“Stay Curious, My Friends…”
TL;DR A mutual feeling of emotional or psychological safety is one of the most important components of any healthy relationship and a key driver of any high performing team, but we don’t give it the attention that it warrants in our day-to-day lives. How do we expand our awareness and make the appropriate investments in our environment? The key starts with managing ourselves.
Over the past few weeks, I have found myself in multiple situations where I or the people around me have been triggered and put on the by something that was said or done in their presence. Voices get raised and accusatory things get said that may make us feel protected while hurting another in the conversation. Escalation has us (and the other) lash out or shut down to provide us with a sense of security. Why is it that we lose the feeling of “safety” and let our self-protective coping mechanisms take over?
Look, we all have insecurities… We all, at some time or another, have inner feelings of being threatened and/or inadequate in some way. While we worry about being judged by others: how we look, how we speak, who we get invited to hang out with, where we live, etc., our self-doubts are really driven internally as we assess ourselves negatively against things that we dislike about ourselves. They become the source of many of the triggers that we are scanning for in most social situations: is our ego, and thus, our very existence under threat and in jeopardy? Additionally, when we were young, we began to build a repertoire of behaviors that helped us gain approval and stay out of trouble; over time, our self-management skills become a labyrinth of “dos and don’ts” that need to be navigated in any interactions. Ironically, the first step in creating safety for others is for us to manage ourselves so that we feel safe.
First some background. David Rock from the NeuroLeadership Institute articulated the “SCARF model” of threat response in his seminal “Managing with the Brain in Mind” back in 2008. [“Your Brain at Work” is a video of a Google TechTalk that he did on how the engineers there can work better together.] SCARF is an acronym for the signals that our reptilian brains are constantly scanning for: we crave Status, require Certainty, search for Autonomy, foster Relatedness (Friend or Foe) with others and try to create fairness. Since fear and greed both have negative connotations, Rock uses the terms threat and reward; we tend to move away from threats to SCARF and toward rewards (“minimize danger, maximize reward”). It turns out that we are wired to respond to threat about 10 to 1 over reward in our reactions, which explains why when there is a gap in information or our understanding, we fill it in with negative data; we are wired to protect ourselves. Our threat responses are some of our worst behaviors that come out when we are under pressure; again, we push others away or shut down the situation.
I have found this model to be simple, yet life changing (no hyperbole!) for me and for many clients that I have shared it with over the past 10 years. I think that the model provides us with a good way for us to self-assess where our hot buttons are and begin to take on routines and habits that can help us be more relaxed and resilient when in stressful situations. We usually have a major and minor component that are most important to us (mine is Autonomy first, then Fairness; I will sacrifice my autonomy to right a situation that does not seem to be fair to others). It is useful to figure out what your triggers are so that you can manage yourself better in the face of stress. Then you can start observing others to see what their SCARF fingerprint might be in order to steer clear of them to work better together (I usually share the article and video with those relationships that are most important to me so that we can discover and learn to navigate together).
Knowing what sets off our defenses is not enough, we also have to develop practices that will keep us from responding, reacting so strongly, recovering and being resilient in the face of triggers in challenging and stressful situations. I start with diet, exercise and sleep: optimizing each of these physical components has me start each day with a fully charged battery; without it, our executive function in the prefrontal cortex is compromised as is our ability to successfully deal with stress. My other habits that support resilience are daily meditation and deep breathing, long walks outside, weekly qigong or yoga and a monthly massage; all of these routines help settle my energy and raise the set point for what might set me off.
Now that we know what might put us on the defensive and we’ve taken steps to improve our stress response and resilience, what do we do in the moment? There are a number of steps that we can take, first being to explore this subject with your most important and most challenging relationships; this will allow you to slow down and debug these situations in real-time, giving feedback to each other and able to make requests for adjusted behaviors on both sides. Next is to use the benefits of your body practices (meditation, qigong, et al) to become more sensitive to your body and your feelings: before you are triggered, you can feel the rise and either stop yourself from reacting at all or to intervene in your emotional response.
Another approach I use in the midst of navigating high-stakes conversations is to remain curious and ask another question, especially when I have a strong position or an intractable point of view. Asking a question shows concern for the other person’s point of view, where they are coming from, and the thought pattern that has taken them there, but, more importantly, it gives me a moment to take a breath, relax and have a chance to actually engage my empathy for their feelings in the matter. Sometimes I have to go through multiple rounds of “tell me more” or “help me understand that” to let go of the grip that surety has on my mind at times. The thing to remember is that we’ll usually get a better answer if we can investigate the range of thought we both have and then integrate our multiple, diverse points of view into a stronger one.
None of this is foolproof and I make plenty of mistakes each day, but I do see progress and am getting better outcomes; I also see the improvements that many clients and teams that I work with accomplish. Once we are able to improve our self-management skills we can begin to trust ourselves, having increased self-esteem and self-confidence.
So, remember: When I feel safe, I can help others feel safe as well; when we both feel safe, we know that we accept and respect each other. From that starting point, we can absorb and adapt to change more easily (realign expectations), learn and iterate to success more quickly (admit mistakes and ask for help sooner), and have better engagement, retention and morale in the teams in which we participate.
Now, I’ll turn it over to you:
- What insights or learning show up for you? How do you assess your defense mechanisms and coping skills? What might you do differently going forward?
- What Qs do you have? What would you like to hear more about?
- What new or different actions will you take tomorrow?
Bye for now…
