By Jade Garratt

How do you feel when you hear the words “You have a body“? And how do you feel when you hear it in a work context? 

You might find it confusing – a kind of “well, obviously”, or think it’s a bit of an odd thing to say. And that’s fair. Yet it’s one of the main principles we include in our Psych Safety social contracts for workshops, and it’s also something we remind ourselves of all the time. I thought it was worth explaining why we think this is so important, and why it can seem simultaneously strange, obvious and profound.

“You have a body” is a principle I first came across through the work of a friend who was integrating it into her work around regenerative farming. It’s the first of 10 “Principles for Prototyping a Feminist Business”,* created by Jennifer Armbrust (which we’ve shared in a previous newsletter) . It spoke deeply to me because it was so different to the head-first, logic-oriented, cognitively-focused world of work I operated in. Like many of us, I’d been taught to regard thoughts as superior to feelings, intellectual work as separate from embodied work and bodily sensations – tiredness, hunger, even pain – as distractions from the important “head” work. I’d internalised messages about pushing through, powering on and ignoring my body. 

To hear it acknowledged that I had a body, and that this idea could exist in a business environment, felt liberating. As Abby Rose puts it, “How did business get so disconnected from being alive?”

Forgetting our bodies

There are a number of important issues this raises. Firstly, that particularly in the world of online work (and even those of us who work in a hybrid way often spend significant amounts of time on screens), we can develop an image of ourselves which is much like the image we see reflected back at us in our online meetings – a disembodied, two-dimensional head. In this world, we are our thoughts, our ideas, our spoken and our written words. It’s easy to become disconnected from our feet, our stomachs, our lungs, our muscles, our bones. We might sit for too long, hunch our shoulders and forget to drink and eat well. And when we neglect our own bodies, we might forget that others we’re working with have bodies and physical needs too. 

And this potentially changes something about the way we work too. When we get too “in our heads” forgetting that we have bodies (or that we are bodies), we lose connection with a way of being in the world which instinctively recognises our humanity and that of those around us. That remembers that we are living, breathing people, with lives outside of work, with feelings, emotions and connections to other people. 

Psychological Safety and the Body

When we are working with psychological safety and aiming to create work spaces where people can work together, better, we want to lead with empathy and understanding. An understanding that people are whole human beings, not just two-dimensional faces on screens, is crucial.

And on a deeper level, when we talk about psychological safety, we often know it by its absence. We know a space isn’t psychologically safe because we feel fear, specifically the interpersonal fear of embarrassment, humiliation or punishment by others in the group. And fear, of course, is not just a thought, it’s a feeling. We might have thoughts like “they’ll laugh at me” or “I’ll get into trouble for this”, but even before we’ve articulated that thought, we might feel a tightness in our chest, we might hold our breath, clench our fists or feel butterflies in our stomachs. If we can tune into these feelings, we’re better placed to explore what’s causing them, and how different ways of interacting with each other might help us all to feel better.

So, “You have a body” is a principle we embed not just into our social contracts, but into the whole of the way we work. Whether we work mostly online or in offices, classrooms, or public spaces, it can be easy to get “in our heads” and forget to feel into our bodies. But when we encourage ourselves and each other to remember that we have bodies, when we ensure our bodies as well as our minds are invited into our work spaces, we can potentially lead with more empathy, more care and more awareness. At the very least, we can remember to do the things we need to do in order to keep our bodies healthy and allow them to sustain all the clever things we do everyday. 
 

Further reading:

10 Principles for Prototyping a Feminist Business

Psychological safety in remote teams

Social contracts

Speaking up at work

Personal user manuals

*Incidentally the other principles may feel familiar from other areas of our work too – “everything is an experiment” for example. 

Psychological Safety in Practice

We should assume that people are reasonable

We’ve covered the Local Rationality Principle previously, and it’s a well established principle that people generally act with reason, as well as an informed approach to psychologically safe investigations into failures. This paper in Cognitive Sciences uses the lens of behavioural science and suggests that instead of assuming people are “predictably irrational”, “behavioral science should start from an assumption that humans are reasonable. We take reasonable to mean that people with knowledge of the situation (including social pressures) would be able to see the behavior as a satisfactory way to achieve a particular goal.”
 

The Coevolution of Network Ties and Perceptions of Team Psychological Safety

In this paper from 2010, researchers explored the reciprocal connections between team members’ perceptions of psychological safety and their social network ties (friendships and relationships). The study showed that whilst psychological safety fosters positive connections between team members, these network interactions, in turn, shape perceptions of safety within the group.

We still have a few spaces left in our January 9th workshop on Delivering Effective Feedback – book here!

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