we all have our baggage

you are influenced forever

No matter how psychologically safe we coaches and leaders work to make our teams, it may never be so for certain individuals.

We can remove psychological safety from others, but it isn’t something we can give. It’s not like physical safety, where everything that makes one unsafe is extrinsic. Psychological safety is intrinsic. Someone twenty years ago may have made the world psychologically unsafe.

We can ask others to make accommodations so we are triggered as little as possible, but the unsafe trigger is within the individual.

I think one of the best, if not the best, shows on Netflix is Bojack Horseman.

It’s about a former celebrity with enough money to do nothing for the rest of his life. However, he is a victim of intergenerational trauma and is trying to navigate the baggage this has left him with.

He experiences varying levels of drug and alcohol abuse during his life. At one point, he’s put on pain medication for a back injury. While high on set, during a scene with his co-star, Gina, in which his character is strangling her character, he experiences an hallucination and starts to strangle her for real. It takes a while for the crew to realise this has gone too far and remove him. The season after this, we catch up with the woman on the set of her next role. Those who have worked with her before comment about how much more difficult she is to work with this time.

She dislikes last-minute changes and gets upset when she hasn’t seen script rewrites before they’ve been sent out. During a scene where she dances with her male co-star, he improvises and dips her.

There was no real threat there, but a man she works with behaving differently from her expectations is now something that makes her fearful.

(Here are some YouTube links if you haven’t seen BH and would like to watch the relevant scenes.

Bojack attacking Gina:

Gina experiencing the consequential trigger:

)

I have been experiencing my own triggers this week at work.

As I am sure it is for many people, performance review season is approaching. This is the first performance review I have had for a decade.

Previously, I have experienced more than one manager using my review as an opportunity for covert discrimination or blame-shifting. I do not believe that my current manager will do this. I find her to be incredibly supportive. However, we talk about the process at nearly every one-to-one meeting, and I am requesting feedback from many of the people I have worked with. I worry about my performance (even though I’ve only been in my current position for two months) and what is about to be said to me. I spend hours each week rejecting the negative self-talk that is passing through my mind, with varying levels of success depending on the day and the proximity of my next meeting with my manager.

I repeatedly review our Trello board and my notes to ensure I’ve done everything I should have. I question why I took such a highly demanding role (to be clear, my role is not highly demanding) because I’d rather have an easier life than report to someone else’s demands. I consider if I could still afford my mortgage if I stacked shelves at the supermarket instead. Then I tell myself that I’ve completed all my tasks, that my current boss has never been anything but supportive, has never put any pressure on me, and has told me I’m doing well. When a meeting comes along, I take a deep breath, and before I know it, the meeting has finished.

I leave with a new to-do list, realising I was never in trouble. My boss and my organisation do all they can to make it an entirely psychologically safe environment.

My personal history means that it can never be so.

As coaches and leaders, we need to understand that although we can (and must) do our part for our team members, they have had a lifetime’s worth of experience that we may never be able to understand, yet it will affect them every day.

We must also be mindful that how we treat our team members today could impact their relationships with every coach and leader they meet in the future.