Webinar: When Everything Feels Exhausting
You may have noticed that life feels like too much right now in almost every arena. How do organizations motivate their employees when everything feels exhausting? Asking individuals to resilience their way out isn’t sustainable. Coping skills have to be paired with structure, psychological safety, and emotionally attuned management. We'll explore what leaders can start doing now for more resilient, productive, and satisfied teams.
Recorded with live attendees on April 28, 2026.
Resources page for the Leading in Turbulent Times series with links and sources.
Transcript:
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Alison Cebulla: Welcome, everyone! Today is the third piece in our series on, leading in turbulent times. So, today we're going to talk about when everything feels exhausting, and creating resilient systems that sustain your team.
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Alison Cebulla: And so, we will get into today what we think are the main pieces of creating a resilient system at your workplace. And I want to mention that I'm seeing that
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Alison Cebulla: pretty much everyone here is an expert in what… in some area of this work. So please chime in on the chat, because we can pool our resources and our collective knowledge, and I may say something that you know inside and out, you know it very well. So please add to the conversation, and please know that I am acknowledging and honoring all of the wonderful wisdom and expertise that you bring.
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Alison Cebulla: Sometimes, when I'm presenting knowledge, and you're like, yeah, yeah, I know, I know this is a thing, I know about this.
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Alison Cebulla: It can serve as a reminder, maybe you forgot to put it into practice, or maybe you used to have a practice, and you've fallen out of practice. So please let this be something where you take and choose the pieces that are going to serve you the best, and maybe it just reminds you to add a little something that has fallen off.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, so let's go ahead and check in in the chat with one thing from the world, or from work.
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Alison Cebulla: That feels exhausting right now.
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Alison Cebulla: Just opening the New York Times this weekend.
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Alison Cebulla: Felt exhausting.
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Alison Cebulla: Just a lot of chaos. Just a lot of chaos and violence, and it's just… it just feels like… too much.
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Alison Cebulla: Yep, exactly. Vito, thank you.
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Alison Cebulla: Politics, yeah, all, news is exhausting. Yep, yep.
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Alison Cebulla: Work politics. Yeah, absolutely.
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, and they're kind of like interlocking circles, right? Where, when people struggle to try and control or have power, we see that at the different levels, from our home environments, to work, to communities, to states, to nations, that…
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Alison Cebulla: Somehow, right now, we're going through something really big as a society where it feels like
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Alison Cebulla: People are really trying to grab a lot of power at all sorts of levels, and it's causing a huge disruption.
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Alison Cebulla: And it… and it feels very unjust, which is… which is also exhausting.
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Alison Cebulla: Oh, a family member with cancer.
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Alison Cebulla: really holding space for that, Karen, refusing to get help, that's… Yeah, that's, that's really hard.
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Alison Cebulla: Constant news buzz. Yep. Okay, so we're all feeling that.
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Alison Cebulla: Assuming everyone is in agreement when, in fact, we aren't all. Absolutely.
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Alison Cebulla: Great. So, go ahead, if you want to put one thing…
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Alison Cebulla: That feels exhausting right now.
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Alison Cebulla: Being exhausted! Yeah, I agree.
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, totally.
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Alison Cebulla: Yep, yep, yep.
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Alison Cebulla: So, in the first webinar of this series, we talked about something called Closing the Loop, which is from the Burnout book from the Nagoski sisters.
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Alison Cebulla: And that's where we allow ourselves to fully feel a negative emotion, and then do something to kind of close the stress loop. So, that presentation is up on YouTube, but there are… there are ways to maybe, like, help us, like, release the negative emotions as they come up, believe it or not, but…
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Alison Cebulla: If we can remember to do it, you know.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay.
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Alison Cebulla: So, and here's a little outline of what we're gonna talk about today.
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Alison Cebulla: Here on the side. And so, the most important thing is, you know, we want to offer a lot of practical solutions and tools that you can start doing right now.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay… So, this is me, and so, for some of you, you've been here… you've been here, before.
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Alison Cebulla: But I'll just remind you and introduce myself to those of you who are new that I have a master's in public health from Boston University. I graduated right before the pandemic started. I graduated, like, December of 2019, and then it was like, oh, here you go!
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Alison Cebulla: And so, I started to produce a webinar series at Paces Connection called A Better Normal.
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Alison Cebulla: And, we hosted experts in trauma-informed care. So today, I'm going to show a little video by Dr. Edronic. That's an example of a trauma research expert that I got to meet because he was a guest on our show. We hosted,
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Alison Cebulla: Basil van der Kolk, Gabrmate,
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Alison Cebulla: Elaine Miller-Karras, a lot of great experts while I was running this and producing this series, and it was really wonderful, and it was a way to offer some community support to folks during the pandemic.
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Alison Cebulla: My career has been in nonprofit management, education, environment, and human rights, and I worked as the Associate Director of Curriculum Development and Training at the Center for Child Wellbeing and Trauma.
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Alison Cebulla: at UMass Chan Medical School.
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Alison Cebulla: So, I told you a little bit about the foundations of TEND. So, the four of us were former colleagues who just realized that employees also needed trauma-informed care and psychological safety, and often weren't receiving it while being expected to give it to others.
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Alison Cebulla: And we just had a hunch that this would be really useful to offer also to employees, and so we founded Tend. And while,
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Alison Cebulla: Some of us were at the medical school job, the Center for Child Wellbeing and Trauma. We experienced some pretty severe psychological abuse that we thought was pretty extreme.
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Alison Cebulla: And actually, and you can tell me in the chat if you've noticed this as well, sometimes the helping professions can tend to attract people
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Alison Cebulla: who have some pretty severe unresolved trauma, and what I… the way I like to think about that is that our wounds always want to be seen. They're always trying to be seen. And so we may be drawn and gravitate towards
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Alison Cebulla: professional roles or personal situations in which our wounds have the chance to be seen, even if we're stuffing them down. And so, in my profession of trauma-informed care, I have noticed sometimes encountering people with really big traumas that they have stuffed down that are trying to come out through this work.
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Alison Cebulla: Let me know if you've seen that as well in your workplace.
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Alison Cebulla: So, what we do at Tend Collective as consultants is that we help teams who have low morale or other employee challenges, or they simply want to improve their systems or morale.
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Alison Cebulla: We help teams integrate psychological safety practices and programs. We help implement structure, norms, and agreements.
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Alison Cebulla: We train managers on people skills, people management, communication, conflict resolution. We train teams on self-regulation skills. We build custom programs in trauma-informed care and psychological safety, and we can do that for… also for the populations you serve, like work readiness programs, for example.
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Alison Cebulla: And we offer one-on-one coaching, especially for managers and executives, training, assessments, and educational content, and more. So, you know, if that's something you're interested in, please let me know.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, so… Right now, we're in something that's being called the polycrisis Era.
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Alison Cebulla: Where there's…
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Alison Cebulla: almost everything seems like it's on fire, and sometimes it's quite literally on fire with the climate crisis.
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Alison Cebulla: So, there is a great article, the link is here.
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Alison Cebulla: talking about how being in a time of polycrisis has made it so that we can't envision the future anymore. And this is leading to a particularly acute type of exhaustion and uncertainty, where we feel like we've lost some meaning, we're not sure if the future is even gonna happen, so how do we prepare for it, and how do we dream for it?
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Alison Cebulla: And it's really actually quite severe, and so it sounds like a lot of you all are feeling that based on your comments in the chat.
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Alison Cebulla: And I always, always, always come back to this, the work of Dr. Gabrmate, trauma expert, MD, and he says that the conditions that lead to stress are uncertainty, lack of information, and loss of control.
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Alison Cebulla: And so just think about the world circumstances and the circumstances in the United States, and this is a perfect storm to feel a big stress response.
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Alison Cebulla: And here are some factors. I had, I had an AI chatbot generate
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Alison Cebulla: these comprehensive lists of why we are in exhausting times. And, I guess there's really infinite reasons, because, it… the list kept going. So, I won't read them, but, there's geopolitical reasons, right? War…
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Alison Cebulla: refugee and migration, right, within the United States, we're having, the random, seemingly random ICE attacks on our communities and the populations we serve.
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Alison Cebulla: Economic… We're… student loan debt, housing costs, cost of living, tariffs, right? That… the tariff tobacco.
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Alison Cebulla: That's been in the news lately, retirement and security, so… Then,
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, another big one is mistrust in the media right now, and just not knowing, like, is this even true? And now we have AI deepfakes? Is what I'm reading true? Is it biased? Who can I trust? Who can I turn to?
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Alison Cebulla: We've all mentioned how exhausting the news cycle is. There's been a lot of technological disruption, I covered that a lot in the last talk.
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Alison Cebulla: climate, And how that's disproportionately impacting certain populations.
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Alison Cebulla: we're still feeling the effects of the pandemic, really. That was hugely disruptive to our nervous systems and to our lives, and we're just now getting back, and there's a lot of grief. I personally lost 3 loved ones during the pandemic.
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Alison Cebulla: So, this was huge.
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Alison Cebulla: So… That was a pretty exhaustive list of exhaustion factors.
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Alison Cebulla: And there's a lot right now. So, then we come to the workplace, where, you know, we're at work 40 hours a week at least.
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Alison Cebulla: And a lot of times, we hope that work can be a really safe space, that we have meaningful work, we feel like we're making a difference, we can check in with colleagues that we trust.
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Alison Cebulla: But sometimes, it's actually adding to the stress.
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Alison Cebulla: So, particularly for folks, those of us who work in human services or nonprofits.
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Alison Cebulla: What we're seeing is that the populations we serve are bearing a disproportionate amount of the,
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Alison Cebulla: of the cost of all of these factors, and that weighs heavy on us, right? Because a lot of us wish that that didn't have to happen, and a lot of us have a big sense of injustice. That's why we went into these fields to begin with.
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Alison Cebulla: is because we wanted to make a difference, and it didn't seem fair how unequal everything was. And we're constantly being bombarded with that, and at the moment, it doesn't seem to be getting better.
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Alison Cebulla: Funding cuts, right? Public… for those of us in the public health field, we saw huge cuts in programs and funding, really embarrassing cuts. And I know a lot of other sectors have as well. Government… you know, federal government programs losing their funding.
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Alison Cebulla: And being asked to do more with less.
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Alison Cebulla: a huge trigger for injustice, right? That's like, well, there's only so much each one of us can do.
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Alison Cebulla: And a moral injury, and even sometimes feeling like, is our work even making a difference? Like, is this really working?
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Alison Cebulla: Secondary traumatic stress and compassion fatigue.
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Alison Cebulla: Anyone feeling that lately?
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Alison Cebulla: Just feeling constantly bombarded and giving empathy to those we serve, and feeling really… yeah.
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Alison Cebulla: really overloaded with that. Yeah.
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Alison Cebulla: So, and the economic precarity is really, is really tough to watch. I, myself, grew up in a low-income neighborhood, and
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Alison Cebulla: You know, it really weighs on me to think about people who were my neighbors, and what they may be suffering now, and how unjust that is, and all the myriad health and mental health problems that come up… come with that.
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Alison Cebulla: Compounding grief, thanks, Karen, yeah, absolutely.
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, did we miss anything? Any other items here that's… that are particular for all of you?
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Alison Cebulla: What else are you experiencing?
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Alison Cebulla: I think sometimes there's also moral injury. We worked with a nursing school to teach soft skills to nursing students, and there can be a big moral injury,
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Alison Cebulla: What's that medical drama show that's really popular right now?
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Alison Cebulla: They show that really well, where the doctors and nurses are trying to save lives, but the businesswoman from the office keeps coming down to harass them about the business side.
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Alison Cebulla: Oh, the pit, the pit. Anyone watching the pit? They do a really good job. Yeah, thanks, Daisy, yeah. They do a really good job of, of,
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Alison Cebulla: of helping us see that moral injury, of, like, this isn't a business, these are people's lives. So that's one.
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Alison Cebulla: Over-regulation and underfunding, yeah. Thanks so much, Heather.
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Alison Cebulla: So… Exhaustion and burnout, so,
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Alison Cebulla: This was supposed to say workloads, excessive workloads.
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Alison Cebulla: Insufficient autonomy.
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Alison Cebulla: That's something we notice quite a lot, because the work isn't organized well enough, with enough structure at a lot of places that we consult, and so people feel like they don't have the authority and autonomy to make decisions that help them feel in control.
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Alison Cebulla: And as we saw with Dr. Mate, feeling out of control leads to a lot of stress. So we're already feeling so out of control in the world, and then we get to work, and no one has exactly told us what we can make a decision about, or not. And that, adds to the stress.
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Alison Cebulla: constantly living in a glass house, especially in anything government. Thank you, Charlotte, yeah.
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Alison Cebulla: So, inadequate rewards, like, we're really seeing CEOs making more and more money than ever, and buying, you know, another house, a vacation house, a yacht, etc. And it's not trickling down.
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Alison Cebulla: So, we're working harder, but we're not seeing the reward there.
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Alison Cebulla: Breakdown of community… Especially after,
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Alison Cebulla: after COVID, for sure, a lot of us haven't been going out and participating in community events, as much, I've noticed that, for sure. But then also, I think there's a little bit of a breakdown of community at work, and so I'd be curious to hear how that might be showing up for any of you.
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Alison Cebulla: Heard about a drama triangle with workers' mindset.
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Alison Cebulla: Blaming, entitlement, and helplessness.
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Alison Cebulla: Got it. Just taking that in.
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, it's tough,
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Alison Cebulla: I think, yeah, when we get to kind of exhaustion in the brain, I can explain a little bit about why that… why it's really tough, why we might be feeling helpless at work.
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Alison Cebulla: So… okay. Mismatch of values, and then a sense of unfairness, yeah.
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Alison Cebulla: And yeah, Heather, dealing with teams outside traumas, yes, I do have a slide on that. People… we're bringing our trauma to work with us, and so that's why we encourage trauma-informed management and attuned management, because,
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Alison Cebulla: People are… we all… we all carry those with us, and we're at work 40 hours a week, so of course it's gonna come out. And in fact, you know, if you kind of think about it, oftentimes we're… we are recreating the home environment that we grew up in. We're recreating it at work. And so, depending on how healthy or not that was, that's what we get at work.
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Alison Cebulla: So that can be really fun, sometimes, and full of surprises.
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Alison Cebulla: And so, a lot of times, as managers, we may not have a high skill set for consistency, appreciation, and attunement. This was something I had to work very, very, very hard to build for myself.
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Alison Cebulla: I had my first management role when I was in my late 20s, and they told me, like, you're not… you're actually not very good at appreciating people. People don't feel appreciated, and we need you to… we need you to work on that.
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Alison Cebulla: So, these are skills that people can learn, and oftentimes managers, directors, people, managers are not coming in with the skill set already, and the company is not investing in the skill set.
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Alison Cebulla: So, let's take a look at the brain science.
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Alison Cebulla: So, you all have seen, if you were here before, the hand model. This is…
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Alison Cebulla: Dan Siegel's hand model of the brain, and we can also see it on the diagram here, but the amygdala's in the middle, and the outside represents the cortex, the outside of the brain. The word cortex means bark, so this is the bark of your brain. And the prefrontal cortex is here, and this has to do with your
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Alison Cebulla: ability to make decisions, your executive functioning, so your fault, like, you're like, I want to do this thing, and I'm doing it, that's your executive functioning. Your ability to work well with others, your ability to remember things, the ability to plan ahead and problem solve and be creative.
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Alison Cebulla: is all happening in the cortex, and when we have… when our fear response comes online, Dan Siegel calls it flipping your lid.
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Alison Cebulla: So, all of a sudden, the cortex is no longer online, we can't do any of that stuff, and we're just here with primitive fight-flight survival and primitive, unruly emotions.
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Alison Cebulla: And so, the thing is, is that the nervous system was designed to keep us safe. If there was a tiger in the jungle, we needed to be able to notice it really quickly, and either flee, or fight back, or freeze, or play dead. And so, this response was intended to help keep us alive.
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Alison Cebulla: Like, if we were to eat something that was gonna be poisonous, our whole body's nervous system
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Alison Cebulla: Comes into action immediately within milliseconds to keep us alive, and it helps us spit out the food, or throw up the food, you know, expel the toxin.
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Alison Cebulla: And so you kind of have to think that our nervous system is always on alert, looking for danger. Unfortunately, right now, when we are in this
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Alison Cebulla: huge… this time of huge uncertainty, urgency, exhaustion, where a lot of things are not feeling good, we come into a state of hypervigilance. So now, our lid is flipped.
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Alison Cebulla: A lot of the time. And over time, over time at work, what happens is that we have difficulty concentrating, we have mental fatigue. We're no longer thinking critically about the work, so we may be doing the tasks.
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Alison Cebulla: Instead of stopping to say, is this the best solution for this problem? I bet we could do it a little better. I'll bet we could bring in this resource. I'll bet we could be more efficient. I'll bet we could drop this piece of it. All those things take access to the prefrontal cortex. And if we're constantly in a state of chronic stress.
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Alison Cebulla: Or exhaustion or overwhelm.
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Alison Cebulla: we now are not doing our very best work and our best critical thinking. And we may have memory issues, and we may be, as many of you have mentioned in the chat about workplace drama.
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Alison Cebulla: This is the perfect storm for conflict at work, because we lose our ability to collaborate with each other when we are feeling in a constant state of stress on fight or flight.
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Alison Cebulla: And people are losing their hope, yes, I agree, that is definitely happening, so we talk about… I talk about that a little bit here at the end.
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Alison Cebulla: One thing that I will just only touch on briefly that you could dig into more, because there are great videos on this online, is something called allostatic load. And so that's the combination of all our systems, like the nervous system, the immune system. So, the immune system is meant to kick in to fight pathogens.
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Alison Cebulla: And… but the problem is, is that if we're in a constant state of hypervigilance, like I just mentioned, constantly in high stress, constantly in fight or flight.
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Alison Cebulla: pretty soon the immune system may get overwhelmed, and a combination with all of our body systems may get overwhelmed, and then pretty soon the immune system may break down and actually start to become the reason that we're sick, instead of keeping us from being sick. And that's where we get things like autoimmune disorders, where our own immune system starts to turn on itself.
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Alison Cebulla: And that is, caused from an allostatic load that is too high, and chronically too high.
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Alison Cebulla: So, again, here is another list that I'll let you… Read through.
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Alison Cebulla: And, as someone mentioned earlier, we bring our trauma with us, so the thing is, is that chronic or complex stress from childhood compounds
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Alison Cebulla: work-related stress. So, if we grew up in a home where we were not receiving a lot of soothing, or a lot of emotional coaching, or a lot of,
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Alison Cebulla: space being held, or a lot of safety, then when we go out into the world and we encounter stress, we don't have those tools and resources available to us. And so, the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study identified 10 stressful childhood factors, but of course there are so many.
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Alison Cebulla: But the more stress you had in childhood, the more work it's going to take for us to figure out how to regulate in stressful times. And so, one thing that we love doing at 10 Collective is doing trainings with teams on
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Alison Cebulla: how to recognize how your trauma shows up at work, and how to work on self-regulation. Now, today, I really wanted to focus on, you know.
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Alison Cebulla: you can't just ask employees to self-regulate at work. You also need to provide the structure and safety for people to feel safe and calm and to calm down. That's very important. However, I have noticed that
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Alison Cebulla: as I work with organizations, people who have better self-soothing strategies and coping strategies are going to be the healthiest and feel the most resilient. So if you feel like you're really just at the end of your line in terms of your resilience.
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Alison Cebulla: It may be time to ask yourself, I wonder what coping strategies I could learn how to use to go ahead and lower that stress response and come back to a place of safety on a regular basis. If you're not doing something daily to feel safe and soothe yourself.
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Alison Cebulla: You may want to start adding that in.
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Alison Cebulla: And if you're not sure what that looks like, I'm not gonna focus on that today, but if you want any ideas, please let me know. You can send me a message or an email, and we do a lot of content on that, just not today.
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Alison Cebulla: So, how many of you have seen this video?
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Alison Cebulla: Karen, great.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, great.
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Alison Cebulla: Has anyone not seen it? Nope. Okay.
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Alison Cebulla: New, okay, cool. So I am gonna go ahead and show it, so if you've already seen it, and you wanna tune out, that's fine. I think it's, like, 4 minutes is where I'll cut it off.
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Alison Cebulla: And so, for the new folks, it's a really nice thing to see. Here's what I want to say about this video, however, is that the baby starts to get distressed. So this could trigger something for you where you're like, I don't want to see a baby distressed, okay? So I want to just hold space for that, that that might come up, but don't worry, because I… in the video.
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Alison Cebulla: the baby is soothed again, okay? So it's gonna be okay. And it is…
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Alison Cebulla: It is sad to see, but everything is okay in the end, and it's a very short… it's a short video. So again, if you've already seen it.
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Alison Cebulla: You can watch it again, maybe you notice something new, or maybe you answer some emails, and it's about… I think it's 4 or 5 minutes.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: Babies this young are extremely responsive to the emotions and the reactivity and the social interaction that they get from the world around them. This is something that we started studying
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: Oh, 30, 40 years ago, when people didn't think that infants could engage in social interaction.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: In the still-face experiment, what the mother did was she sits down and she's playing with her baby, who's about a year of age. I need my good girl.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And she gives a greeting to the baby, the baby gives a greeting back to her. This baby starts pointing at different places in the world, and the mother's trying to engage her and play with her. They're working to coordinate
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: their emotions, and their intentions, what they want to do in the world. And that's really what the baby is used to.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: And then we asked the mother.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: To not respond to the baby.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: The baby very quickly picks up on this, and then she uses all of her abilities to try and get the mother back.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: She smiles at the mother.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: She points because she's used to the mother looking where she points.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: The baby puts both hands up in front of her and says, what's happening here?
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: She makes that screechy sound at the mother, like…
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: Come on, why aren't we doing this?
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: Even in this 2 minutes, when they don't get the normal reaction, they react with negative emotions, they turn away, they feel the stress of it, they actually may lose control of their posture because of the stress that they're experiencing.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: I'm here.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: Emma, what are you doing?
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: Oh, yes, oh, what a big girl.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: It's a little like the good, the bad, and the ugly.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: the good…
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: is that normal stuff that goes on, that we all do with our kids. The bad is when something bad happens, but the infant can overcome it. After all, when you stop the still face, the mother and the baby start to play again.
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Audio shared by Alison Cebulla: The ugly is when you don't give the child any chance to get back to the good. There's no reparation, and they're stuck.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, if you want to share your reaction, whether you've seen it before or not, go ahead and share your reaction in the chat.
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Alison Cebulla: maybe how that made you feel, or what you thought. When I first saw this, a lot of things, clicked into place for me in my brain in terms of understanding human distress.
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Alison Cebulla: And the thing is, is that we are evolutionarily wired to constantly be tuning in to everyone around us.
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Alison Cebulla: So when we're at work, and we have a group of coworkers, our brain is already wired to care how they're doing, and to have… and to know that people care, people are supposed to care how we're doing. And this is automatic. This is how we evolved in… in tribes.
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Alison Cebulla: This is how our brains evolved to survive in our environments, which was to work together and to constantly be scanning multiple people at once, and taking in how they feel, and knowing that they care how we feel. And, it's… this is a wonderful…
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Alison Cebulla: visualization, because we can see with the baby and the mom how quickly the baby becomes distressed when the mom doesn't attune anymore. We are wired to assume that people care how we're doing. Now, of course, not everyone cares about us as much as our mom does.
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Alison Cebulla: But people are supposed to care about each other, and when that doesn't happen, we can see the baby is freaking out, but why don't you care? Where did you go? You just cared about me.
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Alison Cebulla: just a minute ago. It feels very distressing to human beings, not just in babies, but also in adults.
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Alison Cebulla: when we feel out of tune with those around us. And unfortunately, there are many workplaces that feel very out of tune. We don't feel like we're getting to check in with someone regularly. We don't feel like people care about us. We don't feel like there's someone safe we can talk to. Maybe we don't feel like our manager is a safe person. Maybe we're not offering
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Alison Cebulla: safety and attunement and care to others for some reason. Maybe we're too exhausted to offer that.
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Alison Cebulla: So it's something to think about.
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Alison Cebulla: That this attunement to each other is very important to how we feel.
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Alison Cebulla: Just gonna look at the comments for a sec- for a second.
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Alison Cebulla: The lack of nonverbal cues must have impacted the isolation of COVID. Absolutely, Heather, yeah. And there was a paper that we read pretty early on in the lockdown that said, this… okay, we understand we need to lock down, but this is probably going to have some really long-term mental health impacts, and it has.
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Alison Cebulla: Thank you, Rachel. Yeah, we…
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Alison Cebulla: To not… how we may have adapted and not depend on others, yeah, absolutely, for self-preservation. Yeah, you can see the baby starts to kind of shut down and freeze up. That's… that's relatable, right? How many of us are feeling like that at work right now? I'm sure we've all been there.
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, thanks, Vito.
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, the many layers of connections, and when we perceive a loss, what happens, yeah. So I just want you all to think about…
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Alison Cebulla: how well attuned you may feel at work right now. I have a question about that in another slide.
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Alison Cebulla: So, okay, we have… About 15 more minutes here.
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Alison Cebulla: So, we kind of break it down in this one as needing kind of three things at work. This is what we recommend.
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Alison Cebulla: Consistent attunement.
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Alison Cebulla: clarity and structure, and meaning and purpose to address exhaustion, okay? And these types of things regularly for employees are going to increase the productivity and efficiency, reduce stress, improve health, improve mental health.
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Alison Cebulla: Stronger accountability and ownership and teamwork and collaboration, right? Decreasing of the drama that you all mentioned. Higher employee retention.
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Alison Cebulla: And more fun, too. Sometimes work is supposed to be fun, you know? I think it's tough, it's been tough right now, but sometimes it can be that way.
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Alison Cebulla: So, we're gonna talk about these three areas.
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Alison Cebulla: And I have 9 tools, okay? I have 9 tools.
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Alison Cebulla: So, and I will email the slides to everyone, a link to the slides, as well as a link to the recording, so you can check back on these, on these tools, okay?
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Alison Cebulla: And this one I've mentioned in the last… the last two presentations, but people really like this one.
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Alison Cebulla: just acknowledging that these are times that are uncertain and urgent and overwhelming can do a lot. You know, really looking someone in the eye and saying, you know what? I understand why you feel exhausted. Or, you know what?
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, we are all frazzled, we are feeling overwhelmed, and we don't know which political policies are gonna happen from day to day, and and yeah, it's impacting us and the people we serve, and it's a lot.
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Alison Cebulla: And yeah, our workloads are too high, and we are understaffed. Doing that is kind of the bare minimum that we can do to help people feel safe and seen. We don't want to gaslight anyone at work. We don't want to say, no, it's fine. It's not fine, okay? It's really hard.
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Alison Cebulla: So, sounds like that's resonating. Cindy, thanks for your comment.
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Alison Cebulla: What else could we acknowledge at work right now?
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Alison Cebulla: What do you think? What needs to be acknowledged for you?
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Alison Cebulla: Go ahead and share anything that needs to be acknowledged.
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Alison Cebulla: Increased expenses, yeah.
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, we're doing the best we know how to do. Absolutely, Nina, yeah. Negativity everywhere? Yep. Because that's what happens in the brain. It's almost like we can't… we've just… we're off to the races, you know? We've flipped our lids, and they're not coming back on.
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Alison Cebulla: There never seems to be, like, a break from the chaos. Absolutely feeling that, Kim, yeah. And it's okay not to be okay, absolutely. I was working on that today with a coaching client of mine.
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Alison Cebulla: Negative emotions are a part of the human experience, and we live in a society that really wants us to be positive all the time, and that's not very good for our health.
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Alison Cebulla: Great, thanks everyone.
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Alison Cebulla: So, I just want to remind everyone, it sounds like some of you are very well attuned to what these are, the trauma-informed care principles.
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Alison Cebulla: But, you know, if your organization isn't, this is something that we can help with at TEND. We can bring the trauma-informed care principles into your workplace. Safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support.
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Alison Cebulla: collaboration and mutuality, empowerment, voice and choice, and respect for diversity. And so, it's just nice to know that this framework, which was developed by SAMHSA, is available, and all of these things are teachable, and they can all be integrated into the structure of your workplace.
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Alison Cebulla: And just because you offer it to your… the populations you serve, it doesn't mean that you may have it at work. So…
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Alison Cebulla: That's… You know, that's why we started 10 Collective, to help put this stuff into place.
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, Karen, believing that each one of us is coming with the best of intentions is… is what we often refer to as positive regard.
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Alison Cebulla: Like, believing the best in everyone, and it can be really hard to maintain that when we're feeling exhausted, so thank you for that one.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, practice number 3 is consistent attuned supervision. So, I was in a role, many years ago, during the pandemic, where all of a sudden, my supervisor just stopped scheduling regular check-ins with me.
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Alison Cebulla: And I didn't know why she stopped doing that, although I later found out that there was something really stressful in her personal life, I didn't know at first, and no one told me. So all of a sudden, I was having that attunement that we saw in the Still Face Baby experiment, where I was sharing how I was feeling every week, and I was feeling heard, and then I would…
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Alison Cebulla: tackle my work with a lot of enthusiasm, and it just dropped off, it just disappeared. And I noticed that I became very dysregulated because I didn't know what was going on. And so, consistent, attuned supervision of employees is very important so that we have at least
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Alison Cebulla: a time each week or every other week where we feel seen and heard and safe and attuned to. Someone cares about us, someone cares how we're doing and our needs, okay? And consistency can be really challenging when we're feeling exhausted and burned out.
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Alison Cebulla: So I have this question in the chat. How attuned is your employee management? So if you're a leader or a manager, how attuned do you think your management is to others?
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Alison Cebulla: And how attuned is the management that you receive? On a scale from 1 to 10, so 10 is the best ever, 1 is barely exists.
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Alison Cebulla: What is strong?
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Alison Cebulla: And what needs work? For either one of those.
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Alison Cebulla: Maybe just take a moment to reflect on that and share in the chat.
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Alison Cebulla: I would say lately I have been not so great at attuning to my co-founders, actually. Really, pretty bad.
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Alison Cebulla: So maybe, like… Like, a 3 or 4 lately, for me.
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Alison Cebulla: And so just naming the constant exhaustion is a huge part of that.
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Alison Cebulla: Okay, my employee management is 5…
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Alison Cebulla: And mine is, one from your manager. Oh, no! No! Okay, bring us in to help with your manager.
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Alison Cebulla: We can work on it. Really sorry to hear that.
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Alison Cebulla: I know I need to be more consistent with meeting individually with my team. I have fallen in this area. Yeah, me too. Same thing, yeah. And consistency goes a long way, because it just feels really good to our nervous system to know that regular intervals
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Alison Cebulla: We're gonna have that check-in. So, this is a reminder for me, too, and I really appreciate all of you.
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Alison Cebulla: It's tough in a small company when there are fewer people who are all going through things to have one person keep that consistency, yeah. And that's why, you know, project manager roles are really important, and I've noticed at government agencies and nonprofits that the project management role
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Alison Cebulla: often gets overlooked. Whereas in the tech world, in the business world, project manager would never get overlooked. It's often the most important keystone role.
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Alison Cebulla: And I've worked both in private and, nonprofit sectors.
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Alison Cebulla: And it's very sharp, the distinction, where a nonprofit just thinks we don't need to have a project manager to make sure that things are consistent and to keep everyone accountable. Like, here's what we agreed on, here's the work we said we were gonna do, and here's who's managing it.
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Alison Cebulla: And I feel like that's really strange and often really needed, and I'm often telling the nonprofits that we consult with, like, you're gonna need a project manager.
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Alison Cebulla: Attunement at an 8, but new to leading, so may screw up. Okay, great. Awesome to hear, and extreme upper management is only a 7, because there's a gap in leadership, yeah.
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah, and sometimes what happens when people start getting more and more responsibility is they forget that attuning to those they manage can be the most important thing that they do. We've definitely seen that.
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Alison Cebulla: Awesome. Thanks so much, everyone, for sharing, and I'm really holding space for some of the ways that you may be suffering right now, and how hard that is.
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Alison Cebulla: And I totally get it. It's really hard to show up at work to feel exhausted, and to feel like your needs are not getting met, and to feel like you have an empty cup, and you don't have anything to pour from.
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Alison Cebulla: So…
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Alison Cebulla: Practice number 4 would be to understand the chronic stress, burnout, and the brain… that response. So that's something that we offer. We can do trainings with your team, because often just understanding how the brain works, or how the body works, and how we respond to stress, makes everyone on your team more compassionate, which is really helpful.
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Alison Cebulla: So we, you know, we teach the resilience tools, the coping tools, the communication strategies, the conflict resolution, then I personally offer one-on-one coaching with managers, and we get in there, and we go, gosh, what are the barriers? What's coming up for you this week? Why are you not able to offer this? Let's talk about it. And we see huge turnarounds with this kind of work.
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Alison Cebulla: So,
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Alison Cebulla: clear processes, procedures, and roles is fundamental, and I talk about this in every presentation, you know, you gotta have a mission statement, you gotta have a strategic action plan that matches your mission.
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Alison Cebulla: And you want to have those work plans and workflows, and that project manager, right? To keep everyone accountable. And you want the roles to be very specific and clear and up-to-date.
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Alison Cebulla: And, as I said in the beginning, there needs to be clarity on who has the authority to make which decisions. When people don't have any authority, that's where it really starts to feel like chaos.
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Alison Cebulla: And, and that,
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Alison Cebulla: endless meetings, no one is quite sure who has the final word. It feels very stressful.
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Alison Cebulla: So, meaning and purpose.
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Alison Cebulla: We had identified kind of 3 areas, so consistent attunement, clarity and structure, and meaning and purpose. And so, this is something where, at this moment, with so much exhaustion and chaos, we do kind of want to think about, am I tending to the spirit and soul of my colleagues?
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Alison Cebulla: As well as… Whether they're getting their work done. Now, we…
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Alison Cebulla: always say, that the work comes first. You know, we come to work and we have this agreement. I'm gonna do 40 hours a week, and I'm gonna do these 10 things, then you're gonna pay me this amount. And that's the core, basic agreement. But during these turbulent times, we also want to make sure that as we're managing others.
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Alison Cebulla: That we help people find meaning.
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Alison Cebulla: And we tend to their spirit.
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Alison Cebulla: And, so it's just something that I may want to encourage you to just check in with folks, this week, and just, you know, how are you doing with all of this? I'll bet it's hard. And where are you finding meaning and purpose?
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Alison Cebulla: I love this book, by Victor Frankl, and he was a Holocaust survivor, and, you know, we're familiar that we know that the Holocaust was a true, atrocity on human beings.
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Alison Cebulla: And, he was in concentration camps, personally, and he noticed something that certain people in the concentration camps were able to find a sense of meaning, even amidst the most horrific things. And those people were often the ones that were
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Alison Cebulla: finding a way to be kind to others, and to show up for others, and to keep their spirit alive for others, and to keep that connection alive. And this was a really inspiring book for me, because we can always choose, connection.
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Alison Cebulla: And we can always, there are some things that we can choose in terms of our mindset that may help us through these times that feel very overwhelming and exhausting. And it's nice to feel that we have some control in how we show up if we make it into a diligent practice. Like, okay.
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Alison Cebulla: I'm feeling very exhausted, but I am going to try 1% more connection today with others. I'm going to choose 1% more kindness today with others, and just see what happens.
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Alison Cebulla: And, as I said, loss of control is one of the biggest contributors to feeling overwhelmed and stressed. So that's where we may want to just check in. And this is a great tool that Elaine Miller-Karras teaches, which is that we want to scan our body for where we feel dysregulated, but we also want to scan our body for where we feel strong.
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Alison Cebulla: And that's what I love about this, is that there's always some place where we feel strong, and there's always some place where we feel, okay, actually, it feels really nice to show up for this person, or to show up for myself and offer myself tenderness and kindness. So, there are always a few remaining places
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Alison Cebulla: Even in the hardest of times, where we can find something
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Alison Cebulla: That, that we feel we can… we can…
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Alison Cebulla: Control within ourselves, like our mindset, or create meaning or create connection.
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Alison Cebulla: So, and Victor Frankl famously has said that life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose. So this is something where we want to try and tend to the spirit of those we work with.
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Alison Cebulla: Oh, Nina, that's wonderful. Our company agreed to host visits from therapy dogs on a monthly basis. Love… I love to hear that. Great.
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Alison Cebulla: And I'm curious, Wednesday, why watch? Okay, I'm curious what that is, so maybe you want to explain a little more.
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Heather: If you don't mind me getting on… on my.
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Alison Cebulla: For it, Heather, yeah, go ahead
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Heather: I'll even see if I can turn on my camera, which I don't do very often.
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Heather: Okay, the main idea is… I was looking at where it says, address the why.
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Alison Cebulla: Yeah.
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Heather: Of why we're here. And…
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Heather: I combined that with the Taco Tuesday and just said, okay, every Wednesday, just give me your why.
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Heather: And I… I'm an English teacher by trade, so that was alliteration.
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Alison Cebulla: Awesome. I love that. Thank you so much, Heather. Thanks for hopping on, saying that. I love that connection.
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Heather : I'm a dork, I'm a dork.
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Alison Cebulla: Oh, I… so am I, so thank you so much. Perfect. Beautiful. Yeah, Ted Taco Tuesday was something that I created at a place I worked where employees… we had low morale and low collaboration. And so, once a month.
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Alison Cebulla: Some employee got to choose which TED talk they wanted everyone to watch, and then we broke into pairs and talked about it, and the company paid for… this was a job that I had in Texas, so tacos were…
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Alison Cebulla: Plentiful there. But we would, the company would pay for tacos, and we could, not just talk amongst ourselves, but also, like, see what felt meaningful to our colleagues.
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Alison Cebulla: So, okay, we have two more tools, and then I'll let you go before the time here.
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Alison Cebulla: Thank you all for the rich conversation. That's made this one a little… just a little bit longer.
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Alison Cebulla: So practice number 8 is managing the whole person. So this, is the Stress Busters wheel from ACEs Aware program in California from Nadine Burke Harris. So, I consulted a company where one employee was telling me that she wasn't sleeping.
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Alison Cebulla: And I asked if her manager knew that, you know, and she said no. And if you're a manager, and you're doing, you know, consistent regular check-ins with your employees or the folks that you supervise, you're going to want to know if they're sleeping or not.
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Alison Cebulla: That's something you want to know.
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Alison Cebulla: It's really important to know that.
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Alison Cebulla: So, you want to know, is someone going through something really stressful? Is someone… has they… have they lost a loved one? And then you also, you know, you do want to check in and say, hey, you know, physical activity is really important, or healthy food is really important, or, getting, you know, touching grass.
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Alison Cebulla: is actually really, really important. And you want to check in with folks and really, you know, manage the whole person.
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Alison Cebulla: And so then the last one is, as I touched on, training employees on self-regulation skills. So,
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Alison Cebulla: The not taking things personally, noticing and soothing our own triggers and wounds, breathwork, de-escalation, communication and conflict resolution, recognizing barriers to offering positive regard.
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Alison Cebulla: So we want to hope that we can say everyone's doing their best, but a lot of times we just feel so personally offended that people are not considering us, and I see that a lot with the folks we work with.
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Alison Cebulla: And so, we love working with folks on teams to help you figure out, well, why… what's coming up for you? Why are you feeling helpless? Why are you feeling… why are you taking that personally? What is that touching on? What wound is there?
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Alison Cebulla: And so that's deep work. That's deep soul work, that's deep transformational work, that's deep trauma work. We think it's worth doing.
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Alison Cebulla: At companies, like, we… we have seen the benefits.
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Alison Cebulla: So, for company culture, and for resilience, and for, employee retention. So, we think this type of work is worth it, but it's not always easy.
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Alison Cebulla: Our tendencies and patterns, such as do we tend to over-help, do we overwork, why do we do that, or what feelings are we trying to avoid? And then, of course, practicing emotional boundaries so that we can detach and leave work at work and not, not take, that care home with us for everyone in the world, because
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Alison Cebulla: We can't save everyone, even if we really want to.
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Alison Cebulla: So… Great, so… That is… The end of the presentation.
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Alison Cebulla: And again, I'll send out those slides. I just want to say thank you to everyone who participated in the conversation. That always makes these really rich. I hope you feel seen and supported. You are in great company here. You know, if you kind of look around and remember, you know, everyone's
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Alison Cebulla: roles. Everyone here is in human services, and here we are trying to do the most for the communities that we serve, and…
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Alison Cebulla: I, admire and respect all of you, and, you know, let me know if there's another tool or another topic you want us to cover, let us know if we can be of service, and, I'll be sending out some information for another series coming up, another webinar series, because we love to offer tools that you can use anytime.
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Alison Cebulla: Thank you all so much. Good luck with your work this week, and good luck with your exhaustion. I hope you got something you can use. I'll be sending out a survey. Thank you in advance for filling out the survey.
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Alison Cebulla: And I hope to see you at our next event.
