How Work Cultures Heal From Trauma: With Rex Miller [Podcast]

Lately, I’ve been doing a ton of speaking engagements, podcast interviews, and book signing events, and one of the most common questions I get asked is this, “Since Covid, things aren’t the same; the workplace has changed forever. How do we get a handle on the speed of change, the stress, the burnout, and the trauma of what we’ve been through over the last few years? Can Compassionate Accountability® help us sort things out?”

The principles of Compassionate Accountability can certainly help us navigate the difficult conversations around this topic, and give us a framework for upholding what’s most important along the way. And there’s a whole lot more to understand.  

My guest on this episode of OnCompassion is Rex Miller. Rex is a renowned expert in optimizing human and team performance, strategic foresight, and organizational transformation. Join us as we explore how organizational cultures and communities are impacted and rebuild after the trauma of rapid change.

What’s In This Episode

• What are the three kinds of trauma?
• How does trauma show up in our brains and bodies?
• What has happened to empathy over the past 50 years?
• How can storytelling help people heal from trauma?
• What did most companies miss in their response to Covid?

How Work Cultures Heal from Trauma Highlights

Listen To The Audio

Read The Transcript

Introduction:

Are you a leader who cares deeply about a positive and trusting work culture, but also wants to keep a laser focus on performance? Do you ever feel pulled between the two? Good news, you don’t have to choose. My podcast is dedicated to the belief that compassion and accountability are met to work together. Never before in our history has the need for Compassionate Accountability^Ò been greater. Everything from our personal wellbeing to our collective survival depends on it. So I share wisdom, stories and best practices from experts who are in the trenches making Compassionate Accountability a reality. I’m Nate Regier, our host for OnCompassion with Dr. Nate. I’m also the founder and CEO of Next Element Consulting and author of four books about compassion at work, including my new book, “Compassionate Accountability: How Leaders Build Connection and Get Results.” I’m a husband, dad, competitive barbecuer, woodworker, and avid outdoors person. Thank you for joining me and I hope you’ll implement the tips and tools in this show. If you benefit from my podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review to help us reach more listeners. Also, be sure to visit my website at next-element.com and go to the podcast page to access the notes and links for each show.

Nate Regier:

As many of you probably know, my new book, Compassionate Accountability, launched in July. I’ve been doing a ton of speaking engagements, podcast interviews, and book signing events, and one of the most common questions I get asked is this. Since Covid, things aren’t the same. The workplace has changed forever. How do we get a handle on the speed of change, the stress, the burnout, the trauma of what we’ve been through over the last few years? Can Compassionate Accountability help us sort things out? Well, here’s my answer. The principles of Compassionate Accountability can certainly help us navigate the difficult conversations around this topic and give us a framework for upholding what’s most important along the way, and there’s a whole lot more to understand. That’s why I’m so happy about my guest on this episode. We’re going to explore how organizational cultures and communities are impacted and rebuilt after the trauma of rapid change.

What a timely topic.

Rex Miller is a renowned expert in optimizing human and team performance, strategic foresight, and organizational transformation. With over 20 years as a consultant and coach, he has authored six books with Wiley Publishers and received numerous accolades, including the Cornet Global Innovator Award, the Industry Excellence Award, and IFMA’s distinguished Author Award. Rex’s mission is to help teams achieve greatness and experience the exhilaration of being part of an extraordinary group. With four decades of practice experience guiding teams and leaders to triumph, Rex is here to help managers and leaders unleash their team’s true potential and attain success. Rex has seen a lot, he’s helped leaders through a lot and has some incredible perspective on what’s going on right now. He’s passionate about helping leaders in organizations rebuild and imagine a better future post-trauma. So let’s get started. Rex, welcome to OnCompassion.

Rex Miller:

Nate. Thank you. I appreciate it and I appreciate the work you’re doing. Compassion is the gateway, entryway to helping people heal, so I appreciate it.

Nate Regier:

Wonderful. Well, it sounds like we already got something in common, and I’d just like to start by inviting you to share a little bit about your story. How did you get interested in workplace culture?

Rex Miller:

I started in 1978 as a project manager at Southwestern Bell. It’s now AT&T.  And we were going through a major cultural shift. We were going from analog communication – do you remember the rotary dial and click, click, click, click? –  into digital communication, and at the same time, we were moving from primarily private office and open bullpens into cubicles. And I started seeing how managers who had spent their whole lives hoping to get into that private office now being moved into cubicles were just depressed. And I was watching this as a young kid, seeing that as technology changes and disruption comes and as you move people, there’s a big emotional side to that whole component that companies, we didn’t deal with that side of it. We just did the logistics side and made sure that by Monday their keys worked.

Nate Regier:

Wow. Well, normally when we think of trauma, we think of individuals. Something horrible has happened to somebody or they’ve been through it, but you deal with trauma in communities. And a lot of your work is with communities, work communities, that have experienced trauma and you help people recover from that. Will you share a little bit about your experience there and how you see this?

Rex Miller:

It started when we started looking at teachers, caregivers, and found that a lot of the engagement numbers – Gallup says that 70% of teachers are disengaged, either going through the motion or toxic. And after doing work on workplace health and wellbeing, I was at a teacher conference, it was a workshop, it was a leadership training put on by a high tech company, pro bono for teachers, and they did a resilience assessment of these teachers. On the third morning, their Chief Wellness Officer came in and said, based on the resilience assessments we gave you, we’re concerned. They said, 75% of you, we don’t know how you get up in the morning. 25% of you are ready to pop. In my mind, I was thinking fight or flight, right? You are either ready to pop – fight – or you just can’t get up. That’s the flight or freeze.

So, we had just written a book in one of my cohorts on engagement, student and teacher engagement. I started saying, this is not an engagement issue. This is burnout. This is fatigue. These are wounded warriors and it’s trauma. So that totally changed the paradigm we had about workplace engagement because it looks the same on the outside. Then we began research on the education side, and I connected with a clinical psychologist by the name of Jeff Jernigan in Loma Linda. He specializes in brain scan and trauma, PTSD with soldiers and major events. So we began this research into communities that experienced trauma. Then what I didn’t realize is that I had trauma in my own household. Our kids are adopted. My daughter has autism, high functioning form, but during high school she was brutally bullied and then she started experiencing these somatic conditions, autoimmune conditions.

It was diagnosed as MS at a very early age. So going in and seeing how trauma works in the body, there’s a great book by Besser VanDerKolk called The Body Keeps the Score, and I started seeing all this and thinking, oh, I don’t know if my daughter has MS. I do know that she went through some bad experiences. So my whole family went to the Amen Clinic and we all got brain scanned and discovered that not only my daughter, but my oldest son have what’s called the trauma pattern in their brain. It’s called the Ring of Fire. And so began a deep dive into understanding the implications of trauma that go far beyond just the behavioral things we’re feeling. It changes the whole body chemistry, it changes the autoimmune system, and it puts you in this perpetual vigilance of defending yourself. And so that research has led into individuals who have these weird physical conditions and just doing some probing.

I’m not a doctor, I’m not an expert in any of this. I’m curious. So I just start asking, is there anything that happened early on in life that you could attribute that was traumatizing in any way? And I’ll tell you, in most cases there’s something that happened and sometimes just tragic and unspeakable and it shows up in the body condition. There’s another, Dr. John Gasko, who is the former dean of University of North Texas School of Education who rated nine on the ACEs score, that’s the adverse childhood experiences, and went through all kinds of routine and physical therapy to get over this. And he says the issues are in the tissues. So that was the beginning of it, and I just keep my eyes open, listen to stories. We work with a group called Journeyman Inc. In Dallas that works with kids that come out of abusive conditions. They use a form of storytelling and spoken word to help people work through it. So I’m not an expert in this, but I am sensitive to it. When we see it, we either help people, guide them to support, or we help them find a community that can support them.

Nate Regier:

Wow. Thanks for sharing those stories and your journey and for, I’m guessing some of my listeners might appreciate that it is close to home and this isn’t just something out there. And every one of us probably has someone close to us, someone in our family, that probably could be defined as having experienced trauma. And I appreciate you making a distinction between burnout or just engagement. Some of these numbers, you were starting to see a pattern here and you educated yourself. How do you define trauma? Let’s just get clear about your definition there.

Rex Miller:

Well, there’s three kinds of trauma. There’s the level one that you and I most associate with soldiers coming back, first responders seeing something tragic, death, shock, all of that and mass disasters. There’s another kind of trauma called vicarious trauma, which is what a lot of caregivers find that their compassion and connection, their emotional connection begins to absorb other people’s pain to the point where they begin to mirror that, the mirror neuron begins to mirror that, so they begin to take on the same brain wiring patterns. There’s a great organization called HeartMath out of Colorado that has shown how much our autonomic nervous system absorbs the emotions and the feelings of others. The third kind is what we experienced during the pandemic. When you go through long periods of deprivation, uncertainty, fear, at some point in time your body clicks and says, this is permanent, and it does a rewiring in the brain and you get what’s called this default mode network, this ring of fire that you can see in brain scans. Now three very different paths, similar brain wiring.

And the challenge is that when you talk about, what I found when I talk publicly about some of these things that people who have loved ones that have experienced level one trauma, it triggers them to talk about somebody that may have just had a bad time for two years and it shows up as trauma. So being very careful about the language of all of that. And one happy ending to my daughter’s story is that when she got engaged to be married, she needed to get a physical, and I asked her to take her brain scans in to the doctor. When they looked at the brain scans, they rediagnosed.  They said, you don’t have MS. So this just leads me to think there’s so many things that have gotten misdiagnosed that the underlying causes, there’s some unresolved trauma going on.

Nate Regier:

Thank you for clarifying those different kinds of trauma and that it’s visible in brain scans. Our brain actually is wiring, rewiring and firing differently depending on that. When we talked before, Rex, you shared your perspective on what’s kind of happened through the pandemic, especially this evolution of empathy. And I’m really interested in this because we do a lot of work in compassion and trying to clarify what really is compassion and how’s it different from things like empathy and sympathy and other things. Will you share a little bit about what you’ve seen on the evolution of empathy?

Rex Miller:

Yeah. First of all, empathy is your mirror neurons putting yourself in someone else’s place. That’s why in movies, we feel what the hero has felt, or we’re watching somebody learn to ride a bike and they fall, and we kind of feel that Well, that has declined dramatically since the 1990s, well since the 1970s. So they started measuring college students and found that empathy has dropped 40%. And then during the pandemic, we’ve seen another drop of 18% in empathy. A lot of it’s probably due to compassion fatigue, just worn out, burnout, and I no longer have the capacity to take on what you’re experiencing. Interestingly enough, executives lose empathy too going up the ladder because the more difficult decisions you have to make. You started with John as an intern and you were both working your way up. Now you’re his boss. You’ve got to change that relationship. And cutting those emotional or relational ties causes the mirror neurons to atrophy.

Nate Regier:

Thank you for that. So I bring in a little bit of our experience. One of the things that we’ve really tried to distinguish is the difference between empathy fatigue and compassion fatigue.  And the research that was reported in the book, Compassionomics by Trzeciak, he talks about how brain scans show that empathy, when we’re experiencing empathy triggered by the mirror neurons, it triggers the pain centers of the brain. But when we’re practicing compassion, it’s triggering the reward centers of the brain. And that compassion is distinctly different from empathy. And when we’re seeing this burnout, people are really emotionally distancing, almost like to protect themselves from that. So in the wake of all of this burnout, trauma distancing, people just not having the bandwidth, it seems like people are so craving, what we’re hearing is they’re craving safety and connection at work. They want a place to be able to be vulnerable and reconnect, but in a way that doesn’t drain them. And that’s right where your sweet spot is. You’ve been working on some models for how we do this through community. Will you share a little bit about what you’re doing?

Rex Miller:

Well, the first organization I saw that worked on this was Journeyman Inc. And Journeyman Inc. is a program for inner city kids that come out of abusive relationships. And what they found is that they’re shut down and they develop these story templates built around cognitive behavior therapy, changing the story in your head, but first starting out with a template, very easy, what they call low risk, high value. That’s a very easy progression of talking about yourself. Once they get comfortable in that templated form where everybody’s doing the same thing and you can be as open as you want or as strict to the script as you want, then it moves into being able to then tell your story, then feel that story, accept and embrace that this is my story. Then recraft and reframe the story and then learn to tell it well, all within a safe community over time, and this is like a three year period of time in classrooms The graduation of it is in a public forum that’s a celebration.

It’s very urban, street, spoken word, and kids get up in an audience of about 400 to 600, and they speak their truth and they tell it in spoken word.

Nate Regier:

Powerful stuff.

Rex Miller:

It is. And the journey these kids come out with, owning their story and their future with agency giving back to them. It’s very powerful. So what we’ve done is we’ve adapted a version of that for the workplace, and I’ve got a workbook of free pdfs, I’ll send it to you so that you can give to your audience. But we’ve created a series of story templates so that managers can help their teams talk about challenging things like my pandemic story, my return to office story. When George Floyd was murdered, we could feel the tension and the unease was palpable, and there was not a safe way to talk about that event. So we created a story template to help people talk about that.

We’ve even created story templates to make our holiday gatherings more engaging. I created one around Thanksgiving for my family, and these are free on the website. If you go and look at engaging conversations, you can get them. And I’ve got young kids and we have 20 somethings, and the conversations were not, we’d get together and it would eat and leave, eat and leave type of thing. Well, we spent three and a half hours in an engaging conversation and some of it fun. We laughed. We told stories, more stories came out, and I found that this format of creating safe, entry-level conversations was like priming a pump. I’m now also using it when I go into large capital project teams that are in conflict and just begin to create a safe avenue back into humanizing one another. So the first step is we heal in community, whether it’s your team at work, family or whatever, and then we need to rehumanize one another, find safe entry points, and then go through that process that I described that Journeyman Inc. goes through as a progressive way of just the facts of the story. Then the feeling of the story. How did it wound you, how it affected you, reframing it, recrafting it, then telling it well.  That’s the process that we use.

Nate Regier:

Wow, so much there to unpack Rex. God, I’m reminded of one of my colleagues and mentors in graduate school was doing work on trauma and he studied the Killeen Massacre in Texas and was talking about how one of the things that happens during trauma is there’s this event that we can’t reconcile. It doesn’t fit, and so we compartmentalize it and this story becomes this thing that just festers, but we don’t see how it’s part of who we are. And it sounds like your process is really helping people reengage with the narrative in a way that preserves their dignity, preserves their agency, but also helps them take ownership for the narrative that going from what happened to me to I am an agent, I am valuable, capable, and responsible in this world. My listeners who are familiar with the Three Switches of the Compassion Mindset, I’m sure you’re seeing how this process affirms our value. It affirms our capability, but it also affirms our responsibility as agents here. Powerful stuff. And I could see it in your eyes and hear it in your voice that this is, you’ve experienced some transformation and you can really feel this and appreciate what it does for your clients.

Rex Miller:

And we’re at this moment where so many people are struggling. It’s a collective vertigo that we’re in. We’ve gone through a very unique disruption. Not only is it the global mass disaster that we’ve gone through. Imagine friends – I don’t know if you’ve got friends who went through 9/11, but I do, some of them still can’t look at a picture of the Twin Towers.

So two years sequestered. Some people, many people lost loved ones. I mean, we lost all those things. Parents, family members, animals, and then a lot of people lost a livelihood. My business shut down March of 2020 and my business is probably a lot like yours. I make money when I’m in front of people and doing workshops and coaching. Then there is this massive disruption of work. That community that even though we didn’t like it was, we were frenemies with work, but it was reliable and dependable. And so the covenant we had with work was broken. That’s a lot of damage. And so Dr. Jernigan talks about that these things take 7 to 10 years to work through a community. And the challenge we keep running into with companies is that what they do is they just press the pause button with no kind of worker intervention and then try to flip the on switch and say, okay, now we’re coming back.

Well, that just opens the wound up again, and we’re dealing with all of the tactical sides, but none of the adaptive sides. We’re not dealing with any of the psychology of this. We’re dealing with, well, we’ll make you a better workplace or we’ll give you some incentives. Or how about this? If you don’t come in Monday, we’ll fire you. So we’re making all of the wrong moves in order to heal ourselves, our countries, our organizations. I don’t think we’ve yet seen the full price and fallout in the younger generation or just in work in general of the way it’s being handled.

Nate Regier:

Well, thank you for all of the free resources you make available. I’ve looked at a lot of those and we’ll put links in the show notes to some of the organizations, some of the researchers, some of the books that you’ve mentioned. We’ll get ’em in there and thank you for offering some of those free to my listeners as well. We could talk a lot about, I’d love to hear how you work with organizations more about your principles, but I want to start trying to land this plane, and I know you’ve got a new passion going. Tell me about River Rose.

Rex Miller:

River Rose is, it’s 19 acres, 90 minutes southwest of Dallas. It’s a ranch. It’s in a town called Glenrose. It’s beautiful. I’ve got riverfront I’m looking at here. I’ve got a creek over on the other side. We’ve rebuilt. It’s a historic property. The main house is built out of petrified wood and fossil, and we’ve created a retreat facility so we can bring leaders and teams together to just reconnect all those things you and I talked about. This does it in a way in nature, in a place that really accelerates the ability to create those stories and to create that healing. So we’re excited about it. Now, summertime’s not the time to come to Texas, but the fall is very full and it’s great, and we’re excited about it.

Nate Regier:

Wonderful. And we’ll put information in the show notes also. So right before we started recording, you were telling me a little bit about some things you’re working on. What’s new, what’s kind of fresh, and what are you excited about these days?

Rex Miller:

Well, I’ve been working with strengths and strengths assessments for a long time, and I am solving a problem that’s frustrated me forever, and the product is called Genius Spark. It’s a software application and it’s a process. It goes back to something in the research that we found that NASA looked at 1,600 three to five year olds in the sixties, tested them, and they all tested as creative geniuses. By the time we get to 30, only 2% keep that. Now, all of the training that we have on assessments and workshops use a very old traditional model of learning, but it doesn’t use any of the modern sciences, performance science and cognitive behavior therapy and true transformation. So Genius Spark is to provide the ability to focus in on your full potential, use the process of reinforcing it, easy process, so that you can become a better version of yourself. And what we’ve done for companies is taken away lots of the barriers where people go through great workshops, put it on the shelf so it’s usable on a weekly, daily basis. I found that as a consultant and trainer, I was the bottleneck. I was the expert. People loved what I did when I left, they couldn’t do it. So we’ve solved those issues. The book for that is coming out in September, so that’s one of the new things we’re working on.

Nate Regier:

On. Awesome. Is there a name for the book?

Rex Miller:

Genius Spark.

Nate Regier:

Fantastic, fantastic. Rex, you have shared your journey of how you became aware that trauma is different than just engagement. We have a real serious issue going on and that we have to deal with it and we have to understand the brains and we have to have particular techniques and strategies to help people get back in touch with themselves and be able to tell those stories. So appreciative of the work you’re doing to help heal, help communities come back together. And I think in a world that seems to be going more and more virtual, more and more automated, more and more learn as you go, I think the kinds of stuff you’re doing is so critical and so important, and thank you so much for what you’re doing and for being on this podcast.

Rex Miller:

You’re welcome, Nate. Yeah. Well, thank you for the opportunity and I wish you all the best.

Nate Regier:

Thank you. So last thing, how can people get ahold of you if they want to learn more about your work?

Rex Miller:

If they want to keep up with the current work, it’s on LinkedIn and it’s easy to find me on LinkedIn, and then an overview of my services, Rexmiller.com is the best second place to find me.

Nate Regier:

We’ll have it all in there, Rex. Thank you so much,

Rex Miller:

Nate. Thank you too. Take care.

Nate Regier:

Wow, what a powerful and touching conversation with Rex Miller about trauma and how that shows up in the workplaces. Here are my top three takeaways from a really powerful and touching conversation with Rex Miller about healing trauma in our communities and in our workplaces.

The first key takeaway is the issues are in the tissues. Trauma changes body chemistry. Rex explained the brain science. The Ring of Fire is a unique constellation of brain regions that rewire and refire differently as a result of trauma. This is more than just stress and burnout, and it’s much more prevalent than we realize. For example, in one school, 25% of educators showed symptoms of trauma simply as a function of their experience at work.

Second, empathy has declined since the 1970s. Assessment of college students over time shows that empathy has dropped a whopping 40% in the last 50 years and another 18% during covid. This is probably due in part to empathy fatigue, and the long-term effects of vicarious trauma. People are simply no longer able, they just don’t have the capacity to take more on.

And finally, pressing pause doesn’t heal the wound. Through Covid, many companies paused operations, but they didn’t address the trauma employees experienced. Rex explained that Covid was really a global mass disaster with significant disruptions to personal and professional lives. Our covenant with work was broken, and these kinds of things take seven to 10 years to work through in a community. So pressing pause with no trauma worker intervention, and then just flipping the switch on again, all it does is reopen the wound.

In this conversation, Rex shared some personal and touching examples of the kinds of interventions he’s using to help communities heal from trauma.

Hey, everybody. I hope you enjoyed this episode of OnCompassion with Dr. Nate. If you haven’t already, I invite you to buy a copy of my new book, Compassionate Accountability: How Leaders Build Connection and Get Results. Buy multiple copies and unlock some great bonuses, like a free keynote presentation. When you buy the book, you’ll get access to a host of resources to bring more compassion to your workplace. Find out more atcompassionateaccountabilitybook.com. If you’ve already read the book, I’d really appreciate an Amazon review. Thanks.