I'm Lindsay, and it's time to gather at the well. We're on a mission to microdose wellness, create human centered systems and retain our greatest asset, our people. We believe it's time for podcasts that teach moving beyond thought leadership and towards change leadership. Join us and our friends at We Are For Good as we model the way with concrete examples from the field and gain tangible tools, because it's possible to build adult work cultures we don't need to heal from. Let's get into it. Welcome back to a special episode of gather at the well, hosted by our partners at We Are For Good. This episode is titled, When hate calls, and I want to give your nervous system a little bit of a heads up that the content, while definitely could evoke some discomfort, some pain, some wounds, there are also some learnings that I'm hoping to share with you all, some healing and some critical hope. So I thought we had until January, but it turns out we don't. If you've been gathering at the well along the past few months, you know that we wrapped our five part series and even recorded the sixth recap episode, and just a day or so later, I got a harassing call, and I've chosen to come to the podcast community, because I could have kept it a secret. I could have let my fear and anxiety dictate my behaviors. But instead, I want to leave some of the baggage at the door. I want to complete this experience through my nervous system, and I want to move on with clarity, with continued improvement and growth and just lighter. That's my truth, and so I'm coming to share this with you all with a tender heart. I hope you hear me. I'm living in that complexity of leading an organization, and yet, through this very deeply personal episode, I'm going to take my hat off just a little. I can never fully take it off as the executive director of this nonprofit. But in a crisis, there are no frills. There's no masking. It's just your raw identity and truth. So here goes and activation warning. You can skip ahead about 30 seconds to miss the violent message that could trigger your nervous system. So picture this. I'm seated at my desk coaching a superintendent. It's Friday morning at about 943 and I receive a number I don't know. Now, if you really know me, you would know that anytime I get a number I don't know, I answer it. Want to know why? Just in case, it's MacKenzie Scott, what do you mean? Why any other Ed answers their phone? But this time, I didn't, because clients first so I saw I had a voice mail, and at about 10am just 15 minutes later, I took a moment to listen. Here's what it said in a mocking voice, yeah, I'm calling to get a affinity group. The one I want for my college is whites only and straights only, you effing racist, effing kill yourself. That's a lot the trolls are going to troll, but to be contacted on my personal device and the safety of my home on a work morning was a lot. It felt like a violation for many reasons. And I wanted to say, friend, Fridays are sacred. We love a great Friday, a chill Friday, just let me be and as a trauma survivor, I have a tool kit, so I'd love to take us through the process that I used, and to be honest, I had to do this several times across the day. But as you know, I love to tone my vagus nerve. I love bagel toning exercises of all sorts. And so I followed the sequence. I splashed my face with cold water, I swayed and I focused on five audible out breaths. If you want to pause here and actually try the sequence, including the cold splash. I welcome it. But for the sake of this moment, I'm going to invite us just to do the second and third step that I've offered. So you might just ground your feet and. It might adjust your spine getting comfortable in your seat. You might just rock from side to side, front and back. You might make little circles with your body. Find this way that feels most nourishing to you. For me, it's just rocking side to side, and I'm going to do five audible out breaths, starting in the nose and out the mouth.
Each time, allowing my chest and belly to rise with power and with intention.
I that was a lot.
It's a lot, even telling you all here in this way, and yet I feel balanced. I feel clarity and in my certainty, because I've done the work to process this incident. It's something that happened. It's not happening to me in this moment, and being able to delay or put space in between an activating event, and our response is critical. So this thing happens, how do you cope? I started to think about how I would title what I did, and I'm going to call it a CRC, a continuous replenishment cycle that entire 24 hours, the first day that this event occurred, I worked through this cycle, and if you come to our blog, we're going to create a visual for you that you can share with your teams, your clients, anyone in the world who might face these types of incidences. Because this is not the first time, and it will not be the last, not for me and not for organizations and leaders across this country, the CRC starts with attending to your basic needs. So in the face of a crisis, you need to make sure that if you are hungry, if you haven't drink any water, if you need to use the restroom, if you feel physically unsafe, you need to tend to your basic needs. The second step is to engage in somatics, to try and get your frontal lobe back online, to access your reason and your brilliance, the leadership skills, your training perhaps, then it's doing the work there is going to be follow up after any major crisis event. And finally, it's activating community support, appropriate community support. And I'm about to talk about how you would discern and identify that, and that is kind of on replay. Y'all, tending to your basic needs, engaging in somatic work, handling business, seeking communal support. So before we move into a little bit of the discernment building, I want to just invite in a second somatic in case you're still feeling tense from the heavy share I made, let's do a little compression session. To do this, you might just reach around you as if you're giving yourself a hug, taking each hand and caressing or coddling even a little coddle, squeezing a self hug, if you will, just taking a moment and again noisy out breath, dropping your shoulders. Let's talk about it.
So one of the biggest lessons that I learned and was reminded of was that it's really critical to protect yourself from others reactions you need boundaries within support, especially as a verbal processor, it can interrupt your clarity seeking you're working so hard to emote, to express, to work through what happened, but also what steps you need to take. And as a verbal processor after a crisis, it's probably not the best thing if you are accessing someone who is interrupting a whole ton in that moment, right? We want to be in dialog. Don't get me wrong. You don't want to, just like, talk to yourself, unless that works for you, for you, then, you know, bless it. But I. For me as a verbal process or after a crisis, I really need to work through and feel someone's warmth and energy and have them ask important questions, but not at a cadence that is disruptive to my best thinking. I'm making a case for people who are also skilled at self regulating. Because what I found is that, understandably, an incident like this activated fear in stress and anxiety and anger in pretty much everybody I talk to. I could go to my team, and I'm not talking about calling a whole staff meeting to share immediately what happened. If you think back to episode four, I am reminding us of the me we world. So after I did the continuous replenishment cycle, after I went through that somatic progression, I naturally had a meeting with my supervisory team, the team of supervisors at the teaching well, they are all skilled at self regulation, at co regulation, at emotional resilience and community care. The folks you go to to work through this incident need self awareness, and they need self management if we're talking about socio emotional competencies. Because here are the people you'll meet in reactivity and fear is the thread everybody is entitled to respond, but you might not get what you need. As the person who experienced this crisis event, you might meet someone that goes immediately into protective mode, an aggressively loving reaction. If I were to map that to a trauma response, it might be that fight energy. You might meet someone who co ops the moment now they need you to soothe them, because they're scared for you, for themselves. For the world, I might map that to flight. They want to run towards you for support, even though you're the one that just encountered this event. You might meet someone that does nothing. They might not even respond. That's terrible. This is too heavy. Let's not talk about it, right? They might freeze in that moment and just not be able to meet you in your pain. They also might start to replay, kind of their inner stories or anxieties. And it could sound like, well, if you respond with this, then you'll which can land as invalidating or gas lighting or catastrophizing, right? And you might also meet that fourth trauma response, the fawn, someone that does everything. I'm coming over to your house right now to clean. Okay, I'm calling everyone, and we're going to have a neighborhood watch meeting. I'm like, wait a minute. Hold on, friend. Can I get through this day? I've realized that I have a very high crisis tolerance. I have a high capacity and resilience in the face of a crisis or emergency, and a big part of that is that I spent almost a decade in Crisis Response roles, both as a turnaround school administrator, as a district leader who was getting the phone calls when there was an emergency for 5000 children, and now at the teaching well when people call us when things are hard in their schools or their nonprofits or their companies. But not everyone has that crisis tolerance. My truth is that most folks in my personal life who love me so deeply showed up in reactivity with lots of care. So who I could go to to most effectively process was actually the leadership team of the teaching well, who I knew could manage their needs. Practice that self care, but also practice community care. And they gave me permission to not work, and they gave me permission to co regulate. And they loved on me too, but they believed me when I said, I want to keep working today. They believed me when I said, I just need thought partnership on X or Y, and that's important. Let's do another noisy out breath here, deep inhale, so you got to know your people in that first 24 to 48 hours after a crisis, you've got to know who you can go to that can support you showing up in your power. And so what's here? I have been talking to executive directors, I've been talking to board members. I've been talking to superintendents about this incident, and the truth is the vast majority of folks that I have connected with have no plan. And so a part of the blessing of this challenge is that it has really propelled our organization to. To externalize a crisis plan across three lines, and again, come visit us at the teaching well.org, forward slash blog to see a little bit more details about this plan. But at a high level, there are three components. What are we going to do to prevent right? Those prevention steps? What are the intervention moves that we're going to emphasize and what are the postvention elements that we want to ensure our team has access to. This has required us to codify some new policies. So for example, in the prevention we have now created a phone policy, as many small organizations do, many teammates in my organization have their personal phone number in their email signatures because we want our clients to be able to access us at all times. So we are now providing the option for high visibility roles like mine to have a second phone paid for by the org. If that is something that we so choose, we're also willing to pay for Google numbers for any teammate, and we gave direct instruction to the team to remove their personal numbers from their email threads any other identifiable information right as intervention, we are creating the plan to inform our team to immediately notify org and board leadership. So in this case, it would actually be them letting me know, and then I would take it to our board chair and vice chair, both of whom I talked to that day. Intervention also includes notifying the authorities after this incident, both a police report was taken and filed, as well as the FBI tip line. We don't play with hate crimes. We don't play with threatening messages. You take all threats seriously, that's my training. You take them seriously. You document them all. And so both the police and the FBI have all of the information for this individual, and then in post vention, we already pay for a wellness stipend for the team. I know I needed to float right. I needed to really take care of myself, but if your organization doesn't have a wellness stipend, you might in the postvention, want to consider a one time wellness stipend to help your team, re resource, move this event through, metabolize, heal, rejuvenate, and shout out to We Are For Good, because when I notified them that day, they sent a very generous Door Dash to me and my family that just made it so I didn't have to worry about dinner, that I could get a delicious, nourishing meal at the end of what had been an intense experience. There's so many ways that folks showed up for me across the community, and I'm grateful postvention should not be overlooked after a crisis. It's a part of where the healing lives. So this is a shorter episode, and thanks for allowing me to process with you all in community, to be in dialog, to share some of my reflections, and in true gather at the well fashion. I'd love to offer you a couple of affirmations. I am safe. I am supported, I am resourced. I can heal. And if you're a person of faith, no weapon formed against me shall prosper. It won't work, right? So do you? I had to access my Fred Hammond because that's my business, and that's what works for me.
Some homework for you that's really, really important. Do this at baseline. What I mean by that is, don't wait until a crisis comes to you. Do it now when you are hopefully calm in a safe place, but there's three parts of homework. I never give this much, but teacher Lindsay is here because I care about you and I want you to feel safe and prepared, not because I want you to feel anxious and bracing, but because I want you to feel safe and prepared. The first bit of homework, write down one to three names of people in your life who you can access in a crisis moment with the same or more regulatory capacity. Second, write down your CRC, your continuous replenishment cycle. You know yourself, you've been through stressful moments. Is it hydration? Do you just bypass the bathroom? What do you need to do? Write it down. I'm going to drink a cup of water. The somatic practice that I know works best for me is blank. I'm. Or you can leave the do the work open, because you don't know what it's going to be yet. And then again, those one to three people would be your community activation. And finally, especially you org leaders, begin designing your plan. Keep yourself and your people safe, fortify your organization. So as we begin our downward descent, I want to share just a couple closing thoughts. First, a huge reflection and moment of gratitude that I have is that I have what's called a corrective experience with the police. At first, when I knew I needed to make the police report, I felt my somatic state tighten. I haven't always had positive or safe experiences with the police and having them come to my home to do a report, I was cautious, and if I'm being honest, a little worried, especially about scaring my children or exposing my husband, right, who's a black male, to a potential risk. So I was like, I'm gonna go out on the porch, and I'm gonna make this whole right. And I was met with two phenomenal Oakland PD officers. They were caring, they asked thoughtful questions. They also named the confusion. Like, wait, what? So they just want a white affinity group. I was like, Well, you know, the irony is, we have those. We do offer white healing spaces. They're like, it's weird that you're being called a racist when this is racist. I was like, Yeah, well, that's the way the world works. But I just had a really powerfully supportive experience with the police, and I'm so grateful for that. The other thing that I'm really thinking about is just how heavy the burden of Rage is, and I know because I used to carry it myself. So when I think about the people across this country that are so filled with hate and rage, it's my deep prayer that they're just able to set that down. As a woman of faith. I have prayed for this man every day since this event. My task is to be love, and I will so to close with a critical hope. I know it's so easy to go on this pendulum swing either being reactive or inactive, right? Like being defensive and angry and being ready to take up arms, or that inactivity, let me just wait until home. I could just push this off a couple more weeks. I'll deal with this at the next break. My invitation for all of us is to slow the swing, do the work, to get in your body, in your brain, and to stay in your values, and then get ready to take action that way you're responding and not reacting. Here's what I know y'all I will not be deterred from good trouble. I will not be deterred from good trouble. I can't bend to the will or fear or protection of my brain. I was called to create bridges and community and to love across difference, and I have to surrender and see it through. I know what my purpose is, and I'm on the right path. And if that's true for you too, then take the moment to heal, to process, and then get back to work. That's what I'm doing. And I I feel complete and whole. I'm grateful to all of you, if you've listened to this, for witnessing me. I'm praying for covering over all of us, and most importantly, I know what's possible when we all link up in solidarity and heal this country. And I have endless critical hope about that. So come back and gather at the well with us. Thanks for being in community. Have a beautiful day. All right, y'all, thanks for coming to play at gather at the well, the podcast that teaches, if you like this conversation, come visit us online@teachingwell.org and hit us up on our socials, remember to visit the podcast page to download a couple of useful tools to get your life and heal up your work you.
