The Words Don’t Exist Yet
A conversation with Sonja Blignaut on presence, wayfinding, and the intelligence we’ve been ignoring
Sonja Blignaut is a complexity theorist from South Africa who helps people navigate what can’t be managed. We sat down to record a conversation a while back. It was one of those exchanges where you finish and think: something moved in there, and I’m not sure I can say what.
At one point, we were trying to describe what we actually do — the role we play when working with someone in genuine uncertainty. Not the job title. The actual thing.
We went through the usual candidates. Coach. Mentor. Guide. None of them fit.
Sonja landed on something: a tuning fork. You show up as a frequency. Not to teach, not to lead — to resonate with. The other person’s system begins to settle because yours already has.
What it names is something I notice in myself but rarely talk about.
There’s a moment in certain coaching sessions when I stop thinking about what to ask next. The agenda, if there ever was one, goes quiet. Something shifts — not dramatically, but perceptibly. A settling. And from inside that settling, I can sense things I couldn’t access a moment before.
Not ideas. More like orientation. A felt sense of where the person actually is, underneath what they’re saying. What wants to move. What’s being protected.
This isn’t intuition as mysticism. It’s what becomes available when presence displaces analysis.
And what presence opens is not one intelligence but several
Running simultaneously, each tracking something the analytical mind can’t reach on its own.
The body knows before the mind does. It reads the room, registers the hesitation, feels the weight of what isn’t being said. That’s somatic awareness — not a soft skill, a primary data source.
Beneath that, there’s the relational field itself. The quality of contact between two people. Whether something is moving or stuck. Whether there’s trust or performance. You don’t think your way into knowing this. You feel it.
And then there’s something harder to name — an energetic awareness, a sensitivity to what’s alive in the room and what’s not. Where the energy is going. What it’s moving toward.
None of this is available when you’re in your head.
Which is why the most important thing a guide can carry into uncertainty isn’t a framework.
It’s a regulated nervous system.
Sonja said it plainly: when she goes into fear, her ability to help disappears. Not because she loses skill. Because the frequency changes. Her clients feel it before they can name it.
We have built entire industries on the assumption that expertise is what the guide carries. Knowledge. Methodology. Better questions.
But methodology accessed through a constricted nervous system is just noise delivered confidently.
Presence is the variable. Not technique.
This is where the imaginal comes in — and why I think it matters more than most leadership development will admit.
The imaginal is not imagination in the creative or optimistic sense. It’s not vision boards or possibility thinking.
It’s the faculty that can hold what hasn’t taken form yet. It moves in symbol, resonance, and pattern. In the image that arrives when you stop pushing. In the dream that reorients something you couldn’t think your way through. In the moment a session takes an unexpected turn, and something real enters the room.
The rational mind is brilliant at solving defined problems. It is genuinely poor at sensing what’s emerging in the dark.
What Sonja does with wayfinding — and what I try to do in this work — isn’t a retreat from rigor. It’s a different kind of rigor. One that requires you to develop the full range of available intelligence, not just the one that got you credentials.
We don’t have clean language for most of this yet.
Sonja and I both noticed it in our conversation — circling the same territory with different words, neither of us quite landing it. At one point she said: I think it’s the ability to hold the unknown. To hold the unraveling.
I think that’s right.
And I think that capacity to hold rather than solve, to sense rather than strategize, is what this moment is actually asking for.
Not more rational.
More imaginal.
A question for those of you doing this kind of work or simply navigating something that thinking harder isn’t solving:
Where do you notice the shift from thinking about a situation to actually being present with it? What does that feel like from the inside?
If you’d like to listen to our exploration, you can find it here.