Over the past few years, I've found myself doing more training with people in leadership positions. Something has shifted. The requests aren't just about implementing trauma-informed practices or supporting specific initiatives—they're about a more fundamental challenge that leaders are naming with increasing urgency: people are struggling in ways that feel different than before. The pandemic's social disruptions seem to have revealed (or perhaps accelerated) changes that were already underway. Many employees are more isolated, less connected to colleagues and community. Social anxiety has intensified for people who once navigated workplace interactions easily. The relationship to work itself has fundamentally changed for many; questions about meaning, purpose, and the place of work in a full life are no longer background concerns but active negotiations. In this context, the need for leaders who understand mental health as a crucial part of ongoing organizational capacity has become essential rather than optional. This article, which emerged from those conversations and training sessions, distills what I tell leaders who are trying to create workplaces that support mental health rather than merely accommodate it.
Starting with the Wrong Question
Most leaders approaching workplace mental health ask the wrong first question. They want to know how to help colleagues. That's a laudable aim. But the more essential question—the one that doesn't have anything to do with other people but determines whether any intervention with them will be effective—is this: How aware am I of my own patterns of emotional reactivity, and what am I doing to understand and manage them?
Your ability to assist someone else who is in emotional distress depends almost entirely on how well you understand your own emotional challenges and can manage your own reactivity. This isn't a platitude about self-care. It's how human nervous systems actually work. If you haven't done the foundational work of understanding your own patterns, your attempts to support others will likely be ineffective at best, and potentially harmful at worst.
So, let's start there: with self-awareness.
The Inward Foundation: Why Self-Awareness Comes First
When most people think about empathy or supporting others in distress, they imagine it as an outward-directed skill—something you do for someone else. This is the fundamental misunderstanding that leads to so much trouble.
Empathy is an inward skill first. It's a way of being, not a technique or action. Before you can create a steady, trustworthy presence for someone else, you need to understand the emotional undercurrents that shape your own behavior. This is challenging for everyone. It requires noticing what is happening in the moment and managing your own internal feelings, histories, responses, biases, and reactions—all simultaneously.
Consider what happens when an employee comes to you visibly distressed. In those moments, your nervous system begins responding before conscious awareness catches up. You might feel:
- Tightening in your chest or stomach
- An urgent need to fix the problem immediately
- Discomfort with silence or emotional expression
- Subtle irritation or impatience
- A desire to redirect or minimize (I'm sure it's not that bad)
- Anxiety about saying the wrong thing
- Your own memories surfacing unbidden
These reactions aren't wrong. They're how nervous systems work. But if you're not aware of them—if you haven't learned to notice and manage your own reactivity—these responses will drive your behavior in ways that may not serve the person in front of you. You'll be responding to your own discomfort rather than to what they actually need.
The practice of self-awareness means developing the capacity to notice these internal responses as they happen, to understand where they come from, and to make conscious choices about how to proceed rather than being run by automatic patterns. Becoming aware of your own reactivity, managing it, understanding where it comes from, what it means, and what to do about it—these are all aspects of self-awareness, which is a lifelong odyssey for everyone.
Where Your Reactions Come From: The Developmental Thread
Understanding your own emotional patterns requires awareness of how those patterns developed. The way we respond to stress, conflict, and emotional intensity in adulthood has deep roots in our early experiences, in the many ways that childhood experiences—particularly adverse or traumatic ones—shape the architecture of the nervous system. When children grow up in environments where they don't feel consistently safe, where emotional needs go unmet, where there's unpredictability, neglect, or harm, their nervous systems adapt. They develop strategies to survive those conditions.
These adaptations include:
- Hypervigilance to threat or danger
- Difficulty regulating emotional intensity
- Challenges with trust and vulnerability
- Patterns of withdrawal or defensiveness
- Trouble reading others' emotional cues accurately
- Tendency toward either over-responsibility or learned helplessness
- Difficulty setting boundaries or recognizing others' boundaries
These aren't character flaws or personality problems; they're adaptive strategies that made sense in the original context. The challenge is that they persist into adulthood, showing up in workplace dynamics even when the original threat is long past.
The statistics are sobering. Research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) shows that experiences like abuse, neglect, household dysfunction, parental mental illness, or exposure to violence are extraordinarily common. In Canadian populations, roughly two-thirds of adults report at least one category of childhood adversity, and about one in eight report four or more. These experiences correlate strongly with adult mental health challenges, chronic health conditions, and difficulties in relationships and work.
This means that in any workplace, most people—including leaders—are carrying unresolved impacts from childhood that shape their adult functioning.
When you understand this developmental thread, you can begin to recognize your own patterns of reactivity not as personal failings but as adaptive strategies that once served a purpose. That shift—from self-criticism to curiosity about origins—creates the foundation for changing those patterns.
Where Emotions Actually Live
One of the most important insights from trauma research is this: unresolved emotions don't reside primarily in your thoughts or memories. They reside in your body. This is why bringing attention to physical sensations—through breathing practices, mindfulness, or somatic awareness—can activate strong emotions in people (including leaders) who are carrying unresolved emotional challenges.
Your nervous system records experiences as patterns of sensation, arousal, and response. When something in the present reminds your system of past distress—even if you're not consciously aware of the connection—your body responds as if the original threat is happening now. This is what's meant by being activated.
For leaders, this has practical implications. If you haven't developed awareness of how distress shows up in your own body, you won't recognize it in the moment. You'll find yourself reacting—becoming defensive, shutting down, getting angry, withdrawing—without understanding why. And because you're in a position of power, your unmanaged reactivity has larger ripple effects.
Developing somatic awareness means learning to notice:
- Where tension resides in your body
- How your breathing changes under stress
- What sensations accompany different emotional states
- The subtle signals indicating you're becoming activated
- The difference between feeling grounded and feeling dysregulated
These are the foundational skills required to maintain presence when someone else is in distress. If you can't sense your own nervous system activation, you can't manage it. And if you can't manage it, you'll either avoid difficult conversations entirely or have them in ways that escalate distress rather than contain it.
The Companionable Relationship With Difficult Feelings
One of the most important shifts in developing emotional self-awareness is moving from an adversarial relationship with difficult feelings to what might be called a companionable one. Resolving difficult feelings does not mean that they go away.
Most people's default stance toward uncomfortable emotions is resistance: "I shouldn't feel this way," "I need to get rid of this feeling," "This is unacceptable." This resistance creates additional suffering—you're not just experiencing the original discomfort, you're also fighting against it.
The companionable approach means developing the capacity to think: "This is uncomfortable, and I can be with it" or "This feeling makes sense given what I'm experiencing." This shift—from resistance to acceptance, from judgment to curiosity—creates more room for whatever you're feeling and paradoxically makes those feelings less overwhelming.
Difficult feelings are part of your experience. They carry information, and you can coexist with them without being consumed by them. When you're not desperately trying to avoid or eliminate your own discomfort, you can be present with someone else's distress without needing to fix it immediately.
Empathy is Not Outward Action
Here's where many well-intentioned leaders go wrong: they believe empathy is something you do—a set of actions or techniques you apply when someone is struggling. They learn about trauma, attend a workshop, read some articles, and conclude they now know how to help people in distress.
This is dangerous. A little knowledge can cause harm. It's like encouraging someone to fly a helicopter after reading the manual. Reading about trauma or thinking about trauma is not enough. Interacting with people in distress as "practice" for developing your skills can harm both them and you.
True empathy is not an outward action; it's an inward state of being that you cultivate first in yourself. Only then can it extend outward into your interactions. Staff who haven't done this internal work may mistakenly believe that knowing the basics of trauma equips them to intervene effectively. They approach empathy as a conversational skill—what to say, what to do—without cultivating the inward steadiness that makes genuine empathy possible.
Empathy requires:
- Humility: Recognizing how much you don't know about another person's experience
- Self-awareness: Understanding your own triggers, biases, and patterns
- Personal healing: Working on your own unresolved emotional material
- Ongoing practice: Not a one-time learning outcome but a continuous orientation
- The capacity to hold discomfort: Staying present with strong emotions without rushing to resolve them
Empathy is learned through exploration and experimentation, through practice and reflection, not through memorizing what to say or following scripts.
The Skills That Follow From Awareness
Once you've begun developing self-awareness—noticing your patterns, understanding their origins, sensing them in your body, moving toward a companionable relationship with difficult feelings—you can begin building the specific skills that allow you to support others effectively.
Congruence: The Foundation of Trust
Most people become emotionally distressed when there is a contrast between what someone says and what they do. In situations where emotions might already be amplified, consistency between words, body language, and actions is crucial.
People are exquisitely attuned to consistency. Any mismatch—saying "I'm here for you" while checking your phone, expressing concern with an irritated tone, claiming to have time while visibly rushed—undermines trust immediately.
Congruence means bringing your words, body language, emotional expression, and intentions into alignment. This is difficult. It requires that you actually be present rather than performing presence. It means you can't fake it.
In workplace hierarchies where employees are already scanning for safety cues from leadership, your congruence—or lack of it—has an outsized impact.
Presence as an Active Skill
Presence is an active skill, not a passive state. It's not just nodding sympathetically or saying "uh-huh" while someone talks. It's the practice of maintaining your own groundedness while remaining open to another person's emotional experience. This requires:
Staying with discomfort: Most people want to move away from emotional intensity quickly—either by fixing, minimizing, changing the subject, or offering premature reassurance. Presence means tolerating the discomfort of not knowing what to say while someone is in pain.
Managing the impulse to intervene: When someone is upset, you'll feel urges to intervene, advise, or solve. In situations of emotional distress, a listener who immediately pivots to advocacy or solutions can cause harm by removing or minimizing emotional processing, which is foundational to healing. In most situations, it's best to lead with empathy. Solutions and strategies come later.
The practice of pause: One of the most powerful interventions is also the simplest: pause. When someone shares something difficult, pause. Sense the feelings in your own body. Take a breath. Then respond (or don't—sometimes continued presence is the response). This sequence—pause, sense, breathe—creates space for genuine connection rather than reactive problem-solving.
Attending to what's underneath: People often present with surface-level problems when what's actually happening is more complex. Presence means being curious about what might be underneath without interrogating or diagnosing.
Tracking multiple streams: You're sensing your own bodily responses, noticing the other person's verbal and non-verbal communication, tracking the emotional tone, and making ongoing choices about how to respond. This is why presence is an active skill—it demands full engagement.
Holding Space Without Collapsing
Containment is the capacity to remain steady and available while someone else experiences intense emotion, without either absorbing their distress (becoming overwhelmed yourself) or deflecting it (minimizing, fixing, or avoiding). It's the skill of being a sturdy container that can hold someone's experience without being shattered by it or refusing to receive it.
This requires boundary awareness. You need to know where you end and another person begins, to recognize that you can care deeply about someone's suffering without making their feelings your responsibility to resolve. Many helping professionals struggle with this distinction, either becoming enmeshed in others' distress or maintaining such rigid boundaries that genuine connection becomes impossible.
Empathy is inherently boundaried. It's not about merging your experience with someone else's or feeling overwhelmed by their emotions. Developing this skill requires that you balance openness with healthy boundaries—remaining present without being subsumed by another person's pain, or being dismissive of it.
Practical strategies for containment include:
- Grounding techniques that help you stay present in your own body
- Breath awareness that maintains your own regulation
- Mental reminders that this is their experience, not yours
- Clear understanding of your role boundaries (you're not their therapist)
- Knowing when to bring in additional support or resources
Authentic Language
Authentic and empathetic conversation works best when you're able to be yourself, use your own forms of language and speech, and feel comfortable with what you're saying. This does not mean you should say anything you want. Rather, it means that whatever words you know, whatever styles of speech you use, have within them the possibility to be used in helpful and empathetic ways.
Learning conversational skills for supporting emotional distress cannot be reduced to scripts or techniques. Research shows that new skills are learned faster and more effectively when learners are encouraged to explore and experiment in their own unique ways. The same research (from Ecological Dynamics theory, if you really want to know) shows that expert feedback can be both helpful and harmful, and that it needs to be timed effectively.
This means that workshops teaching specific phrases to say often miss the mark. The skills that matter—noticing your reactivity, staying present with distress, maintaining congruence—can't be learned formulaically. They require practice, reflection, and ongoing adjustment in your own unique way.
Recognizing When to Stop
One of the most essential skills is recognizing when not to continue a conversation. If the following signals are not present, back off or get help:
- The person is willing to engage: They're responding, making eye contact (or culturally appropriate connection), showing openness to conversation
- They have the capacity to process: They're not completely dysregulated, not in active crisis requiring immediate intervention
- You have capacity: You're grounded enough to maintain presence, not triggered or overwhelmed yourself
- The setting is appropriate: There's enough privacy, time, and safety for the conversation
- You're clear on your role: You know your boundaries and aren't trying to be their therapist
If these conditions aren't met, the most empathetic thing you can do is acknowledge limits: "I can see this is really difficult. I want to support you, but I think this might need more than I can offer right now. Let's figure out what to do."
Recognizing Distress
Most leadership training provides checklists of warning signs: changes in performance, mood, appearance, attendance. While not wrong, these lists miss the more fundamental skill: noticing patterns and changes specific to the individual in front of you.
This requires that you actually know your employees well enough to recognize when something has shifted. It means paying attention not just to obvious crisis signs but to subtle changes in:
- How someone engages in meetings (more withdrawn, more aggressive)
- The quality of their contributions (less creative, more rote)
- Their interactions with colleagues (avoiding certain people, increased conflict)
- Their responsiveness (taking longer to reply, tone shifts)
- Energy and presence (going through motions versus engaged)
You're not diagnosing mental illness. You're noticing that something has changed for this particular person. This distinction is crucial: you're attending to patterns, not symptoms.
It's also important to recognize that high-functioning doesn't mean fine. Many people experiencing significant mental health challenges become skilled at masking their distress at work. They meet all their deadlines, attend all their meetings, and present a competent front—while privately struggling intensely. Your role isn't to ferret out hidden suffering, but to create conditions where people feel safe enough to let you know when they need support.
The Conversation
When you notice concerning changes, the most powerful intervention available is a direct conversation. Many leaders avoid these discussions, fearing they'll say the wrong thing. But silence and avoidance often increase isolation and distress.
The conversation structure matters less than the quality of presence you bring to it. That said, understanding how we engage makes an enormous difference in what becomes possible.
The Problem With Questions
Many well-intentioned leaders approach these conversations through questions: "How are you feeling?" "What's wrong?" "Do you want to talk about it?" These seem like natural starting points, but they carry a subtle problem. Questions—even well-intentioned ones—can inadvertently shift the conversation away from the other person's experience and toward our own needs as listeners.
When we ask questions, we are, in a sense, directing the conversation according to our framework, our curiosity, our discomfort with silence. Questions make the conversation about us—our need to understand, to categorize, to know what to do next. They put the other person in the position of answering our questions rather than exploring their experience.
The difference between "It seems like you're carrying something heavy" and "Are you okay?" is the difference between offering presence and seeking reassurance. The first invites; the second probes.
Prompts That Reflect and Invite
Instead of questions, we can offer presence through prompts that reflect and invite rather than query:
- Just checking in...
- It looks like...
- It sounds like...
- I get the sense that...
- It seems like...
- So it's like...
- Help me understand...
- What you're saying is...
These prompts open space without directing it. They reflect what we notice without presuming to know what it means. They invite the other person to continue, to deepen, to clarify—on their own terms.
"It sounds like today was difficult" leaves room for the person to say more, or to say nothing, or to correct your perception. "Was today difficult?" puts them in the position of answering your question rather than exploring their experience.
This distinction may seem subtle, but it matters enormously. These prompts create a fundamentally different conversational dynamic—one in which you walk alongside the person's experience rather than interrogate it.
Making It Your Own
These prompts must be individualized to each person's temperament, background, and style of speaking. What works naturally in one person's vocabulary may sound stilted in another's. One leader comfortable with metaphor might say "It's like you're walking through fog today." Another might simply offer "I'm noticing you're quieter than usual." The specific words matter less than the orientation they represent: reflecting rather than questioning, inviting rather than directing, being with rather than solving.
In practice, this might sound like:
Instead of: "Are you stressed about the deadline?"
Try: "It seems like the deadline is weighing on you."
Instead of: "What's bothering you?"
Try: "I get the sense that something's shifted for you recently."
Instead of: "Do you want to talk about it?"
Try: "Just checking in... you haven't seemed yourself lately."
Instead of: "How can I help?"
Try: "It sounds like you're dealing with something challenging right now."
The Structure of Presence
When approaching these conversations, a simple framework helps:
- Name what you've observed specifically
"I've noticed you've missed several meetings this month, which isn't typical for you."
"It seems like you've been more withdrawn with the team lately." - Pause and create space
After naming your observation, pause. Don't immediately fill the silence with more words or questions. This pause signals that you're genuinely interested in what they might say; you're not just performing concern. - Listen without rushing to fix
When a colleague responds to your presence—when they begin to share what they're experiencing—your role remains the same: to listen, to reflect, to stay grounded in your own center while holding space for theirs. You do not need to have answers. You do not need to fix what they're feeling. You need only to be present, authentic, and steady.
This is where all your self-awareness practice matters. Your discomfort with silence, with emotional expression, with not having answers—all of that will surface. Notice it, breathe, stay present. Try to sense feelings in your own body, as sensations. Remember to give time for the other person to respond.
- Continue with reflective prompts as needed
If they begin to share, you can continue using reflective prompts: "So it sounds like..." or "Help me understand..." or "What you're saying is..." These keep you in the role of witnessing rather than directing. - Separate wellbeing from performance when necessary
You can care about someone as a person while also maintaining job expectations. But in the initial conversation, lead with concern, not performance management. - Offer resources without pressuring
"We have an Employee Assistance Program that might be helpful—would you like information about it?" respects autonomy more than "You need to talk to someone." - Check for safety
If someone mentions thoughts of suicide or self-harm, or if you're concerned about immediate safety to themselves or others, this moves beyond your scope. Know your organization's crisis protocols and use them.
What Not to Do
Avoid:
- Rapid-fire questions: "What happened? When did it start? How are you coping? Have you talked to anyone?"
- Premature solutions: "Have you tried...?" "What you should do is..."
- Minimizing: "I'm sure it's not that bad" or "Everyone goes through this"
- Making it about you: "I know exactly how you feel because I..."
- Forcing disclosure: "Come on, you can tell me"
- Diagnosing: "It sounds like you're depressed" or "That's anxiety"
The Goal
Remember: the goal isn't to extract information or solve their problem. The goal is to demonstrate that you've noticed, that you care, and that support is available. Supporting colleagues does not always require formal interventions or dramatic moments. Often, the most powerful support happens through simple, consistent gestures offered genuinely and with time to hear whatever follows.
In a trauma-informed culture, checking in becomes routine rather than exceptional—a signal of care rather than alarm. These moments work best when they come from a place of genuine presence rather than obligation, when you, as a leader, are prepared to actually listen to whatever unfolds.
When Individual Support Isn't Enough: The Systems Lens
Even the most self-aware, skilled leader cannot resolve systemic problems through individual conversations. If multiple people are showing signs of distress, if high performers keep burning out, if mental health seems like a pervasive issue rather than isolated struggles, the problem is organizational, not individual.
Mental health emerges from the dynamic interaction between people and their environments. This ecological perspective means looking at:
Workload and expectations: Are deadlines consistently unrealistic? Are people expected to be always available? Is there chronic understaffing?
Autonomy and control: Do people have meaningful input into their work? Can they make decisions within their scope? Or is everything micromanaged?
Clarity and stability: Are expectations clear? Or do priorities shift constantly, leaving people uncertain about what actually matters?
Relationships and belonging: Do people trust each other? Can they have difficult conversations? Or is there toxicity, gossip, or undermining?
Recognition and growth: Do people feel valued? Is there path for development? Or are contributions taken for granted?
Psychological safety: Can people speak up, admit mistakes, ask for help, or challenge ideas without fear of punishment or ridicule?
These systemic factors have more impact on workplace mental health than any wellness program or individual intervention. If the environment is chronically depleting people's psychological resources, your empathy skills won't be enough.
This is where leadership has the most leverage: not just in responding well when people struggle, but in reducing the conditions that create struggle in the first place. Your self-awareness extends to organizational awareness—noticing patterns, questioning "that's how we've always done it," and being willing to change structures that harm even when they're convenient for productivity. You need to put skin in the game.
The Long Practice
Supporting mental health as a leader isn't a competency you acquire and then possess. It's an ongoing practice that requires sustained attention to your own patterns, continuous learning about human development and distress, and genuine commitment to creating workplaces where people can bring their full humanity.
The most important thing you can do is commit to your own ongoing journey of understanding your emotional patterns, managing your reactivity, and developing authentic presence. Everything else follows from that foundation.
When leaders engage this work genuinely—not as a performance or program, but as a real investigation of their own patterns and possibilities—the impacts ripple through entire organizations. People feel safer, more seen, more able to do their best work. Not because the leader has become everyone's therapist, but because the leader has become more fully present, more aware of their own patterns, and therefore more capable of creating conditions where others can thrive.
