Trauma Informed Leader

Brain fog at work is real, and this piece explains what causes it. After a difficult season, your brain runs extra work in the background that takes cognitive resources away from focus, memory, and planning. Five practical steps you can start using this week, plus guidance for the employer who wants to support you well without asking for private details.

Workplace stress conversations often collapse three very different conditions into one word. A practical framework to tell whether your workplace is hard, harmful, or toxic, plus what to do at each tier.

For three weeks straight, I drove to work with my heart pounding before anything had even happened. Three practical self-regulation tools you can use at your desk, plus an honest look at when self-regulation is not the answer.

Most leadership content teaches what to do. The work that runs underneath all of it is the state your body is in when you walk into the room. Your nervous system as a leader sets the ceiling for what your team can access: their creativity, their honesty, their willingness to take risks. Three practices a trauma-informed leader can start using this week to lift the ceiling.

Reflective supervision is a structured, recurring conversation between a leader and the person doing the work, focused on the person rather than the work itself. It originated in clinical fields where the emotional weight of the work was obvious. Every trauma-informed workplace needs it for the same reason. People who carry hard work over time without a regular place to process it eventually break down, leave, or both. A reflective supervision practice is the protected hour t

What a trauma-informed leader asks in one-on-ones that most managers miss, with question sets to use this week for the employee and the leader