the table from a version of yourself who’s already achieved what you want, and interview them. “Where Nettie says go improv, I say permission to play granted. Make it up.”

She connected it to a technique from Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, where he imagined sitting with a roundtable of people like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Edison, asking them how they did it. Same mechanism. Borrow a different identity than the one currently stuck in the weeds.

Focus Is Singular

One distinction I want to underline: focus doesn’t mean juggling several things at once and calling it vision. “Focus is really like singular,” I said. “It’s not foci. We’re multiple things when we start to disperse our energy, but it’s singular and it’s clear and we can see it. Seeing it is super, super important.”

That’s the part of managing proprioception as a woman leader that’s easy to skip. Not just deciding to look forward, but making sure what you’re looking at is actually clear and one thing, not a blurry composite of five goals at once.

Three Things to Do This Week

1. Identify one comparison you keep making to your own past (revenue, team size, energy level). Then ask whether it’s helping you move or just draining you.
   
   
2. Try the Rearview Vision(tm) exercise for ten minutes. Pick a specific future date. Set the scene. Notice what happens to your energy while you’re in it.
   
   
3. Write down one goal you’re currently chasing because someone else is doing it, not because it’s actually yours. Decide this week whether to keep it or drop it.
   
   

What’s Coming Next

Next week’s episode looks at what happens when the day-to-day reality of leadership doesn’t match what you expected it to feel like. If that disillusionment sounds familiar, join us Wednesday at 3:30pm ET on LinkedIn Live and YouTube.

If you’d like more information about the 90-day planning session or the Momentum Planner, comment PLAN below. If you’d like a roundtable conversation with both of us about your own vision, comment CONNECT and we’ll follow up with a three-way message on LinkedIn.

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Nettie Owens, CPO-CD · The Sappari Group · sapparigroup.com · © 2026