by admin | May 28, 2026 | Inside the Work Blog
What it means to feel heard at work and why the nervous system knows when it doesn’t.
This week, our team had a thoughtful conversation about what it means to feel heard, and perhaps more importantly, what it feels like when we don’t.
What emerged was striking in its diversity.
Some people described feeling heard as a physiological experience. Their bodies soften. Their shoulders drop. Their nervous systems stop bracing. Others spoke about pace and time – not being rushed, interrupted, or pushed toward premature resolution. Some emphasized the importance of relationship and trust. Others named the need for validation: having past experiences acknowledged rather than dismissed, minimized, or debated.
The conversation reminded me that feeling heard is not simply about whether words were exchanged. It is an embodied, relational experience.
And while the pathways into feeling heard may differ from person to person, the discussion eventually circled toward a surprisingly simple but powerful framework from a 2023 study by Roos, Postmes, and Koudenburg titled Feeling heard: Operationalizing a key concept for social relations.
The researchers describe feeling heard as:
the feeling that one’s communication is received with attention, empathy, respect, and in a spirit of mutual understanding.
What I appreciated about this framing is that it shifts “feeling heard” from something abstract or sentimental into something operational. It gives us ingredients.
Not a script. Not a communication hack. But conditions.
Feeling Heard Is More Than Agreement
One of the most important insights from both the research and our conversation was this:
People do not necessarily need agreement in order to feel heard. They need evidence that their experience has been seriously received.
This distinction matters enormously in workplaces.
Leaders often assume that if they cannot accommodate a request, fully resolve a conflict, or align with someone’s perspective, then the person will inevitably leave feeling unheard. But in practice, many people can tolerate difficult outcomes far more readily than they can tolerate dismissal, defensiveness, avoidance, or relational disengagement.
People often know when a perfect solution is impossible.
What becomes destabilizing is when they feel invisible inside the process.
Attention Is a Leadership Practice
The research identifies attention as a foundational component of feeling heard.
In workplace settings, attention is often undermined not by malice, but by speed.
Multitasking during conversations. Listening while preparing a rebuttal. Moving too quickly toward efficiency or problem-solving. Responding before fully understanding.
Many workplaces reward responsiveness over presence.
But people can often feel the difference between being managed and being meaningfully attended to.
Attention communicates:
- “I am with you.”
- “I am tracking what you are saying.”
- “Your experience matters enough for me to slow down.”
For some nervous systems, particularly those shaped by marginalization, chronic interruption, invalidation, or high-stakes workplace dynamics, this slowing down can profoundly alter the experience of psychological safety.
Empathy Is Not Fragility
Empathy is sometimes misunderstood in organizations as lowering standards, avoiding accountability, or becoming emotionally overaccommodating.
But empathy is not the absence of accountability.
It is the capacity to understand the human experience occurring alongside the issue being discussed.
A performance conversation without empathy can feel cold or threatening. A conflict conversation without empathy can escalate defensiveness. A change process without empathy can produce distrust even when intentions are good.
Empathy does not mean agreement. It means demonstrating that another person’s reality has been considered with care.
Respect Is Felt Through Process
Many people associate respect with tone or politeness. But in workplaces, respect is often communicated structurally.
Through:
- transparency
- predictability
- fairness
- responsiveness
- inclusion in decision-making
- clarity around expectations
- honoring boundaries and time
- not humiliating or dismissing people publicly
People often determine whether they are respected less through organizational values statements and more through repeated lived interactions.
How meetings are facilitated. Who gets interrupted. Whose concerns are minimized. Who receives follow-up. Whose discomfort is treated as inconvenient.
Respect becomes visible through patterns.
Feeling Heard Is Collective, Not Just Interpersonal
One of the things I appreciated most about the visual framework from the article was that it moves from “me” to “we.”
Feeling heard begins interpersonally, but it shapes collective culture.
When people repeatedly feel unheard at work, the consequences are not merely emotional. Over time, organizations often experience:
- withdrawal
- disengagement
- conflict avoidance
- resentment
- fear-based communication
- decreased innovation
- reduced trust
- emotional exhaustion
People stop bringing forward concerns. They stop contributing ideas. They conserve energy. They protect themselves.
Conversely, cultures where people more consistently feel heard often build greater resilience for navigating complexity, disagreement, and change.
Not because conflict disappears but because people trust they can survive being in it together.
Questions for Leaders
As leaders, facilitators, educators, and colleagues, perhaps the question is not simply:
“Did I communicate?”
But also:
- Did people experience attention?
- Did they experience empathy?
- Did they experience respect?
- Did the process create conditions for mutual understanding?
- What signals did the nervous system receive in this interaction?
Because feeling heard is not only cognitive.
It is relational. Physiological. Cultural. Structural.
And increasingly, in complex workplaces, it may be one of the most important conditions for sustainable trust.
-sd
Reference: Roos CA, Postmes T, Koudenburg N (2023). Feeling heard: Operationalizing a key concept for social relations. PLoS ONE, 18(11)
by admin | May 19, 2026 | Inside the Work Blog
One of the biggest misconceptions about difficult conversations at work is that they’re primarily communication problems.
Often, they’re nervous system problems – first.
Not because people are irrational.
Not because they lack professionalism.
But because conversations at work rarely happen in a vacuum.
They happen inside:
- power dynamics
- histories
- uncertainty
- identity
- performance pressure
- fear of consequences
- previous unresolved tension
- competing interpretations
- emotional exhaustion
Which means by the time a conversation becomes “difficult,” people are often responding to much more than the words being spoken in that moment.
I see this often in leadership spaces.
A leader says: “I don’t understand why this conversation escalated.”
But when you slow the situation down, the escalation often started long before the conversation itself.
Sometimes people are carrying:
- months of ambiguity
- accumulated frustration
- fear of being misunderstood
- previous experiences of dismissal
- anxiety about reputation or belonging
- uncertainty about consequences
- internal pressure to stay composed
And then one comment, one email, one meeting, or one moment becomes the place where all of that tension finally surfaces.
It is often times when the nervous system has reached capacity.
A Case I’ve Been Thinking About
Recently, I was reflecting on a workplace situation where a leader needed to have an evaluatory conversation with a team member.
On paper, the conversation seemed straightforward.
The leader had prepared clear examples. Their intentions were good. They believed they were being direct and transparent.
But the conversation deteriorated quickly.
The employee became visibly shut down. The leader became more rigid and procedural. Both people left feeling frustrated and misunderstood.
And afterward, the leader’s interpretation was: “They became defensive and unwilling to hear feedback.”
But when we unpacked the interaction more carefully, a different picture emerged.
The employee had entered the conversation already highly activated.
There had been weeks of uncertainty. Limited communication. Ambiguous expectations. A growing fear that they were “failing” without fully understanding why.
So by the time the evaluatory conversation arrived, the nervous system wasn’t hearing: “Here’s an opportunity for growth.”
It was hearing: “You are under threat.” “You are disappointing.” “You may be rejected.” “You are about to lose stability.”
And importantly, the leader’s nervous system became activated too.
The more shut down the employee became, the more the leader tightened their delivery in an attempt to regain clarity and control.
Which increased discomfort for the employee even further.
This is what people often miss about difficult conversations: Both people are usually adapting in real time.
And adaptation under stress often looks like:
- defensiveness
- over-explaining
- withdrawal
- rigidity
- appeasement
- emotional flooding
- intellectualizing
- shutting down
- excessive calmness
- loss of language access
- urgency for resolution
Not because people are intentionally difficult.
But because nervous systems under pressure prioritize protection before connection.
What Leadership Can Do Differently
This doesn’t mean avoiding accountability conversations.
It doesn’t mean eliminating feedback.
And it doesn’t mean leaders are responsible for managing everyone’s emotions.
But it does mean leadership needs to become more aware of the conditions surrounding conversations — not just the content of them.
Some of the most effective leaders I’ve worked with understand that difficult conversations are shaped long before the meeting itself.
Things that reduce unnecessary nervous system activation include:
- clearer expectations earlier
- fewer ambiguity gaps
- predictable communication
- relational trust before crisis
- transparency about process
- slowing conversations down
- naming observations instead of assumptions
- checking interpretation before escalation
- making room for clarification
- understanding the role of power dynamics
- separating accountability from threat
And perhaps most importantly: Learning how to regulate yourself before trying to regulate the conversation. Because people often mirror the nervous system conditions around them.
A leader who becomes rigid, urgent, emotionally reactive, overly procedural, or conflict-avoidant under pressure can unintentionally intensify the very dynamic they’re trying to resolve.
The goal isn’t perfect communication.
The goal is building enough clarity, structure, and relational steadiness that people can remain connected to themselves while navigating discomfort.
That changes everything.
Practical Tools for Difficult Conversations
A lot of my recent work has focused on helping leaders and teams navigate conflict, communication, regulation, and difficult conversations more intentionally inside complex systems.
I recently developed a practical Difficult Conversations Toolkit that includes:
- conversation frameworks
- nervous system awareness tools
- regulation prompts
- reflection exercises
- structured conversation supports
- practical guidance for navigating high-stakes conversations
You can explore it here:
https://silviadaddario.com/courses/when-conversations-get-hard-course/
-sd
by admin | May 9, 2026 | Inside the Work Blog
It’s Mental Health Awareness Month, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how often we talk about mental health as though it exists separately from the systems people are trying to survive inside.
We talk about stress.
Burnout.
Anxiety.
Emotional exhaustion.
But we don’t talk nearly enough about adaptation.
About what it costs to spend years learning how to suppress parts of yourself in order to be perceived as professional, credible, emotionally regulated, or safe to work with.
Especially for people whose ways of thinking, communicating, processing, or relating don’t naturally align with dominant workplace norms.
Many leaders are not struggling because they are incapable.
They are struggling because they are carrying enormous invisible labour inside environments that reward performance over authenticity, speed over processing, and composure over honesty.
And over time, that adaptation has a cost.
I see it in leaders who:
- rehearse conversations repeatedly before speaking
- monitor their tone constantly
- over-explain to avoid being misunderstood
- shut down mid-conflict because their nervous system floods
- absorb tension quietly to preserve relationships
- feel exhausted after meetings that others barely notice
- spend more energy interpreting the room than participating in it
A lot of this gets framed as personal weakness.
A lack of resilience.
Poor communication.
Being “too sensitive.”
Overthinking.
But much of what we call dysfunction is actually adaptation.
Adaptation to systems that were never designed for different nervous systems, communication styles, identities, or ways of processing the world.
And the hard part is:
many of these adaptations work.
They help people stay employed.
Stay connected.
Stay credible.
Stay safe.
Until they don’t.
Until the body starts signaling distress.
Until burnout becomes chronic.
Until anxiety becomes constant.
Until people lose access to themselves entirely while trying to remain acceptable to everyone else.
This is one of the reasons I think mental health conversations need to become more structural.
Because mental health is not only about what individuals carry internally.
It’s also about what environments repeatedly require people to suppress, perform, absorb, navigate, or survive.
And leadership matters here.
Not just in how leaders support others, but in what leadership itself currently demands from people.
Many leadership models still reward:
- emotional suppression disguised as professionalism
- certainty over reflection
- rapid responses over thoughtful processing
- endurance over sustainability
- neutrality over humanity
And increasingly, I think many people are realizing those models are not working.
Not because people are failing leadership.
But because leadership, as we inherited it, often fails people.
Particularly neurodivergent people.
Disabled people.
Queer people.
Racialized people.
Trauma-affected people.
Anyone whose body or nervous system has had to become highly adaptive to move through the world.
For me, this isn’t about lowering expectations.
It’s about asking better questions.
What kinds of leadership become possible when people are not spending enormous amounts of energy masking?
What happens when regulation is understood not as emotional suppression, but as staying connected to yourself under pressure?
What changes when workplaces stop rewarding the appearance of steadiness and start building actual capacity for honesty, reflection, repair, accessibility, and relational safety?
I don’t think these are fringe questions anymore.
I think they are becoming central leadership questions.
Especially as more people quietly realize:
the way they’ve been surviving at work may not actually be sustainable.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing more about neurodivergent leadership, invisible labour, emotional regulation, conflict, and the hidden adaptations many people carry inside professional environments.
Because I don’t think we need more conversations about how to perform wellness inside unhealthy systems.
I think we need more conversations about what different kinds of leadership are making visible about the systems themselves.
-sd
by admin | May 3, 2026 | Inside the Work Blog
There’s a version of leadership that gets rewarded.
It’s steady. Contained. Clear. It knows how to move things forward without disrupting too much. It makes people feel like things are under control.
And for a long time, I thought that was the goal.
But there’s another experience I keep seeing in myself, and in the leaders I work with.
A sense of not quite fitting.
Not because we’re unclear. Not because we’re incapable.
But because what we’re being asked to hold doesn’t match how we actually see, think, or lead.
Sometimes it shows up like this:
- You see complexity where others want simplicity.
- You ask questions that slow things down when speed is rewarded.
- You notice impact – relational, emotional, systemic, in rooms that are only tracking output.
- You feel the moment something is off, even when no one else names it.
And over time, a quiet calculation starts happening.
Do I adapt… or do I stay with what I’m seeing?
Most leadership models don’t account for this moment.
- They teach you how to communicate more clearly.
- How to manage conflict.
- How to influence outcomes.
But they don’t always ask a more fundamental question:
What happens when the container itself isn’t built for how you lead?
Because a lot of what gets labeled as “overthinking,” “too emotional,” or “not strategic enough” is often something else entirely.
- It’s pattern recognition.
- It’s systems awareness.
- It’s relational intelligence.
- It’s a different kind of leadership.
And right now, we are still trying to practice that kind of leadership inside systems built from older templates.
Templates that prioritized control over care. Efficiency over relationship. Certainty over curiosity. Templates that were never designed to account for trauma, power, or inequity in any meaningful way.
So when leadership starts to look more human – more regulated, more relational, more aware of harm and its impact,
it doesn’t always “fit.”
It disrupts pace. It surfaces tension. It challenges decisions that would have otherwise gone unquestioned.
And here’s the part we don’t name enough:
That disruption isn’t the problem. It’s the signal.
Because leadership, as a practice, is in the middle of a shift.
From authority to accountability From control to capacity From performance to presence. From maintaining systems to questioning whether those systems should exist as they are.
This is what trauma-informed, conflict-aware, equity-minded leadership actually asks of us.
Not just to navigate within systems more skillfully but to notice where those systems produce harm and to have the capacity to stay in the tension of changing them.
And that’s not clean work.
It will feel slower. Less certain. More exposed.
It will ask you to stay in conversations longer than is comfortable. To name things that don’t land neatly. To hold complexity without rushing to resolution.
Which is why so many people feel like they don’t fit. Because they’re practicing a form of leadership that the current structures don’t yet know how to hold.
But something important gets lost when we compress that.
Not just for the person doing the compressing but for the system itself. Because the very thing that doesn’t “fit” is often the thing that could change what isn’t working.
For me, the work isn’t just learning how to lead better within existing structures.
It’s about recognizing when your way of leading is pointing to something those structures can’t yet hold and deciding what you’re willing to stay with anyway.
Because new ways of leading don’t enter systems fully formed and widely accepted.
They show up first as friction.
And the question isn’t always “How do I fit this space better?”
Sometimes it’s:
What is my way of leading making visible that this space isn’t yet designed for?
If you’re feeling that tension lately, you’re not alone.
And it might not be a signal to shrink.
It might be a signal that you’re practicing a form of leadership that is already moving us forward even if the system hasn’t caught up yet.
-sd
by admin | Apr 28, 2026 | Inside the Work Blog
Not everything that is said is equally heard.
In many leadership conversations, listening is treated as a personal skill.
Be present. Don’t interrupt. Show that you’re engaged.
All of that matters.
But it doesn’t capture what’s actually happening in most workplace interactions.
Because listening is not just about attention. It’s about interpretation. It’s about power. And it’s about what the environment is able to hold.
Two people can say similar things in the same meeting and be received very differently.
One is seen as thoughtful. The other as disruptive.
One is heard as raising a valid concern. The other as overreacting.
One shifts the direction of the conversation. The other is acknowledged and then the conversation moves on.
The difference is rarely just what was said.
It’s how it was heard.
And how something is heard is shaped by more than intent.
It is shaped by:
- who is speaking
- how much credibility they are assumed to have
- how their tone is interpreted
- what risk they carry in naming something
- and whether the environment is structured to hold what they are bringing forward
Listening, in that sense, is not neutral.
It reflects the same patterns of power, identity and perception that show up everywhere else in our systems.
In the Work
In a recent consultation, a staff member raised a concern about how a decision was being implemented.
They were careful in how they said it. Measured. Specific. Grounded in the impact they were seeing.
The response was immediate.
“I think we just need to stay focused on solutions here.”
The conversation moved on.
No one interrupted. No one dismissed them explicitly.
But nothing shifted.
A few minutes later, someone else raised a similar point.
This time, it landed differently.
“That’s a really important consideration.”
The group paused. The idea was explored. The conversation changed direction.
The content wasn’t fundamentally different.
But the reception was.
And that difference matters.
Because people notice these patterns.
They learn, over time: • what gets traction • what gets softened • what gets redirected • and what gets ignored
And they adjust.
Not always consciously.
But consistently.
Some speak more strategically. Some filter more carefully. Some stop raising certain kinds of concerns altogether.
Not because they don’t see them. But because they’ve learned how those concerns are likely to be received.
What This Requires of Leadership
This is where listening becomes a leadership practice, not just a personal skill.
Because as a leader, you are not only listening. You are shaping what is heard.
Through:
what you respond to
what you follow up on
what you let pass
and how you interpret what is being said
Listening, in that sense, is one of the primary ways leaders contain, or fail to contain, tension.
When something is named, there is a moment.
Before it is resolved. Before it is acted on.
A moment where it either:
expands into something that can be understood
or collapses into something that is redirected or minimized
That moment is not neutral.
It is shaped by how it is received.
And that reception determines what happens next.
If concerns are quickly reframed, people learn to self-edit.
If impact is acknowledged but not engaged, people learn that naming something doesn’t change anything.
If tension is rushed toward resolution, people learn that complexity won’t be held.
Over time, this shapes not just conversations—but culture.
The Shift
We often ask: How do we get people to speak up?
But a more precise question might be:
What happens when they do?
Because people are always assessing that.
Not in a formal way.
But in the moment.
Is this something that will be heard? Is it worth the risk? Will anything shift?
If the answer is no, often enough, people don’t become less perceptive.
They become less visible.
A Small Practice
The next time someone raises something that feels slightly off, uncomfortable, or disruptive, pause.
Before responding, ask yourself:
What am I hearing and what might I be missing? What is the function of what’s being said? Is this something to solve, or something to understand?
And most importantly:
What would it look like to hold this for a moment longer before moving it forward?
Because listening is not just about making space for people to speak.
It’s about what you do with what emerges when they do.
-sd
by admin | Apr 17, 2026 | Inside the Work Blog
It starts as something small something that doesn’t quite hold.
A comment. A decision moving too quickly. A moment that feels off.
And then comes the quieter moment: the decision not to say something.
We call what happens later conflict.
But what I see, over and over again, is something different.
We don’t have a conflict problem. We have a containment problem.
Because most conflict doesn’t begin out loud.
It begins in the moments where something is noticed but not named.
Not because it isn’t important. But because the conditions don’t feel right.
So it gets held.
Internally. Relationally. Quietly.
Until it doesn’t.
By the time something is called conflict, it’s carrying more than the original issue.
More interpretation. More emotion. More consequence.
And at that point, the response often shifts quickly to resolution.
How do we fix this? How do we move forward? How do we get back to alignment?
But not all conflict is asking to be resolved.
Some of it is asking to be understood. Or named. Or held – without being rushed into agreement.
And when we move too quickly to resolution, we often collapse the very thing that needed space.
Difference. Tension. Perspective.
In the Work
I was in a meeting recently where a decision was moving forward.
The conversation was smooth. Aligned. Efficient.
And there was a moment, brief, almost imperceptible where something didn’t quite hold.
An assumption embedded in the decision that hadn’t been tested.
I saw it.
And I could feel the calculation in real time: Do I name this? Do I let it go? Is this the right moment or does it disrupt what’s already moving?
That moment is where most of the work actually is.
Because if it isn’t named there, it doesn’t disappear.
It moves.
Into side conversations. Into hesitation. Into misalignment that shows up later as something harder to hold.
In that moment, I paused the conversation.
Not to challenge the decision. But to create space for what hadn’t yet been said.
To slow it down just enough for the assumption to be named and explored.
Nothing escalated.
There was no conflict to resolve.
But the conversation changed.
What This Requires of Leadership
This is what I mean by containment.
Not control. Capacity.
The capacity to:
- hold tension early, before it escalates
- distinguish between discomfort and harm
- stay with difference without forcing resolution
- and create conditions where something can be named without becoming rupture
Because conflict carries data.
About where things are unclear. Where assumptions are misaligned. Where power is uneven. Where something isn’t working the way we think it is.
But that data is only accessible if the environment can hold it.
Without that, people adapt.
Some speak and absorb the impact. Some stay silent and absorb it internally.
And we call that professionalism.
But from where I sit, that’s not a communication issue.
That’s a design failure.
Leadership isn’t just about encouraging people to speak.
It’s about creating conditions where what is spoken can be held.
The Shift
If we can’t hold it early, we’ll be forced to manage it later.
And by then, it’s no longer just about the issue. It’s about everything that wasn’t named along the way.
So the question isn’t: How do we handle conflict better?
It’s: What are we actually able to hold when it shows up?
Because if the environment can’t hold tension, people don’t become less perceptive.
They become less visible.
-sd
