The Undercover Mystic's Playbook Pt 2.

Navigating the Subtle Energetic Structures of a New System

In Part 1, The First 30 Days Are the Field, we explored how the earliest stage of any leadership transition is less about action and more about presence. By tuning into the energetic rhythms, relational cues, and unspoken tensions of a new environment, you begin to stabilise the system simply by being in it with clarity and care. That orientation creates the foundation for trust. In this second piece, we move from sensing into pattern recognition: the deeper work of navigating the subtleties that shape behaviour, influence decisions, and govern flow. Every enterprise carries its own invisible codes that are structural, cultural, narrative, and somatic (sensory). The moment you begin to notice and name these patterns, you are proactively setting the tone, relationship dynamics and design for what comes next.

The Power of Perception

Let the system show you how it moves before you decide what it means.

Before you interpret anything, hold. Let the system reveal itself. Let the energy circulate in you and tune into how it makes you feel. Initial impulses or even discomfort around prevailing human and systemic operating systems will have reasons for being. Disruptive change before decoding the energetic dynamics in play can be counterproductive, even if such changes make sense to you. Let the relational geometry settle around you without rushing to define its shape. Leadership at this level is anchored in deep listening in which you are consciously tuning your perception. By approaching early-stage orientation in this way, you are enabling circumstance to sharpen your Sensory Intelligence which will serve you in all aspects of your life.

“Rather than seeking allies to run your agenda, tune into team pain points to support theirs. Carry the energy and language of a circuit breaker.”

When you arrive in a new role, your body is already reading the room. Your nervous system is processing and adapting to tone, pace, the relational field, and unspoken pressure points. As patterns reveal themselves, find the flow of existing dynamics to become “part of the team”. Rather than seeking allies to run your agenda, tune into team pain-points to support theirs. Concurrently, carry the energy and use of language of a circuit breaker, consciously and persistently framed to authentically alleviate systemic pressures rather than adding to it.

Patterns and Group Mind Dynamics

Pattern recognition begins by observing the repeat signals that structure decisions, movement, and energy.

Every organisation is animated by patterns. Some patterns are designed, others are inherited as the default “way it has always been”. In this I am reminded of this novel social experiment here below. A woman enters a waiting room, where, without explanation, every person in the room stands up each time a bell rings. What she doesn’t know is they are actors. One by one, the actors are called away, leaving her alone, and yet she continues to stand with the bell. New strangers arrive, and remarkably, she begins transmitting the behaviour to them.

This simple setup offers a powerful reflection on how enterprise culture can shape human behaviour, and how culture embeds itself through persistent signaling even when irrational. Drawing on the metaphoric video case study above, consider: in what areas of your life are you standing when the bell rings? Enterprise systems condition their own continuity until the friction behind patterns are made visible. To crack dysfunctional systems, low friction, easy adoption alternatives need to be provided, and incentive signals shifted.

To be a leader, quietly reflect on inherited behaviours. Most importantly, reflect on your own behaviours that you inherited from your last job. What can you learn from the way they do things here? Is it possible that the approaches that need to change are your own?

System patterns live beneath behaviours: in cadence, in language, in how people enter and exit conversations. Most are unconscious. Legacy roles, old power lines, compensatory behaviours, hidden allegiances. You’ll see them in how feedback loops are handled, how silence is used, how time is held. No need to get caught up in creating a catalogue of dysfunctional conduct. Your role is to feel and see dynamics with fresh eyes.

Patterns to tune into include:

• Structural patterns (how decisions move)

• Cultural patterns (how trust is earned or withheld)

• Narrative patterns (what stories justify stagnation or motion)

• Somatic patterns (what the body senses before language arrives)

  
  

Questions you might also like to explore include:

• What are the repeat conditions that reinforce high friction patterns?

• Where is energy pooling? Where is it leaking?
  

Reserve judgement and see the enterprise as a living structure. Your capacity to see clearly, in and of itself can be enough to shape the field. Once your clear seeing is shimmering through the field, you can begin to work with form.

Sensory and psychic Intelligence

“Clear seeing” is a function of your sensory and psychic intelligence. These two faculties exist in inverse proportion to the extent you are stuck in the mind. In other words, thoughts obscure and obfuscate feelings. The less thought dominates conscious awareness, the liberated you are, to consciously feel through the innate intelligence of your other faculties. These faculties, specifically, are the senses, the glandular system and the central nervous system. Sensory intelligence is oriented around your capacity to choose how you feel and consciously emote. Part of sensory intelligence is understanding how you affect the field. Without an awareness of how you influence the field, the signals you receive from the world around you are, in no small part, distorted by your own unconscious projections.

“Your intuition is only as clean as your inner signal. If you’re listening through tension, you’re hearing your own story.”

Sensory intelligence is cultivated through somatic practices such as ecstatic dance, and a consciously felt awareness of holistic presence that can arise in meditation, or in fact any moment you choose to feel.

Psychic intelligence is a function of the central nervous system. It is your ability to feel and discern signal, combined with a felt sense of your energetic influence on the field. The beauty of tuning in to the felt presence of your influence, is when you do there is a a rising tendency to radiate care and compassion, which in turn cultivates trust. This is the sign of a leader authentically connected to higher purpose. Are you?

Advanced Leadership Attunement

Owning an effective leadership transition is a deliberate act of attunement. You have stepped beyond first impressions and into the discipline of reading the field as a living system. By feeling the energetics of the enterprise, you are internally mapping the structural, cultural, narrative, and somatic patterns that govern its motion. You are feeling the way decisions travel, the cadence of trust, the stories that sustain momentum, and the sensory currents that shape behaviour before language arrives. In the presence of felt awareness, you are actively cultivating sensory and psychic intelligence, and refining your inner signal to see the system without distortion. From this vantage, you begin to influence the field simply by how you hold yourself in it.

Leaders who master this phase carry a quiet authority. They know when to let the system move and when to introduce a shift. They earn the right to intervene because they have listened deeply enough to understand what the enterprise is actually asking for.

Leadership challenges are elegantly designed to drive the conscious evolution of you and the people around you. In Part 3, we step across the threshold, where felt presence begins proactively shaping the field. Stay Tuned!