79. When Your Boss Isn't Helping
As many of you will know, I had a course called Burnout Recovery. The course is no longer available, but one of the modules was so impactful and powerful that I wanted to share it more broadly on the podcast this week. I’m talking about something that so many people in the public health profession experience, that isn’t taught in your MPH program but that you can use for the rest of your career. I’m showing you what to do when your boss isn’t helping.
Having skills or knowledge in a specific area does not mean you are a good leader of people, yet so many folks in public health are promoted to managerial roles for this reason. It can lead to dissatisfaction, frustration, and resentment for those on the receiving end of the leadership, so if this is something you have experienced, you are not alone. It can feel like there’s nothing you can do or nowhere you can turn, but there is actually a lot you can do, and that’s what I’m helping you with this week.
In this episode, discover why having a boss that doesn’t support or help you isn’t just something you have to put up with, and two things you can do when you feel this way. I’m showing you how to stop rejecting yourself and how to start creating the belief that something different is possible for you.
If you want to take this work deeper and learn the tools and skills to feel better, all while having my support and guidance each step of the way, I invite you to set up a time to chat with me. Click here to grab a spot on my calendar and I can’t wait to speak to you!
Coming soon! New Course: How the Patriarchy Robs You of Your Rest (And how to get it back!). Join the waitlist to be the first to know when this course is out!
What You Will Discover:
Timothy Clark’s four stages of creating psychological safety and how to create this for yourself.
Where you can feel empowered and create change.
How to stop ruminating over what you can’t control and start focusing on what you can control.
Why you can’t rely on anybody else to make your dreams come true.
The problem with focusing on what other people need to do instead of what you need to do.
How to start having the experience you want to have with your boss.
Why you do not need any current or past evidence to believe something you want.
Resources:
Join the waitlist to be the first to know when my new course: How the Patriarchy Robs You of Your Rest (And how to get it back!) is out.
Sign up for a Curiosity Call to find out if individual coaching can help you!
Follow me on Instagram!
Questions? Comments? I'd love to hear from you! Email me at info@mckoolcoaching.com
Join my weekly mailing list to get bonus free resources and coaching opportunities!
Full Episode Transcript:
Hey, you all, I’m Marissa McKool, and you’re listening to the Redefining Rest Podcast for public health professionals. Here we believe rest is your right. You don’t have to earn it, you just have to learn how to take it and I’m going to teach you. Ready? Come along.
Hey everyone, I wanted to jump in here and just set the context for this episode. It’s a little bit different but I’m so excited to bring it to you. Some of you might be aware I had a course called Burnout Recovery. I know many of you took it. And that course is no longer available. However, one of the modules from that course is so impactful and so powerful I really wanted to share it more broadly with all of you listening to the podcast. Now, if you took that course, I don’t want you to exit out.
I want you to relisten here because where you are no in your life is probably different from where you were when you took the course. And I guarantee you if you relisten you will get new insights. And for those of you who didn’t take the course, don’t worry, if you find this episode helpful I have a brand new course coming out that I’m going to share more about at the end of the episode and how you can get it. So, stay tuned to the end and with that let’s talk about what to do when your boss isn’t helping. Let’s go.
Hi everyone, welcome back to video two. We’re going to be talking about when your boss or leadership isn’t helping. I know so many of you have been experiencing this throughout the past two years, throughout your public health career. And maybe it’s gotten more intense but let’s talk about what to do when you’re experiencing this. And this is not just something you can use now. This is information, and tools, and skills you can use for the rest of your career. And this isn’t stuff taught in your MPH program.
So, let’s first start with the common challenges many of us face with our supervisors, our leadership in public health. So, we feel like they don’t listen, or they don’t understand even if they’re listening. Or they give lip service, they tell us, “I hear you, we’ll do this.” And then they never do it. Maybe you feel like your supervisor is actually promoting inequity or causing harm, saying sexist things, doing microaggressions, other things that may cause harm in the workplace to you, or your teammates, or the whole environment.
Crossing boundaries, texting you nights and weekends, emailing you constantly, asking you to do their job, or taking your work and not giving credit, not having your back, not saying no to more work, not advocating for your needs, and there’s many, many, many, others. Many of us have either experienced this now presently or the past couple of years, or just at some point in our career. And I think it comes to the point where you get to a point in your career where you question, is this just something I have to put up with? And I would say no, and we’re going to talk about why today.
But first I want us to zoom out. You spend so much of your time focused on these micro experiences, and these are important, I’m not trying to negate that in any way. But when you focus so much time on my boss isn’t listening or they’re texting me in the morning, or whatever. You miss the opportunity to zoom out and see the bigger picture of what’s going on in the field, and why so many of us experience these challenges.
And that’s because in public health we have kind of adopted a way of promoting folks to manager, and supervisor, and leadership positions that do not result in having good leaders. I hate to say it, but it’s the truth. We have promoted folks to leadership roles because they have great knowledge or skills in their specific content area or methodology area. We have promoted star performers, we have promoted folks who have gotten great results. That does not make someone a good leader.
Having skills and knowledge in a specific content area like biostats or like survey development does not mean they’re a good leader of people. Maybe they’re good at leading that type of work, and getting the work done and knowing what to do. But it does not mean they're good at inspiring people, of being creative, of listening to people, of bringing different skillsets together, of advocating for the people that they supervise. Star performers does not equal a star leader.
And even if you have someone who has some good leadership skills supervising you, doesn’t mean they have all the skill they need. They could be a great listener but actually have never been taught the skills to advocate to leadership above them for your needs. Or you could have someone who is a great leader in another organization or in another team. And we have just adopted this idea of if you’re a great leader for that team, or that project, or that organization, you must be a great leader overall and you’ll do great on this team leading these people. That’s not true.
There’s so many factors and so many skills you need to lead people especially as it changes by project, or by team, or organization. You also might have leaders who don't know how to lead people of different types of work styles, or different team dynamics, or different backgrounds. There is lots of reasons in the field we have these common challenges. And the reason I bring this up is not to say there’s nothing you can do about it, or anything like that. But just to point out you are not alone, and you’re not crazy. And this is something that's systemic.
We do need to change in the broader field, but that doesn't mean you have to wait for all your leaders to get better trained or for us to hire leaders, and supervisors in a different way and change our norms in public health to feel better, and to manage the experience you’re having with your leadership or your supervisor. And what happens when you experience all these things on a micro level is that you feel hopeless. You feel like there's nothing you can do, you have no one to turn to.
But actually, there’s a lot you can do and that’s what we’re going to go over today. The two things you can do when you have a boss or supervisor you don't feel like is supporting you, or is helping you, or advocating for you, or listening to you. The first is focus on what’s in your control. How many hours a day, how many minutes an hour, how many days a week do you spend thinking about all the things you can’t control, thinking about your boss and their decisions, and what they didn’t do, and what they should have done, and what you wish they would have done?
Thinking of a leadership team and the decisions they made, and what they did wrong, and what they should have done. How much time do you spend focusing on that? Way too much, you all, way too much. You can’t control them, what they do, what they don't do, what they say, what they do say, trust me. I wish we could control people, we can’t. And if you focus all your mental energy to there, of course, you’re going to feel hopeless, and resentful and like there’s no solution, because there is no solution when you just focus on what other people need to do because you can't control them.
When you go into that mental habit and you play that mental record player every day, you are choosing to ensure you continue to feel hopeless, and resentful, and like there’s no solution, because you’re only looking to people, to external circumstances you have no control over to feel better. That will never work. You have to focus on what’s in your control. There is so much in your control particularly what you do, what you don't do, what you decide, what you say, what you don't say.
So much more in your control than you’re letting on, than you’re realizing, then you’re giving yourself the opportunity to find out. Because you're spending so much time in the mental drama about what other people should or shouldn’t be doing. You have to redirect your brain to what’s in your control which is you, your decisions, your actions, how you want to think, how you want to feel. That's where you will start feeling hopeless and feel hopeful. That’s where you start to feel like there are solutions and see them.
That is where you'll feel empowered. And your brain doesn’t want to spend time there. It’s so much easier, even though it feels like doo-doo, even if it feels terrible, to focus on what you can’t control on other people what they need to do. Because then your brain doesn’t have to exert energy to make changes, and make decisions, and deal with doubt, and take risks. Your brain doesn’t want to do that. But do you want to keep continuing to feel terrible? Do you want to continue to feel like you're not supported?
Do you want continue to not have the experience you want to have? I’m guessing not. And in order to do that you have to redirect your brain constantly and focus on what you can control. And once you start doing that, you get momentum because you see that is where all your power lies. You have no power when it comes to determining how your boss or supervisor is going to act. You have so much power, a 100% power when you focus on what you can do.
Maybe you don’t like all the options you have for what you can do or not do. It doesn't mean it's not in your control, a 100% in your control. That is where you get empowered to make change and have a different experience. And from there you can start to create psychological safety for yourself. So psychological safety, I’m just making sure I’m saying their name right, was developed by Amy Edmondson in the 90s. Their research team researched healthcare teams to figure out what made the most successful teams, successful.
And what they found was teams that had psychological safety were the most successful, had the least failures, had the most measures of success. And what that meant was they had a space that was created where they could be vulnerable, they could be honest, they cold share mistakes, they could learn, they could advocate for change, they could participate, all of it. And they talked about this in the sense of what the workplace needs to do, what the managers need to do.
We are going to talk today about what you need to do to create this for yourself. Timothy Clarke created Stages of Creating Psychological Safety. And they created this for leaders, for supervisors as a guide, as a training, as an understanding of how leaders create psychological safety for their team. I’m going to go over quickly what they proposed and then I’m going to talk you through how you can do this for yourself. And you do not need to wait for your supervisor to get trained on this, or your leadership to be able to create this in order to change your experience, in order to feel better.
You can lead if you want but you’re just going to keep feeling miserable and you’re probably going to wait forever. Wouldn’t you rather just take this into your own hands and do something about it? Because you can. And they talk about the stages in four stages of creating psychological safety. The first is inclusion safety which is the need to connect, the managers creating inclusion and connection among the team. Learner safety, the ability to learn, and grow, and managers facilitating that, contributor.
The ability to have everyone contribute and feel like they’re contributing. And challenge safety, the ability to make changes. You do not have to wait for your boss to develop these skills of creating psychological safety. You can create this for yourself.
But the first is stage one, I call this self-inclusion safety. So, this is where you decide your experience matters even if it feels like your boss, or leadership, or supervisor does not agree. This is so important. You have spent so much time thinking about how your boss and your leadership doesn't hear you, doesn’t listen, doesn’t do anything. But you do not validate your own lived experience. You are waiting for them to validate your experience. You are waiting for them to see you. You are waiting for them to signal to you that they hear you.
And while you’re doing that, while you’re just focusing on them, and their behaviors, and what they aren’t doing, waiting for their validation, and their acceptance, and them seeing you, and hearing you, guess what you’re doing? You are not seeing yourself. You’re rejecting yourself. You’re not hearing yourself. You are not validating yourself. I know it feels like you are but you’re not.
When your whole mental space is focused on someone else and what they are or aren’t doing, you do not have space, you are not making space to focus on what you are experiencing. And when you don’t make space to validate yourself and what you're going through, and what you’re experiencing, and telling yourself it’s real, and you see it, and you hear it, and you’re accepting of it and you love yourself, and it doesn’t matter what other people think, you know what's true, and you know what you’re experiencing, that’s when you stop rejecting yourself.
And that’s when you start including yourself. This is so, so important. You need to create inclusion in yourself. It would be great if everyone around us created inclusion for us. It would be great if everyone around us validated us and accepted us, and didn’t reject us. Again, we can't control them. If you wait for them to do that, you’re going to be waiting a while probably. You can do this yourself now, validate yourself, make yourself feel included, not necessarily in your boss’s experience, in your own experience.
Stop projecting yourself, start focusing and being inclusive of yourself and your lived experience, and honor it. You don't need them to agree, or them to understand, or them to validate you to stand in the truth of what you're experiencing, and honor you don't want to experience anymore, you want to figure out something different. So that’s stage one. This is foundational, this is key. If you do not work through this stage the other three stages are not going to work. So, this is really, really important.
Second stage, belief in learn safety I call this. This is creating the belief, a different experience is available to you. You have to first do stage one, where you create self-inclusion, where you accept yourself where you are, where you believe where you are, where you don't focus on everyone else. That is required to then create the belief, a different experience is available to you. If you’re still in the space of rejecting yourself because you’re seeking external validation from your boss or leadership to hear you or see you, you’re never going to believe something is available you.
Because when you’re seeking validation, acceptance, being seen and heard from your boss and leadership who have proven they don’t hear you, they don’t see you, you’ve tried that and it’s been proven and you’re rejecting yourself, you can’t believe something different is available to you because what you’re telling yourself every day is the only way I have a different experience is if they change, if they do something differently. It’s they have to change to do something differently for me to have a different experience.
So, if that’s your current belief and you don’t have the belief that you see yourself, and you validate yourself, and you don’t need them to see that, you are never going to believe a different experience is available to you. But once you stop projecting herself at stop needing them to validate you, and see you, and hear you, because they’re not, and you’ve tried, and they haven't. And you start focusing on what's in your control, focusing on your lived experiencing, honoring it, then you can create the belief, a different experience is available to you.
Because then you’re believing your lived experience right now, you’re standing in the truth of what you believe is happening right. And when you believe in what’s happening right now you can then leverage that to believe something different is available, is possible for you. And that is empowerment, that is the best feeling. And so many of us are socialized to think about possibilities and change in the context of what is evidence.
So, we are taught that in order to believe something can be different, we can only believe these small amount of things that could change, that we have evidence for, that we have past evidence for, that we have current evidence for. So, we only believe very small, our experience can change a little or just in this way. That is depressing, you all, that is really depressing. You do not need any current or past evidence to believe anything, to believe the experience you want to experience is available to you.
If you continue to only believe based on current or past evidence you have you’re missing out on 90% of the experiences available to you, that you can have. You have to create the belief that a different experience is available to you and not contingent on ‘evidence.’ The second thing to this is you have to use your creativity and imagination to believe. You have dreams inside of you, they are there, and you know they're there because every time they pop up and you have a thought, maybe I can do this, that would be fun, I’d like to do this. Guess what? Your brain knocks it down.
One of those at the carnivals, you know the little head pops out and you hit the dinger? That’s kind of what your mind’s doing to all your dreams. But for many of us who maybe have one or more marginalized identities, who maybe have been socialized as a woman, or as a person of color, or immigrant, or have a disability, we've been told by systems of oppression that we can’t dream, that it's not possible, that we don’t have the evidence and we need to have it.
And we have layered socialization on top of what we believe is possible for us, but those things aren’t true. That is absolutely not true. Anything is available for you to believe. And it’s your work as you go to figure out and use your creativity and imagination of what you want and your dreams to knock all of those negative unhelpful thoughts down that you can’t, that you don’t have evidence. Only you can do that, you have to knock those thoughts down. You have to decide to believe anyways, which is a skill, but you can absolutely do it.
And I guarantee you, there’s something in your past where you did not believe, and you had no evidence for, and you did it anyways. What is that? you did it, you can do it again. That’s the belief piece.
Now the learn piece. So, what you have to do, decide what you want. You have spent so much time focusing on what you don’t want, the boss you don't want, the type of leader you don’t want, the work you don’t want, that’s where you’ve lived. You all, that’s exhausting to be in the space where it’s, I don't want this, I don’t want this, I don’t want this. There’s no fun, there’s no ease, there’s no hope, there’s no excitement. You’ve got to go the space where you focus on what you want.
What experience do you want? Not what you don't want, what do you want, big and small, what do you want in a leader? What do you want in a team? What do you want in a career? What do you want in a home? What do you want in a partner? I know we’re talking about bosses but that’s just one piece of this. This is a skill that can apply to any area of your life. What do you want? You have to focus your brain on what you want, not what you don't want. You’ve spent enough time there.
Your brain’s going to want to go back there because it’s so much fun for your brain just to complain about things that you don't want. You have to redirect your brain to think about what you do want. And once you start redirecting your brain it will start to be fun there too. You have dreams, you have imagination, you have creativity in you, just begging to come out. The only thing preventing it from coming out is your brain, is the negative thoughts it’s having, the internalized limiting beliefs you’ve internalized from socialization and messaging.
But you have the power to quiet those thoughts, say, “I’m not thinking that today. I’m using space to be creative today. I’m just going to give this a try.” You have to believe and learn what you want. So that’s stage two.
Stage three, create and contribute safety, create this for yourself. You create the belief you can create the experience you want. So, stage two is all about creating the belief, something different is possible and figuring out what you want, what’s the different that you want. Stage three, you have the belief that something different is possible. Stage three is believing you are the one who creates it. You’re the one who gets to create it.
We rely and are told to rely on other people to create our experience. That’s why we were so stuck on wanting other people to change so we have a different experience which does not work. You cannot rely on anyone else to create your experience. You cannot rely on anyone else to change your experience. You cannot rely on anyone else to make your dreams come true.
You have to create the belief that you're in charge of that, that it’s a 100% in your control, that you get to create what you want from stage two, that whatever you put down for what you want isn’t not only possible, but you create it, that’s stage three, believing you’re the one who creates it, that you’re the one in control.
So, stage four. Stage four is the final piece. And stage four is the fun part. Stage one to three is the hard work. This is the fun part, you all, challenge and change safety. This is where you take action fueled by belief. Now, here’s the thing. When you have tried to take action to change your experience you have not found it fun, or easy, or exciting. And that’s because you haven’t done stage one through three.
Because you're changing the experience without the belief, something deference is possible, without knowing what you want, without accepting yourself and including yourself and stop rejecting yourself. That's why it feels hard, and icky, and like an uphill battle. And you’re trying to change your experience by changing someone else.
What we’re doing when you create your own psychological safety is you create inclusion for yourself and stop rejecting yourself, which allows you to believe something different is possible, which then allows you to create the belief you can make it happen and you figure out what you know what you want. Once all those line up, that’s where the work is, changing your belief. Once those all line up and you have that, this is easy. This is fun, this just flows.
Once you believe something else is possible, once you know what you want, once you believe you can create it, guess what? You feel excited, you feel empowered, you feel confident and that fuels your actions. You're much quicker at making decisions, you know exactly what to do and it's fun and it’s easy. And you try something that doesn’t work, you try again. We are so focused in our society on how. How do we feel different? How do we change our experience? How do we get a raise? How do we change our boss?
No, we need to focus on the belief, what you believe, stages one through three, that is the setup for success. That’s the work. Once you get here, the how easy, fun, exciting and you can do it and you create whatever you want to create in your life. Your actions are driven by the emotions you create because of the belief you have developed in your lived experience, in yourself, in what can be different, in what you want, in the fact that you can create it and you're in control.
And you don’t have to wait for anyone else to change, anyone else to do something differently and make a different decision. You’re in charge of your life. Alright, you all, I think that's it. I want you to think about how you can stop rejecting yourself and start including yourself. And how you can create the belief that something different is possible. And think about what you want, and the belief that you can create it. Once you get that down this is easy, you can have the life you want, the boss you want, the work experience you want, I promise.
You all, wasn’t that so helpful? I mean you can see why hundreds of people took that course. Now, while the Burnout Recovery course is not available, if you found this excerpt of one of the modules from that course, helpful, then you definitely want to check out my new course. It’s called How The Patriarchy Robs You of Your Rest and How to Get it Back. Now, it's not quite available yet but I have opened a waitlist that you can join so you can be the first to know when it is available and get access right away.
The Burnout Recovery Course was really talking about how to eliminate or reduce burnout. This new courses is talking all about how to get more rest, how to turn what you know about rest onto its head. How to see all the subtle, sneaky ways the patriarchy tries to take your rest from you so you can start taking more rest, say fuck you to the patriarchy, and start feeling better. So, if you’re interested, check out the show notes, we’ll leave a link below so you can sign up for the waitlist and be the first to know when it’s available. Alright you all, have a great week.
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
Hey everyone, I wanted to jump in here and just set the context for this episode. It’s a little bit different but I’m so excited to bring it to you. Some of you might be aware I had a course called Burnout Recovery. I know many of you took it. And that course is no longer available. However, one of the modules from that course is so impactful and so powerful I really wanted to share it more broadly with all of you listening to the podcast. Now, if you took that course, I don’t want you to exit out.
I want you to relisten here because where you are no in your life is probably different from where you were when you took the course. And I guarantee you if you relisten you will get new insights. And for those of you who didn’t take the course, don’t worry, if you find this episode helpful I have a brand new course coming out that I’m going to share more about at the end of the episode and how you can get it. So, stay tuned to the end and with that let’s talk about what to do when your boss isn’t helping. Let’s go.
Hi everyone, welcome back to video two. We’re going to be talking about when your boss or leadership isn’t helping. I know so many of you have been experiencing this throughout the past two years, throughout your public health career. And maybe it’s gotten more intense but let’s talk about what to do when you’re experiencing this. And this is not just something you can use now. This is information, and tools, and skills you can use for the rest of your career. And this isn’t stuff taught in your MPH program.
So, let’s first start with the common challenges many of us face with our supervisors, our leadership in public health. So, we feel like they don’t listen, or they don’t understand even if they’re listening. Or they give lip service, they tell us, “I hear you, we’ll do this.” And then they never do it. Maybe you feel like your supervisor is actually promoting inequity or causing harm, saying sexist things, doing microaggressions, other things that may cause harm in the workplace to you, or your teammates, or the whole environment.
Crossing boundaries, texting you nights and weekends, emailing you constantly, asking you to do their job, or taking your work and not giving credit, not having your back, not saying no to more work, not advocating for your needs, and there’s many, many, many, others. Many of us have either experienced this now presently or the past couple of years, or just at some point in our career. And I think it comes to the point where you get to a point in your career where you question, is this just something I have to put up with? And I would say no, and we’re going to talk about why today.
But first I want us to zoom out. You spend so much of your time focused on these micro experiences, and these are important, I’m not trying to negate that in any way. But when you focus so much time on my boss isn’t listening or they’re texting me in the morning, or whatever. You miss the opportunity to zoom out and see the bigger picture of what’s going on in the field, and why so many of us experience these challenges.
And that’s because in public health we have kind of adopted a way of promoting folks to manager, and supervisor, and leadership positions that do not result in having good leaders. I hate to say it, but it’s the truth. We have promoted folks to leadership roles because they have great knowledge or skills in their specific content area or methodology area. We have promoted star performers, we have promoted folks who have gotten great results. That does not make someone a good leader.
Having skills and knowledge in a specific content area like biostats or like survey development does not mean they’re a good leader of people. Maybe they’re good at leading that type of work, and getting the work done and knowing what to do. But it does not mean they're good at inspiring people, of being creative, of listening to people, of bringing different skillsets together, of advocating for the people that they supervise. Star performers does not equal a star leader.
And even if you have someone who has some good leadership skills supervising you, doesn’t mean they have all the skill they need. They could be a great listener but actually have never been taught the skills to advocate to leadership above them for your needs. Or you could have someone who is a great leader in another organization or in another team. And we have just adopted this idea of if you’re a great leader for that team, or that project, or that organization, you must be a great leader overall and you’ll do great on this team leading these people. That’s not true.
There’s so many factors and so many skills you need to lead people especially as it changes by project, or by team, or organization. You also might have leaders who don't know how to lead people of different types of work styles, or different team dynamics, or different backgrounds. There is lots of reasons in the field we have these common challenges. And the reason I bring this up is not to say there’s nothing you can do about it, or anything like that. But just to point out you are not alone, and you’re not crazy. And this is something that's systemic.
We do need to change in the broader field, but that doesn't mean you have to wait for all your leaders to get better trained or for us to hire leaders, and supervisors in a different way and change our norms in public health to feel better, and to manage the experience you’re having with your leadership or your supervisor. And what happens when you experience all these things on a micro level is that you feel hopeless. You feel like there's nothing you can do, you have no one to turn to.
But actually, there’s a lot you can do and that’s what we’re going to go over today. The two things you can do when you have a boss or supervisor you don't feel like is supporting you, or is helping you, or advocating for you, or listening to you. The first is focus on what’s in your control. How many hours a day, how many minutes an hour, how many days a week do you spend thinking about all the things you can’t control, thinking about your boss and their decisions, and what they didn’t do, and what they should have done, and what you wish they would have done?
Thinking of a leadership team and the decisions they made, and what they did wrong, and what they should have done. How much time do you spend focusing on that? Way too much, you all, way too much. You can’t control them, what they do, what they don't do, what they say, what they do say, trust me. I wish we could control people, we can’t. And if you focus all your mental energy to there, of course, you’re going to feel hopeless, and resentful and like there’s no solution, because there is no solution when you just focus on what other people need to do because you can't control them.
When you go into that mental habit and you play that mental record player every day, you are choosing to ensure you continue to feel hopeless, and resentful, and like there’s no solution, because you’re only looking to people, to external circumstances you have no control over to feel better. That will never work. You have to focus on what’s in your control. There is so much in your control particularly what you do, what you don't do, what you decide, what you say, what you don't say.
So much more in your control than you’re letting on, than you’re realizing, then you’re giving yourself the opportunity to find out. Because you're spending so much time in the mental drama about what other people should or shouldn’t be doing. You have to redirect your brain to what’s in your control which is you, your decisions, your actions, how you want to think, how you want to feel. That's where you will start feeling hopeless and feel hopeful. That’s where you start to feel like there are solutions and see them.
That is where you'll feel empowered. And your brain doesn’t want to spend time there. It’s so much easier, even though it feels like doo-doo, even if it feels terrible, to focus on what you can’t control on other people what they need to do. Because then your brain doesn’t have to exert energy to make changes, and make decisions, and deal with doubt, and take risks. Your brain doesn’t want to do that. But do you want to keep continuing to feel terrible? Do you want to continue to feel like you're not supported?
Do you want continue to not have the experience you want to have? I’m guessing not. And in order to do that you have to redirect your brain constantly and focus on what you can control. And once you start doing that, you get momentum because you see that is where all your power lies. You have no power when it comes to determining how your boss or supervisor is going to act. You have so much power, a 100% power when you focus on what you can do.
Maybe you don’t like all the options you have for what you can do or not do. It doesn't mean it's not in your control, a 100% in your control. That is where you get empowered to make change and have a different experience. And from there you can start to create psychological safety for yourself. So psychological safety, I’m just making sure I’m saying their name right, was developed by Amy Edmondson in the 90s. Their research team researched healthcare teams to figure out what made the most successful teams, successful.
And what they found was teams that had psychological safety were the most successful, had the least failures, had the most measures of success. And what that meant was they had a space that was created where they could be vulnerable, they could be honest, they cold share mistakes, they could learn, they could advocate for change, they could participate, all of it. And they talked about this in the sense of what the workplace needs to do, what the managers need to do.
We are going to talk today about what you need to do to create this for yourself. Timothy Clarke created Stages of Creating Psychological Safety. And they created this for leaders, for supervisors as a guide, as a training, as an understanding of how leaders create psychological safety for their team. I’m going to go over quickly what they proposed and then I’m going to talk you through how you can do this for yourself. And you do not need to wait for your supervisor to get trained on this, or your leadership to be able to create this in order to change your experience, in order to feel better.
You can lead if you want but you’re just going to keep feeling miserable and you’re probably going to wait forever. Wouldn’t you rather just take this into your own hands and do something about it? Because you can. And they talk about the stages in four stages of creating psychological safety. The first is inclusion safety which is the need to connect, the managers creating inclusion and connection among the team. Learner safety, the ability to learn, and grow, and managers facilitating that, contributor.
The ability to have everyone contribute and feel like they’re contributing. And challenge safety, the ability to make changes. You do not have to wait for your boss to develop these skills of creating psychological safety. You can create this for yourself.
But the first is stage one, I call this self-inclusion safety. So, this is where you decide your experience matters even if it feels like your boss, or leadership, or supervisor does not agree. This is so important. You have spent so much time thinking about how your boss and your leadership doesn't hear you, doesn’t listen, doesn’t do anything. But you do not validate your own lived experience. You are waiting for them to validate your experience. You are waiting for them to see you. You are waiting for them to signal to you that they hear you.
And while you’re doing that, while you’re just focusing on them, and their behaviors, and what they aren’t doing, waiting for their validation, and their acceptance, and them seeing you, and hearing you, guess what you’re doing? You are not seeing yourself. You’re rejecting yourself. You’re not hearing yourself. You are not validating yourself. I know it feels like you are but you’re not.
When your whole mental space is focused on someone else and what they are or aren’t doing, you do not have space, you are not making space to focus on what you are experiencing. And when you don’t make space to validate yourself and what you're going through, and what you’re experiencing, and telling yourself it’s real, and you see it, and you hear it, and you’re accepting of it and you love yourself, and it doesn’t matter what other people think, you know what's true, and you know what you’re experiencing, that’s when you stop rejecting yourself.
And that’s when you start including yourself. This is so, so important. You need to create inclusion in yourself. It would be great if everyone around us created inclusion for us. It would be great if everyone around us validated us and accepted us, and didn’t reject us. Again, we can't control them. If you wait for them to do that, you’re going to be waiting a while probably. You can do this yourself now, validate yourself, make yourself feel included, not necessarily in your boss’s experience, in your own experience.
Stop projecting yourself, start focusing and being inclusive of yourself and your lived experience, and honor it. You don't need them to agree, or them to understand, or them to validate you to stand in the truth of what you're experiencing, and honor you don't want to experience anymore, you want to figure out something different. So that’s stage one. This is foundational, this is key. If you do not work through this stage the other three stages are not going to work. So, this is really, really important.
Second stage, belief in learn safety I call this. This is creating the belief, a different experience is available to you. You have to first do stage one, where you create self-inclusion, where you accept yourself where you are, where you believe where you are, where you don't focus on everyone else. That is required to then create the belief, a different experience is available to you. If you’re still in the space of rejecting yourself because you’re seeking external validation from your boss or leadership to hear you or see you, you’re never going to believe something is available you.
Because when you’re seeking validation, acceptance, being seen and heard from your boss and leadership who have proven they don’t hear you, they don’t see you, you’ve tried that and it’s been proven and you’re rejecting yourself, you can’t believe something different is available to you because what you’re telling yourself every day is the only way I have a different experience is if they change, if they do something differently. It’s they have to change to do something differently for me to have a different experience.
So, if that’s your current belief and you don’t have the belief that you see yourself, and you validate yourself, and you don’t need them to see that, you are never going to believe a different experience is available to you. But once you stop projecting herself at stop needing them to validate you, and see you, and hear you, because they’re not, and you’ve tried, and they haven't. And you start focusing on what's in your control, focusing on your lived experiencing, honoring it, then you can create the belief, a different experience is available to you.
Because then you’re believing your lived experience right now, you’re standing in the truth of what you believe is happening right. And when you believe in what’s happening right now you can then leverage that to believe something different is available, is possible for you. And that is empowerment, that is the best feeling. And so many of us are socialized to think about possibilities and change in the context of what is evidence.
So, we are taught that in order to believe something can be different, we can only believe these small amount of things that could change, that we have evidence for, that we have past evidence for, that we have current evidence for. So, we only believe very small, our experience can change a little or just in this way. That is depressing, you all, that is really depressing. You do not need any current or past evidence to believe anything, to believe the experience you want to experience is available to you.
If you continue to only believe based on current or past evidence you have you’re missing out on 90% of the experiences available to you, that you can have. You have to create the belief that a different experience is available to you and not contingent on ‘evidence.’ The second thing to this is you have to use your creativity and imagination to believe. You have dreams inside of you, they are there, and you know they're there because every time they pop up and you have a thought, maybe I can do this, that would be fun, I’d like to do this. Guess what? Your brain knocks it down.
One of those at the carnivals, you know the little head pops out and you hit the dinger? That’s kind of what your mind’s doing to all your dreams. But for many of us who maybe have one or more marginalized identities, who maybe have been socialized as a woman, or as a person of color, or immigrant, or have a disability, we've been told by systems of oppression that we can’t dream, that it's not possible, that we don’t have the evidence and we need to have it.
And we have layered socialization on top of what we believe is possible for us, but those things aren’t true. That is absolutely not true. Anything is available for you to believe. And it’s your work as you go to figure out and use your creativity and imagination of what you want and your dreams to knock all of those negative unhelpful thoughts down that you can’t, that you don’t have evidence. Only you can do that, you have to knock those thoughts down. You have to decide to believe anyways, which is a skill, but you can absolutely do it.
And I guarantee you, there’s something in your past where you did not believe, and you had no evidence for, and you did it anyways. What is that? you did it, you can do it again. That’s the belief piece.
Now the learn piece. So, what you have to do, decide what you want. You have spent so much time focusing on what you don’t want, the boss you don't want, the type of leader you don’t want, the work you don’t want, that’s where you’ve lived. You all, that’s exhausting to be in the space where it’s, I don't want this, I don’t want this, I don’t want this. There’s no fun, there’s no ease, there’s no hope, there’s no excitement. You’ve got to go the space where you focus on what you want.
What experience do you want? Not what you don't want, what do you want, big and small, what do you want in a leader? What do you want in a team? What do you want in a career? What do you want in a home? What do you want in a partner? I know we’re talking about bosses but that’s just one piece of this. This is a skill that can apply to any area of your life. What do you want? You have to focus your brain on what you want, not what you don't want. You’ve spent enough time there.
Your brain’s going to want to go back there because it’s so much fun for your brain just to complain about things that you don't want. You have to redirect your brain to think about what you do want. And once you start redirecting your brain it will start to be fun there too. You have dreams, you have imagination, you have creativity in you, just begging to come out. The only thing preventing it from coming out is your brain, is the negative thoughts it’s having, the internalized limiting beliefs you’ve internalized from socialization and messaging.
But you have the power to quiet those thoughts, say, “I’m not thinking that today. I’m using space to be creative today. I’m just going to give this a try.” You have to believe and learn what you want. So that’s stage two.
Stage three, create and contribute safety, create this for yourself. You create the belief you can create the experience you want. So, stage two is all about creating the belief, something different is possible and figuring out what you want, what’s the different that you want. Stage three, you have the belief that something different is possible. Stage three is believing you are the one who creates it. You’re the one who gets to create it.
We rely and are told to rely on other people to create our experience. That’s why we were so stuck on wanting other people to change so we have a different experience which does not work. You cannot rely on anyone else to create your experience. You cannot rely on anyone else to change your experience. You cannot rely on anyone else to make your dreams come true.
You have to create the belief that you're in charge of that, that it’s a 100% in your control, that you get to create what you want from stage two, that whatever you put down for what you want isn’t not only possible, but you create it, that’s stage three, believing you’re the one who creates it, that you’re the one in control.
So, stage four. Stage four is the final piece. And stage four is the fun part. Stage one to three is the hard work. This is the fun part, you all, challenge and change safety. This is where you take action fueled by belief. Now, here’s the thing. When you have tried to take action to change your experience you have not found it fun, or easy, or exciting. And that’s because you haven’t done stage one through three.
Because you're changing the experience without the belief, something deference is possible, without knowing what you want, without accepting yourself and including yourself and stop rejecting yourself. That's why it feels hard, and icky, and like an uphill battle. And you’re trying to change your experience by changing someone else.
What we’re doing when you create your own psychological safety is you create inclusion for yourself and stop rejecting yourself, which allows you to believe something different is possible, which then allows you to create the belief you can make it happen and you figure out what you know what you want. Once all those line up, that’s where the work is, changing your belief. Once those all line up and you have that, this is easy. This is fun, this just flows.
Once you believe something else is possible, once you know what you want, once you believe you can create it, guess what? You feel excited, you feel empowered, you feel confident and that fuels your actions. You're much quicker at making decisions, you know exactly what to do and it's fun and it’s easy. And you try something that doesn’t work, you try again. We are so focused in our society on how. How do we feel different? How do we change our experience? How do we get a raise? How do we change our boss?
No, we need to focus on the belief, what you believe, stages one through three, that is the setup for success. That’s the work. Once you get here, the how easy, fun, exciting and you can do it and you create whatever you want to create in your life. Your actions are driven by the emotions you create because of the belief you have developed in your lived experience, in yourself, in what can be different, in what you want, in the fact that you can create it and you're in control.
And you don’t have to wait for anyone else to change, anyone else to do something differently and make a different decision. You’re in charge of your life. Alright, you all, I think that's it. I want you to think about how you can stop rejecting yourself and start including yourself. And how you can create the belief that something different is possible. And think about what you want, and the belief that you can create it. Once you get that down this is easy, you can have the life you want, the boss you want, the work experience you want, I promise.
You all, wasn’t that so helpful? I mean you can see why hundreds of people took that course. Now, while the Burnout Recovery course is not available, if you found this excerpt of one of the modules from that course, helpful, then you definitely want to check out my new course. It’s called How The Patriarchy Robs You of Your Rest and How to Get it Back. Now, it's not quite available yet but I have opened a waitlist that you can join so you can be the first to know when it is available and get access right away.
The Burnout Recovery Course was really talking about how to eliminate or reduce burnout. This new courses is talking all about how to get more rest, how to turn what you know about rest onto its head. How to see all the subtle, sneaky ways the patriarchy tries to take your rest from you so you can start taking more rest, say fuck you to the patriarchy, and start feeling better. So, if you’re interested, check out the show notes, we’ll leave a link below so you can sign up for the waitlist and be the first to know when it’s available. Alright you all, have a great week.
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
Enjoy the Show?
Don't miss an episode, follow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you listen to podcasts.
