The show’s guest in this episode is Dr. L. Carol Scott. She is a TEDx and keynote speaker, #1 international bestselling author, and coach who helps leaders succeed by strengthening social and emotional intelligence. With a PhD in Developmental Psychology, she brings trauma-sensitive insight and practical tools to show how early relational patterns shape leadership, work, and life. Her work bridges research, neuroscience, and real-world experience to develop the leader while honoring the person.

—

 

Listen to the podcast here

Trauma-Informed Leadership with Dr. L. Carol Scott

Hello, welcome to the show. I’m Melanie Parish. I’m an author, a podcast host, an executive coach, and a team coach, and I’m super excited to be here today.

Hi, I’m Mel Rutherford. I’m McMaster University’s first transgender department chair and co-host of the experimental leader podcast.

Well, what are you thinking about today, Mel?

Well, I’m coming to the end of my five-year term as department chair. I’ve got about four months left, and I’ve started highlighting and underlining all of the work that I’ve done so that people in my department can reflect on it and can understand it as a whole package. So I’ve been asking people for feedback on remember that time that we created our core value statement? Remember how we created, we used our core values to inform our formal consensus decision-making. Remember how we you know, we created our strategic plan, and then we prioritized the activities based on our strategic plan, and just make it like we’ve done all this work for five years, but I’m taking the opportunity to package it all up and make sure that people see what we’ve done, understand the work we’ve done, see what we’ve accomplished over the last five years.

And what’s your hope? Is it your hope that those things will continue on? Or is it like just cementing your legacy, like what’s the driver behind all that?

I think that seeing all of it in a snapshot is really important because all the work that we did was really connected, and it was really moving us, you know, towards developing our department and developing resilience in our department. And I think it’s worth putting it all together and letting people see that it was all connected. Cool. That’s cool. What are you thinking about?

I am thinking about bad leadership. And I’m thinking about bad leadership because I’ve been thinking about that like we talk about leadership and what good leadership does all the time, and we think about the impact of good leadership. And I was like, I’ve been thinking about, like, when you have a bad leader, what, what’s the impact on the organization? And sometimes things get kind of quiet, like, it’s actually like if, especially if it’s kind of a controlling leader, then, then everything starts, like there’s some flow. It’s incredibly efficient to be a dictator, or to make all the decisions, or to be doing control. And so sometimes it’s not so obvious what the impact is on an organization for a while, and so, so I’ve been thinking about that, and then I’ve been thinking about like, so it might get quiet for a while, but what you’re missing is multiple brains working on problems, and diversity of thought and resilience in the decisions and maybe implementation. If people are rebelling quietly, like the opposite of consensus, consensus decisions get implemented really quickly. But if people aren’t on board with things that are being imposed, then you may it may be quiet, but it may not actually be happening. So I’ve just been thinking, you know, sort of about that and how bad leadership isn’t always super obvious for a very long time.

I think that’s really interesting. Interesting.

I’m pretty excited about our guest today. Our guest is a repeat guest, which is fun. Her name is Dr. Carol Scott, and she’s a TEDx and keynote speaker, a number one international best-selling author, and a coach who helps leaders succeed by strengthening social and emotional intelligence. And like you, she has a PhD in developmental psychology, and she brings trauma-sensitive insight and practical tools to show how early relationship patterns shape leadership, work and life.

—

So Carol, welcome to our show.

Welcome.

Thank you so much.

Well, it’s great to have you here. Thank you. Yeah, it’s great to have you, and I’m curious what you’re experimenting with in your work and in your life right now.

You know, I’ve been kind of finding myself at the edge for a while now of the reality that leadership development is personal development, personal development. Is leadership development, is personal development, is leadership development. I think lots of us have been advised over and over again, maybe in our lives, to leave it at the door. You know what? Your personal life doesn’t come into the workplace, and that is just such utter BS. There’s no way to do that. And so I’m really looking at how when we bring our whole self, because we do, you know, how’s that whole self doing and what did, what did my whole self learn when I was three years old about controlling other people rather than collaborating with them? That was just so perfect. Melanie as a starting point. The like bad leadership comes from learning bad strategies when you’re 567, years old.

I think that’s so true. And the one I see is control like that someone has a strategy if they aren’t willing to tolerate some chaos, and they try to control but that makes the world really small, really fast, and so it can be really effective as an individual contributor, but in a leadership role, you’re not developing anyone because you haven’t even it hasn’t even occurred to you that someone might have ideas that you hadn’t thought of.

Does part of that come from fear?

I think so, or just strategy. So could be fear that that made the strategy happen, like, if I’m going to get hurt, and you can you PhDs can knock me down if you want to. But what I see is like people have strategies for how they deal with relationship people chaos period. So one thing might be so I think really, people who grow up in really safe environments are really willing to tolerate more chaos. They’re willing to invite other people’s ideas.

They’re willing to because they feel safe in themselves, yeah, but if someone gets beaten up every time they have an idea, they start to fight for their ideas, or they start to fight for themselves, and they they don’t want to introduce chaos because they might get hurt.

And I totally agree with you, and I pulled out that I created a framework some years ago, pulling out one key social and emotional milestone from each of the first seven years of life. So from the infant year, trust, we learn to trust as matter of fact, it’s the only social strategy you have when we’re born. We can trust other people to take care of it. That’s pretty much it, because we can’t do anything else. And that if my experience as a young infant is that I need stuff from the world. I need food, I need comfort, I need a blankie. And nobody comes, and I lie in the dark and I cry and I cry, and nobody comes with that, then I have a foundation for my life of nobody comes. I’m on my own. I have my own back. I can’t depend on other people, right? And so I take that now into the workplace. I’m 35 years old, and I don’t believe anybody has my back. I believe I have to take care of everything. What kind of a bad boss? Does that make me a bad leader? And then the one that you’re talking about happens for the toddler. It’s that sense of identity, of I know who I am, and if you don’t get seen, and you don’t find it safe to be who you are when you’re two years old, then you’re going to be codependent, you’re going to be a victim, you’re going to be a bully. There’s lots of ways you can go from there.

Oh, it’s very interesting. And that is what we talked about, which I saw in your bio. The trauma-sensitive insight is that this.

Yes, this is where I really kind of, this is with the intersection of my academic education and my own personal life and recovery. Because of the work that I’ve done for 40 years, both in my field and in my own life, I can see so clearly how, if we experience adverse childhood experiences, as they call them, the aces, if even a few bad things, bad things, hard things, challenging experiences, things we can’t understand happen when we’re very little, that creates a kind of structure that cannot be successful until those are addressed. And there’s a therapy that might work. But, you know, some people don’t need therapy. They just need to say, Oh, look at this crappy pattern I’ve developed well.

And there’s a certified coach who came up with similar frameworks. Her name is Lisa Danley, and she helps people, sort of, reparent those children in a coaching context, at whatever age, also sort of a disapproving parent. It’s been a while since I looked at her stuff, but I think it’s really interesting that there is coaching. Approach to handling emotion, which means we’re handling it in the moment. What’s there now? What’s your need now? As opposed to looking at a more therapy background that might go into the past, look for reasons, talk about parenting, that kind of thing. So I love that there’s a coaching approach to deal with exactly this kind of trauma that you’re talking about.

Yeah, and when I when I guide women, high achieving women in business or organizational or government leadership, what I ask them to do is take a look at what you’re doing now. What is the pattern of how you’re getting things done? Because I have needs, and I will bring them to work. I need things from other people. That’s a fact, how I’m getting my needs met at work may be healthy. It may be a direct, open ended, I need this from you, and you interact with me about that, or it may be manipulative, or it may be, you know, condescension, or it may. There can be a whole lot of ways I get my needs met, but I will bring them and I will get them met. And so the question is, what are you doing to get your needs met right now today? Are you aware that you have some what are they so, yeah, my focus is very much on the present moment and what’s happening in your leadership today.

So is the trauma awareness about the leader being aware of their own trauma or about the trauma of the people they’re leading?

Great question. Both. Oh, excellent question. Mel, yeah, yeah, both. And actually, the latest keynote that I did, what I pulled out was this modern, contemporary pattern of pathologizing each other in the workplace and, frankly, in our families and everywhere else. All of a sudden, everybody’s triggered, and they think they know what that means. All of a sudden, everybody thinks that they have a narcissist and a relationship with them, and they think they know what that means. They’re talking about being in a trauma bond with someone else who experienced some bad thing with them, which isn’t at all what a trauma bond is. I mean, it we’ve developed this sort of pop psychology language for each other now that really distances us both from each other and from real growth within ourselves. It’s too easy just to toss a label in there and say, Oh, well,

Well, and, and there’s, um, there’s a piece, as long as we’re talking about trauma, there’s something that that has happened in the last, I think mostly in the last five years, where if someone is uncomfortable, then then there’s an assumption that someone else has done something wrong, exactly. And I’m, I’m wondering if you could speak to that a little bit, and what you think some of the path out, out of that, or through that, is,

This is such a phenomenon that made me want to talk about it. Actually, it’s was the driver for the developing the keynote is this sense that if I, if you say something to me, and I have an unpleasant emotional feeling in response to it, then you have triggered me, and you have done something wrong, and you have harmed me. I’m sorry. Having an emotional reaction to someone else’s behavior is the most quotidian, the most daily, the most minute by minute occurrence that life offers us. So yes, you’re going to have emotional reactions to the things that I say. And so if we can, if we can clarify, because I think this is about that same toddler. This is this. I call these the self aware success strategies. Because if you have self awareness as an adult about the successful strategies you were meant to have as a child, like being an independent self and being okay with who you are, you know, then you can navigate the adult world much more effectively. So if we look at that strategy of independence, of saying, I’m over here, thinking and feeling and wanting and needing what I think you’ll want and need, this is me over here. You’re over there. You got your own things. You’re thinking and feeling and wanting and needing over there, and we’re both okay, you’re both Okay, and we can interact around that stuff, and we can disagree about that stuff. And it doesn’t mean that I’m being mean to if I have a different point of view. It doesn’t mean that I’m gaslighting you if I have a different memory of an experience we shared. It means we’re two separate people with two separate brains. That’s it.

And as leaders, how do we speak to those teachers to make that clear in our organizations?

We start by getting clear in ourselves. That’s yeah, if I, if I could not sit calmly and hear you attack me. You a member of my team. If I cannot sit and hear you attack my leadership and respond with something along the lines of, I’m sorry to hear that. That’s how you’ve been feeling. Let’s unpack that. Tell me some more if that’s not the kind of response I can give in my sense of independence, my strategy of an independent person. Personhood is frayed in some way. My I refer to boundaries as the edges of yourself, not as a no, don’t do that thing. I don’t set boundaries. I own them. So I am the boundaries of myself, the edges of my mind, my body, my, you know, emotional world, all of that stuff is me. And as long as I’m over here feeling okay with all of that, then you can say anything you want to me, and I can hear you. That’s gold in leadership, and that’s rare not to become defensive, not to try to fix you in the moment, make you the problem, fix you. You know those kinds of things really come from we do the work ourselves. First, I couldn’t have told you when I was 35 what I needed, what I thought, what I felt or what I wanted, because I was so invested in pleasing everybody else and doing what they wanted and thinking what they thought. And that was that was trauma recovery for me, that was not about just needing to mature, that was needing to find who I was.

Yeah, it’s interesting. The word capacity was really popping into my mind as you were talking, and I actually feel like given political climates, given all that’s going on in the world right now, our capacity is shrinking. We’re very careful. We’re very quick to protect and stop the flow of information from people that don’t say exactly what we’re thinking and even when, like, there’s an error or something happens in an organization. I mean, it really is okay to say, I think you’ve made an error, and that’s not a personal attack. That’s literally saying, I think there’s an error here. And you may have intended, you may not have, and it’s okay to just say, whoops, that’s not what I intended. So it is interesting to it is interesting to notice I like the word frayed. There’s something frayed about a person who has these strong trauma responses. It’s interesting.

And it is so for me, so much of my recovery has been about managing my nervous system, and they didn’t really understand that for a long time, because science wasn’t there yet. For me, when I was in my 30s and I started in psychotherapy, the neuroscience wasn’t there for me in the 1980s we didn’t know things that we know now, and so now I can look back on my history and understand it from a completely different scientific point of view, and I can see when the sense that you know triggering isn’t about being angry at someone or feeling offended by someone. It’s that your nervous system gets poked and reacts automatically. It is an autonomic nervous system process, and so I can look at the times when I felt so under threat by someone’s behavior, that it was as if someone had a knife to my throat. It was just an interaction in a meeting, but my body was telling me you’re about to die, and so the reactions that I had were way over the top.

Yeah, my question is, like, when we’re with someone who’s having that response as as a leader, what do I do?

I bring my focus to my energy and bring my like I literally my breath into my body. I sit with my hands on myself and breathe and just give them a minute, the initial surge of adrenaline, the big brush of cortisol, and the surge of adrenaline that triggers one of these kinds of experiences in your body. It fades over a few minutes. It fades fairly quickly. And the more space you give it, the less you pressure it, less you push it into a corner, the faster it can recover. And then, if the person is open to it and has the kind of relationship with Me that would allow me to say it, then I might suggest, I suggest you take a deep breath, take take a breath all the way into your belly, maybe put your hands on your thighs, give yourself you know, it’s like there are physical things you can do to break through the trigger as well. So I might start suggesting some of those things that work for me. When I feel like this, I put my hands on the arm of my chair, and I lean back, and I take a breath, you know, things like that.

And what can a leader do to impact the culture of their organization when they see this? You know, people responding to, you know, other people’s comments emotionally and by saying they’ve been triggered, and that kind of thing.

You know, this is one of the hardest things. I mean, it’s always, of course, starts with me and starts with my work. But if I can say, well, I hear that you’re upset, and what I just saw happen was he disagreed with you, and so I think you’re angry, but that’s not the same as necessarily that he’s assaulted you. You’re not, you’re not in danger here. So can we just talk about the disagreement? Bring that. It’s all about bringing the. Fire down, dialing the heat back, always, and that’s not something we’re very good at right now in our culture, as you pointed out, Melanie, no,

But what I like is that you’re saying I saw that you had a disagreement. I saw that you had a strong emotional response, but you’re not buying into the idea of because you’re triggered. He did something wrong, right? Yeah, that’s right. Oh, you gaslit me. Well, no, not really. I just said I disagreed. So I like that you’re naming the sort of facts to extricate everyone from a paradigm where, because someone is triggered, someone is evil, yeah,

I did a recent keynote where I had a series of slides of a trauma bond. Is not this, it’s this. Triggering is not this, it’s this, you know, and I could hear this sort of soft murmuring, wow, going through the audience over and over again, because they literally have just picked up these terms out of common usage without any clear understanding of what they mean.

Can you define what you think a trigger is? 

Just say that something happens in the environment. I can explain how it happens. For me, something changes in the physical environment. So my nervous system runs along happily on I’m calm, or I’m alert, I’m paying attention, I’m chugging along. Life is good. And then something, instead of being alert to it, something seems that I should be afraid of it. Something changes. It can be the expression on a person’s face. It can be a change in tone of voice. It can be raised big arms fast. It can be so many things, depending on what kind of history you have, something happens. And the amygdala at the base of my brain, the little lizard, is the way I think of the amygdala up there ready to press on the alarm button. Because the lizard like this right there, like so like, always looking around for the trouble coming. And so the amygdala sees some and stomps on this alarm bell, and my entire nervous system is flooded with this signal that says you’re about to die. And it’s literally the same as if someone is like, ready to kill me has a gun in my face. That’s the thing that happens to my nervous system. Doesn’t make any logical sense, because triggers are not logical. Okay? So then what happens is the mostly the vagus nerve system activates a whole lot of physical symptoms. So a trigger is physical. Your throat closes your your eyes tear up. Your heart beats faster. It comes down through your torso, starts up here and runs down through your torso. So your stomach churns. Your gut churns. All these physical symptoms occur, and that is what we are reacting to with whatever we do next. So if I stand up and push my chair into the table and say, I’m leaving this meeting, damn it, you all are a bunch of idiots, that is flight right? That is the flight reaction to what just happened to my nervous system if instead, what I do is I sit in my chair and I look down and I start playing with my fingers. That’s freeze. The stress responses just happen because the nervous system is triggered. And so then we will do something unless we know how to interrupt the trigger and calm ourselves down, and that’s what I mean by the physical actions of taking deep breaths. I put my hands on my thighs often to ground my upper torso into my lower limbs. There’s just a lot of things you can and then getting up and moving is helpful. Moving the large muscles just dissipates all the cortisol and the adrenaline back out of your system, but as long as it’s active, you’ll sit there doing whatever it is that you do, fight, flight, freeze or fawn, you will do that. What? What is fun? People pleasing? Oh, I didn’t mean that. I was just joking. I’m kidding around. Please don’t be mad. It was, No, I don’t want to say that. It was, never mind.
Well, do you have any more? Do you have a question? Mel, do you have anything else?
Well, where, where would somebody find you if they wanted to get more of you?
I’d love for people to find me these days on sub stack, I started a new blog there called Leadership stretch marks, and it’s for high achieving women who want to think about how their personal lives are part of their leadership, and how leadership appears throughout their personal life. I mean, I’m a leader in way more than an organization in my life. I’ve been a leader in my church, I’ve been a leader in my neighborhood, I’ve been a leader in my family sometimes. So leadership is personal. Personal is leadership, and I would invite people to come join me there.
Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to have you.
Thank you.

Thanks for joining us today.

—

I heard some interesting thoughts today. It was interesting to think about leaders needing to be aware of their own trauma that they bring to the workplace, as well as the trauma that workers bring to the workplace.

Yeah, I thought all of that, and I loved her description was so succinct and clear about what you experience when you have a response, like a trauma response or a body response from something that happens in a room. And I love the fight, flight, freeze or fawn like I I thought that was all really interesting. It’s not things I haven’t heard, but I thought it was a really nice description of all of that. And I think it’s really helpful to have these conversations about what we do as leaders, when people are having all these reactions around as well.

And I’m noticing that making the leaders human and thinking about leaders experience actually opens up leadership to more people.

I think, I think that’s definitely true.

Well, it has been great to be with you today on the Experimental Leader podcast. Go experiment.

Go experiment.

Important Links: 

Dr. L Carol Scott

Dr. L. Carol Scott integrates more than a century of theory, practice, and research on early learning and brain development; lessons from a lifetime career with children and families; and tools from her own journey of recovery after a childhood filled with trauma.

A committed Jayhawk, she earned double-major BAs in Anthropology and Human Development, an MA in Early Education, and a PhD in Developmental Psychology at the University of Kansas. Since 1985, she has held leadership positions in her field, starting at the local level and rising to become a national thought leader and influencer.

For her final act before life’s curtain, Carol has a dream: to change for the better the way we treat each other in America. That dream is achieved as she teaches you something you have both been desperate to understand and never knew you wanted to know. Yes! You can finally understand “what makes people tick,” by learning more about the universal patterns in your own internalized mechanics, ticking away.

Carol’s seven Self-Aware Success Strategies–the SASS–are her foundation for coaching Women on the Rise to greater success, no matter how they define that success.

 

Charlotte Otter is an author, speaker, podcast host and advisor. Having worked in large
companies, including leading global communications teams, she now advises a wide range of
clients on reputation, change communications and building effective communications teams.

With global experience in companies such as SAP and Anglo American, and clients ranging
from BASF and Siemens to smaller start-ups, Charlotte is acutely sensitive to the needs of
global audiences and crafting stories and messaging that lands.

In a world of wall-to-wall digital noise, it is stories and our humanity that break through.

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

Join The Experimental Leader community today: