Triggered – Dealing With Past Pain In The Workplace
- Feb 1, 2024
- 5 min read
Written by: Marisa Murray, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Do you have any gremlins impacting your workplace? You probably do, but if you haven’t noticed them, that’s okay—gremlins like to hide in blind spots. In fact, they excel at it. If you’ve brought in any new executive hires recently, I can almost guarantee they are lurking nearby.
In my work as an executive coach, I’ve noticed three different “gremlins” who plague almost all executives in the first eighteen months of a new role at a new organization. I find it helps to warn my clients about these gremlins because at least if they know they exist, they can keep an eye on them.
The three gremlins come in the form of three basic questions:
Gremlin 1: “Am I adding enough value?”
Gremlin 2: “Am I being valued?”
And last but certainly not least, Gremlin 3: “Did I make a mistake choosing to work here?”
These gremlins and their corresponding cloud of uncertainty makes integrating executives highly sensitive to being noticed, appreciated, and recognized—which can then bring out a number of agitating behaviours.
These three gremlins exist because new leaders want to do a great job, but the uncertainty and fear of repeating past mistakes creates a gap between their intentions as a leader and the impact of their behaviours. Instead, we have to choose to manage our gremlins by becoming curious about our behaviours. Usually, this means we have to name the past pain that was triggered and make the conscious decision to deal with it. This helps us move forward in a positive direction.
None of the gremlins appeared out of thin air. They’re all a result of the blind spot they breed in—triggers from past pain. I like to define this particular blind spot as the actions people take or the ways they behave to protect themselves from past pain.
I like to think of triggers as these big red buttons hiding out in our bodies. And once they get pushed—look out! A trigger creates a temporary involuntary emotional state which then snowballs into unnecessary friction, overreactions, and mistrust.
To move beyond these impediments to performance, we need to examine the trigger button and disconnect it so the negative behaviours associated don’t explode out of us. So where do we start?
Baggage for hire
All of us come into a new position with all we are: the good, the bad, and everything in between. When we have gone through negative experiences or lived through a traumatic event, our brains become programmed to subconsciously scan for familiar situations or experiences in an effort to protect us from any new pain. Once triggered, it fires off the alarm, telling us, “Oh no! Here it comes again!” Whether we’re actually in danger or not is irrelevant once we’re triggered.
When you hire any individual, you’re not just hiring the skills on their resume and the personality in the interviews—you’re hiring their baggage too! We all come with baggage, shaped by the difficulties we’ve witnessed or gone through in the past. The issue here is that triggers don’t come with warning signs. They just show up when you least expect, and the reactions they set off can lead to real damage—even if the danger itself was imagined. The internal protective instinct of the brain follows its own logic based on past pain—meanwhile, the external behaviours experienced by others may appear illogical in the present context.
In my book Blind Spots, I highlight a case study of a specific leader who was stuck in a cycle of triggers. He’d been fired from a couple of jobs near the two-year mark—which had conditioned his brain to expect trouble as he neared his two-year anniversary at his present employer. This resulted in a behavioural shift—an otherwise engaging personality became more off-putting, more abrasive, and more threatening to those around him.
All of this was a shield, though—an attempt to protect himself. His past pain of being fired had created some unconscious habits, speeding him down the dead-end highway of self-sabotage.
Triggers are so deeply rooted in the subconscious, though, he couldn’t recognize this pattern when we began our coaching sessions. We had to carefully unpack the baggage to discover his behaviours were being driven by a fear of being fired. With this made explicit, he was able to make a breakthrough to see the damage he was doing to himself, his teammates, and the company.
All too often, the root emotion paired up with the trigger is fear. It could be fear of being excluded, fear of losing a job, or even fear of not being heard. Whatever it is, leaders must learn to shift away from the fear creating friction in their lives and move toward faith—in themselves and in their teams.
From hurt to healing from our past pain
No way around it—dealing with the baggage of our past pain hurts. But it’s necessary for leaders to heal both themselves as individuals and their relationships with others. We can ignore a broken, displaced bone, but unless it is put back in place, it won’t heal properly. Otherwise, it negatively affects our entire body, infecting other areas or leaving us with a permanent limp. We can either leave our reactive behaviours in our subconscious and hobble forward as leaders until we’re too broken to function—or we can dig into the depths to consciously heal.
Becoming aware of one’s triggers empowers you to be proactive rather than reactive. The first step is acknowledging you have your own residual self-protective instincts which are no longer relevant. You have a scar but you don’t need to protect yourself for it anymore. As a leader, this understanding must be transmuted to the team. Everyone has past pain, so learning to identify and recognize those pains is essential in taming the triggers which come along with them
To start unpacking the baggage, ask the following questions:
Self-reflection questions: |
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Team-reflection questions:
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For more real-life examples of how leaders healed from their past pain to tame their triggers and scale their impact, read my book Blind Spots: How Great Leaders Uncover Problems and Unleash Performance. As a leader, you can play a pivotal role in helping team members discover their latent fears, develop faith in their work, and retrain their brains to become the best versions of themselves.
P.S. Want to gain invaluable insights into your blind spots right now, that’s why we built www.feedbackfriend.ai. Get the feedback you need for free today.
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Marisa Murray, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Marisa Murray is a leadership expert and executive coach with three Amazon best-sellers: Work Smart, Iterate!, and Blind Spots. She is CEO of Leaderley International and a TEDx speaker, dedicated to helping individuals and teams achieve superior performance. Her epiphany that "Blind Spots are the Key to Breakthroughs" inspired the creation of FeedbackFriend.ai, an AI-powered tool democratizing feedback access. Recognized by Manage HR magazine in the Top 10 Emerging Executive Coaching Companies for 2023, Leaderley serves clientele from the upper echelons of Fortune 500 companies. Through Marisa's writing, coaching, speaking, or 360s—her mission is to cultivate leaders that accelerate positive change.
