What makes you feel emotionally unsafe?

A friend of mine follows my parenting blog. She's also an agency worker. So one day she said to me, "Why don't you write a blog for agency workers? They need this as much as parents do!"

And then my sister, an assistant professor in the Department of Nursing at University of Hartford, CT, introduced me to the term 'horizontal violence' and said, "Why don't you write this blog for nurses, too?"

As a helping professional, you may need ongoing support and encouragement more than anyone, because you do so much for so many - with so little. But you can get so caught up helping others that it may not occur to you (or you simply may not have the time) to ask for help when you need it.

So where to start? What's the biggest challenge you face that I know something about?

Emotional safety.

In all the workshops, seminars and consulting I've done, frontline workers said they felt unsafe - with clients, with co-workers, with bosses. And if you're in a helping profession, you know what I'm talking about.

So here's what I do want to do in this blog:

• I want to focus on solutions.
• I want to write posts that you can read in 2-3 minutes a week.
• I want to provide you with simple but powerful tools to help you create the emotional safety you need to do the critical work of helping others.
  
• I want to offer ongoing support and dialogue.
  
• And I want to give you an opportunity to comment, ask questions and be heard.

And here's what I don't want to do:

• I don't want to create an academic discussion around oppression, vicarious trauma, horizontal violence, etc. Others, much more qualified than I am, are already doing that very capably, so I'll stick to what I know.
  
• I don't want to explore the whys and wherefores - "How did we get into this mess in the first place?" - or focus on the problem.
  
• And I certainly don't want to provide you with sound bites that are trite and have no real value.

But I need your input for this to work. So tell me: What makes you feel unsafe at work? What creates or contributes to an emotionally unsafe work environment for you or others?

You can have your say here. And you can help create more emotional safety in your workplace - regardless of what anyone else is doing.

Take a minute to leave a comment - anonymously, if you want - and let's see what we can do together!