10 practices that help you create psychological safety

Psychological safety - so incredibly important for work environments if we want to be having courageous conversations about race, equity, health, burn-out, doing business for a liveable planet, changing systems for good.

Inspired by, and building on Adam Grant’s table of Psychological Safety (what it enables when you have it and what happens when you don’t), if you’re a leader, manager, HR/people practitioner, coach, here’s 10 really important practices that help you create psychological safety with those that you lead/support/serve:

1. Cultivating our ability to be present

2. Creating clear structures

3. Having rhythms and rituals

4. Communicating our expectations with compassion

5. Processing and (then) expressing how we feel

6. Sharing our thinking/decision making processes

7. Cultivate a practice of listening, really listening (see also no.1)

8. Getting comfortable with our BEING not just our DOING

9. Practice (in our own safe spaces) meeting our vulnerability and the places in which feel tender for us

10. Getting familiar with our body and it’s reactions (i.e how our nervous system responds to external stimuli)