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1. Empower your people
What sets somebody up for a trauma are two things in particular. One of them is being able to do something, being able to make a difference, being able to change the situation. So as long as you can change things around, you have some say about how to change things around, you’re likely to be able to find something that helps you to work with whatever happened to you. So for a company, what’s really important is for people to have freedom, to have options to do different things, to have an option to speak your mind and to speak your voice and to say, “I believe this,” and to be listened to. You don’t necessarily have to do it, but at least you need to be seen for who you are, what your talents are, what your contributions are, and that people know your name. And people know that you are a particular person who is different from the next person.
2. Cultivate a sense of community
Number two is social support, synchronicity. The way you get the sense of pleasure and joy is by being in tune with other people. You don’t get a sense of pleasure and joy by yourself. You get it because you and I are telling each other a joke and we laugh or you and I play tennis together and we lob that ball, right? Or you and I do this hike together and we do it together. And so pleasure and joy is very much an interpersonal process of moving together and being in sync with each other. I’m very intrigued by how the Japanese tradition — I know how it’s going now — is for workers to get together in the morning and to sing together and to dance together. For a Western person, that sounds bizarre. Once you know something about the seat of pleasure and joy that makes perfect sense because I love to sing and I’ve sang in choruses. I also play some musical instruments. I know that singing with other people is a major source of pleasure and cohesion. I like to say to people, nobody’s ever killed themselves after singing Handel’s “Messiah,” after singing the “Hallelujah” chorus, because when you sing together with other people you get a sense of cohesion and pleasure. Even though the person next to you may not be somebody you like very much, by being able to create something together, you get that sense of cohesion and pleasure. And so anything that you can do to get people rhythmically and musically in touch with each other will enhance their sense of meaning and pleasure in the work that they’re doing.
We’ve seen this in our trauma work. With the kids we work with, we don’t talk about the details of their trauma. The main thing we do is we create these conditions where that frightened part of their brain that tells me “I’m in danger — people are going to hurt me” gets deactivated by having them move together, play basketball together. Teach them martial arts, singing, theater so they get a sense of being mutually reciprocally involved with other people where they get a sense of when I do that, you feel good about me, when I do that, you feel bad about me, and vice versa. We need to make each other feel good about each other. My team and I this last week went on a white water rafting trip in the headlands of the Hudson River. We got very cold and we got very wet, but it’s exhilarating doing something together and having that deep sense of community of doing something. And we did it together. So the sense of community and people being there for each other is a critical part of surviving and thriving.