The SFD, tied up with a bow that says “you are not enough.”

There was a knock on my door.  “Have you a minute?”  Lisa said as she edged open my door.  She looked angry.  Very angry actually.  “Of course” I said as I put down my pen, swung around towards the empty chair in the corner and gestured for her to take a seat.  I took a deep breath and braced myself for the SFD. 

The “Stormy First Draft” as Brene Brown (a shame and empathy researcher from Texas USA) calls it.  Brene, if you don’t know her, is my favourite story-teller and knows just a little bit about shame, blame, and leadership.  Her teaching tells us so much about how to be restorative when working with teams, complaints, and breakdown in effective communications. 

The Stormy First Draft.  We all have it.  We all do it.  We all need it.  It isn’t a judgement on you as a person if you have lots of them.  I have a library of them – all unpublished.  If you ever see me driving the M2 in Northern Ireland you’ll see me orating them in the car.  Every. Single. Day.  My husband to be, JP, is a seasoned audience of my SFD’s.  Patient, kind, generous of spirit, and one of the best reflectors I know, he is my editor of SFD’s.

The Stormy First Draft is your first and most emotional response to an event which threatens some sense of your security.  They are usually gift wrapped in past pain, insecurities, fear, and tied with a colourful bow which reads “I’m not good enough.”  And before you think this is a gift just for the girls.  It isn’t.  Guys have Stormy First Drafts too.  They just don’t talk about them as much as girls do, which is a great sadness to me considering the suicide rate in men and the raft of research which suggests that women’s propensity to tell their SFD to, well just about anyone who will listen (including a random granny at the bus stop who just asked how your day was going), is a protective factor in mental health.  We all need an editor for our SFD’s, and good leaders accept this (often unacknowledged) responsibility with the wisdom that it will build stronger and more resilient employees.  It is the “support” function of your leadership role.

Lisa sat down.  She took a deep breath and said:

“I hate working here.  I am so fed up with this.  Do you know what they did?” 

“To You?” I asked, checking myself against the fourth rule of braving leadership – Vaulting.

“Yes to me!” she replied

“Ok, good,” I thought, we were within the boundary of talking about things that belonged to Lisa to talk about.  In practicing restoratively, "Vaulting" is keeping confidential things that are spoken to you, but which do not belong to you, and equally important, not listening to things that are spoken to you which do not belong to you or the person talking about them.  It goes to the core of integrity – of being trust-worthy.  Bottom line is if you or the person talking to you, isn’t involved in the trouble you are sharing, if they don’t impact you or them in some way – then mind your own business and frankly, stop being a gossip. 

And so out it came, the SFD, words tumbling over each other.  How, ever since she had spoken out against the expectation that everyone should work overtime, and she had chosen to not work overtime, because she had children to care for, “they” had ignored her.  Whispers fell to silence when she walked in the room, covert looks were passed over shoulders and although nothing was said, she could feel the judging stare as she packed up her bag at 6pm every evening and left the office. 

“They’re bullies – they don’t understand what it is like to juggle children and work.  I’m going to put in a grievance.”

Now the Stormy First Draft is a double-edged sword.  They are dangerous if they become your truth.  And they become your truth through unchecked repetition either to yourself or to others.  And so this effective and crucial leadership skill of processing the SFD is not just for managers and HR.  Everyone should be trained in it.   Because often we choose to tell SFD’s to selective people whom we know will agree with us, we keep them secret from people who will actually process them.  And yet, in organisations that have great leadership, the task of processing the SFD is a cornerstone in building a compassionate culture, where creativity, solutions, harmony and collaborative productivity resides, and avoiding the shaming, blaming culture where those things come to die.

The unarguable pre-requisite for the SFD is permission to tell the SFD in the first place, safely, and without fear of judgement that you are  “hysterical,” “weak,” “a complainer,” “can’t cut it”, or you “need to grow a set.” Don’t even get me started on what the “set” to be grown is… Balls? Breasts? Both? Neither? Who knows?  But the message is clear, “you are less than when you express feelings.”  The list of judgements which can come on the back of the SFD when your team are not explicitly trained in the value of it, in the right place with the right people, is long and often the experience is harsh, punitive and destructive.

Now, I’ve covered permission giving and receiving as part of trustful container building before, so I won’t labour it again here.  You can read it on our blog here, and learn a quick exercises on how to build it in the resources section of our website here.  But let’s talk about what you should do when someone brings you their SFD.
 
Listen to the SFD
Unfettered.  A little like a tummy bug that needs to be expelled from the body, just let them get it out.  Don’t try and work out what is in it just yet.  Just let them say it out loud.  I use lots of these:

Nodding,
Mmm Hmm
Tell me more
What else?
Can you say more about that?

This takes a wee bit of time, so remember your boundaries.  If you don’t have the time right there and then, schedule a time and acknowledge the importance of respecting their story enough to give it time.
 
Acknowledge and Empathise with their feelings
Acknowledge and empathise with the feelings they are expressing.  Naming them is important in building emotional literacy so that they are able to verbalise the emotion rather than demonstrate it.  Did you know that only 20% of adults can name more than 3 basic emotions to describe their feelings?  That means 80% of us can only name, 1, 2 or 3.  And when we can’t verbalise a feeling, we tend to act it out in the manner of a 3 year old stamping their foot.

Find the emotion.  Name it.  Check it.  Without stepping over the boundary, into their feelings (sympathy).  So lots of these types of acknowledgements: 

"This sounds really difficult for you – you feel treated unfairly, I understand how angry you are."
"I hear you saying how rejected you feel."
"You sound hurt and isolated."

But never this:

“I know exactly what you mean, I felt totally furious when that happened to me.  It’s horrible isn’t it?” 

This is sympathy.  Not helpful.  Because now you are both wallowing in the SFD and sinking fast.
 
Reflect and reframe the basis of their feeling as a consequence of their unmet needs
Learning how to reframe SFD’s as having an impact on your needs as is a key skill in restorative practice.  We have a very snappy title for it – “Restorative Language.”  Good eh? 

Different to blaming language, where the feeling is connected to the other person’s behaviour, in restorative language we connect the feeling to our needs.  Identifying your needs which are impacted by someone else’s behaviour, allows you to express much more clearly what is and isn’t a boundary for you in a concrete, professional and assertive way.  The difference can be seen in Fig 1 & 2 below.

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Fig 1

Fig 2

Restorative Language follows a very simple formula. 

1. Identify the behaviour, and describe it factually
2. Identify the impact of it on you or them,
3. Connect it to whichever need of yours or theirs has been compromised.

For example you might say in response to Lisa’s SFD:

“So when Julie and Aoife stopped talking as soon as you came into the room you felt hurt and suspicious because you need to feel like you belong in this workplace too and if there is a problem you need to be able to address it transparently?”

OR

“So when you pack up your bag in the evenings, you feel judged because you need to be valued for the work you do when you are here and not for the choice to put a boundary around your home life?” 

The above way of reframing feelings as connected to our needs rather than someone else’s behaviour helps us to feel more in control of ourselves, express our needs more clearly and take the personal out of what often feels (and sometimes is) very personal to us.  Often we go straight to blaming language which connects our feelings to their behaviour and sounds more like this:

“Every time I walk into a room and they stop talking they make me feel like crap.” 

This contributes to a sense of not having control over our own feelings because we have given power (in our heads) to someone else to “make us” feel something.  And of course this just isn’t true.  So having someone help us to make sense of that SFD and start to identify which needs of ours have been offended or infringed upon helps us to identify what we then can do about it. 
 
Bridge the Gap With Them
This is where you help the person to identify what request they must make to best secure their needs being met.  It’s the “would you be willing to…” request made clearly and directly after an assertive assessment of how what is currently happening is impacting on their needs.  

So the above restorative statement above extends to become:

"When you stop talking as soon as I come into the room 
I feel hurt and suspicious 
because I need to feel like I belong in this workplace too. 
If you are upset with me, would you be willing to talk about it privately with me? "

Of course, when you do this you are making yourself vulnerable to a refusal, a further rejection.  This is the bit that takes the courage.  There are some things you can do to maximise the chances of the person agreeing to your request.

1. Ask it in private so they can save face,
2. Don’t ask for it when you are still in your SFD, process it with someone you trust first,
3. Smile while you ask for it,
4. Sit next to them, not across from them.

In my experience, when you use this very clear way of communicating, taking radical responsibility for your own needs in expressing what the problem is for you, instead of pushing your feelings back onto them, I have found people generally work in harmony with you.  Of course not always.  So let's look at 3 possible outcomes:

1. They will admit there is a problem, and now that you have opened a line of communication which is non-threatening, they will follow your lead and discuss it with you.  Consequently, because all behaviour is simply a form of communication, now that the issue has been spoken, they don’t need to keep demonstrating it to you through their behaviour and so it subsides or stops altogether.
2. They will deny that there is a problem at all.  This happens most often when people don't want to solve problems, they just want to express them.  But again, as in the example above - they have now achieved their goal.  You know they are aggrieved.  You have verbalised your realisation of it to them.  They no longer need to keep showing you and so the behaviour subsides or stops altogether.
3. They will deny that there is a problem, enjoy that they have upset you and continue to behave in an upsetting manner.  And yes, if you have attempted to resolve this by connecting and they continue to hurt and impact you, then by all means protect yourself and look towards your grievance procedures.  This is not meant to disregard policies your employer has for providing a safe workplace.  

When this last example happens it is disappointing but surprisingly it won't bother you anywhere near as much as you think it will.  It has less power to impact you, because you now know this is about them and their issues and not you or yours.  Because for you, your SFD is no longer tied up with the bow that reads “you are not enough as you are,” and that shaming message, at the end of the day, is most often the real crux of the problem.

LJ Sayers is a restorative practitioner and trainer, a mum, a partner, a mediocre saxophonist, and the chief quality controller of all chocolate in her household.