Natural, normal, and innocent
Feeling emotions is good for us. We know how to feel sadness. Humans have this incredible mechanism that’s been fine-tuned over about 6 million years of evolution, in which our body can process sadness physically in a way that expels tension and reduces stress within our nervous system. It’s called “crying.” We have a similar built-in response for fear that involves rising cortisone levels, elevated heart-rate and increased adrenaline. These processes can be physically taxing, but they’re also natural, normal, and innocent. It’s what we’re designed to do as a way of processing emotional energy and moving it out of our bodies.
What we’re NOT designed to do is resist those processes and trap that energy in our bodies. We’re not designed to feel sad and try to ignore it and push through it. We’re not designed to feel afraid and try to pretend like that fear doesn’t exist. We’re not designed to feel angry and smile.
We’re not designed that way, but we are often conditioned to do just that. Many of us have been conditioned that emotions don’t belong in the workplace at all. And that feelings of anger, fear, and sadness are “unproductive” if not outright “unprofessional.” We may have additional identity markers that increase that pressure because we don’t want to be the “emotional woman,” “angry Black person,” or “the new person” that is too confused and asking too many questions.
But the brutal reality is this: when teams don’t establish the psychological safety for people to allow feelings like fear, frustration, or sadness, they will spend outrageous amounts of energy trying to work around their biology and humanity. They will strain themselves to mask their fear. Turn unexpressed sadness into building resentment. And allow completely normal frustrations to become simmering tension.
Blind spots on the team will proliferate as people spend their meetings nodding along when they disagree, avoid sharing contrary views, and bite their tongues about strong feelings that they’re having (usually for good reasons). Ultimately finding it impossible to hold the emotions in, they will seek private audiences (“meeting after the meeting”) to let them out. In the absence of psychological safety on the team, people will pursue their own methods for safety: forming factions, currying favor with perceived power-holders, and trying to learn the unspoken rules of their environment.
If this is what we call “professional,” it’s not hard to see why so many workplaces turn toxic.
Building psychological safety is the hard process of pushing back on that conditioning. Being honest about what we feel (and letting other people have their honest feelings) almost always takes courage. But when we can push through that conditioning, we harness the design of our natural biology and humanity.
There’s a reason why teams with psychological safety have proven so much more effective than teams that don’t. When there is safety to be honest, we avoid all the profound “energy traps” that most people and teams find themselves routinely caught up in. When we can freely name our gut feelings, unease, frustrations, and fears - we let that energy move through our bodies naturally. When it becomes the norm, teams don’t just become more honest, they become more open, more aware, more emotionally nimble. In other words, all the energy that was going into resisting our normal human feelings goes into the work instead.
Choosing our “design” – our very humanity – over our conditioning, takes tremendous courage. But just as resisting our nature comes with big consequences, embracing our nature carries profound benefits. We can set our teams loose. Our own bodies and hearts will be a lot happier, too.
