Leading Consciously: Staying Relational with Presence and Attunement
When we feel safe, we work better together.
It’s been said that the fundamental unit of work is a conversation. You’d think that would make working simple, yet when there are people involved it can be anything but.
When two nervous systems meet, there may be a lot happening for each person individually that affects the other and the space between. For example, when your blood boils, or you find yourself spinning stories in your head in the middle of a conversation, it’s hard to be with another person much less be in a collaborative space to get work done together effectively. What does it take to stay relational?
A lot - it turns out.
Staying relational means noticing yourself when you’re upregulated or triggered, knowing your fear responses, and being able to self-regulate. It means noticing the other, getting curious about what’s happening for them without making up stories, and asking open honest questions or extending empathy. How present you are able to be over the course of a conversation determines how well you’ll be able to be relational, versus purely transactional.
Leading consciously calls us to become attuned to ourselves so we can better attune to others. In doing so, we can put “connection over content” knowing that when we feel safe, we can show up more fully.
When we can create safety for others as well, we work together better.
The more fluent we get with our own internal and relational states the more fluid our experiences can become. In turn, we move from stuckness into living a life flowing with more presence, confidence, spontaneity, and pleasure. We can bring this quality into our interactions at work and reap the benefits there as well.
Leading consciously involves how you place your attention and tend to the quality of your presence.
How can you come into whole body alignment (or come into integrity with yourself) and leverage that alignment as a place to lead from?
We get familiar with coming back to ourselves as an anchor place ripe with information, often circling around questions like: “How am I right now, and what do I need?” Doing so has a way of rooting us in what we know to be true, which has a way of rooting us into the present. We can lean into the relationship with the information our body is giving us, with open, honest questions, genuine curiosity, or other ways of contributing from a generative place. When we’re able to do this, we are able to lead from love versus from our fears. That affects the quality of your interactions with others.
What Is Attunement?
Attunement is that sense of being seen, being heard, and as somatic therapist, Sarah Schlote says: “feeling felt, and getting gotten.” When we have these things, we tend to feel safe. Likewise, an over or underactive nervous system (i.e. a nervous system that doesn’t feel safe) returns to a felt sense of safety through various ways of attunement.
When we feel safe, we can be present in an embodied sense with a full range of our capacity in the moment. In other words, we’re able to make choices and act not out of fear.
We can show up undefended, curious about what’s happening, clear about what’s happening inside of us from feelings and sensations, and we can notice how our body reacts to the situation, conversation, or new information flowing in. We are not stuck, clinging to defenses.
When we feel safe, we have more capacity for more of us to show up and more capacity for being relational.
Sarah Scholote writes:
“When we “are seen and heard, feel felt, and get gotten” [ … ] by another individual, our nervous system begins to settle and we begin to feel safe in relationship. When we feel safe, as the polyvagal theory suggests, many more things are possible: a deeper sense of intimacy and connection, the capacity for play and creativity, the attention and focus necessary for learning and other higher order brain functions, and the ability to rest and digest effectively. Our nervous system can do all these things because it is in a state of sustainable physiology that is conducive to experiencing those said things.”
Our bodies know the difference. The safety that we afford another in this way of relating brings dividends to both parties.
What does it feel like to have your thoughts, insights, and feelings considered? That is the grounds for the respect of the other that compounds trust in the space between. It creates the allowance for you to show up more and more of who you are in the relationship.
Relating is quite a thing as humans. We hide ourselves out of fear and lack of safety — often for good reasons we’ve come by honestly. Or, we act out defensively because we don’t feel safe.
Clean and clear relating is a profound and potent endeavor. At our best, we’re able to be attuned to ourselves, and what happens for us in relationship, and equally as curious about what’s happening for the other person in front of us.
When we’re able to attune to another, our presence and care show that what they say and how they are is considered. They know that we won’t tromp their boundaries, ask too much, or push them over the edge of what keeps them sane.
Dr. Dan Seigel, founder of interpersonal neurobiology, says:
“When we attune with others we allow our own internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships. Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well, and throughout our lives we need attunement to feel close and connected.”
Attunement is the ability to be present with another’s expression of their experience and adapt and respond appropriately.
You got some degree of this as a kid growing up, and whatever you got, it impacted you and how safe you feel in different relationships today.
You can think of attunement as a balance of presence and care. Kelly Wendorf, Founder of Equus, says: “Presence without care is aloof. Care without presence is ill-placed.”
How do we hone in on that balance? Presence and curiosity build bridges between ourselves and the other, and they create space for us to notice what’s happening so we can choose how we’d like to respond.
Staying Present
The more aware we are of what’s alive and happening in us, the easier it is to regulate our nervous system. When we can regulate our own nervous system, we can stay present and stay relational.
The more regulated we can be, the more chances we have to show up with clarity and kindness, make relational choices, and act from a place that’s not in fear and shutdown and defensiveness. From that place, it’s more likely we’ll be able to have generative, attuned conversations.
“The best remedy for thinking too much is staying more engaged with your senses in the environment,” notes author and horsewoman Anna Blake. “Rather than thoughts, emotions, and rat-on-a-wheel overthinking, take a breath and stroll through your senses: Touch, taste, smell, sight, sound.”
In many ways, being an embodied presence involves sensory-motor info-tracking. In other words: What are you feeling? Literally, what is your body doing, what are the sensations? Knowing and naming builds personal congruence — you’re truing up and aligning what’s happening on your insides. What are you conscious of?
Here are some questions to help you shift back into presence, or to explore what’s happening for you once you catch yourself unregulated:
- I feel… (what emotions might be present?)
- What are the sensations in my body? Where are they? What are they doing?
- This reminds me of… (What memories come to mind?)
We have to be in our bodies to be attuned to ourselves, the environment, and the people around us. Additionally, we need to feel safe enough to stay in our bodies to engage from there. (For example, how often do you find yourself dissociated in conversations or interactions?)
Where are you on The Openness to Discovery Scale?
As humans, we shift in and out of presence all day long. It’s a natural state of being with this brain of ours. Yet knowing where we are at any given moment can be a handy skill so that we can choose how we might like to show up for the person or issue in front of us.
At work and home life, how can we remain a safe haven relationally and keep things moving along? The trick is to know how to stay emotionally steady and not give in to defensiveness.
Here’s a fabulous tool developed by the Hendricks Institute to help locate how you are showing up: The Openness to Discovery Scale (also known as the Openness to Learning Scale, or you may have seen this talked about as “Above the Line/Below the Line”).
- As you take a good look at this tool, what are some of your greatest hits?
- Where do you tend to show up on this scale in conversations at home or work?
The space in the bottom half of this scale are the places in which we don’t feel safe and show up with our arms full of defenses. We get quiet. We fight and argue. We shut down any real conversation that challenges our point of view.
Each of us has our own signature move when we don’t feel safe and are on the defensive. Sometimes, our moves shift depending on the situation or audience we are with.
As you look at and take in this scale, consider these questions:
- When have you experienced conversations or relationships in which you show up above the line? What is it that makes it possible for you to show up there?
- When you’re showing up in the bottom half of the page, what does it take to shift back to neutral or the top half of the page? As you think about making those shifts, what comes up for you?
- How easy or difficult is it for you to shift when you catch yourself in an upregulated state? When or where have you seen this modeled before?
The openness to discovery scale is a tool to play with in your day-to-day life to notice your trends in staying relational (or not).
Red, Yellow, or Green?
If you’ve followed Reboot long enough, you may have encountered the Red-Yellow-Green check-in tool that we use in nearly every check-in. This is a tool derived from Steven Porges’ Polyvagal Theory which speaks to our nervous system states. We use this tool to speak to when our nervous systems are online or offline, when we’re triggered or when we’re feeling safe.
If you dive into Polyvagal Theory just a bit with the Polyvagal Defense Hierarchy model by Sara Scholote, you’ll begin to see how our physiology changes as our nervous system gets more activated.
As we move from a green to a yellow state, for example, our defenses start to show up. Once we sense danger in the environment or in basic work conversation, our social survival behaviors begin to mobilize and we start orienting defensively.
In a normal flow of our nervous system, what goes up with activation can come down with attunement. Once a felt sense of safety is established, it’s easier to operate in the green again.
What do you know about your fear responses, and how to shift out of them? Consider these questions:
- What happens to you when fear sets in or you sense a threat? (Freeze, fight, flee, flock, faint, …?)
- What are your defenses? How do those show up? (Use the Openness to Discovery Scale as a reference).
- When your defenses show up, what happens to the conversation?
- Once your fear and defenses are activated, what brings them down?
- Conversely, when someone else’s fears are activated, and their defenses show up, what happens for you?
Often, the triggers that activate our fears are not going to kill us. It’s exceedingly rare to die from a meeting at work, even the most charged of conversations. Yet, sometimes the charge for us around some conversations is high. While our nervous system tries to keep us safe in those instances, it’s often not life or death.
Our task, then, is to notice when we’re activated. How can we notice what’s happening for us? What might this be telling us? What might we need to ask or ask for? How can we regulate our inner state and choose response behaviors that match the situation?
The Hendricks Institute has a myriad of resources and materials available online. Fear Melters is one of the tools that can help add awareness to your fear responses and help shift back to presence and a felt sense of safety.
Revealing Brings You Into the Relationship
Revealing involves knowing what’s happening inside of us and naming it. When you are able to share that with someone else by revealing what’s true for you, your insides and outsides match, which creates even more of a safe haven.
One of the ways to shift into presence and step into the relationship is to reveal something true for you.
Revealing is a big deal. And, it can feel scary to attempt because it can feel vulnerable. Yet, by withholding or withdrawing from a situation or conversation, you’re reacting from a place of fear and not taking a proactive stance in tune with your own creative agency.
Gay and Katie Hendricks write:
“Withdrawal and projection are the natural outcomes of withholding. When you withhold, you keep inside yourself things that should be expressed. The very act of hiding these things takes you one step back from the relationship. A result of this withdrawal is that you will begin to project. In other words, you will begin to attribute to other people things that are actually issues of your own.”
In other words, when we withhold or withdraw from an interaction, not only do we keep ourselves one step out of the relationship as they note, but we fall out of presence. According to the Openness to Discovery Scale, we go below baseline into the bottom half of the page.
Not all of us have had good experiences sharing our truth and having the sense of being seen, heard, “feeling felt and getting gotten.” This can make us hesitate to reveal as a practice.
Consider these prompts or spend some time journaling with them:
- Who do you feel safe bringing up important issues with?
- Who do you turn to when you need someone to reach out to?
- With whom do you share what’s really going on for you?
- When you think about naming and sharing what’s true for you or your experience, what happens in your body? (For example, Is there a doubt, fear, tension, openness, or energy?)
- What happens in relationships when you withdraw and withhold?
- What stops you from sharing what’s real and true for you in certain situations?
Getting Curious
As adults, attunement means communicating our feelings and needs as part of relating. Unlike when we were young humans with limited to no vocabulary, we can’t expect folks around us to know what we need or even to know how we are feeling. People in our adult life might be good at asking us questions at the right time, or noticing when something is off about us, but it’s unfair to expect anyone to have X-ray vision around emotions and meet our unvoiced needs.
Adulting done well involves communicating our states and needs to others clearly, kindly, and when and where necessary.
As partners, teammates and colleagues, it’s important to build our own somatic awareness — that is, how our body is feeling, what we’re feeling emotionally, and what it may remind us of — as well as to be able to turn to our workmates with curiousity: what’s happening for them, over there? What we’re aiming for are ways of relating that are inviting for the whole self to show up from both sides of the table and to create a safe space for that to happen.
Curiosity is important because no one has the same inner map or meaning map that you do. We each have a different neurological blueprint and way of knowing the world. When we are able to be present with each other, we are able to see each other clearly, and not from the influence and map of our own known inner-terrain. That affords us a co-creative space.
We bring curiosity as we see and hear the other: What are we noticing? What can we get curious about? What is happening in there, in that experience, in their inner world and landscape, in their bubble of awareness, now? What might you wonder about or want to ask about to learn more?
Bringing curiosity and attention to notice what’s happening inside of ourselves is a keystone move.
What is my body telling me? What am I feeling? As I listen to this person, what am I feeling? (What might it be stirring up in me?) As I hear this person, how might I respond appropriately?
When we can be present in ourselves to be with others in that way, it’s an invitation for each other to be known more fully in the context of the relationship. It takes a big reveal about how we’re doing. It’s about being honest and congruent with what’s true for us. Yet the conversations that follow have a different context, texture, and flow when they come from a ground of “safety first.”
Being relational is hard work. Learning to stay relational and not shut down or fall into defensive stances, or take up a fight takes some core inner work. We must first become aware that we’re falling out of presence, know our fear signature, explore what’s happening for us, and what we might need. How can you play with the Openness to Learning Scale in situations and conversations at home and work?
