Recommend people generously, speak about their strengths.  Go onto their LinkedIn page and leave a glowing recommendation.  Mention them in a room full of opportunities.

Tearing ideas and people down is cheap and easy work. Be a builder.

When the news cycle feels heavy,

When the loudest voices are angry and full of blame,

It can feel hard/lonely/overwhelming to care for yourself, let alone to care for others.

You can lose energy and lose hope.

But the world needs us - it needs men and women who are commited to empathy and to care and to making our small areas of influence places where people thrive.

So, this week, I am highlighting a few of my current favorite things to give you a bit of a boost.

What research, best practices, and personal experience show, again and again, is that one of the best ways to get a person regulated/back to a stable place is not by telling them that they aren't sad or admonishing them to just get over their feelings.

Acknowledgment is powerful.  People want to feel seen and heard.  When our emotions are witnessed, it helps us to move to a different state in freedom instead of pushing down our feelings, pretending that they aren't there, or hiding from a place of shame.

Creating replicable templates for care is an organizational game-changer.  Most companies rely on a patchwork of episodic support.  Some teams or individuals are big-hearted, gifted organizers that show up with care when it matters most.

But true growth comes from taking those best-practices and making them into standard operating procedures.

Your coworkers are not family members, but this same cycle of overwhelm and negativity can happen at work.  We find ourselves hyper-aware of all that is going wrong, keeping mental tallies of all the ways that coworkers and clients are dropping the ball.

Or, when that mental accounting becomes too exhausting, we go numb, merely going through the motions of to-do lists.  

There is a better way. 

How you care for your employees (and clients) during disruptive life events matters.

The company lost a lot that day - a promising new hire (whose moving expenses they'd already paid), all the work of the recruitment team, and they suffered a huge blow to their reputation as a place that puts people first.

Not to mention the new, added cost of having to find + hire her replacement.

All because one manager wasn't skilled at empathy and connection.

Empathy PTO is a great example of a policy that makes values manifest.  Thinking creatively, Monique and her team provided a category of PTO that could be used with flexibility, allowing employees to take the time they needed during seasons of disruption.

“Don’t get distracted from what matters most”.

Which was another way of asking us, both personally and organizationally  – what are you for? 

I’m making a list and putting it somewhere that I see often – what do I want to be marked by?  When people spend time with me, in person or in virtual space, what do I want their energetic imprint to be?

One of the answers that consistently emerges, for me, is hope.

Helping, in the moment, does not mean that we never address the behavior of the skill-deficit - it means that we, as leaders, are clear-eyed enough to know that, when someone's brain is in a moment of overwhelm, they aren't able to learn or absorb new information.

Especially at work, this can be difficult for managers and coworkers to navigate.  Which leads them to avoid conversations about disruptive life events entirely.

Try utilizing this helpful question -"What is a good next step for you right now?"

This question can move someone into their generative mind:  yes, these things have happened to me and they are crappy...but what is within my power?

It also keeps you (the listener) from slipping into the Fix-It Frank empathy avatar - telling the person going through a hard time what they need to do, which can lead to conversational shut-down.

It's hard to know what you haven't been taught.
Most of us didn't receive any purposeful instruction on how to be empathetic and connect with others.  We seldom teach it in our MBA programs or our onboarding.  

And yet, we need our leaders, managers, and team members to operate in this skillset again and again.

Whether it is 1992 or 2024, elections come with high stakes and big emotions.  And 2024 is no different.  A recent report from the American Psychology Association found that 3 of every 4 Americans are stressed about election day (next Tuesday!).