Responsibility and Triggers in Leadership

How responsible leaders use triggers to make the unconscious conscious

Inevitably, there are moments in leadership and life where we get triggered.

When there’s a conflict, you might become scared and anxious.

If someone questions your decisions, perhaps you get angry and resentful.

Or when a colleague is emotional, maybe you feel frozen or numb.

Whatever the context, we all come across situations where we get triggered. In these moments we are reacting without awareness in a disproportionate way to the situation at hand. We’re not capable of noticing or enacting what the moment is calling for. In fact, when we’re triggered, we are not responding to the moment at all. Instead we’re reacting impulsively based on the patterns of our past.

What can we do in these situations? We can take responsibility.

Responsibility is often associated with weight, burden, and taking the blame.

But as has been often pointed out elsewhere, perhaps a more helpful definition is that responsibility is the capacity of being able to respond. It is being response-able to what the moment is calling for.