When a leader goes numb, the way in is through the senses, not analysis — so ask for a scent, not a reason.

Scent skips the thinking mind, reaching the seats of emotion and memory before language arrives.

Track the scent of your aliveness over time to learn its notes — then tend that fragrance as your anchor.

The other day, a leader I'd worked with for some time came into our coaching session and said, "I feel numb, so numb. I feel nothing. I'm so overwhelmed."

So, I asked: "If this numbness were a scent, what would it smell like? Don't think. What's the scent—the first thing that comes in?"

She closed her eyes. "A cave. Deep underground. Cold stone, dripping in the dark—stalactites and stalagmites reaching toward each other for a thousand years, never quite touching. There's a sky up there somewhere. I just can't feel it. It’s like wet limestone. The smell of a place the sun has never reached.

Something shifted. A leader spends her life searching for a way forward. What this one had lost was the way in—and only our senses can lead us there. So, I asked her to smell.

Why Scent, and Not Words?

We have almost no language for smell. We name a color or a sound—crimson, shrill—but a scent we can only point at: like rain, like jasmine. "Smell is the mute sense, the one without words," wrote scent historian Diane Ackerman (1990); in most languages, odor borrows from whatever carries it (Majid & Burenhult, 2014). Because there is no ready word, it can't be answered from the mind's surface; to answer at all, you must reach past language, into the field where the feeling lives. The word hardly matters — jasmine or wet fish; it only proves the reach was made. What matters is what it opens: a receiving mode, through which information can now enter with a wider lens, and we can feel more, through our senses.

And the senses carry more than we know. A dog reads a street as skeins of scent (Yong, 2022) — a world we skim straight over. The channel is open in us, too, only dimmed.

The Body........

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