From Theatre to supporting vulnerable people to supporting Business
For decades, traditional models of leadership have relied heavily on masculine-coded paradigms: linear progression, relentless expansion and growth, hyper-rationality, and continuous proving. Even as more women have stepped into executive seats, many have done so by adopting these exact same patterns—measuring their value strictly by outputs, achievements, and structural and hierarchical recognition.
As Indigo Brave marks its 30th anniversary later this year, three decades of working people from all walks of life – including some of society's most vulnerable people, business leaders, teams and professionals – have made one truth clear: whoever you are, the drive for high performance without relational depth is unsustainable. This is our story.
We did not set out to work with CEOs, Entrepreneurs or Leaders, and certainly not to be consultants in business culture or executive coaches! In the early days of Indigo Brave, our foundational practices were not born out of textbooks or theories. Instead, through trial, error and real-world facilitation across hundreds of organisations, we stayed with one crucial question: What Actually Works? Through this enquiry we discovered and shaped our own unique models and methodology, some of which are essentially now known as Authentic Relating practices. We arrived at these tools simply because they were the exact methods of communication, interpersonal contact, and relational honesty that actually worked.
When paired with Indigo Brave’s leadership and team development techniques, we have witnessed that these practices offer a dynamic, living methodology for personal and organisational transformation.
We have worked for hundreds of organisations from tiny grassroots charities to global organisations like Rolls-Royce, and without clever marketing, MBAs, persuasive sales pitches or management theories. We are the first to admit we do not have those skills. We are still in business purely because we get results. How did we end up here? (We do often ask ourselves!)
Indigo Brave was born out of a passionate group of actors forming their own touring theatre company. We came out of a space defined by the desire to communicate, by the desire to make work and take artistic risks, to translate raw emotion, to find the depth of ensemble storytelling, and to engage with the high stakes of producing and performing our own work.
In the theatre, you cannot fake connection. If an ensemble doesn't trust each other, the play falls apart. To create extraordinary (award winning) work on stage, we relied daily on rigorous trust exercises, circle-based reflection, physical and vocal improvisation, and radical, compassionate feedback. In a rehearsal room, people learn to take off their masks, move past ego, read somatic cues in real time, and lean entirely into mutual support to reveal more of who we really were.
We loved it! And there was a by-product to the theatre we were producing. We witnessed our own individual ‘awakenings’ - profound human growth, trauma release and emotional intelligence developing and spiritual healing, happening inside our artistic ensemble. Eventually this came to be more important to us than the ‘shows’ and a realization struck us: Why aren’t these powerful, life-changing practices available to all? This work is fabulous! If we are growing and changing and becoming more and more our authentic selves, then everyone needs access to these healing and transforming techniques. Yes, we were young and passionate and more than a tad evangelical about the power these creative techniques had to change the world And yet, it turns out, we were right!
We applied for our first grant and completed a project with ‘disaffected youth’. We created a powerful piece of theatre with them and on the back of those results, got another grant for a different group of vulnerable teenagers. The project was a huge success. We applied for some work with teens at risk of being excluded from school - again a wonderful success, and on we went. We began to get a reputation for creating measurable changes in behaviour through our unique methods. We also developed a reputation for building meaningful connections with groups that no one else wanted to work with: young men on probation, kids with anger issues, adults with mental health issues, adults with HIV and AIDS, adults in prison and adults who were locked away from society. We were the first theatre company to perform a show and run a creative theatre workshop in Rampton High Security Hospital Prison. More of all these stories are told in my book, It's Not About Self-Esteem: Self-Worth Is The Key To Success.
We were using every tool in our kit: Augusto Boal, Jerzy Grotowski, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Brook, Keith Johnston - Ritual and Improv and Archetypes all merging together to encourage and support people to tell their own stories, find their voices, create and share the ‘Theatre of You’. It was powerful work. I will never forget our first group of adolescents who had been found guilty but not yet sentenced; we got brought in to ‘fill their time in this strange limbo period. The deep sharing of their experiences led to us to creating a play for young people at risk of crime and drugs. (More about this in the book - they taught us so much!) They told us that there had been times they could have chosen differently and got out, but they didn’t. They wanted other kids to have more choice. They called the piece ‘Escape Routes’ and it toured for 2 years to kids at risk of the same future across Nottinghamshire. Another very powerful piece was created by a group of people who used self harming, called ‘Raining in my Summer’. They communicated their experiences, including needing medical intervention and being judged and dismissed, and performed it for the staff supporting them. I will equally always remember the group of adults diagnosed with HIV and AIDS in the early 2000s who wanted to create their own play about their experiences and how they were being viewed and treated. Very bravely, they chose to take their play into medical schools and hospitals so the professionals could see and feel their realities. The workshop afterwards where the medical professionals shared the impact of the stories and songs they had seen and heard, was very moving for everyone. I could go on!
We became known for achieving measurable and lasting changes in behaviour. Real results on the ground; integrated, embodied results that lasted. The professionals working with our groups started to ask us to train them in our ideas and methods; so we had to learn how to run a training session for mental health professionals, for teachers, doctors, even dentists! Which we did.
Our theatre work won a National Award for Innovation in Education, and we started to get noticed. Part of the award was an Intellectual Property audit and a consultant came and dug deeply into what on earth we were doing. Some very interesting questions got asked about our business strategy (which we didn’t have), why we were lurching from grant to grant application (we didn’t know another way), and how we believed we would be sustainable once the grant culture in the arts dried up. We didn’t know this was coming in the UK, but our consultant did.
The process all led to one conclusion: Why aren't you selling these highly effective behavioural change techniques to business?
So we took a bold leap, and at a theatre in the East Midlands UK, I ran a workshop for ‘Learning and Development Professionals’ looking for something truly different to engage their staff in programmes at work. A wonderful woman (an HR professional, and still a champion of our work today) came to talk to me after my session. She explained that she worked for a global business who employed a number of PhD Chemists and Bio Chemists who had been employed for their academic and intellectual achievements, who now couldn’t progress in the company without a lot more ‘people’ skills; leadership, management, emotional intelligence etc. Training these highly intellectual people with more theories, presentations, data and information was not working and she wanted something different,
The year was 2004. It was a bold leap for her and for us, but we have never looked back. We started developing our experiential toolkit out of the theatre world and into the heart of what business most needed; Emotionally intelligent, Presence based, Authentic Leadership which creates high-trust, high-performance cultures. We got great results for that very brave and forward thinking professional, and her rigorous evaluations and championing of our work led to more work than we could handle. Eureka!
We had SME's in the UK and global businesses as clients. We worked in France, Belgium, Romania, Poland and the US. We grew our team and always continued with our fundamental commitment that we would make our work available to vulnerable people at prices they could afford. We could now do that because we charged corporates what they were happy to pay for the results they were getting, and we were no longer dependent on the fashions and trends of the diminishing grants available.
What fascinated me the most was that the corporate world needed our just as much as the groups of ‘vulnerable people’! We began believing that the corporate work would allow us to do the “real” work (being based in Nottinghamshire, we even called our business plan The Robin Hood School of Finance!), but we were so wrong! We found that professionals working in corporate environments and public services needed our work just as much as ‘vulnerable people’. We found that there was so much high stress that many people were often operating in rigid silos of emotional suppression, survival strategies leading to so much defence, posturing, and communicating from their trauma and fear.
We loved being invited into such challenging environments. So much challenge, so much variety and such presence needed from us. And so humbling and gratifying to see the shifts, changes and transformations happening in the people with whom we worked. We never offered any ‘off the shelf’ training but listened carefully to what the professionals really wanted. We adapted our ensemble games, devised new techniques, and moved our understanding of honest ‘radical compassion’ feedback circles into practical leadership methods. We watched hardened executives drop their defences, teams resolve years of unspoken tension in single sessions, and burnt-out leaders rediscover their authentic voice.
We always worked to create breakthroughs, and word of mouth spread our work. We were even lucky enough to work with Rolls-Royce, where for over 20 years, every year, we trained all of their new apprentices in the BRAVE method (Be here now, Resilience, Accountability, Vision and Emotional Intelligence). They loved it, and the contracts were renewed.
Although we had no background in business training or organisational development, it didn’t matter. Our signature was our results. We stripped away the academic fluff and set out to answer central questions: What do your leaders and or teams actually need to be doing to make your business work? What do they need to embody? What actually works on the ground? What do we need to do differently to build leadership and communication which creates unbreakable high performance teams?
The details were always totally unique to the business but the fundamentals were the same. We need leaders and teams who can create real human trust and offer deep compassionate presence as well as stellar business results. Both are needed.
Our journey has always been about bringing deep human warmth, embodied truth, and vulnerable courage into spaces that need them most. We came from the stage, but our lifelong mission became helping people step fully onto the stage of their own lives with grounded authority and radical self-worth. Entering ‘The Theatre of You’.
The Foundations: Self-Esteem vs. Self-Worth
At the heart of the Indigo Brave methodology (yes, more in the book) is a fundamental distinction that has transformed the lives of thousands of leaders over the past 30 years: the difference between conditional self-esteem and intrinsic self-worth.
The Trap of Conditional Self-Esteem: In our model, self-esteem is external, conditional, and performance-driven. It is built upon what we do, how well we perform, the status we hold, and the praise we receive. When a leader operates without understanding the difference between Self-Esteem and Self-Worth, then her value fluctuates with every win, failure, praise, or criticism. This can create an unspoken terror of falling short, driving her to over-prepare, over-control, and over-function, ultimately leading to imposter syndrome and exhaustion.
The Power of Intrinsic Self-Worth: Our Self-worth is below our self-esteem and there needs to be a strong membrane between the two. Self-Worth is an inherent, unshakeable realization of value rooted in who you are, it is a ‘Be-ing’ level of self, independent of rank, productivity, or external approval. A leader operating from self-worth does not need every meeting or project to validate her right to lead. Mistakes, even failures are integrated as learning opportunities - the pain can be significant, but they are not personal catastrophes. This allows her to lead with radical transparency, and robust resilience, we can admit mistakes, and welcome challenging perspectives without feeling threatened.
The Core Pillars of Feminine Leadership
Feminine Leadership is not defined by gender, it works equally well with men and women. Rather, it represents a relational, intuitive, and cyclical way of operating that balances traditional hyper-linear approaches to management.
Cyclical Awareness Over Perpetual Linear Drive: Nature operates in seasons—growth, harvest, decay, and rest. Traditional corporate models demand continuous, quarterly linear growth without pause. Feminine leadership restores balance by honouring the natural rhythms of creation, rapid execution, and necessary integration or "wintering."
Embodied Intelligence: Strategic clarity does not happen purely from the neck up. We are not ‘brains on legs’. Feminine authority integrates head, heart, and gut coherence. It recognizes somatic signals—tightness in the chest, visceral gut feelings, shifts in atmospheric tension—as valid organizational intelligence.
Relational Depth Over Positional Power: Rather than managing through top-down authority or transactional metrics, feminine leadership builds influence through genuine resonance, radical empathy, and mutual accountability for failures as well as successes.
A key insight established throughout Indigo Brave's history is that transformational leadership requires both energies working in harmony within a leader:
Feminine (Yin) Energy: Source of deep compassion, intuitive flow, true collaboration, and relational space.
Masculine (Yang) Energy: Source of highly effective boundaries, decisive action, structural clarity, and grounded direction.
When these two energies align, leaders cultivate an expanded ability to process dynamics in the moment. Instead of reacting out of habit, they lead from a spacious internal clarity—balancing soft relational presence with firm, effective boundaries and decision-making.
Discovering Authentic Relating and Circling
It was only recently—just two years ago—that we came across Marco and Sophie’s course Authentic Relating in Community through our connections with the Global Eco Village Network (we also happen to live in an intentional Eco Community but more of that another time). Imagine our joy when we see other paths walking alongside us. We were thrilled to discover that the very ways of communicating and sitting in relational presence we had been practicing for three decades had a formal name in the wider personal growth world: Circling!
In our quest for practical, lived truth, we had quite literally reinvented the wheel (but hey - we’ve learnt a lot about how wheels work in the process).
How do we use Circling? Circling brings present-moment awareness, active curiosity, and radical truth-telling into interpersonal dynamics. Instead of discussing abstract theories or analysing past events, it focuses on what is happening right here, right now in the living relational field between people.
Revealing Current Reality: When anchored in intrinsic self-worth rather than conditional performance (self-esteem), a leader can drop the need to appear composed. She can openly state her immediate experience: "I notice my pulse quickening, and I'm aware of a hesitation in me to speak on this next budget item."
One of our most popular models: "Zero Zone (™)": When workplace pressures escalate, leaders often default to reactive survival strategies. All based around our Freeze, Fight, Flight, and Fawn practices, we can find ourselves performing and attempting to survive through pleasing, pushing, rescuing, becoming the super-hero, or shutting down parts of ourselves and numbing the discomfort. However, it is perfectly possible to break these habits and watch the true success that comes through authenticity and presence. We work through somatic relational practices, where executives and leaders learn to drop into their body's quiet axis with Indigo Brave’s model The Zero Zone (™), enabling us to recognise our triggers and build our capacity to hold space for difficult emotions in ourselves and others whilst maintaining heart coherence and access to our deepest forms of intelligence.
Conclusion: 30 Years of Embodied Transformation
We need our masculine energies and our feminine energies in leadership. There are times for both. We have been out of balance with our leadership styles, which mirrors our being out of balance with so many aspects of nature and life on our precious world. Currently I am witnessing more need for leading from our feminine authority, and to bring that into our Authentic Relating. This is not about abandoning structure, vision, accountability, or strategic rigor. It is about grounding those elements in an unshakeable foundation of intrinsic self-worth and relational truth. Being able to stay present to the really tough stuff and witness that ultimately business needs to serve humanity, not the other way around.
Our experience reaffirms that the future of healthy organisations depends on leaders who have the courage to ask what real, sustainable leadership is. We may need some radical truths and the ability to step off the performance hamster wheel. By embracing somatic intelligence, honouring cyclical growth, and practicing real relational contact, leaders create resilient and sustainable cultures where people grow and thrive alongside healthy profit. When we remember to honour the original Feminine Energy—Mama Gaia herself—and work in sustainable ways with her, we can truly achieve sustainability for our world and her people.
Where to Find Out More
Laila-Elizabeth Risdon and the team continue their cutting-edge work at Indigo Brave.
You can contact them at www.indigobrave.com
You can buy the book, It's Not About Self-Esteem: Self-Worth Is The Key To Success on Amazon.