Threat brain? Yes, let’s avoid it.
Threat brain is a necessary survival function that can kick in needlessly when modern anxiety gets too great.
Reading the Fast Company article “Feeling constantly stressed? Blame your ‘threat brain’” gives a lesson for your workplace kindership practice. Because part of kindership is to help everyone into a mental space that facilitates relaxed work.
There are two parts of our brains, “safe brain” and “drive brain,” where your best work happens. The terms were coined by author and psychologist Nelisha Wickremasinghe and covered in her book Beyond Threat.
Mental performance coach to Olympic athletes and executives, Colin Guthrie color codes his mental space zones: red, blue, and green, with green being the optimum for the most rewarding performance.
Whatever taxonomy you choose, we know that different mental states can make or break a day at work.
A kindership practice should work as a conduit to guide everyone into their best performance space.
What leaders can do to be the conduit might include:
Keeping the focus on goals, not tasks – how people go about their jobs is less important than the result and directing the “how” is often micromanaging behavior and highly stressful for the employee.
Managing deadlines humanely and as a team – avoid placing undue, do-or-die deliverables solely on any one person. Spread the effort across the team.
Validating feelings of anxiety, fear, and depression – the pandemic lumbers on. Work life balance is still disrupted, and uncertainty is rampant. Having an honest group gripe about individual challenges, is not waste of time. Especially if leaders listen and mete out assignments with mindfulness of the pressures.
Building in do-over time – Pandemic or not, establishing a learning organization needs to encourage errors and failures as part of the process. This gives creativity and innovation a safe space. But again, it’s up to leaders to point out “the learning” when things don’t work.
In worst case scenarios, your organization can have an epidemic of panic attacks that can be mild or serious when too many people succumb to “threat brain.” Learn the signs of panic and encourage people to not invalidate it as imaginary or weakness.
Practicing kindership with workplace approaches and policies that acknowledge human needs and positive emotion can bring the panic level to zero. And that’s a metric effective managers should aspire to.
