How to Practice Trauma-Informed Leadership w/ Danielle Smeltzer

In this episode of Relationships at Work, Danielle Smeltzer, founder and CEO of Awarely Embodied Leadership, dives deep into the transformative power of trauma-informed leadership. She challenges conventional leadership narratives, revealing how emotions—like stress and even anger—serve as vital signals from our nervous system, not weaknesses to suppress. Danielle explains why curiosity is the cornerstone of self-awareness and how leaders can use it to build healthier, more empathetic workplaces.

We explore the myths around stress and burnout, the importance of co-regulation in team dynamics, and why trauma-informed leadership isn’t just another buzzword—it’s a lifelong practice. Danielle also shares practical insights on how leaders can balance empathy with accountability, break free from the "quick-fix" mentality, and truly connect with their teams on a deeper, more human level.

If you’re a leader seeking to foster more meaningful connections while navigating the complexities of modern work, this conversation is for you.

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Transcript

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Russel Lolacher: And on the show today, we have Danielle Smeltzer and here is why she is awesome. She's the founder, CEO, and Chief capacity Officer of Awarely Embodied Leadership, Inc., challenging organizations to consider more sustainable paths to growth through trauma informed coaching workshops, and disruptive thought leadership.

I do love a disruption. Over the last 16 plus years, she's been a founder, consultant, thought leader, and strategic partner for CEOs, founders and leadership teams to help organizations grow more sustainably while navigating change. My God, we all need that. Welcome to the show, Danielle.

Danielle Smeltzer: Thank you so much for having me.

Russel Lolacher: So before we get into, well, what we kind of mentioned in the bio there, which is the trauma informedness of it all. Super curious about that. We have to dig into your past first, which with the first question I always ask my guests. What is your best or worst employee experience?

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah, I had a hard time with these, because I think all of them are a little bit bittersweet. I mean, there's a, there's a good part and a bad part to all of them, but the best, I would say, is, especially as a woman working in male dominated industries, which is my history, is men saying my name in, in rooms that I'm not in to help me grow my career.

And I've had an incredible capacity for that over my, my tenure of people who have stood up for me and opened doors that I couldn't have opened. And so I'm super grateful for that.

Russel Lolacher: What, how did you find out about it? That's always what I find interesting is your name gets brought up and you're like, oh, that's nice. What did they say?

Danielle Smeltzer: These ones were very clearly indicative that something had been said by a promotion or a new opportunity that came up. And ones that were quite surprising too, of, of opportunities that I maybe didn't think I was ready for. But they're like, nope, you got this. Here you go. Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: So, one more question to that. I always find it interesting. Cause it really depends on the caliber of leader when it comes to that, because And I was just talking about this recently with a friend of mine. When we do these, I guess, reviews, yearly reviews or whatever, however frequently you do them, and they always ask you like, what's your five year plan?

I always want to turn around and go, what's your five year plan for me? Because at the end of the day, you have a bigger idea of what opportunities are out there. But I don't know, because you have a more strategic lens being further up the chain. So in this case, what did you do as an employee to better prepare those leaders to be informed, to bring up your name?

Did you have to, did you have to sell yourself? Were they overly attentive and paying attention? I'm just trying to understand what your role was in it.

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah, I mean, earlier on in my career, I think it was a lot of just showing up and being saying yes to everything and being highly adaptive and having a ton of energy. This was before I had a lot of like clarity and exactly where I wanted to go. And so they were seeing paths for me, just as you said, and seeing opportunities for me that.

That weren't even presented publicly. It was like, there's this major change happening in this organization and so and so is leaving or a founder is leaving or a partner of a founder is, is filling a gap and can no longer do that as an organization scales. And so it was being, being there and doing the work and then the opportunities arising.

Russel Lolacher: The reason I dug into that a little bit more is because you'll hear work speaks for itself, and that's not always the case because you're relying on a leader being good and great to paying attention to your work. So it's an interesting sort of balance of how much do I sell myself so that they have that information to speak in the room, or how much do I rely on them to be a great leader that pays attention, knows my worth, sees my value, and connects it to the opportunities that are out there.

Danielle Smeltzer: hmm.

Russel Lolacher: Yeah, it's a tough call. Oh, we have to get into your topic because I'm super curious about, and I know we dug into this in our pre conversation, so my brain was firing and I'm like, oh, I have to wait for this. I have to wait for the conversation. So let's start off first with usually what I do with every episode, which is definitions.

I need to really make sure we're on the same song sheet because we don't define anything in the leadership space. So, I hate starting a conversation without doing so. How would you, or how do you define trauma informed leadership?

Danielle Smeltzer: I'm so glad you're asking this, and I did my prep work. I listened to a bunch of episodes today, and I was like, oh, he's gonna ask me that. So I, I was trying to distill it down for myself and for you. So, trauma informed leadership for me is, it's a practice. So it is a practice of building awareness so that you can lead with balancing empathy and accountability. With trauma informed leadership, we're often thinking of the outward perception of making sure we make people feel safe and, and supported and, and involved in things like that.

But really, my, my stance on it is taking accountability as a leader for our own behaviors, our own stress response patterns, and really how we show up. But also acknowledging that there's context around us of what happens in other people's lives that they bring into the workplace. So it's like this constant conflict and clash of my history, someone else's history, and then our, our role as a leader is being aware of that place in between.

Russel Lolacher: So, the trauma informed piece, to me, it feels like you're just always assuming people are going through a hard time or, or yourself as a trauma informed leader, because the first relationship you should have is with yourself, obviously, so that trauma informedness is that, is that how you enter it when you come to those relationships and building connection is that you're assuming not everything's perfect.

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah, it's assuming that essentially everyone's coming with their own lived and learned experiences into the workplace, whether and I know you've talked about this on your episodes, whether it's their, their cultural upbringing, or their, their, their socialization, or something terrible that happened to them in their life.

And, and the, the definitions of trauma has changed a lot. And I think that's part of the, the work that I do is, is also shifting that understanding of what that is. So in the past, we used to think of things like PTSD you're, you're in war, you're in this major conflict, there's this incredible exposure to something terrible. Now, we know from so much more research on neuroscience and neurophysiology what actually happens in our bodies is it's actually can be something pretty small. So it can be something that's too much, too fast; too little, too late; or just anything that puts our body out of whack and unable to process and experience the world in the way that our regulated system is supposed to work.

And so it's essentially a disruption of how we experience the world. And if you think about the workplace, it's like constant disruption between people, process systems, whatever is happening. And so we're just these nervous systems really just going like all over the place when we're working. And so when we can start to understand and appreciate that we're connecting that brain body experience as like a whole of a person as a leader.

Russel Lolacher: How do you differentiate it with all the other, and I'm going to sound like a jerk here, but the forms of leadership, I mean, I'm a servant leadership. I'm a human centric leadership. I'm a, is it another style? Is it an intention? Like, how do you, how do you align that?

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah, it's a good question. I, and that's certainly why I say it's a practice. So the, the awareness for me is. A lot of the leadership training that I did historically, and I did a lot of different courses and things like that. And it was always about cognitive awareness, which is great. We learn something, we do something.

But we forget about why we react and respond in different ways and situations and also how other people react and respond. And so that's where I was like, I want to go deeper in understanding. Why I actually do the things that I do. And so that's where trauma informed takes into consideration the brain, the body, as well as the heart.

And by heart, I mean, values, beliefs, things that guide us more as who we are. And when I say body, I mean, sensations and everything that happens within our nervous system that actually informs a lot of the way we behave and act. Mm

Russel Lolacher: If you're introducing this with new leaders, do you feel there is some resistance based on generations? And I'll say this in the sense that if I, if you came at me and said, I'm going to teach you trauma informed leadership. Great. I don't have any trauma. What trauma are you talking about? My team's great. They're fantastic. What am I, where's trauma in this? What, what are they? What's the challenges? That's just a blocker or a challenge to overcome. It's not ...

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: Trauma. It just feels like it might be a word that can rub people the wrong way.

Danielle Smeltzer: Totally. And so that's actually why the name of my company is embodied leadership, not trauma informed leadership. And so embodiment is like taking into consideration that we all have bodies, we all experience the world, not just in our brain, but also in our body. And It's a part of my work is redefining what trauma is and as I said, lots of people think of it as like a big event, but it's also acknowledging that not every traumatic event actually results in trauma and that most of the work that I'm talking about is actually how do we renegotiate our relationship with stress and because essentially what trauma is, is stress that impacts the body And isn't processed and then get stuck, and that's where we have physical symptoms and manifestations of burnout and things like that.

So I'm kind of like taking it back a few levels of... trauma is like the worst thing that can happen. Most of the time a lot of us are experiencing it as stress and everyone can relate to stress. So that's kind of where I have that entry point of, 'you're a leader, you're probably experiencing stress.'

Russel Lolacher: I like that you approach it as a practice. And the reason is, is because there are, and I hate when leaders do this, they go, I have a leadership style. I'm like, great. Then you're a horrible leader because you have to have different styles. Not one style works for everybody. Command and control actually does work in certain situations, but also empathetic leadership.

This feels like no matter which type of leader you need to be in a certain situation, like an emergency, command and control is really necessary in those situations. But then having this as a practice on top of that, I find that... it's not a hat on a hat. It is actually useful. It is actually something that can be connected regardless of the Swiss army knife of leadership you're using in that way.

As a communications guy, I'm always, okay, but what do they need? How did they understand what we're trying to do? As opposed to me, it's understanding the trauma, the backstory, and then adapting the leadership style based on that. So I see it working interlocked ish,

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah. It's really like a foundational model of me as a person, as a leader, my belief is that I need to take accountability for my emotions, my behavior, the context that impacts me going into the workplace, even before I'm interacting or supporting other people. That's my first responsibility is knowing what sets me off, what drives me and what causes me to act the way that I do.

And yeah, absolutely. I call myself like a chameleon because I, this is my foundation. This is what keeps me like generally grounded in this context of embodied leadership, trauma informed practices, but then I'm adapting to whatever's happening in that situation. And just like you said, if there's a major fire, like a crisis that needs to happen, I'll pull in other parts of my skillset and background. And, and one of the, the big misnomers, I think with trauma informed leadership, like you said, of men or other people thinking like, why don't you do this? It sounds fluffy is, it's, it's not an excuse for behavior.

It's okay, cool. Everyone comes with their history and certain people might react and respond in different ways that sometimes may be inappropriate or maybe inflated more than it needs to be. My job is to like, understand that there's might be something behind that, but also then have the conversation about what's happening. And so it gives me that pause to go, okay, this person's reacting in a way that maybe he's a little bit off. I can acknowledge that, but then also go what's happening and let's figure this out and let's dig into it.

Russel Lolacher: I want to connect some dots here between embodied leadership trauma, but also characteristics. So if I'm trying to figure out whether I am already, or I want to lean into the characteristics that would be this type of leader, what are we looking at? What are we pointing to?

Danielle Smeltzer: I should acknowledge that certainly in different practices and different leaders, they may have different names for this. This is just my scope of practice because it's a passion of mine. And what I generally call it, but it's, it's really coming down to that awareness. So do I have a general understanding of my stress response patterns, my emotional behavior, how I show up in the world, and am I taking that space and time to intentionally of respond instead of react.

And so that's kind of like the baseline, right? Do I have a general sense of where I'm at? Do I know where I tend to stay within my nervous system state? Am I like always wired up here or I'm always in shutdown. And so when you have that understanding of your baseline, like that's, that's generally where we start.

Russel Lolacher: That feels like not a work thing though. That feels like a life thing.

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: So are we doing this so for instance, I can see that, but I'm also maybe in a home situation and my partner is driving me nuts and I'm like, I'm angry. Why am I angry? Why is that the reaction that I have?

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah. Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: I don't think it needs to be in the workplace for us to start paying attention to those triggers.

Danielle Smeltzer: No. Yeah. So my... the reason I started doing this work and bring it into the workplace and certainly a lot of the training I've done is definitely designed more for a clinical setting. And what I saw was there's too much of a definition and a polarization of what was work and life. And I think we all experienced this during the pandemic, where suddenly we're working with our babies on our lap and our dogs in the background and our partner working from a table next to us.

And suddenly we realized that our work and lives are really in this blended state more than ever. And that, so that's kind of my conversation around work life balance is we expect people to shift the way they act, the way they respond, their stress levels between shifting between home and work. My argument is that's not realistic.

From the work that I do from like the nervous system perspective, you can't suddenly tell your system to go, this is a place we should be stressed and this is a place we shouldn't be stressed. And so my, my whole approach is, can we use these skills to move between all these spaces in our lives with greater ease?

And so this is this whole like capacity building. And so that we're much more flexible and adaptable to everything that's happening in our lives cause sometimes, as you said, it all comes together as well.

Russel Lolacher: What are we doing to sharpen these skills? Cause there's a lot of people do not have self awareness and yet they understand that this is an important thing if they want to be a great leader, they have to understand this.

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: So what are you telling people that you're like, you know what you should be doing a little bit more of?

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah. So it starts with that very like fundamental understanding that the way we think and the way we behave is not just directed by our brains that we have bodies that interpret the world in a very different way. And so I started the very basic levels of teaching people the language of the body.

So a lot of that is in through sensations, imagery, the way we move, the way we behave, the way we act, and the way that we put meaning towards things. It's called, the model I use is called SIBAM. It's part of the work I do in somatic experiencing, which is the foundational education I have in this.

And that's all basically the language, learning the language of the body, which then connects us more into the brain. So I work with people on those kind of really foundational skills of developing that understanding, because the language of the brain and the language of the body are quite different.

Russel Lolacher: I love that you brought up the senses because I've, I mean, I've been doing the show for a while. I've been a leader for a long time and it's always focused on focused on cerebral. It's why do I think what I'm thinking? Why do I... well, that was a weird reaction to it. And I don't think, and I love that you mentioned it, that we spend enough time going, 'does my temperature go up? Do I feel uncomfortable in my clothes? Should I be sitting somewhere else? How does my spatially, what is that communicating as well to others and to myself?' I don't think we go down that path enough.

Danielle Smeltzer: hmm. Yeah. So the language piece is a, it's a big part of where I start, but then it's also understanding that everyone's baseline is different. And some of us may need some additional support to build capacity to move with more ease and all these spaces of our lives and that's part of that foundational piece of trauma informed practices and embodied leadership.

And so it's, it's, simple things like. like right now, like I am orienting to my space behind me. There's a very intentional reason that I have these colors and these flowers that I grew myself and dried and put in this book, this, this vase that I bought from a local potter, because as I'm in these conversations and I'm talking about trauma, which can be challenging, I can orient.

To these things that bring me ease in my nervous system. And so those are the types of things I start to teach people about of how do you integrate that into very simple ways within your work and your life of bringing in these moments of ease and these, these, these resources essentially so that you can move back and forth between these moments of conflict and challenge and stress and move back and forth with ease and calm and let me give me your nervous system a break so that you can be more present and engaged and have these types of conversations.

Russel Lolacher: All right, I'm going to throw the title of the podcast at you. Relationships. How does this inform the relationships with our teams, our colleagues, our leadership? We're focused so much on ourselves and understanding.

Danielle Smeltzer: hmm.

Russel Lolacher: So what's the benefit or they, I want to, I assume it's positive. So I'm going with benefit.

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah. Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: What, where's that relationship?

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah. So there's this really cool thing that happens within our bodies that we don't even know happens every day. Well, actually we do. We've all been in toxic workplaces where there's that one person where you're like, this person can affect the entire room, change an entire environment.

And we know this to be true, but when you look at it from actually what's happening physiologically, it's that our nervous systems are communicating with ourselves. And so you can hypothesize that some of those leaders may be in a place where they are not regulated. Their nervous systems or there's like in this constant sight of flight or flight and that actually affects people around us.

So this is called co-regulation. Sometimes it works in a positive way. Sometimes it doesn't. And so my part of trying to work towards this practice as awareness is that anytime we're in a space with someone else, even you and I in this container of a video. We are playing off each other's nervous systems.

And so part of our role and accountability as a leader is what impact and influence do we want to have? Some people maybe don't care. And they're like, I want to rule through fear and command and control. Maybe that's their style. For me, I find if I can invite that stillness and that joy and that space for connection, that's really where I can allow people to explore who they are.

Develop their own skills and in that space. And those are some of those the baseline things that we need for these big buzzwords we talk about of psychological safety and diversity, equity, inclusion. These are the basic conditions that we need to have before we can go into that big work.

Russel Lolacher: And to your point, how does diversity impact this? Because how I show up and how I understand how I show up can be received very differently based on somebody's background, socioeconomic, cultural, tons of different factors. But I don't have any control over that. I only have control over me. So how do you, how do you approach that?

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah, that's a good question. And we do a lot of cross sectional understanding of that in my training too, of acknowledging that everyone has different ways of learning, different beliefs, different cultural things. And ultimately, it's acknowledging that yes, that is all true, but we also all have nervous systems and so like in my work, I'm acknowledging that those things are there, but I'm focused more on the nervous system connection.

So if I am providing safety in my system, that's lending to someone else who may feel unsafe because of maybe cultural challenges or disconnect or bias or whatever, that's like my baseline responsibility is providing safety for them to start to feel safer in that space. And so that's, that's like the baseline starting place.

Russel Lolacher: So what are people getting wrong with this? Because again, like I sort of mentioned before, trauma induced sounds scary. It sounds bad. It sounds like a lot of baggage. What are people getting in the way of this being useful for them?

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah, I think going back to the conversation we had about acknowledging that the definition of trauma has changed. So it's basically anything that affects our innate ability to move in a regulated state between stressors and deactivation. And so when we can acknowledge that it's just part of a human experience, that's really great to do.

And it's not always a big story. That's the other part of it is we don't need to know anyone's story. We don't need to know what happened to them. We don't need to know the specifics at all. It's just acknowledging that through our lives there are things that impact the way that we react and respond to things and we all bring that with us.

The last part is that there can't be accountability when you're trauma informed. And this is certainly something I'm continuing to work on is balancing, you know, coming from an empathetic, grounded state of meeting people where they're at, but also that behavior is not excused, even with context being present of stressors or trauma that's impacted them.

And so I think that's part with accountability is acknowledging things impact how we behave, but it's not an excuse for poor behavior in the workplace.

Russel Lolacher: You're speaking my language. I, I, I have a big problem with leadership in that they never are generally accountable. They're really good at responsible, but accountable is this, but what if they're actually bad leaders? We're not holding them to any sort of standard. So to have trauma informed understanding that even if somebody is going through things, we still have to be accountable for how we show up, how we work, how we connect with others. How do we encourage this type of leadership? If this is what we need to be focusing a lot more on and how we show up and how we connect, how we 'raw, raw, cheerlead' this, Danielle?

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah, I think it's dismantling a lot of these like larger conversations of expectations around leadership, like getting away from this command and control model. It's also going away from glamorizing burnout and stress. I think we celebrate the rise from burnout as opposed to proactively mitigating it.

And so that's a lot of what the work I do is trying to change the narrative along with our relationship to stress. Like we, we think that stress is bad and terrible and this thing we need to avoid, but I'm actually trying to encourage people to look at stress as something that can sometimes actually serve them.

And stress isn't something we need to be scared of. It's just when we get stuck in an activated state or when we lack awareness of how it impacts us on a longer term basis. And so that's, that's a lot of the shift of culturally that I'm trying to have these conversations with of we're so scared of all these things.

Let's bring them out into the open and have greater conversations about them cause that's the only way we're going to change actually how workplaces engage in these relationships with people.

Russel Lolacher: I want to dig a little deeper into that particular topic of stress because as soon as we talk about stress, we're talking about burnout. It seems to the next sentence, right? But then

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: There will be others that go, 'no, it's good stress. It's motivational. It's inspiring. Yeah. How do you balance the two?

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah. So that a lot of that comes down to the awareness. So the first thing is acknowledging not all stress is bad. It's been very demonized. And I'll be the first to say I've certainly been in that space before of trying to avoid stress or eliminate it, which really just gets us into more stress because, as leaders, that's just not possible.

We are constantly going to have things thrown at us, situations we have to deal with. So my stance is okay, let's start to differentiate between good stress and bad stress. And this, this evolves depending on how much capacity we have, like how much exposure to stressors we've had on a long term basis.

But it's really starting to understand like we call it a window of tolerance and so all of us have within our nervous systems, this, this, the space that we can move between stressors of an activation and a deactivation. And naturally we're meant to just move back and forth. But if we're like... the pandemic is a great example. We were in a prolonged state of stress for two, three years. None of us are meant to go through that. So that could be defined as bad stress. Good stress is I literally have to finish this project by 5 p. m. on a Friday. So I'm putting in 12 hour days for three days and I'm just going to do it.

Great. I'm doing a presentation. I need to speak a little bit louder, bring up more energy because I have to engage this room of 400 people that need to just be tuned in. Those are all examples of good stress bad stress is essentially when we get stuck in activated state and that starts to deplete us.

It's really hard for a nervous system to maintain that amount of energy. It is really tiring. And so that's when you'll have the 3 a. m wake ups and like just the general malaise and I'm just exhausted and depleted and so the qualities are very different. And I think that's the thing is like the quality is, is different between good stress and bad stress.

Russel Lolacher: Do we need to understand this better from a cultural standpoint? I asked that because we don't generally hire for this. This is not something we go, Oh, I have five questions I need to ask and one of them is about self and trauma informed leadership. We don't, we look at it as something maybe after the fact, not proactively. Can organizations do that?

Danielle Smeltzer: I don't know if it necessarily has to be explicitly like, are you trauma informed? Are you an embodied leader? Those are certainly languages that I'm using to, well, really disrupt a space that needs to be talked about. But I think it comes down to that awareness piece. I don't differentiate really between personal development and professional development anymore.

I would expect that any leader is doing both and I would encourage people to be like over indexing in personal development at this point as well because that's typically where you're getting into like the underlying root causes of why you are the way you are and your values and and it's that bigger picture piece.

So those are the questions I would encourage organizations to be asking of the deeper questions of who you are as a leader. How do you build awareness? Like, how are you handling stress? And what do you do with stress? And how you're also creating that balanced and grounded perspective for people around you too, because that's a big part of it is we affect the people around us.

Russel Lolacher: Do you feel organizations, leadership, HR...have any role to play in perpetuating or supporting this type of leadership?

Danielle Smeltzer: Oh, it's funny, I, yeah. Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: It's a lot about you've figured this out. You know yourself, right? But we're not living on an island here.

Danielle Smeltzer: Huh. And I have this debate often of whose responsibility is it to fix, fix this really big problem we have of stress and burnout right now, and I go back and forth on it, and sometimes it's the accountability of the individual. Sometimes it's the organization. I think it really has to be both working hand in hand.

And at the end of the day, organizations are people. So it really does come down to CEOs, founders, other people leading by example. I hope that we're getting to this place where we're realizing that the way we've been working just isn't sustainable. I mean, we're seeing it in all the stats, even in the StatsCanada statistics.

I did an article on that recently, and it's the people talking about burnout and like how stressed out they are at work is just going through the roof. And then we have productivity issues and all this stuff that like I think the stats are starting to actually show themselves in different ways.

The data is there. So I hope that certain leaders can maybe start to see that connection to ROI because some of them need that. But also maybe just because it's the right thing to do.

Russel Lolacher: Yeah but I mean, if we actually did the right thing we needed to do, that would be a much different world we live in, Danielle. Working with your clients, working with CEOs and leadership, can you think of any like real aha moments where you were walking them through this to really sort of shift their thinking and they're like oh right this is what I need to be doing now moving forward.

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah. So I, and it's interesting one of my biggest challenges for me personally is my knowledge is like my greatest barrier as well as my greatest thing. So I have to talk about this in language that people understand. So it's like, how do you want to feel? What impact do you want to have on the world?

And how do you want to show up and support your team members? And how are you connecting people with purpose? So I, I use a lot of language that corporations and business leaders understand. And then once they're like, okay, like I get that, then I go deeper into the why behind it. And that's when I started to explain what's actually happening in the nervous system and equipping them with more of the understanding of neuroscience.

But it really starts with the basic things of what are you trying to achieve and how are you trying to get there and what's getting in your way? And then I'm breaking it down and this, this work that I do, I'm also like realistic that I'm balancing it with strategy. Like my background is, is operations and, and, and HR. And I can speak the language of, of strategic planning and financial budgets and things like that. So I always acknowledge that the two go hand in hand as well.

Russel Lolacher: I love the fact that you have to speak corporate speak and almost dehumanize the topic to get to the human part of the topic

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: It breaks my heart can't we just...

Danielle Smeltzer: It's been my greatest challenge, the translation into what it actually means for people. Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: Yeah. And I mean as a communications nerd myself, it's really understanding, okay, but what's going to resonate with you? What, how, what story do I need to tell for you to go...

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah.

Russel Lolacher: Oh, this is relatable to me.

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah. Yeah. And the stress and burnout is definitely the biggest one. Even though that's such a hot button topic, that's the one that people relate to. Everyone has experienced some form of stress, hopefully not burnout, but it's, no one's immune to it essentially right now.

Russel Lolacher: We seem to have gotten on a bit of a roller coaster since COVID. It was the pendulum swang one way before COVID, then it swang all the way to the other end. And now it's sort of balancing itself out to some degree.

Danielle Smeltzer: Hmm.

Russel Lolacher: How has it changed for you in the interest and understanding of this?

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah, it's, I mean, it's good and bad, I think. It's, there's certainly a lot more acknowledgement and understanding that, we need to think about our relationship with stress. We, we generally know that burnout isn't good. But there's also a lot of fake experts and there's a lot of, a lot of promises out there like trauma informed work is not a done in practice.

You don't go to a course and then suddenly you're a trauma informed leader. That's not how it works. Also, people aren't going to resolve their issues with stress or trauma overnight. It's not do these 5 steps and I'm suddenly regulated and I'll never have stress again. That's not the reality.

And so a lot of what I'm trying to do is just be realistic about it. Let's build awareness. Let's build tools, but also being human in this experience that we're always going to be working in these challenging situations. And these things are going to cause us to question what we're doing and how we behave.

And I think that's the biggest thing is there, there is no magic solution. We're always going to be working at this in one way, shape or form. And so that's what bothers me a lot about some of the language out there is there's a lot of promises that are not realistic.

Russel Lolacher: If you just meditate five minutes a day, Danielle, it'll all be fixed.

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah, exactly. And what we're forgetting in a lot of those places is like a lot of people who've never stopped their entire career telling them to sit and meditate for five minutes, their system will literally panic and feel like that's unsafe because that is unsafe within the context of the system that they've been operating in. And so there's a lot of work that we have to do before we can even get to the space of someone being able to safely and excessively meditate for five minutes, which is not what the internet wants you to believe.

Russel Lolacher: No, no, of course not. It's we can click bait in five minutes and find five things we can do right now, Danielle, to, to fix our burnout.

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah. Yeah. And that's not, that's not the reality. And that's, I'll never make those promises. And if I do, please tell me.

Russel Lolacher: So then I have to ask the question about regulation, because I know for me, if I'm in a stressful or anxious moment, I need a few minutes, but I also have a partner that might need an hour of just putting a podcast on or music or something. So as much as we talk about, well, your five minutes a day aren't going to fix you, there are things that help each of us to sort of explore.

So how do you find what might work for you? Because some people are doing none of this and just redlining every day in, in, in going through life. So where do you start to go down that path?

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah. And I'll acknowledge I was like that too. I did that for years and years and years and ended up with chronic pain and chronic illness. And now we're working backwards. It took me a long time to start as my yeah. Counselor would say it took me five years for my nervous system to be even in the room with me of doing deep work.

So I think that's just really good for people to acknowledge that this work takes time and even just starting with the awareness and the intention to learn more and build more awareness is like a really, really just like a big place to start. But the biggest thing is learning about your own unique nervous system.

We're not making any changes at first. It's just understanding what is your baseline place? Like, you said, I need this much space to come back into a state of regulation after a stressor. That's fine. It's just acknowledging that we, we have different tendencies. Like for me, it was I spent 20 years of my life basically stuck in an activated state.

Whereas some people may have spent the last 10 years of their life in a shutdown state. And that's, so that's where you start is like, where am I right now, without judgment, just acknowledging and understanding what your predisposed conditions are.

Russel Lolacher: Even the, and I'm just, for me, it's I know so many people, even to get to that conversation is so hard because they have to admit that they're in an active state all the time because being in it and admitting it are two very different conversations.

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah. And I think that's one of the big thing about this is also starting to take away our labels of what is bad and good. And so being activated is not bad. Being shut down is not bad. It's that we put those labels as a society on these things, expecting people to be constantly in a state of regulation or calmness.

And that's not the point. The point is to be able to have a reaction to something, notice it, and then be able to move back from it. And hopefully maybe not have as much blowouts or things like that. But it's, it's, we're not trying to demonize anything. Even anger is a really good example. Like I didn't have access to anger for about 10 years of my life.

And now I do because it's safe to, and I know that it is a, it's a communication from my nervous system saying that something is out of alignment as opposed to demonizing, I shouldn't be angry when really that just gets stored in the body and that's where we get stressed.

Russel Lolacher: And I hope for leaders to really lean into their curiosity because as much as we need to remove labels, that's how people understand things. And you're talking about nuance and you're talking about context, which is not the world we live in. We want answers, we want simplicity, and we don't want the fuzzy edgesand try to understand that. So I can see that being a huge challenge.

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah. You picked up on the, the, the great word there is curiosity. And I'm in, I'm in a three year program right now where I'm doing really deep, intense trauma work to, to learn and understand this on a really deep physiological level. But that's all they ask of us is curiosity. Just come with your curiosity to witness what your neurosystem is doing. And that's, that's the work we do.

Russel Lolacher: I love that. Thank you so much for being here, Danielle. I really appreciate it, but I'm not letting you off the hook quite yet. I have one more question for you, which is what is one simple action people can do right now to improve their relationships at work?

Danielle Smeltzer: Yeah. I think it's really what we just said is starting to build that curiosity, to build the awareness of where you are at as a leader what makes you react and respond, and that's that, that piece of let's start taking some accountability as leaders, as opposed to, which we all like to say, blaming everything on organizations.

Yes, they have a part to play in it. But at the start of the end of the day, we are people working with people. And the relationship with ourselves is how we have relationship with others.

Russel Lolacher: That is Danielle Smeltzer. She is the founder, CEO, and Chief Capacity Officer for Awarely Embodied Leadership. These are new lips. Thank you so much for being here, Danielle.

Danielle Smeltzer: Thank you so much for having me. This is great.