How Psychological Safety Allowed Me Survive… and Thrive
My first job in the nonprofit sector felt like a dream job when I was doing it. I thought I could be happy doing that job forever. It allowed me to contribute to something I’m passionate about, create a community where I felt like I belonged, and hone many skills I didn’t know I had until I needed to start using them.
When I had this job, I didn’t know much about much, and I didn’t know much about myself. I didn’t know how much of myself to dedicate to my work, but I knew that it felt good to be good at something. I didn’t know words like organizational culture or psychological safety, and I didn’t know how to listen to my own body’s warning signs that something was amiss.
That job ended up being pretty terrible for my mental and physical health, and I’m committed to telling my story and using it to help other nonprofit workers set boundaries and build resilience. As I was leaving that situation, someone who served as a guide and a catalyst entered my professional life and helped me to see the ways in which I wasn’t psychologically safe because my supervisor brought a lot of personal challenges to our professional relationship.
Previously, I had worked as a therapist with children in their homes and communities, and then I was a professional nanny. These roles didn’t really lend themselves to a line between personal and professional, and everyone I had worked with to that point had treated me with respect. So when I had a boss who had a big codependent part, a lot of emotional instability in their home life, and virtually nonexistent boundaries between personal and professional, I didn’t know anything was wrong for a long time.
For much of my time in that job, I felt psychologically safe - free to express my ideas and opinions, to try things out, to make mistakes, and to afford the people I supervised the same grace. I excelled in what I was doing and was constantly being recognized for my job performance and outcomes. However, for even more of the time, I was afraid. I was afraid of my boss’s instability, of not being good enough or working hard enough, and of this precarious thing we were building coming to an end when I depended on it so much for my identity and self-worth.
And come to an end it did. There came a time when it was clear that my boss’s mistreatment of me was something that I was expected to pass along to the people who reported to me, and only then did it become clear that it was unacceptable. I had different standards for others than I had for myself, and realizing that was a wake up call that I couldn’t continue to remain in the situation. When I decided that it was time to move on, the organization had become so dependent on me that I knew that removing myself was tantamount to removing its very foundation and destroying it. It closed for business six weeks after my last day. It took me years to stop feeling like this was my personal failure.
I could probably fill an entire book with all the lessons I learned from that situation, but I’ll highlight just two of them for now:
I committed to understanding how to build sustainability into everything I build. I don’t want anything I create to be solely dependent on me. Now, I teach my clients how to do the same thing because responsible organizational leadership and program management is built on a strong institutional foundation that isn’t dependent on any one individual. And those of us who are building for the people we serve—and not ourselves—want our impact to outlast us.
From that point on, I built my life to protect me from that situation ever happening again. Since that experience, I’ve lived through a couple of trials and learned more about myself than I ever thought possible. I also emerged as someone who is self-reliant but effectively collaborates with others because I know that skills that complement my own ultimately make me stronger. And I am dedicated to taking what I’ve learned and powering purpose-driven people to not only do great work but also live great lives. It’s not just possible, it’s required if we’re ever going to realize the world we’ve envisioned.
Now that I’ve had the opportunity to create my own job and choose who I work with, I am experiencing the highest degree of psychological safety in my career. Sure, my skills continuously increase, but the speed at which my confidence has increased has outpaced that exponentially, and both of those things are due to the that I am free learn, grow, try, and fail without restriction.
It also means that I approach tough conversations and sticky situations head on, with enthusiasm and surety, while being grounded in my body. My first nonprofit job resulted in me having shingles and stomach ulcers in my twenties, and now I know that my body can tell me things about what I’m experiencing—though that’s a story for another day.
