Especially right now.. how about some helpful perspective about what’s going on in your head and some uncomplicated ways forward? Welcome… this is exactly that.  

That “especially right now…” phrase might be my most-uttered 3 words over the last several months, as I’ve coached and taught individuals and teams. Coaching dynamics like how we listen, connect, make meaning and coordinate– all matter more than ever before, because… 

We are all like water balloons filled a bit too full right now, and we don’t even realize it.

Look at that water balloon… it’s just sitting there looking totally normal, yet if you happen to touch it with just the right amount of pressure, it will explode.

Have you seen/felt this dynamic lately? 

Maybe you’ve noticed it in others. Maybe in yourself.  Likely both. Even though I’m coaching others every single day lately on how to handle this, I’ve still been personally blindsided by it many times in the last few months… accidentally triggering people to set off extreme reactions that feel surprising, and leave us (even me, pretty thick skinned) a bit rattled. 

The key here is this… it’s real, it’s not quite over yet, and it’s all of us.

Sensitivity is high, emotional fatigue is palbable, nervous systems are crispy, and many of our natural outlets for stress release and restoration have been restricted. While we’ve come a long way through this global challenge, fear and uncertainty have become undercurrents, now blended into our baselines. 

In those moments, we can feel simultaneously taken aback, yet charged at the same time… how are we so easily triggering? How are we so easily triggered? Why am I actually yelling back at this woman in the grocery store who I wouldn’t even be fazed by a year ago? 

Triggers to our anger/fear/pain are real, and we all have more of them than we realize right now, close to the surface, like exposed nerves. 

To be clear, so many topics which feel urgent right now are tense for folks even in normal circumstances… like politics, personal rights, racial inequity, and confronting our individual roles in societal issues. These are challenging for people to productively navigate through with one another no matter what, as we don’t have tools, training, or good models for doing so in a healthy way, especially when we disagree. Yet those predictable land mines aside, even what once was no big thing, can set us off easily right now. 

ALL of it feels more extreme, and is more volatile, because we also have these other tiny things going on, like…. 

• fear of viral contagion or death

• disruption of all normal daily activities

• restriction of all social interaction

• lack of agreement within family, team, community about (health) rules/protocols

• dissolving of (helpful) boundaries between work, school and home life

• no childcare or child outlets

• prolonged, intentional isolation

• financial hardship

• job or housing insecurity

• stripping of autonomy and choice

• loss of loved ones

…for many, many months. Whaat?

Read back over that list and just breathe into the fact that any one of those things under normal circumstances would present crippling challenge and stress. All at once and prolonged for almost a year, it defines the molotov cocktail that’s filling those water balloons, everywhere we go.

It has been going on so long, and we are so adaptive as humans, that we keep almost forgetting that we’re still in the pressure cooker. 

We don’t quite notice that our fuses are shorter, our patience is thinner, our prolonged agitation is still there, and our threshhold for strain is maxed, until… BAM!… someone says something the wrong way to us; or gives one too many suggestions for how we should improve something; or questions us on something, or confronts us about anything. That’s when it comes out, and it can be ugly. 

A natural reaction to any trigger our brains perceive as threat, is to downshift into…

Fight mode– the urge to aggressively attack physically or verbally, accusing, blaming;

Flight mode– get out or run away asap, or avoid/hide; 

or Freeze mode– shut down. 

In any of these primal instincts, our brains get emotionally hijacked, distilled to the basics to survive a bear attack. We can’t access our higher-order, rational words or thinking skills in those moments. You’ve experienced that every time you couldn’t think of your best comeback line in an argument until later that day, long after the actual argument; your system had to calm down and reset before your brain could come fully back online into normal thinking mode. That’s happening a LOT for folks right now.

The good news is… the muscles we need here are the muscles we needed all along, completely buildable. 

While sometimes just claiming our composure feels like a feat, we can also actually grow capability in some important ways through this.

Emotional self-awareness tends to collectively be one of our weakest muscles, yet we can usually get away with skating along without that strength when things are, well… normal. Yet that’s not where we are right now (hello, 2020), and our normal workarounds for this are lately failing more than serving us… 

If I ignore talking about it, and power right on by it, maybe it’ll just go away. 

If I compartmentalize that to handle later, I can just focus right here to be productive in what I need to get done. 

If I shut down all that emotion on the team, we’ll all feel better. 

Workarounds are meant to be temporary, to get through an unexpected episode or challenge with a tactical reroute… yet by design, they often solve one problem but add strain somewhere else in the system. Handling it “later” doesn’t suffice when your workday, kid’s school day and your whole life blur together in the same marathon-from-one-chair-at-the-kitchen-table, without boundaries between or true outlets to step back for perspective or processing. So, instead of our pent-up angst leaking out to contaminate other things, or exploding unproductively when we, that overfilled water balloon gets squeezed-just-so, let’s get ahead of it…

As a leader, you have stakes in this. 

The once-normed era of the autocratic, “it’s not personal” approach is actually ending (finally!), and leaders who are not able to meet people where they are as sensitive humans in it with them as a real, flawed humans themselves, are quickly being seen either as the new flavor of monster-boss, disingenuous, or just plain out of touch. Brene Brown’s 10 year study (Dare to Lead) of multinational leaders indicates that those who will lead us into the next frontier are leaders who can demonstrate the skill of courageous leadership by owning and developing tools to reckon with vulnerability as a real thing. And research keeps showing us that creating psychologically safe spaces for people to take risks and trust (not necessarily about discussing emotions all the time, but safe to show vulnerability, fault, etc.) determines a team’s capacity for innovation more than any other factor. That’s got to get led by YOU. So…

HERE’S WHAT TO DO: 

Call out reality.

There’s nothing more unsettling than someone in the midst of a crisis who’s acting as if everything is just fine. We can get honest about what’s going on without sinking into an abyss; in fact there’s huge power in doing so. What we ignore or keep hidden tends to hold more emotional power over us; what we can see clearly, own and make concrete– gets depowered. So call out what is, helping your team to own it, too, so you can intentionally (vs. reactively) choose next steps… 

So yes, we’re still in the pressure cooker (+ all crises parts listed above) – it’s all of us, it’s taking a tremendous toll, and that’s real. If you haven’t lost loved ones, you know someone who has. If you haven’t lost security in employment, finances or basic needs, you’ve thought about it, and likely know someone who has… and each of those needs its own process to heal from. Yet we can’t begin the healing until it’s over and we’re through to the other side, and it’s taking… way…too… long... to get there. This is affecting people’s work, concentration, and ability to be creative/productive, while the trains must keep running. This is easily the hardest challenge we’ve ever lived through, and while we’re overcoming alot and growing resilience through it, it’s rough. 

So… say all of that ^ out loud to your team, make eye contact, and then just take some deep breaths together. Let people share “What I feel like saying is…” (a recent round of that with a team of execs went an hour long, and they thanked me afterward). You don’t have to have a solution for it. Just calling it out is a tremendous relief for people; it will normalizes what they’re feeling as okay.

Notice what’s missing

Outside of the folks in our safebubbles, notice that our cues are gone. We’ve used nonverbals to communicate and understand others, all day long, for our entire lives. A single facial expression or change in posture can say enough to create alignment, flag an issue, offer support, redirect effort, build rapport, alert disapproval, or forge trust. We normally use those cues to gague where we are, and how we’re doing with one another. Yet working/learning/teaching/coaching in person with masks, we’re stripped of those facial cues to rely on or calibrate ourselves with right now. On the flip side, working remotely, seeing only (sometimes glitchy) faces on screen without context of the other nonverbals (posture, movement, actual eye contact, physical energy), we spend a lot of energy guessing, trying to interpret clipped and controlled segments of face-only time, while also distracted by our own faces onscreen, others’ faces, how long we’ve been looking at that screen. So…. 

Use Your Words

Overindex on verbal communication… for good things, tough things, and things you assume you shouldn’t need to say out loud. What once were a thousand quick, communicative looks across the room as you worked in parallel, the connective tissue of your collaboration– now needs to take verbal form to be known. “Hey- we’re crushing this right now- glad you’re here.” (or whatever that look would’ve communicated)

We are meaning-makers. We fill in the blanks for what isn’t said, and whether people go positive or negative in those created stories depends on a lot of things you can’t see (their internal narrative style, confidence in what they’re doing/relationship with you, how much sleep they got last night, what someone else just texted to them 5 minutes ago, etc.). 

So… say more than you think you need to. Articulate what you think they’d otherwise just “get” from you, including what you assume doesn’t need to be said… and know that you’ve given them one less thing to spin about in their heads. You’ll all spend far less time/energy trying to guess at where everyone else’s heads are, so you can accelerate forward.

New Muscles, New Tool of 2-In, 2-Out:

Everyone has their own “stuff” going on, and it’s hard to just check all of it at the invisible door of the virtual meeting. Yet our vocabulary around “how we’re doing” is limited. It’s easy to get caught in the “I’m okay” non-answer cycle, which is unhelpful, plus doesn’t give any actual data for you to go on. So… instead of asking the same “how is everyone?” question, try a new tool, also helping build the muscle of tuning in to others with more specificity… 

Start meetings with each person sharing 2 words to capture where they are coming in to it, then end it with each sharing 2 more to capture where they are coming out of the meeting.

In just seconds, people own and articulate where they are, plus the team gets a quick read of everyone else... both crucially helpful (yet otherwise hard) right now. The simple sharing of those 2-words-in, 2-words-out creates instant investment by the sharer (you’ll see more engagement the rest of the meeting from them), plus a little emotional release+connection with that moment of being authentically heard and seen by others. This builds empathy and emotional fluency on the team, which leads to more creativity, trust, and productivity. 

It also gently requires us to actually tune in to ourselves, and pinpoint/name where we are– that’s the great muscle-building part. “Feelings” have that name because we literally feel them in our bodies first, usually long before our minds can catch up, label them, and decide what to do with them. The more we can name where we specifically are, the faster we can complete the stress cycle they’re a part of, and move through them. 
Listen carefully and with eye contact as folks share their words… it’s a moment to hold space for people to be /share where they are without judgment, and have that be enough.

The more we build these muscles, the more self-aware and other-aware we become, and the smoother/faster we can move through it all. 

Read the room differently

This might sound crazy, yet… If you’re working (or teaching) in person with folks, do one single Zoom call, so you can see people’s faces while they’re actually speaking naturally. During, build some visual-auditory-kinesthetic memory of them to carry back into your masked interactions. It helps. Then, when you do things like 2-in-2-out, you can get the whole picture of where someone is, building empathy. Your visual, auditory and kinesthetic experience of someone can finally come together!

Boundaries for a reason 

In normal times, we have natural boundaries and transitions between modes of operation, roles we play, and parts of our lives. Our brains work fastest with a clean ending to one thing, then a clean beginning to what’s next. Those multiple, few-minute walks you’d typically do between in-person meetings created those clean transitions all day, like onramps and offramps, allowing your brain to let go of focus on one thing, then shift and reset mentally, physically and emotionally before the next– the recovery before the next sprint. Your commute to and from work did the same for the parts of your life– it framed clean transitions and needed decompression for our attention, our energy and our roles. 

So… create new transitions and boundaries. Time box your focus during the day, making focus sprints shorter than you think. Leave 5 minute breaks between things, and during each…. Get up to walk outside, change your visual focus (screenbreak) and reset your state. Your energy will increase, and your nerves will smooth out. 

Pick and choose control 

Our core drive of autonomy manifests as our ability to choose– our actions, our decisions, our next moves. That drive has been confined repeatedly in 2020’s relentless restrictions, so we’ve all got some pent-up autonomy to get out. Taking control can be a very productive thing, especially when it can feed your energy. Rather than feeling like more to do, any of these will actually spark generative energy, because your autonomy drive to choose it yourself will be back ON. 

Physically initiate something. Take physical control in areas that both make you happy yet also add positive energy to the world and others… like ninja-clean your space, rearrange a room, start that exercise thing you keep putting off (or take it up a notch to hit a new goal, if you’ve already started). That kinesthetic energy spent helps move emotions through their cycle, plus lets you feel/see some control over something!

Make something. Take photos, write something, make art, cook something, grow something.

Learn something. Start a new book, take on a new skill, expand thinking into a new topic. 

After any of these, your tolerance and patience for everything else will increase. 

Get a Pro 

Having someone outside your head to hear you, bring perspective, and help you work your thoughts, emotions, pain and frustration is indispensable… especially right now. Coaches and therapists are pros with concrete tools, processes and ability to help sort through what’s brewing in your water balloon. If you have one, talk to them more often than you think you need to, and if you don’t, yet have considered getting a pro like this in your corner… now is the time. Let’s chat!

Mind Your Energy

Stamina is about energy allocation over time. The amount of energy that we’re using daily on things that just weren’t even things a year ago is staggering… reinventing what/how we do everything, constant risk assessment of safety to do X or go to Y all day long is now constant. It’s a lot of energy we didn’t have to tax ourselves with before, and there’s a reason we’re exhausted… our surge capacity is depleted (Susan Haelle’s pivotal explanation is perfect). Just like an athlete needs to be in peak shape during their most high-pressure game season, you need to be in peak shape energetically right now.

Pay attention to the energy you’re letting in and the energy you’re putting out. Because you’re in closer proximity to people right now for longer periods of time, this is key. It’s okay to choose not to absorb energy if it’s not helpful for you. Give yourself breaks from other people’s energy, and do intentional state changes to reset, reframe and recharge. 

Meanwhile, in a more macro and disciplined way, take care right now to feed your energy. State is where you are mentally + emotionally + physically– all 3 all the time. Yet pay close attention to each kind of energy’s capacity, too. We’re built to sprint and recover, sprint and recover, not  sprint a marathon’s distance, like we’re doing right now by default. 

Pick 1 thing for each, and work them into your daily routine, to keep your energy where you want it. My dailies are: Emotional = journaling, Physical= exercise outside, look at the sky 5 min +1 gallon of water, Mental= reading every morning (from a book, not a screen).

Handle with care.

Every person we know has experienced the surreal, ongoing test that 2020 was (and continues to be into 2021), yet what that actually means is different for us each. That matters- because while some of it is universal and collective, our individual experience of it is very personal; it’s all around us, and many folks will only fully process it all in years to come. So approach with care, and hold empathy for that other full water balloon as you make contact.

So… this is DO-able. We can stay fueled and aware in all the ways we need to be responsive, resourceful, and in an intentionally healthy place for ourselves and others– ready for what comes, our balloon mindfully filled, yet pliable… especially right now.