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Safer Teams by Tuesday
According to the weather app, this today is the last really cold morning, hopefully of the year(!). It was -30° C again when I went to do chores, and the novelty of the beautiful sunny sky with associated difficulty breathing has worn off. However, there is now an inch of fluffy snow on top of the icy field that is our yard, and I ventured to take the horses back into the barn. First time in probably over a week. Been just too treacherous.
They were happy, although walking carefully. Eclipse in particular has little balls of ice under her hooves that mean she is essentially rollerskating through her day. No fun. Four legs are necessary in these conditions. One of the nice things about the breakfast time “indoors” is the likelihood that hooves shed their coating of accumulated ice-boots. I see them lying around like frozen casts of the underside of each horse’s walking surfaces.
Have I mentioned how much I enjoy July??
Weather is such a limiter of teamwork, here. I have longed for an indoor riding arena for my whole adult life, or at least the time and resources required to haul horses to the nearest one just outside of Prince Albert. Neither have been granted me to date. I have to live with winter. Deep, self-pitying sigh.
The fact is, this lack of access to a year round space for riding has not been the real limit on my progress as regards my own skill with horses. To be completely honest, I’ve been far more constrained by hyper-busy-ness, anxiety and trips up to overwhelm, and a generally scattered approach to self care, than any physical layout. Even if I had had access, for the last 20 years, to a multi-million dollar equestrian facility, I would have had no emotional, mental, or even physical availability to learn within it. Nope. I’ve had other, larger fences between me and sitting deep in a saddle.
In trying to order my inner home, and create both boundaries and some welcoming bridges for access to relationships and growth, I am confronted pretty frequently by my own accumulation of clutter, debris, and ankle-breaking disorder. First things, first. I need a clean Home. Then I can think about a rational approach to riding with more skill.
I’m writing this and thinking again about all the many, many teams I’ve been a part of (and some I’m still a part of) which have absorbed my contributions, both positive and less so. When a person shows up in a team with obvious gaps in their ability to both sense and respond to their own needs for care, the team often faces a tricky social dilemma. How to support increased health in an individual, without crossing boundaries, ignoring the mandate and limits of the team, and yet dealing with reality in real time?
It’s one hard thing, for the leader, and the teammates, both.
This is where I think having a shared story that includes some sort of functional breakdown of stress responses can be useful. I’m developing my tall building of stress idea, but there is no reason you can’t come up with your own, specific, experientially proven concept map. The basic idea that I’m working off of is transferable, even if how I’ve labeled and ordered my “levels” isn’t quite how you see it. I think what is a takeaway for teams who are functioning in any sort of stressful environment (and that’s just called Life, so…) is that the view changes depending on the height or distance away from Home.
Home is a useful word for the centre, the base of support, the stable core of a person, or even of a team of persons. Home base means everything looks as clear and logically oriented as it ever is going to. Moving sequentially away from Home, things get more challenging to decode, the appearance of new information increases in frequency, and the possibilities for response to events multiplies. That’s fine, as long as everyone knows how to get back to Home Base. It’s critical that after a prolonged period of work “in the field,” each team member has a means of accessing their origin point for this project. Otherwise, the normal confusion of a typical workday will turn into real chaos.
In schools, I often suggested teachers come up with a 5 point scale that described in non-judgemental, objectively measurable terms the escalation of a student whose behaviour was becoming problematic for the classroom. This was less about a child’s self-awareness, and far more (as per my intention, anyway) about creating clarity in categories of problems. The difference between a young person who is happy, learning, connected, and calm/alert, and that same person in a “red zone,” flying completely out of control, is very apparent. What is much less easy to note (especially on a busy Tuesday) are the stages of that child moving from a “1” (Home) to a “5” (complete meltdown). But, they exist. If you watch, you can see a child edging into (in my opinion, anyway) anxiety, then fear, then a loss of a sense of agency (what I call “flooding”). After that, there’s really no other option for return to safe and happy. Overwhelm or whatever you want to call it, is just inevitable.
Ride it out, pick up the pieces, comfort and repair the connection, and then resolve to try again to see those shorter, smaller, in-between levels, where it’s still possible to turn the ship around.
Adults also escalate, and we all have the capability of losing control, which looks far worse in a grown-up than it does for a child. At that point, social disapproval can often bleed into correction, sometimes of the criminal kind. Unfortunately, a punitive response is rarely effective in helping the victims or recipients of collateral damage. Prevention would, obviously, be a far better option.
I think that creating more language (as is definitely happening in many areas of “mainstream” society) to describe the mid-stages between a Just Right Challenge (and the floor below it - Home) and a truly terrifying outburst of anger, grief, or utter confusion and loss of any grip on reality, would be helpful in directing our responses, within a team.
Within the daily stresses of a typical “workday,” there are many levels of more or less focus, more or less attention to detail, even some spikes in emotion that go with the full range of being human and caring about what we’re doing. Those are all healthy, normal, and can be tracked by each of us as part of our personality, or your personality, engaged in a team pursuit. However, it’s my argument that someone who is experiencing an escalation out of this normal range (which can include fast, intense, and maybe even shockingly adept course corrections or skillful tactics) looks different, behaves differently, and will experience reality differently enough that it shows up as an obvious change in relationships.
Instead of trying to ignore these tells, and thereby prevent embarrassment (as if anxiety or other associated fear levels are somehow shameful) wouldn’t it be great if a teammate could identify the escalation tactfully, and engage in predetermined and proportional responses? Kind of like First Aid, for choking. It’s important to know that someone choking is going to be embarrassed, so much so that they may leave the room and be invisible even as they lose oxygen. When someone escalates out of a Just Right Challenge, and into an anxious state, they are now in a position where their sensory systems are receiving highly edited information. Distortions are quite possible. A negative feedback spiral is probable. This is a staging area before true fight or flight responses start to appear, and it’s a really great opportunity to help, not wait for the elevator to keep climbing.
This is where having made a sort of if/then plan as a whole group is very helpful. Even better if the ifs and thens have been posted in visual form. Anxiety can be seen, heard, felt, especially in group settings. When it shows up, no matter who is the most sensitive person and therefore the most likely to resonate with its presence, having a clear response plan that is likely to de-escalate everyone and not judge anyone is just…so incredibly helpful. And potentially cost-effective, too.
Here’s an example for a group of adults, let’s say, working together to fundraise for the local dog rescue by (among other projects) hosting a BBQ at the local park. Happy and safe, right? Hopefully so, along with profitable. However, having a team meeting before handing out aprons, the leader of the group, knowing that the public can include anyone, and that interactions surrounding food and money can go any which way, and furthermore, that the whole topic of dog rescuing has many side-issues and distracting characters within its community, took the time to prepare these wrist wraps for each volunteer.
They also went over the following information verbally…
Observable signs of a jump in stress sufficient to signal a “level change” in a teammate - check if they need help:
you hear raised voices with an angry tone
someone looks cornered
trouble handling items all of a sudden (clumsy, dropping things, signs of confusion)
someone stops responding to other volunteers (going “silent”)
Some quick and easy first responses to help de-escalate, rather than letting the situation progress:
Someone stand beside the person right away. Don’t (necessarily) talk to the person, just come alongside, seeing what they’re seeing, and if you can figure out the situation. Be with.
If there is trouble, use a code word (like “banana”) to let the rest of the group know you’re responding to a stressful escalation.
Have a breakout person designated to provide company and protection from the public while the person “under fire” works to come back to a Home Base.
Offer water, snacks, and shade. Do not rush.
Encourage taking these sorts of breaks near the beginning of subjective feelings of increasing tension, as opposed to “toughing it out.”
Creating these sorts of common sense plans and strategies in advance, while possibly sounding like “too much support,” may actually really help in the heat of a compounding situation. Knowing what to do before things turn into a clear crisis is very empowering for most people, and creating a culture that supports explicit work to “come down,” is very affirming for the ones who might otherwise feel they must jump over their limits in a group situation.
There are many contexts a team works within which are inherently stressful. Competence and confidence are huge protections and provide almost miraculous buffers for people on any sort of front line. However (and this is a big however), a single unexpected variable (a phone call from home, an unexpected, unrelated “trigger,” or a random verbal attack from a stranger, etc.) can startle someone out of a productive zone, and into a completely different “storey.” It’s a great thing if the team expects this, has prepared for it, and can smoothly support that person de-escalating with dignity, some privacy, and grace.
