Biology Before Psychology
Embodied Cognition and Psychological Safety
Conscious thought is energy intensive and slow. Our internal threat assessment systems use unconscious processes to conserve energy and move quickly. Once our bodies have assessed a situation as unsafe (whether physically or psychologically), we take evasive or defensive action without conscious thought.
If you have ever had the experience of not knowing what got into you or behaved in a way that did not feel like your usual self without knowing why, you have experienced the unconscious, rapid action of one of these defensive actions.
Whether the behaviour is pure instinct or the result of training, it is not conscious. The body acts without the mind’s involvement.
We Can’t Think Fast Enough to Create Safety Through Conscious Action
Every person in a room is always having an impact on how safe everybody else in the room is feeling. We include how safe other people appear to feel as part of our safety assessment.
The body acts faster than the mind can think. Other people are acting in response to our impact in a room before we can do anything that requires conscious thought.
People who compartmentalize their feelings create fear in others.1 If the people around you can see that you are compartmentalizing or hiding things from them or from yourself, they do not need to know that you aren’t being fully open and honest in order for their bodies to react as though the situation is dangerous. Your self-management is evidence of the danger.
If we become reactive and the people around us pick up on it, our reactiveness triggers an escalation spiral. The whole energy of the room can shift quickly because everybody is reacting faster than they can think.2 Once this happens, we must find a way to stop the escalation and move to repair.
The first task of anyone who wants to create psychological safety for others is to bring their own psychological safety into the room with them.
How to Bring Your Safety into the Room With You
Know how your body feels when not at ease. Many of use have learned to ignore discomfort or accept reactiveness as normal. We must learn to pay attention to the subtle signals in our body that tell us when we are not feeling free to be all of ourselves in a moment. A good tool for this is the Above the Line/Below the Line assessment from Conscious Leadership Group.
Accept whatever you notice. If we are not feeling safe, we only make things worse by making it wrong to not feel safe. We must accept the reality of whatever we feel.
Shift to ease if you can. There are many tools for creating ease in your body. Meditation, breathing, mindful physicality, or anti-anxiety grounding techniques can be useful. Or you can use cognitive reframing or refocusing to change how you are thinking about the situation.
Be open and transparent with others. If you cannot shift to ease, you can help create ease in others by calmly naming whatever you are experiencing. This conveys a message that you can handle whatever you are experiencing which allows others to relax rather than worry about you.
Explicitly ask for help when you need it. Clarity about what you need helps other know how to handle a situation.
Commit to the work at hand. If you focus on what you are doing and why it matters, it is easier to identify the tasks that can be done to reduce risks. Your brain interprets the fact that you are taking action as evidence of your power and of the possibility of a positive outcome. This reduces fear.
Work With The Human Bodies
Adults have learned to behave the way they do because it was what they needed to do at the time they learned it. This learning is physical, neural and muscle memory.
Habits are formed and changed through neuorplasticity. Changing brain connectivity is constrained by biology. Creating additional psychological safety in a group requires time and patience and practice translated into neural connections.
In the short term, one must accept what is and work with the current bodies in the room, with all their quirks, histories, and trauma. In the longer term, part of increasing psychological safety in a group is helping group members adapt and develop more collaborative and skillful habits for dealing with stressors and challenges.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Emily-Butler-8/publication/295464767_Social_consequences_of_emotion_suppression/links/5a72047daca2720bc0d9daf5/Social-consequences-of-emotion-suppression.pdf
Leadership and Self-Deception from The Arbinger Institute has a clear discussion of this dynamic.