Overcoming Workplace Trauma

A Performance Solution Case Study

Any sudden or unexpected distressing experience can induce a trauma response. Left unchecked this will take root and may severely inhibit performance. Ultimately the stress of unresolved trauma can lead to burnout.

Trauma responses are common and there’s no rule to say they can’t happen at work. Because trauma is a felt response – an emotional hijack – talk therapies are often unproductive.

Find out how we used a very simple physiological state based technique to eliminate a trauma response in under 40 mins.

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Overview of Client & Context

During a break in an ‘Advanced Communication Skills’ training course, being delivered to an NHS team, an Operations Manager approaches and asks for help with an issue.

She has been attending a ‘rapid development’ program for managers for the last few months. The program involves practical training with a small cohort of delegates and three coaches.

During a recent weekend session the Operations Manager was delivering a presentation in front of the group. One of the coaches deemed that she was not approaching the exercise with sufficient solemnity.

He interrupted and gave, what she describes as, a very angry and aggressive rebuke in front of her peers and the other coaches. She had an immediate and strong emotional reaction.

The coach described his feedback style as ‘tough love’ but since that point she has struggled in contexts involving public speaking. It has now reached the extent that she is staying quiet in work meetings and this is a threat to her performance.

Demographics

SECTOR: Public Sector

COMPANY SIZE: Large Entity, Public Sector, Small Entity

CLIENT CONTACTS: Operations Manager

Scope & duration

SCOPE: Behaviour Change, Individual Employee/Role

PROJECT DURATION: 40 mins

Project Features

Approach & Processes

Performance Solutions: State Based Coaching

From the initial conversation it was clear state based interventions were required. This demands a period of focused and uninterrupted attention so we agreed to conduct a coaching session after training was completed.
A brief evaluation of the scope of the problem revealed that the trauma response was beginning to generalise into other related contexts but the strongest response was for any type of public speaking.
A purely state based intervention was selected. The specific method uses a state building 'game' to generate a high performance state and then map it onto the un-resourceful context - in this case to collapse the trauma response.
Within the intervention the coach calibrates subtle shifts in the coachee's game performance to recognise:

i) when a high performance state is achieved

ii) when the un-resourceful state has collapsed.
The setup and execution of the game took no more than 30 mins. There was an agreement to follow up as soon as the coachee had an opportunity to 'test' for success.

Results

This coaching session was not formally arranged and was slotted in as an ad-hoc session at the end of a training delivery day. None the less a result was achieved with the session taking just 40 mins.

What was a powerful and debilitating trauma response was eliminated with a simple technique. Evidence through calibrating responses in the session was backed up when the coachee reported, a week or so later, that they had spontaneously volunteered to deliver a presentation and it went without a hitch.

Notable Highlights

Talk Free Coaching

Other than initially defining context for change coaching was conducted without talking about the problem.

Super Fast

Entire coaching session lasted less than 40 mins.

Seamless Recovery

Negative state was completely eliminated with no 'residue' of problem state.

Conclusions

Traumatic responses are classed as 'one time learnings' usually induced by a single intense felt experience - unlike slow burnout which typically creeps up over time. Because it is a felt experience talk therapy often doesn't work and in fact ruminating on a feeling can cause a trauma response to generalise and exacerbate a performance problem.

State based approaches to coaching focus on rewiring the neurological and physiological gateway to the felt response. If we consider state as the sum total of cognitive and physiological processing it's clear we have multiple access points to change state. Including talk therapy. But the physiological approach is not only significantly faster but also more robust.

The stand out piece, from a coaching perspective, in the feedback offered by the client is that her offer to deliver a presentation was spontaneous. Given she'd just had coaching we may have expected some deliberation and maybe tentative nerves: "I've just had coaching on public speaking... I think I'll be OK... yes I'll offer to do a presentation" - instead her offer was spontaneous and instant. <b<As if the trauma had never happened. This demonstrates that state is a high level driver of behaviour and performance.

This was an ad-hoc session without the benefit of planning. Ordinarily we would include some skill based coaching too. Often state based performance issues arise because of lack of competence - we don't want to make incompetent people feel great about being incompetent! Even without any planning the session delivered - demonstrating the versatility of working directly with state.

The final point to note - and it's an important one - working with state can involve very little talking about the underlying issue. In fact we can work content free which means the solution perfectly preserves confidentiality and dignity where necessary.

As a quick and confidential method of getting employees back on track state based coaching is possibly the most under-utilised performance tool used by employers.