four women in ShelterBox team shirts stand in front of a mountainous landscape.

This is part 3 of a multi-part series on Dolly Chugh’s The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This book is about how to move from believing in good, with all of its slippery connotations, to building structures in our lives that allow us to be better, and make more connections. Each post will start with a quote from the book. Leave comments for me below. Let’s talk about what you think. And you can buy Chugh’s book here, so we can discuss more at length.

…”[Brittany’s] experiences as a black women had given her first-hand reasons to be a believer, but they did not equip her with the skills to be a builder…[Her] beliefs about her ability to grow were necessary, thought not sufficient. The beliefs she had about the people around her also mattered, specifically, her belief about what business school professor Amy Edmondson calls “psychological safety.” Edmondson…has shown that when a group believes they can speak up, ask for help, admit mistakes, propose ideas, take blame, confess uncertainty, and disclose inability, they learn more and perform better.”

_The Person You Mean to Be, Dolly Chugh, pg. 30

As I’ve grown, I’ve sought out psychological safety, even without really knowing it. Part of this is just figuring out what makes me feel good. It sounds simple, but it’s more than that: It’s about defining what you value.

For instance: I run, sporadically. I’ll happily train for half-marathons and longer events, but I don’t love to run. What I consistently seek is a thing loosely reflected in the runner’s high. I always relish being outdoors, and I like the extra-observational quality I seem to acquire when I run (I notice a lot when I’m out), but really, I’m chasing the sensation of having finished a run, or the idea of being strong enough to go out every day, if I want to. I want to know I can.

It took me years to figure this out. Now, when I try to talk myself out of a jog, it’s easier for me to talk myself back into it: I just need to embrace the Bacchanalian side of me. Whereas before, I used to wear T-shirts that said things like “Yes it hurts” and believe that I enjoyed the sensation of being tired, now I say things like “One beer for two more miles” and “I get to rest tomorrow if I can just manage this many miles.”

Watercolor dinosaur--T Rex?--in sneakers, sunglasses, and a polka-dot racing jersey.
Me, when I run now.

(Also, my new puppy is getting very good at running, and he seems to enjoy the time we spend together. I could be projecting.)

This is not a perfect science. Clearly I don’t mind the suffering, and on some level I enjoy the burning muscles and sweaty face. It’s just that my personal value system places a higher value on joy than it does ick.

So how does this translate to the things I value in psychological safety? In the example that comes right before the passage quoted above, Chugh describes an organization that is “stumbling upwards.” It is trying really hard to do diversity and inclusion, but every once in awhile it fails hard, even as it’s putting in measures like including minority members on its board.

She lists the risks people feel they can take in safe psychological spaces, like admitting mistakes and taking blame, and that got me thinking about the safe psychological spaces that populate my life, and whether or not I can pinpoint the qualities of those spaces that allow me to perform better. I’ve chosen a few of them below, and I hope you’ll share some of yours with me.

  1. An all-woman disaster-relief team. I volunteer for ShelterBox, an international disaster-relief agency. Most of our team members are male, so it’s rare that an all-woman team gets matched up together on deployment. On my thirteenth deployment, I finally landed on one.
    ShelterBox puts all response team members through the same rigorous training, so we all know what’s in each other’s kit; what the safety protocol is; what our remit is, and so on. These provide us with a basic level of psychological safety when we’re in questionable places. But having an all-woman team made things like complaining about your period totally okay. Being able to tell someone, “I got my period,” and having them exhibit empathy instead of “I don’t know what to do with that” is extraordinary.
    Also, my teammates put “Yi Shun, CALL YOUR HUSBAND” on the team calendar because I was deployed over my anniversary. That was pretty great, too. I’m not sure a team of men would have thought of that. Not having to consider whether or not it was appropriate was aces.

    (from left to right: Kate, Ursula, myself, and Amy. This team was deployed just before International Women’s Day, which felt appropriate.)
    This example speaks to my preference for a low-stakes default state. I prefer to just tell people things, for instance, without having to anticipate a bad or embarrassed or embarrassing response. Both these things—my period, which can cause fatigue, and worse, extra extra hangriness; and my anniversary, which was causing guilt—needed to be dealt with. Being in a safe environment allowed me to allow the team to help with those.
  2. The team at Tahoma Literary Review. Four of us run this literary magazine, which is trying to add to the status quo of the literary-magazine industry. We are not affiliated with a college or university, and we pay our writers and our staff. (This is an unusual thing in the world of literary magazines.) We are nowhere close to even federal minimum wage, but we are working towards a new model that we hope will inspire change.
    We have published a lot of first-timers and undergraduates and strive for diversity and inclusion, and most of our meetings are fun.
    We share similar communication styles, or we know enough about each other to be able to parse what we are each trying to say even when we stumble. Because we are all remote, we all have to be really, really good about communicating our needs and worries to each other, and for the most part we are able to do so. When we have stress points, I think we are pretty good at saying so.
    I think much of this has to do with our commonality of cause. Because we all ultimately want the same thing for our magazine, we can surmount more and take more risks with each other.
  3. Southern New Hampshire University. I teach in the online MFA program here. I like it a lot, even though its mascot is…meh.

    (Frankly, I find him terrifying.)
    The entire MFA is online, so we need to have a pretty good support system for both students and faculty members. In this program, I’ve never lacked for answers or felt lost. When I need help, I can choose from a student’s academic advisor, my own team lead, or one of two associate deans to communicate with. Of course I need to do some due diligence to ensure that I am communicating with the right person, but I don’t ever feel alone or unsupported.
    This system, maybe because of its structure as an online education tool, puts communication first. We are asked to respond to all students within 24 hours maximum. And we post welcome messages at the beginning of every term and introduce each week in the term with an announcement of some sort.
    SNHU places a high value on constant communication. This creates a feeling of safety for me, and has allowed me to weigh in on everything from diversity initiatives to internships in my short time with the program.
  4. My high school friends.

    These are the women I have known since high school or before. They are people who already know what I was, and so are not expecting anything more than my teenaged self, which was probably the worst version of me. They allow for flexibility and allow me to ask a lot of stupid questions.
    This relationship speaks to the part of me that values the (sometimes harmful) ideology behind family. You can make mistakes around each other and you can inadvertently hurt each other, but you can’t imagine not seeing each other, so you make steps to move past it. This relationship also allows me to talk through ideas even when they are not fully formed, something that’s echoed in my relationship with my husband and my brother.

These are the values that underscore my sense of psychological safety and contribute to my growth mindset. In her book, Dr. Chugh invites the reader to think about where you feel safe, and I’ll echo her here: What are your psychological safe spots or relationships, and what values do you think they underscore? Tell me in the comments below.