In a recent LIVE broadcast of the Being Human Is Good for Business podcast, the team at Trilogy Effect discusses the challenges of being a leader when, it seems, the whole world is completely stressed out.
We’re all still ‘in the thick of it’ in terms of coping through this pandemic, and today’s leaders have the job of managing their people, many of whom are dealing with some personal trauma, through a whirlwind of change and stress.
Recorded as a LIVE show on LinkedIn on February 9th, 2022, leadership experts Heather Marasse, Wendy Appel and Mary Beth Sawicki ask the question that’s top of mind for many people, “How are you doing?”
They provide insight based on their recent experiences in supporting leaders and lots of practical advice and tips for leaders who may be struggling to support their teams while still hitting their business goals and objectives.
Wendy Appel explains: “We are going through a collective experience where people’s basic trust has been shaken. And, at the same time organizations are dealing with important issues that have rarely been examined before now such as equality, diversity and inclusion. Add to that the struggle of managing big changes to daily operations such as moving to hybrid workforces, team recruitment and retention and integrating new ways of working! There’s been so much uncertainty, and this equals stress!”
Mary Beth Sawicki adds: “Today’s leaders need to recognize that many in the workforce are not feeling well, either physically or emotionally. But business goes on and performance demands are not altered. You need to find a healthy balance of performance expectations and empathy for these challenging times.”
Providing leadership development in this context means taking different and new approaches that account not only for skills development, but also the mental health of the leaders and their teams. That’s why Trilogy Effect is now integrating Internal Family Systems (IFS) into their coaching services.
IFS is an empowering paradigm for understanding and harmonizing the mind. The coach brings a compassionate approach to guide inquiry into a client’s experience in a self-healing way.
“We integrate IFS into our coaching and consulting practice,” explains Heather Marasse. “We use what we see as appropriate in the moment with each client. In everything we do, we also practice ourselves. To be in the business of growth, we need to use compassionate inquiry and develop self-compassion in order to extend it to others. With IFS, we are able to meet this important client need.”
Listen to the full LIVE episode to learn:
How pandemic stress is impacting workers.
Are we seeing collective trauma in today’s workplace?
How is pandemic stress changing leadership?
What is IFS and how does it change the coaching experience?
Listen here:
MACHINE GENERATED TRANSCRIPT
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. It may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the podcast.
BEING HUMAN IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS LIVE SHOW
00:00
Mary Beth Sawicki: You know, even though we never truly have certainty in our lives. It's a myth that we do and that little bit that we did have, it has been dismantled and people are left feeling anxious, and frustrated, changed, fatigued and confused, all of the above.
00:24
Announcer: Welcome to the Being Human is Good for Business podcast. In each episode of the leadership development experts at Trilogy Effect and explore how the process of self-discovery unleashes the potential in us all. Now here's your host Sherrilynne Starkie.
00:42
Sherrilynne Starkie: My name is Sherrilynne Starkie, and this is this year’s first live broadcast of the Being Human is Good for Business podcast, which is for business leaders who want to build high performance teams. Today, I'm joined by the senior management team at Trilogy Effect. The purpose of this podcast is to help people discover who they are as a leader and as a human being and to help them unleash the full potential of their organizations. This is something that the team at Trilogy Effect have a lot of experience in. Among their clients are many globally recognized brands and Fortune 500 companies, and they've also helped lots of technology executives become great leaders too.
So, today we're asking a question that's on the tip of just about everybody's tongue and that is, ‘How are you doing? How are you feeling? How is your team coping?’ Because we're all in the thick of it in terms of coping through this pandemic and today's leaders have quite a job on their hands in managing their people, many of who are dealing with personal traumas, through a whirlwind of change and stress. So let's explore what some leaders are doing. Heather, Mary Beth, and Wendy, so how is the pandemic stress impacting workers?
2:06
Heather Marasse: Well, I think given that we're entering the third year of a global pandemic, I think the word that we all hear a lot of, in one way, shape or form, is depleted. People are just feeling like there's not much left, not a lot of in reserve and there’s been quite a toll taken on coping with this unusual situation for such a long time. I think it feels like we might be finally turning a corner, but it's still in the distant future and there's no certainty around it.
2:46
Sherrilynne Starkie: Yeah, I’m sure that all of our viewers and listeners today can certainly relate to the feeling of depletion.
2:53
Mary Beth Sawicki: Yeah, I think, people have been toughing it out for a few years now, we're into year three, you know, people's energy reserves are, they're running on empty.
Speaking for myself, I thought we'd be in this for six months or so and then my life would return to relative normal, so I thought I could do this for six months. My business partners know I'm an introvert. So, as Heather said, I've been training for lockdown my whole life, but with each new wave, new variants, new recommendations that have been handed down, the uncertainty is really taking its toll on people.
You know, even though we never truly have certainty in our lives. It's a myth that we do and that little bit that we did have, has been dismantled and people are left, feeling anxious and frustrated and change fatigued and confused and you know, all of the above. So it's, it's definitely impacting people deeply.
3:54
Sherrilynne Starkie: And Heather, the brain really likes certainty, doesn't it, the human brain?
3:58
Heather Marasse: Yeah, we are little security and certainty-seeking creatures and things that we do, to replenish our energy and our sense of capacity, have been limited by the pandemic. So things like being able to take a vacation and go somewhere, see something different, well that was limited. The ability just to visit and socialize freely, that's been limited and constrained. So there's been a feeling of being boxed in and an inability to replenish ourselves, physically, but in particularly, emotionally and spiritually. I mean, you can still work out, you can still go for walks, but it's the social and emotional connections and even the spiritual experience of having something put back into my bucket. It's been harder and it's been three, going into three years of it now.
4:59
Sherrilynne Starkie: Everyone is kind of experiencing this all at the same time. So there's kind of like a collective on we, or something of this feeling of depletion that we're at, but there's like a community feeling around it because we're all feeling it at the same time. Wendy, can you tell us a little bit about how this kind of collective trauma is presenting itself in the workplace?
5:23
Wendy Appel: Sure, trauma’s kind of a big word and we all have different definitions, because it’s in the vernacular now. It used to be very much of a psychological term and people sort of tossed it around, not willy-nilly, but say, ‘I’m traumatized,’ but what do we mean by that? You know, trauma is often precipitated by a loss of control, pain, uncertainty… it doesn't have to be inflicted via war or an enormously significant event, but it can be a repetitive abuse of power, people feeling helpless, and confusion.
So this kind of situation, that we've been in for several years now, has made people feel like they are being traumatized because it's a lot for human beings to hold. We've got a polarized society, and it is global, and that has invaded the workplace. Things seem to be happening all at the same time, in the midst of COVID, and the midst of elections that have created polarization or are huge symptom of polarization.
We've got black lives matter, we've got diversity inclusion, we've got ‘me too’, we've got disasters born of climate change. Whether you believe there's climate change or not, we’re experiencing a ton of natural disasters. So all of this is happening at the same time. I'm being, personally impacted, the fire that swept through Lewisville, Colorado, where I’m based, and 1200 homes are now completely burnt to the ground and businesses. So that's just one place, a small place on the planet, but people are experiencing it all over the world.
This is showing up in the workplace and so there's insomnia, people are experiencing insomnia. People are naming it as being stressed, they're naming it as being overwhelmed. It's hard to make plans anymore, you want to go do things to get replenished and you can't make plans, or if you do, they seem to get changed. Everything seems to be a moving target, whether it's in your personal life or your work life. We're going back to the office in January 2022, oops, Omicron, we’re not.
So it's a constant moving target and the brain likes certainty. So with all of this and all of this that we're trying to hold, and pay attention to, and deal with, the brain can't get a toehold in certainty and so it creates a lot of anxiety and discomfort.
8:17
Sherrilynne Starkie: So here we have our leaders trying to manage the workforces that are all dealing with these kinds of issues and they’re playing out in kind of different operational issues. They're trying to manage a hybrid workforce and in our last live podcast, we talked about the struggles as to recruitment and retention. That's still probably even worse now, than it was earlier in the autumn when we talked about it. Then working on integrating new ways of working. Using technology across teams and time zones and geographies in ways that were new to many before the pandemic was called. In summary, it's just day-to-day, and leaders are dealing with so much uncertainty.
9:09
Wendy Appel: Well, and I just want to say one more thing about the polarization and how that's showing up in the workplace. Some people are absolutely do not want to get vaccinated and other people don't feel safe if people aren't vaccinated. Some people want to stay home and never come back to work and other people absolutely want to come back to work and some people want the flexibility in the middle. So you’re running an HR organization, you're the CEO of an organization or the leadership team.
How do you manage for people who have very definitive points of view and requirements and even more so, where people are being very vocal about it. Then, with the need for retention, wanting to support people in these preferences or strong points of view, and navigating through that is very challenging.
10:06
Heather Marasse: Yeah, over and above trying to keep the business running and perform and produce and grow and meet expectations of shareholders, et cetera, which is a full-time job.
10:19
Sherrilynne Starkie: It's a lot, you know, I feel like a lot of people's kind of personal stress, personal traumas from past years, might be brought to the fore and they’re asking to reveal some private information in the workplace, to deal with their medical status or vaccine status.
10:41
Heather Marasse: Yeah, there's kind of a feeling that the lines have blurred between it used to be work from home, but it became live at work pretty easily and the lines get very blurred and that's a quote from one of our clients actually. Your know, ‘I don’t necessarily want to share all this stuff, but suddenly my children need attention and daycare got closed down. So I'm in the middle of a call or a meeting and I have to turn my camera off and excuse myself to go make sure the kids don't set the house on fire or something.’
There's stuff going on in my life that I normally wouldn't be bringing into a meeting and maybe don't choose to, but I have no choice now. So again, there's a lot of this feeling like, ‘I don't have as much choice and control over what part of myself I share and what part I choose not to.’
It just wears you down. I think that's what we keep hearing, people get worn down and that's the depletion aspect of it. So it has really been a challenge, especially because it's been so long. Nobody expected this to go on like this, and we don't know when it's going to be over and now it becomes a case of, well, how do we live with it? That too takes energy, to start shifting your mindset and your mental modeling around it.
12:02
Sherrilynne Starkie: Yes and Mary Beth, this kind of puts an extra tax on leaders, because not only are they going through all this themselves, they're trying to lead their workforce, many of whom are experiencing these same kind of stresses.
12:18
Mary Beth Sawicki: Yes, absolutely, and I want to add something to what Wendy was speaking about earlier around the polarities. I think we talked about them at a very high level, like on a global scale, but people are experiencing polarities in their families too and that has been incredibly challenging. We've been hearing a lot of our clients sharing about that and just the general feeling of being stressed and overwhelmed and not feeling equipped to face the challenges that are coming really from every direction and affecting the main pillars of our lives.
That’s our families, our health, our careers, our communities and just that sense of security that we had. So, I love Heather's expression that people are feeling worn out. They are worn out even if they've been trying and making efforts with self-care. Self- care is getting encouraged everywhere and it can be challenging to do that while also, doing their best to be there for their teams, you know, take care of themselves and encourage it in their teams as well. Yet they often feel they just don't have someone they can turn to for their own support or, or no time to do so. People can feel like, ‘I just don’t have time for that.’
13:34
Sherrilynne Starkie: So how does all this impact you as executive leadership coaches and consultants? How is it changing how you work with your clients?
13:48
Heather Marasse: Well, it has challenged us because we're living through the same thing that our clients are and one of the things that we know is required is that, for us to be supporters of growth and development for our clients, we need to continue our own.
So we have continued to invest in our own development, we have coaches. It has also provided an opportunity for us to add to our tool kit and to innovate. We have done so in different ways and have done what we can to bring some additional ways to support people when those lines get blurred and when there's just so much an experience of depletion of capacity.
One of the things that we've introduced or integrated, I will say, into our practice is a methodology of coaching and of counselling called IFS, Internal Family Systems. So that's one of the things that has helped the three of us, but also is something we weave in, when appropriate, with some of our client work.
14:55
Wendy Appel: Yeah, we love IFS and kind of took it on and decided to learn about it because you can only support your clients as much as you grow yourself. I certainly found my clients got to a place where they say, ‘Okay, I've got the self-awareness now, I see my patterns, I got insight about what triggers those patterns and I may even be able to manage those patterns like, okay, I'm not going to do that, I'm going to make a different choice,’ but the managing takes a lot of bandwidth. You're still always in that grip of the pattern it's right there and so they are saying, ‘So, what do I do? How do I make it go away?’ basically. And then ‘I wish I had a magic wand, but I don't.’ So that forced us to kind of really look farther afield, beyond the traditional organizational development and coaching tools and IFS came to my attention about 15 years ago.
So it's kind of been there, on the radar screen, and the timing was right. So the three of us decided to embark on, learning it both for our own development, and for our work with clients to really help them break some of these patterns so that they're not in the grip of the pattern and really re-establish a relationship with themselves.
You probably want to know what IFS is, because Internal Family Systems doesn’t really say what it is. There's a family therapist named, Dr. Richard Schwartz who pretty spontaneously, through sort of coming to the end of his rope in his own working with families that this methodology, spontaneously emerged.
Then it grew and developed as he started seeing how it worked. This was probably about 40 years ago and then, in the last several years has really started getting a lot of traction, globally. So what it is, in the simplest way, to talk about. It is you know, have you ever said, ‘You know, while, part of me thinks this, but the other part of me wants to do that.’
You've got this internal dialogue going on with all these voices and all these opinions. So often, we run a way from it, or we're just confused by it or we've got a lot of anxiety. So we tend to do things to run away from our anxiety or pain or the stuff that's going on in here. What IFS helps you do is actually turn towards it, and get to know the part of
yourself that wants this, and the other part of yourself that wants the other thing. It’s really to get to know these different parts or voices within us and understand what's really going on.
In another way to think about it, this is our own protective system and that's trying to protect us, in some way, and getting to what's underneath that and healing. So there's something about IFS that’s very experiential, it's not intellectual, it's guided, but you're in control as the coachee, and it becomes very calming to the whole system. We find that our clients, especially when they're kind of in an anxious, upset state, it really helps bring them back to themselves and calm. It’s almost, as I said, it’s a very healing process to go through. I'll stop there because I'm sure my colleagues have things to add about.
19:02
Sherrilynne Starkie: I was going to go to Heather next and say, Heather, can you maybe share with us an example of how you integrate the IFS into your coaching and the kind of impact that it’s had.
19:16
Heather Marasse: Well, I rarely use it overtly because there isn't a need to, but often when you're working with someone, especially when it's somebody with a lot of responsibility, it's easy for us to forget everything that we do that works. Instead we focus on what didn't, so especially, when you finally are in a place where you can talk with your coach about not feeling good about how this meeting went, and you’re a little concerned about how the next one's going to go, what inevitably shows up are some inner criticisms.
So often the desire is to get rid of that critical voice, but by gently including the modalities from IFS, we actually listen to the critical voice and work on understanding why it's being so critical. What it’s trying to achieve and what's the intent there? What usually shows up is this heartfelt desire to protect and make things go well. So it's a process of ‘befriending’, turning towards the noise that seems hard to hear and befriending it for its misguided, but well-intended, efforts and that kind of just calms the system down.
Remember, we've got a state of heighten nervous systems right now. Three years of this constrained experience puts everyone's nervous systems on edge and what this allows is for calming the system back down. We all have a system and IFS is an exploration of our inner system and when it's on high alert, it's hard to be at your best. You’re in survival, you feel threatened and you're working harder than you need to and it inhibits our creativity.
21:11
Sherrilynne Starkie: Mary Beth, you talk a little bit about embodiment in some of the coaching that you do and I know that IFS aligns with that. Can you explain that piece of it?
21:22
Mary Beth Sawicki: As Heather and Wendy pointed to, this isn't an intellectual experience. It is truly an embodied experience, the heightened nervous system of it, turning toward what's going on in your body. When we are activated/reactivated, there's generally, like my jaw might clench, I might have some tightness in my chest, my stomach might be upset and kind of turning toward that and the wisdom that's available in the body, because our bodies are always in the present moment.
So turning toward that and exploring what's going on, as Heather said, to befriending versus avoiding and turning away from it can help us understand what's going on and help us process what's happening. ‘Why am I upset about this situation?’ Our bodies hold so much wisdom about what's going on and when we access it, it can be extremely helpful. I'll say that part of this that's really important is slowing down, because I know for me, I just want to race to the finish line. If there is an upset or if someone's upset with me, I want it resolved quickly. If there's something wrong here, I want it resolved quickly, but the slowing down versus jumping into action, we can miss critical information if we move too quickly, so working with IFS has really, for me, helped reinforce the value of slowing down.
22:52
Wendy Appel: I'd love to say something else about the embodiment, because I think some people even kind of twitch when they hear the word. We use our bodies, yet we're so in denial of our physical body and our physical need, especially in a work environment or a stress environment, where we turn away. Our body just becomes an object to get through the day, to get things done and we're not paying attention to the little aches and pains as we sit at our desk too long.
Whatever it is we're doing or denying the need, you know, not even going to the bathroom when we need to, or getting that glass of water, whatever it is that our body is asking for. I don't know if this is the human condition or a cultural condition or whatever, but we feel a lot of safety with knowledge and information and data and planning and preparing and what's in our heads. We tend to cut off here and not tune into the body or like I said, the body just gets used as an object to get stuff done. Yet the body is constantly going, yoo-hoo, trying to get our attention. So sometimes, and many times, when we don't give it the attention it needs, we get sick.
You know, autoimmune disease, and women have a higher disproportionate of incidents of autoimmune disease, because we're constantly caretaking other people. I can imagine that’s showing up more during COVID. Heather, what did you say? It was the, she-cession?
24:33
Heather Marasse: I didn't coin the phrase; it's been out there for a while, the ‘she-session’ instead of a recession. COVID caused a she-session, particularly in families with younger children. There was no choice for women who were working outside of the home when daycare shut down, when school’s closed, somebody had to take care of the children. In the vast majority, in a marital partnership, where the women or one of the partners, and it usually was the female, who had to either take a leave, reduce their amount of work, et cetera, and some of them stepped right out of the workforce. This has cost women way more than it's cost men, in terms of their career progression.
25:24
Sherrilynne Starkie: Well, the embodiment piece resonates for me, because I know when I start getting a sore neck and shoulder it means I am stressed out about something. It doesn’t mean I pulled a muscle working out or something. It means that something is bugging me. Before we go, because we are starting to run out of time and I would like to offer our audience some tips on how to lead stressed out teams.
25:53
Heather Marasse: Well, I think the first tip is to bring some compassion to your experience and to the experience of others. So again, going in and just being with whatever's going on, you're upset, your sadness, your frustration and maybe, if we're lucky, some joy, some excitement, some love. Just bring back, you know, compassion means ‘with passion’, so come back to your heart, passion lives in the heart and provide it for yourself so that you can provide it for others. In fact that’s actually an instrument capacity, it allows you to hold more.
26:38
Mary Beth Sawicki: I'm going to go back to the body piece and just speaking for myself, I know that when I slow down and am present in my body and speak from there, I'm calmer. I am clearer and I'm more creative. I have more compassion for myself, and others, so I encourage people to practice with that. Just tune into your body, it could be several times a day, just check in, do a bit of a scan and, you know, come from there.
27:09
Sherrilynne Starkie: Excellent, Wendy?
27:16
Wendy Appel: Well, to acknowledge, to not run away from what is so, whether it's inside of yourself, with other people, or the larger environment. I think that's how we started our conversation here today was the ‘what is so’. What's really going on in the world? I think that's a great starting place. Stay engaged with people, stay in relationships with people, and the COVID and everything that's going on, in addition to COVID. It’s a huge invitation to re-establish a relationship with ourselves and extend that to others.
28:04
Sherrilynne Starkie: Re-establish a relationship with yourself and extend that with the others in your life and in your work. I feel really optimistic about that, so I hope that we can all go back to our work lives with that thought in mind, We are running out of time here, so I am going to draw this to a close and say thank you to our leadership experts at Trilogy Effect and to everyone who joined us on the call today.
Please check out the Being Human is Good for Business podcast. Starring these three leadership experts and also check out our blog. We have a newsletter also that's full of useful tips and advice, and they're both free to subscribe to and we have a free leadership guidebook that's downloadable from our website.
Now I'm going to add links to all these resources in the comments after the show, so watch for those. We hope that you take advantage of all these resources so that you can become your best self as a leader and all that's left is to say goodbye. Goodbye from Heather and Wendy and Mary Beth, and goodbye from me, SherriLynne Starkie. And remember that being human is good for business by everybody, thank you.
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