Do We Really Have To Talk About Feelings At Work? With Kate Woodsome

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0:43The Anxious Achiever: Or as my editor is always telling me, you got to kill your darlings.

0:52The Anxious Achiever: I'm Maura Aaron Smele and welcome to The Anxious Achiever. Today, I'm joined again by a friend of the show, Kate Woodson. A while ago, I gave a talk in Florida and it didn't land. It just didn't land. It was a huge audience and I could tell. Afterwards, a man came up to me and he said, more or less, I don't understand why we have to talk about feelings at work. I'll be honest. For a long time, my response to people like him was to just keep going, right? I'd say, that's their thing. And this is medicine. They need it. I'll keep fighting the good fight and they'll come around to me. Some people in my talks would light up and rush over afterwards and tell me they'd been waiting years for someone to say what I talk about out loud.

1:33The Anxious Achiever: We talk about our feelings. We talk about anxiety. But I think others were counting the minutes. And then I started talking with my friend, Kate Woodson, on text, on the phone, over a lot of conversations. And she helped me see something that I'd been missing. Not everyone wants to talk about their feelings. In fact, most people don't. Not everyone welcomes a conversation about mental health at work. Not everyone experiences these conversations as safe. In fact, many don't. And that was a blind spot for me. For many people, stress and trauma have taught their nervous systems that opening up is dangerous, and rightly so, right?

2:10The Anxious Achiever: We're going to talk about that today. When is it safe? When is it not safe? And how do we get people to understand their own emotional landscape and their own stress map in a way that's helpful just for them, right? Just for them. Kate spent 23 years as a journalist. She has covered war zones, the pandemic, and January 6th, she's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Kate was always excellent under pressure until she wasn't. And today she's a certified resilient toolkit facilitator and her work connects individual stress patterns to what happens, not just in our workplaces, but in our democracy.

2:47The Anxious Achiever: So this is a conversation for those of us who are wrestling with how to have safe conversations that help people understand when their bodies are feeling stress, when big emotions are happening, so that we can further cooperation and collaboration.

3:07The Anxious Achiever: Kate, welcome back. Obviously, I guess, friend of the pod. I've never said that before. I'm so honored to have you back. I've been wanting to talk to you online about this for a while. It's something you and I have been sort of having a dialogue about on text and on the phone for a while. But today we're going to talk about sort of the workplace trauma connection. And, you know, I think trauma is one of these things. It's kind of trendy. It's everywhere. It's always been everywhere, but maybe not trendy. But, you know, it's something that I have to tell you that really only has come into consciousness for me in how I do my work with companies in the past six months.

3:56The Anxious Achiever: I mean, I did my first episode about being trauma informed several years ago. Like it's definitely been something I personally kind of knew about. But I think it was only in talking to you that I was able to sort of make a connection between talking about mental health at work and talking about our emotions at work. And the fact that not everyone is experiencing that conversation in the same way, in a safe way, in a way that they understand. And that trauma might be like knitting it all together. So I want you to help us unpack that in a way that lay people. I am not a licensed mental health professional.

4:39The Anxious Achiever: in a way that lay people with an interest in this stuff can sort of get curious about and maybe want to dive in more after the show. Yeah, it's a really big conversation. And I love that we have this conversation on text, on the phone, in person and on the pod, because I think the more we collectively as a human species understand stress and trauma patterns, the more choice we have in how we respond to stressful events, right? And I should put a disclaimer in too, I am not a therapist. I am not a mental health specialist. I was a journalist for 23 years reporting in societies and cultures that have experienced great social and political tumult around the world, including our own.

5:33And I left journalism to become a certified resilience toolkit facilitator, which is based in the nervous system and uses micro practices to begin to be aware of our stress responses. and I integrate that knowledge with also an approach to systems change, looking at our organizations, looking at our democracy, looking at ourselves that make the connections between stress patterns on an individual level and stress patterns on a collective level. So that's the spiel of how I look at this stuff. And I think one of the things that's really important for everybody to remember and I suspect your listeners know it well, but unless you are a robot, and there might be a few of us recording this call, you have a nervous system, right?

6:29Which is our brain, our brainstem, our spinal cord, and all these nerves that are threaded throughout our body. And the autonomic nervous system's main job is to keep us alive. It is constantly scanning for safety and danger. And so it is constantly that our brain and our nerves and our spinal cord are sending all this information, taking in information from the outside world and our inside world, our organs, our DNA, what we've been through in the past, what our families have been through in the past. And all the information is informing our brain to make decisions about how we think, how we feel, how we act.

7:12And if we are wired for threat detection, because we need to stay alive, we are constantly scanning for anomalies that might seem threatening to us, to conversations, to tone, right? To figure out, can we relax enough to open up, to be curious, to be connected? Or do we need to be on guard? Do we need to look for our people who we know we can trust? and do we need to be prepared to fight, flee, or freeze, or appease or fawn, for example. So when we begin, when people begin to understand that inside of us, all of us have this system that is scanning for safety and danger, then you can begin to notice your stress patterns in a different way, right?

8:03And so if you notice that you are more agitated or on edge because you have stress that is unmitigated, that is a defensive response to what your body is perceiving to be threat.

8:19The Anxious Achiever: That's right. And there is a spectrum between stress and trauma. And I think one of the things that is important to understand is that stress comes and goes. ideally we have this flexibility that enables us to meet a challenge and then we come back you know we reset but if you have experienced something that is too much too soon too fast for your nervous system to process or if you experience stress that is so prolonged that you never get a break so for example living with chronic adversity racism poverty discrimination of any kind for a long period of time, that in itself can, can wear you down too.

9:07Yeah. And so when your nervous system doesn't have a breaker is overwhelmed, that defensive posture, that threat response can get stuck, like a smoke detector that's always on. And so trauma is when we get stuck in this scanning for danger, it rewires the brain, it doesn't have to be permanent. But it makes us much more vigilant to try to figure out how do I stay safe? And when you have millions of people in chronic states of stress and millions of people who have grown up with trauma or had it passed down to them over generations, that becomes a way of being, a way of acting, a way of creating laws, a way of running meetings.

9:57So I'll yield back because this is a conversation, But I just wanted to set that foundational understanding of, you know, what do feelings have to do with the workplace? What is stress and trauma? What is, you know, if you are human and you live in this world, stress and trauma are part of the experience of work in whatever country you're in.

10:19The Anxious Achiever: That is correct. Let me let me just ask you a clarifying question. I mean, I think I think one of the it's funny when you talk about stress on the spectrum and trauma, as we've talked about my son. smashed up his knee and went into trauma surgery, right? Huge break, blood loss. You know, he probably wouldn't have lived if it hadn't been fixed somehow because it was a huge loss with lots of blood loss, blah, blah, blah. So that's different than a stress fracture over time, which also needs to be addressed and will lead to a break probably. So when you talk about stress and trauma being on a spectrum.

11:01The Anxious Achiever: It sounded like you were almost saying that stress that is experienced for too long can become trauma. Like how deep, dig a little deeper into how stress and trauma are related. Because I think when we think of trauma, we think of what happened to my son. He went up for a shot, his knee exploded. Something happened. I was in the car accident. That happened in a, could be a millisecond. And my life was never the same, which is different than I have been chronically poor and fighting for my survival for 30 years. That's right. Exactly. So again, if we think of our nervous system as this dynamic, resilient operating system that is able to metabolize stress when we have the resources to process it.

11:58So when we have the ability to move our bodies and get stress out of our bodies, if you feel that rush of adrenaline as, you know, our car is racing to you and you have to jump out of the way, you have this rush of adrenaline and sometimes we want to shake it off. Other resources might be like that car keeps playing in your head. And so you talk to a therapist or you talk to a friend or you go into nature. These are resources that help us to metabolize and make sense of the stress. When you have prolonged stress without the resources to offload it, to reduce it, to mitigate or balance it out, our capacity diminishes.

12:40So it's like we all have a container that of stressful experiences that we can handle. And if you have had more stressful experiences as a child, your container might be more full of adversity than somebody else's. So if you have a new stressful experience, you might have phenomenal response systems to be able to be nimble and problem solve and be creative in a way that other people who haven't been through adversity are able to do. So you've been through hard stuff before and you know how to respond. And it feels like you can handle a ton of stress.

13:20The Anxious Achiever: And generally you can. When you've had a lot of adversity, stress tolerance grows and grows. And at the same time, it's not an infinite, well, it's an infinite container for adversity. And so if you continue to pile on without resources, like a living wage, like access to healthcare, like friends and family that ground you because you're working all the time or because you're addicted to your phone, and then you continue piling on stress from deadlines or from work assignments that you will be lauded for, rewarded for, all this stuff, you know, your capacity will diminish. Will that turn into trauma?

14:02Not necessarily for everybody. I think there is a big difference between, you know, really hard workloads and growing up in poverty or growing up with chronic racism. So part of the thing with trauma is that it rips away your sense of safety. It rips away your sense of agency, control, dignity. So we're talking about conditions that fundamentally diminish your sense of being a human that deserves respect and dignity, right? And so it is a spectrum. Not everybody has trauma. I will say in this country, in the United States, 64 % of Americans grew up with at least one adverse childhood experience.

14:53So neglect, poverty, abuse, loss of a loved one, these things that can be really shocks that rip away your sense of safety, that rip away your sense that the world is safe. So 64 % of Americans grew up with at least one. We know there are researchers in Oklahoma, the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University that have analyzed national surveys on adverse childhood experiences. And they've seen an uptick in the number of adverse childhood experiences that Americans have had pre-1940, post-1940 and post-1998. they're forecasting that people growing up after 2018 will on average surpass a cumulative of three adverse childhood experiences.

15:40Three ACEs.

15:41The Anxious Achiever: And listeners, just quickly, we've done a couple episodes on ACEs. I will link them in the show notes most recently with Melissa Merrick, president and CEO of Prevent Child Abuse America, just because I know this is a great topic that you probably want to delve into. Good. Yeah. And so the point that I'm making here is that, you know, adversity is in the water. We grow up with adversity and we grow up with coping mechanisms that are phenomenal and make us super high achievers. And we also grow up with, you know, it's sometimes diminished capacity because we have tolerated and endured so much stress.

16:20Yes. Yes.

16:21The Anxious Achiever: And sometimes we just break because we're human. That's it. And, you know, the straw that broke the camel's back is a useful aphorism for a reason. I think that's it. You know, my most recent I can point to what broke mine is I grew up in adversity, turned that adversity into a superpower where I was able to operate in very high intensity, high pressure newsrooms, meet deadlines, go into any kind of a situation, stay calm under pressure and stick the landing like a gymnast. I covered the January 6 attack, was surrounded and threatened at the US Capitol, stuck the landing, reported that, stayed, quote, calm.

17:06But then afterwards, kept working, kept meeting deadlines, never discharged the energy. And the stress was a trauma. It was too much for my system to handle. And I eventually essentially had a collapse. It would have been like your son's had broke his what a knee? His tibia. His tibia. That was a rupture. I had a rupture where my sense of safety was ruptured and I needed to heal it. And so it was like everything I was handling, handling. But what I learned from that is that how well you recover from adversity reflects how well you were doing the day before and the resources, information, and skills you have in the days after.

17:55So if your cup is relatively empty, you have very little to pull from, right? So I was understaffed. Our staff had been cut. I wasn't sleeping. I was totally burned out. We'd covered racial justice protests, the pandemic, the election, and then the insurrection. So totally empty cup with a newsroom that was also totally empty of resources to give. And so if I had gone there, had all the sleep that I needed, had the team that I needed, all of those things, it's possible I would have been just fine. um i also had you know a history of adversity that again made me really good at my job but also made me vulnerable because i didn't have other supports in place yes so when we think about our workplaces going back to you know high achievers anxious achievers who have normalized extraordinary levels of stress and perfected the dance of you know how how much can i do without

19:02The Anxious Achiever: breaking. I think it's really good to begin doing an audit of what is deteriorating before the break comes. Does that make sense? What is deteriorating? Say more. In what sense deteriorating? Relationships. You know, things that are meaningful to you, things that are aligned with your values, whether it is family or exercise or eating well, maybe get put on the back burner a little bit because you need to finish this brief for a client. When I think about deterioration now, I never fully understood it because my identity was totally enmeshed with my professional accomplishments. Totally. Totally.

19:47So my value system was productivity, which, you know, my dad gave me this wooden block, you know, those like cheesy wooden, sorry to anyone who loved these things like home sweet home or love laugh love yeah yeah sorry he gave me this wooden block that said never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life oh that's a good one I like that it's a really good one and what at the time that he gave it to me I was like oh like come on and um because I thought the sign of a good life was you know for me it was public service it was reporting. It was making an impact to the client I served, which was the public.

20:28And whatever industry you're in, I think we all have that version of it. So, but if I look back now, the deterioration was my own decision making. So what decisions are you making out of scarcity because you're afraid somebody else will get it? What decisions are you making out of fear versus love or generosity? What decisions are you making because you're adrenalized? Like when you begin to notice your states of stress and that you're operating in this threat, fear-based, got to do it or else, that affects how we talk to people. It affects the demands we make of people. Yes. It affects our tolerance for humans, right?

21:19Like I know when I'm overloaded, I will tell my best friend, we FaceTime almost every day. I'll tell her I hate everyone.

21:28The Anxious Achiever: And then I'm like, okay, I'm beyond my capacity. How do you love people, right? Annoying people, people are so annoying, right? And so, so when you're so stretched, it's really hard. Let's talk about the noticing piece, Because I think that you and I probably have both had the experience and probably listeners have as well. We live and breathe this stuff. Totally. I always say it's like turning on your seeing eyes. Once you turn your seeing eyes onto this stuff, you don't unsee it. In fact, you see it everywhere. That's right. You're attuned in new ways, but most people, many people are unattuned and often to protect themselves.

22:18The Anxious Achiever: So I want to spend a little time on this because I think that to me, this has been a real aha moment in how we help people become healthy. Obviously, my focus is the workplace. Your focus is democracy. We're not all starting from the same level. And that makes it hard. So real quick, though, basic baseline. What is a trauma response when we talk about a trauma response? And how might that show up in someone who is not Kate Woodson and has done all this work? Yeah. So and I mean, it's still showing up for me. Yeah, that's right. So trauma responses are different for different people. But if you think about your system, your nervous system's primary goal is to keep you safe.

23:13A trauma response is an effort to protect you from pain. That might be relational pain, it might be physical pain, any kind of pain. So for maybe your listeners, a trauma response, and this isn't everyone, but is workaholism. And so I think about this in terms of if you grew up in an environment that wasn't safe or didn't have certainty, or if as an adult you had something that happened that ripped away that sense of security and safety, you are going to do everything in your capacity to have control, to be able to dictate the conditions upon which you can steer your life, you can make decisions, right?

23:58Also, if your identity and safety is enmeshed with productivity and success, easing back on work is dangerous. It feels dangerous, rather.

24:13The Anxious Achiever: It does. Right. So also, when you are not occupied by a client or a challenge or a deadline or whatever it may be, then you have time to think. Then you have time to remember. then you have time to physically feel. And for a lot of people, that's not safe. That does not feel safe. And so a trauma response can be that that workaholism to stay busy. It could be micromanaging, right? So it is so interesting. I used to lead teams as well. And when I was well resourced, I think it was a pretty good manager. When I wasn't well resourced, and I didn't have enough staff and I was over my capacity, I was a total micromanager.

25:03And my fear of failure, my fear of the team failing came out as control. And we weren't in existential danger, you know, most of the time. But my nervous system responded as if I was. Does that make sense?

25:27The Anxious Achiever: Yes, 100%. And my listeners will sort of know these also as what we would call anxiety responses, right? I mean, I think micromanaging is a classic one. I also think of sort of diving into over functioning, right? I mean, a lot of us, right, who grew up in family systems, where things weren't safe, and we sort of were the glue. We, we, we became used to just taking it all on our shoulders and we knew that if we did it, it would be good. That's right. And so that's another behavior that again, it feels as natural to us as waking up in the morning and stretching. That's right. We don't notice we do it.

26:09The Anxious Achiever: We do not. We do not. And we get rewarded for it. That's right. But it can be, as you're saying, it's an anxiety response, a stress response, a trauma response. It can be. And it's also, you know, a never ending wheel. So, you know, I have one. So this sounds, you know, this sounds so arrogant. Let me just say this. I love talking to people who want to start their own business. You have an idea, you have a plan. How do you jump off? I have a great book for you. And it's by legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Mark Pincus. It's called Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love. It's a fast-paced, 170-page read created for exactly the uncertain times we live in, whether you're working at a company or you really want to start that business.

27:01The Anxious Achiever: It was an instant national bestseller. And the thing that I love about it is it has a battle-tested, easy-to-follow framework to rapidly test and assess new ideas, right? So you can separate the great ones from the bad ones. Mark is offering our readers two books for the price of one. Go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious. And that's Mark with a K. Getmarksbook.com slash anxious. It's just$16 a book for you and a friend to get the book that Y Combinator's Gary Tan says will, quote, change your odds of success because it teaches you how to kill your losing ideas. Or as my editor is always telling me, you got to kill your darlings.

27:40The Anxious Achiever: That's a pretty big endorsement from the head of the number one startup accelerator that's twice as hard to get into as Harvard? Once again, if you go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious, Mark will send you a second copy for free that he's paying for. Just go to getmarksbook.com slash anxious. When I talk to professionals, here is the number one complaint I hear. I'm in so many meetings, I don't actually have time to do work. And at the end of the day, everything we've talked about in all those meetings is just a jumble in my head. And I feel kind of stuck. If you can relate. and you know the struggle, try Granola.

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28:59The Anxious Achiever: If meetings are eating up your day, granola is a no-brainer and you can try it totally free. Just head to granola.ai slash achiever. That's granola.ai slash achiever and get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai slash achiever. Do you remember a day when you had finished paying off a debt? I remember the day that I finished paying off my graduate school education loan. I felt so free. I feel like I had been paying off student loans for decades, and I probably had because I was 41 when I paid that last loan payment. It's an incredible feeling. and even better is when you can see the finish line and you know that you have a plan.

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30:18The Anxious Achiever: I've talked about Monarch before and the thing that I love about Monarch is it helps you adjust in real time and it doesn't just look back with what you've already spent. It helps you look forward. Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code achiever at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off, just$50. That's 50 % off your first year at monarch.com with code achiever. I have won so many awards. I've won many different awards. It's never enough. You know, like I have been behind the scenes. I've been in front of the scenes. I've done like every job in news. And you're only as good as your last story.

30:57You're only as good as your last win. And somehow as like we act as if that will keep us safe. But guess what? The news industry is imploding. It doesn't matter how high achieving you are. Our democratic system is imploding. Our mental health is deteriorating. So the way we have learned to cope with challenges, the way we have learned to numb our pain and stay productive through the deterioration or the rupture of our relationships, of our health, it's not working. It's not protecting us. No. And so it comes back to this question of like, this is not everybody recognizes this or even knows how to begin because it's like, shit, what do we do now?

31:47The Anxious Achiever: I mean, and that's why I think this work is so hard. and it's it's really hard if you're a trauma counselor seeing someone who came to see you I think that for people in my field to me it was um it was just such an aha moment of why I felt like when I first started doing this with the very best intentions you know having done all my research and been such a good student like I am and knowing all my theory. So many people, I think at the end looked at me like, what the fuck is she talking about? And it was, it was always this sense, right? Some people in the room would be so excited that someone was finally talking about this and they couldn't wait and they came up to me after and they were so, so excited.

32:54The Anxious Achiever: And then I think a good number of people were sort of either just like totally checked out, like, when is this going to be over? Or like, oh my God, what the hell is she, you know, just, or like, this is dumb. This has nothing to do with work. I'm not anxious. What is she talking about? And, and I have to admit, this does not paint me in a good light is that for a while it was sort of like, well, I'm just going to keep fighting the good fight, right? They, it's like, Like this is their medicine. This is what's good for them. And then actually thanks to talking to you and like sort of just learning more about this stuff, I was like, oh, no.

33:30The Anxious Achiever: I have not been a good steward of this with many people because of everything we just talked about. And almost like some taxis have their lights on and some taxis just drive right by with their lights off. Yeah. Well, first of all, when you say this doesn't paint me in a good light, it does because you are acknowledging your deep desire to help people and you're acknowledging how much there is to learn. Right. And yes. And how beautiful. And I'm not alone. I'm sort of using myself as a symbol because, you know, it's my show. So I'll just use myself as a symbol. But I think a lot of us like that's it.

34:13The Anxious Achiever: A lot of us do this. Well, yeah. And also like, we want to help. We haven't read everything. We haven't learned everything. And then we're like, Oh, but anyway, we'll never read everything. And we'll never learn anything. And thank goodness, because it leaves room for other people. And then we can collaborate and help each other. But our society thinks only that only I can fix it, right? That's right. That's also a reframe. Yeah, I think a lot about shame. And how corrosive shame is and how limiting it is. And when I look at executives, whether it is in academia or corporate settings or newsrooms, executives quote, have to have all the answers.

34:57And so admitting that you're, or even acknowledging that your success and that your way of leading might actually be what we refer to as maladaptive coping mechanisms. is terrifying. Yeah. And when you begin to recognize, wow, my micromanagement didn't work for everybody. Wow, my demands, my perfectionism, my standards were actually really not conducive to holistic well-being. And allegedly, that's something I care about. It can be really painful. It can be really painful as an executive to begin to recognize that you might have contributed to a cycle of ill being unintentionally as a human as a human it can be that's right as it not even as an executive in friendships in relationship and so I think that shame presents a lot of prevents a lot of people from taking a step toward working on it or in some circles healing.

36:06And so what I think about, again, is like, what is the first step? It's the noticing. And then, you know, a phrase that I use is compassionate curiosity. So when I'm in the field reporting, I generally try to use compassionate curiosity with my sources, however different they might be from me, whatever extreme thing that they're saying, I'm always curious and compassionate that something in their life shaped them to be there now. And I think it's very rare to turn this on ourselves. But as we begin to notice, wow, I'm really micromanaging right now, or wow, I am responding in a way that just totally backfired on me.

36:52Maybe consider using a little compassionate curiosity on yourself and say, what is my system trying to protect me from? like was that response actually an attempt to keep me or someone I care about safe yes and not

37:09The Anxious Achiever: I was an asshole I overreacted oh my god it did it again and both you know both like for sure I have been an asshole I've been totally like I cringe thinking about it it's so uncomfortable and we all do yes and if i only live in that self-flagellating shame there is no room for forward movement it's just isolation and isolation really is not a winning strategy for anything positive um so yeah it's the beginning to notice and like oh shoot i didn't do that right but why What's happening? And then if you realize like, oh, I'm trying to keep myself safer. I think this is the way to keep my team safe.

38:01You know, add another layer of inquiry to it. And also add a layer of inquiry and also do something that helps you feel a little more grounded. Right? So when I say more grounded, if your stress level is prepared to fight a bear, or if your stress level is prepared to meet a deadline, but you're not on deadline and there's no bear, then that stress response might not be proportionate to what you need in that moment. And that noticing of disproportionate or stress response that's not coherent with the moment is asking you to take care of yourself. It's asking you to find some coherence, to take a walk, to breathe, to take water.

38:47You know, I've been coaching people in a very high stakes environment lately, and they will tell me I don't even have a time to go to the bathroom. And then we got a little further down the line and I realized they weren't drinking water. I was like, well, you're not going to the bathroom because you're not drinking water. But they were they're so adrenalized. They they are ignoring their physical needs. And, you know, when you are adrenalized, it changes time. you have no time. But when you come back to balance, one minute suddenly can be like two minutes, you can get a drink of water and maybe, you know, eat chocolate or whatever your thing is.

39:29Give yourself what you need. That's it.

39:32The Anxious Achiever: I you know, my favorite quote from Emma Seppel at Yale is anxiety. Sometimes it's just asking us, what do we need right now? You know, and maybe that's food or maybe it's a little bit of a rest or I interviewed this morning I did a recording with the wonderful psychologist Guy Winch and he said that when he needs to ground himself he he loves Hungarian Vizsla dogs and that he has his Instagram algorithm trained to serve him reels of adorable puppies and so that's what works for him he's like I don't know people do box breathing people do this people do that I like to look at puppies I'm like yeah great yeah exactly find your thing right find your thing and it's your thing I mean it's funny I I because I was thinking about this and I was thinking about our time the two things that I will give to an audience or a person I'm working with just like at the beginning to try to help them think about this stuff is one I will ask them to close their eyes and think of their email inbox.

40:41The Anxious Achiever: And is there a name in that email inbox or a subject line that like when you just see that email pop up, you have a physical reaction? You know, maybe you feel nauseous. Maybe you want to slam the laptop shut. Maybe you want to drop everything and like craft the most precise response. Maybe you want to scream. Maybe you get a headache. Maybe you start, you know, I have posed that question to thousands of people. Everybody has that name or that subject line. And then the second is I asked them to think of a boss that they had. Yeah. Who would get micromanaging in their business and think about like, why?

41:28The Anxious Achiever: Like, was there anything that happened? Or how did that experience feel for you? And again, no one, no one gets out of here without a bad boss. Very few of us get out of here without a boss that doesn't trust us and is in our business. And to sort of just practice maybe extending them some compassion about why they felt the need to always be in your business. And I'm curious. So those are like two of my ways in. That's right. Those are good ways in. What are some of your ways in when you are working with people and trying to just, again, get them to maybe just turn their seeing eyes on like 20 %?

42:09Yeah. Well, you know, part of what I think about are the stages of behavior change, like trans theoretical behavior change, right? And I swear I'm not a robot.

42:24The Anxious Achiever: I know that that actually sounds like a like a prog rock band, but that's OK. Trans, the radicals, behavior change. But yeah, no. I mean, OK, let me back up. I think of all the times I tried to change people, generally people I historically dated. Right. And like it doesn't matter how much you say or do. Until a person is ready, they're not ready to change, right? Same thing in offices. Same thing in your family or whatever. Same thing with yourself. So to turn the seeing eyes on, first of all, begin to recognize that all of us, very few of us are static. We all have the ability to change, to adapt, to bring in more information.

43:17and you know the stages of behavior change are pre-contemplation like we're not even thinking about it we don't even know that there's something that we could change or that we could feel better or there's a different way of doing it that's totally not ready contemplation is when you begin to get ready you're like oh i'm aware of a problem i'm weighing the pros and cons but i'm still influenced by fear or trauma um then there's preparation which is you're ready you're committed to change you you're taking little tiny steps then there's action which is you're you're you're doing it and then there's maintenance which is like it's hard work to change and then there's relapse which is inevitable the point with this is that how can we begin to use our seeing eyes again it's that compassionate curiosity so if I know that I have a goal and I'm not meeting it and I keep doing the same thing over and over, something has to change.

44:21And generally in my history, I would think it would be the other person.

44:28Same thing in my sphere of, you know, working on democracy through our own inner healing. A lot of people will say, I want to save democracy. I want to heal democracy. I want to change the system. We need to overhaul the system. what people don't realize is that we are the system. And so if you want to vote in a new leader or you want a new policy, generally those policies will reflect the same problems until we begin to learn the lessons, until we begin to do the work ourselves. And we begin to integrate these understandings of stress, trauma, fear, anxiety, nervous system into our workplaces, into our policies, into our practices.

45:07So to begin to use, you know, your seeing eyes is to look at maybe your goal, where you want to go, and just to notice what is working with that, what is working towards that, and what isn't without judgment. And then begin to notice, Am I trying to control someone else, right? What is the tiny thing that I might be missing in myself that, including fear, that is making me continue to do something I think is in service of my goal, but is actually undermining it?

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50:32People have a trauma response to trauma. It's terrifying. You want me to look at what?

50:39The Anxious Achiever: Exactly. And there's, you know, so much associated with it. So maybe I'll mention stress. Maybe I'll mention adversity. Maybe I'll start with, if you want to design a culture of well-being, what does that look and feel like? design backwards I love that I love that design backwards great design thinking well so I mean a lot of your work is about sort of changing damaging inputs uh vicious cycles into virtuous cycles right so let's take that let's take a team let's take a team and a leader who is is really thinking Like, you know, huh, I really want people to be less stressed. But year after year, people are getting more stressed.

51:33The Anxious Achiever: They seem to be more mentally unhealthy, more burnt out. I feel like I'm so stuck. Yeah. I think that is such a, no one wants the people around them to feel bad. I can't tell you how many managers I've talked to who have said, like, I'm really trying here. And like, we have a therapy app and I let them leave and go to therapy and they take walks. And I just, I don't know what to do. It's the sense of like literally being like stuck in the quicksand almost. Yeah. I think, you know, part of it is we are in an extraordinarily trying time where we are, as humans, exposed to so much distressing information, content and experiences, whether it is our own or someone else's.

52:32So if you think about the nervous system needing to rebalance and reset, the way a lot of people reset is by going to their devices. And as many calming Hungarian dogs as there are there, there's also a lot of other input, right? And also we're in a perma crisis, in a poly crisis, which means many overlapping crisis that have no seeming end. um so part of it for managers and teams is to acknowledge our our bodies our brains our nervous systems weren't designed for this level of distress yes um and it makes sense that people are really challenged right now so that's one two a lot of managers will say one thing and do another so historically I would tell my teams take time off reset you know take care of yourself and I would never do it myself and so the implicit message was uh she will judge me if I do that because she's not doing it herself there's no trust there there's no trust so um can I really take time off can I really is that gonna so that's an area of inquiry for for leaders what is the culture, you know, and I know now like leaders will say that I'm taking time off and then they're like hunkered down in their bunker.

53:56But anyway, performative can work a little while. The other thing is every nervous system is different. Everybody's histories are different. And so this is science and art. And it is recognizing that different people have different needs, which makes management extraordinarily difficult, particularly if you're trying to meet bottom lines. And it is also what makes managers, the good ones, spectacular humans. So one thing that's really important to think about remember this everyone's nervous system is seeking safety everyone's nervous system is scanning for threat danger or safety and for a lot of people uncertainty ambiguity um lack of choice is dangerous so i had been consulting in a in a workplace that very high intensity, major, major discrepancy between what the managers thought was the stress, were the stress levels of the staff and the staff stress levels.

55:20And when I talked about the need for choice and the need for clarity, one of the leaders said we gave them Keurig coffee so that they have lots of different choices of coffee and what's really funny is I've seen this everywhere like one obviously like Keurig's like you know ramped up on sales and they know who to hit but um two managers like we give them choice they can choose hazelnut or they can choose you know what I mean um so So, yes, and what is my point? How does a manager meet the moment? One, recognize all of this as small steps. And the way my framework is awareness agency action. So in order to do something, you need to be more aware of it.

56:13And my journalistic training is I generally say I don't have enough information. And I live in that space for a really long time. I don't have enough information. I need more information. Because I'm trying to piece together what happened with this person. What is, you know, is happening? Anyway, so when you have more awareness, then you say, okay, this skill is missing. This clarity is missing. This choice is missing. What do we do institutionally to create the conditions to give more agency, to learn the skill, to do the thing? Then when you have a skill, then you can apply it to action. But we think like, boom, boom, it'll happen.

56:53boom, boom, it'll happen. And it doesn't, it doesn't happen for us. So why would it happen for the people? The other thing I think a lot about is awareness. It's so much learning. It's so much learning. And generally people in high stakes situations where we are adrenalized and we are afraid of staff cuts, we are afraid of budget cuts. We think if we take any time to zoom out and begin to notice dynamics, it's just going to lose us time. The other thing where we're worried about is like, how can we personally be the personal therapist for everybody?

57:27The Anxious Achiever: That's right. And if I begin to own my own failings or my own weaknesses, people will run over me, right? So it's titration, tiny little steps that you begin in yourself to begin to notice dynamics and then start to ask people, you know, to connect the dots. It's all like investigative journalism. It's so interesting. I was just thinking about that. Yeah. I mean, I think for me, one of the things that I really like to do, and it's easy for an outsider to come in and do this. It's harder if you're the boss of a team that's been working together for a while, is to give people sort of work styles questionnaires and ask them, how do you like to receive information?

58:19The Anxious Achiever: How do you feel about surprises? What's your ideal meaning? How do you like to come up with new ideas? You know, and what you sort of get to pull out is a sense of this is when this person feels in their stride and really, really good. And this is what makes this person feel nervous and a little more insecure. And just that knowledge, again, is so powerful. I, you know, I've, I worked once with a, with a manager who said, you know, I just, I can't handle surprises. Great to know. I, I, I just, if something is just like thrown at me, I get thrown. I'm working on it. But if we could try to like minimize the surprises, the last minute dump, that would be really good for me.

59:10Yeah.

59:10The Anxious Achiever: And I just I just love that. I'm like, yes, like way to take agency. So I think that, you know, and again, like we as humans on a team are a lot less judgmental of each other. I think if we step out and say this corporation, it's like at the end of the day, like oftentimes when we're on a team, we're just we're just a bunch of people and we kind of know each other. So that I think is good. And then the other thing I think is clarity, like as much clarity and over communication, because as we all know, as you said, uncertainty is a trigger for a lot of people. Yeah. And, you know, like if you can't do anything, at least try to be clear about the basics.

59:53Yeah. I mean, I have seen over and over and over and experienced myself when there is lack

1:00:00The Anxious Achiever: of clarity, the spirals people go through spirals. And not only that, if you don't, if one doesn't have lack of clarity, which means lack of control, they will try to seek it in another way. And generally, it's not that helpful. It backfires on the manager, right? So you have all these spin outs of people trying to seek clarity and control or create clarity and control through mechanisms that you don't want them to do because you weren't able to articulate their job title, their role, the expectations, because you've got your own shit, right? Yes. Yeah. So part of the clarity is telling people, I am working on this.

1:00:41Here's a timeline or, you know, like by yourself time, but then acknowledge if you don't follow through, it's going to backfire on you. And the amount of time I know that leaders and colleagues are spending processing angst, dysfunction, worry, fear. It's like you slow down to go fast, right? We have to slow down to go fast. I like that.

1:01:12The Anxious Achiever: I didn't coin it. I know, but I still like it. HT, whoever did. Thank you. HT? HT. Hat tip. Oh, hat tip, right. Oh, God, that brings me back.

1:01:25Exactly. Sometimes, sometimes I'll say hashtag duh, thinking I'm so, thinking I'm so cool with young people. And like, they're literally like, what?

1:01:37The Anxious Achiever: Okay, elder millennial. Exactly.

1:01:46Anything else you want to say before we close out? I mean, if you're listening to this podcast, thank you. And good job. You know, the quest for knowledge, the quest to better understand yourself and to better understand other people. This is the work. And how beautiful, Maura, that you've created this community, that there is a community. You know, the world is a very, very, very challenging, stressful, scary place. And what we need is more people who are brave enough to be compassionate. And curious. And curious. Brave enough to be compassionate and curious. So that's all I'd say. Thanks for letting me be a part of it.

1:02:32The Anxious Achiever: Oh, my gosh. Well, I know. I know that my listeners and my audience and anybody who is in the algorithmic flow that you and I are, we are. We're trying. So hard. And that's all we can do. Yeah, we're trying so hard. And sometimes we need to not try so much, right? Well, that's another podcast. Exactly. Thank you.

1:02:58The Anxious Achiever: That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.

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