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(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Kelly Campbell. Kelly speaks and writes about trauma, leadership and consciousness, something she calls the new TLC. She’s also the author of Heal to Lead, revolutionizing Leadership Through Trauma Healing. Kelly is a trauma-informed leadership coach to emerging and established leaders who know they’re meant for more. So Kelly, welcome to the show.

Kelly Campbell (01:33): Hey John. Thank you so much for having me.

John Jantsch (01:35): Alright, so we’re going to talk a lot about trauma, pretty weighty topic perhaps, but let’s maybe start with how do you define trauma?

Kelly Campbell (01:44): Yeah, that’s a great place to start because I think that there’s a lot of misconception around that. A lot of people have this idea that it has to be something that’s really big and really impactful, and that’s not actually true. So trauma, the way that, or the definition that I’ve come across that I love the most is really just unintegrated energy and information. So I’ll say that a different way just for everyone to wrap their heads around When we have situations or experiences where our nervous system doesn’t have the ability to cope with them, that becomes trauma and that’s how trauma is stored in our body. So it’s really just an overwhelm of the nervous system, and so when I say it’s unintegrated information, the nervous system’s inability to integrate what it’s being given or what it’s on the receiving end of, that’s where if that remains unresolved or unprocessed, that’s where we get into tricky territory and where it becomes problematic because then it’s kind of floating around and coming back and really causing some maladaptive behaviors. But we’ll get into all of that as we continue to talk.

John Jantsch (02:52): It sounds like when you talk about energy that is lucid almost sounds like the electrical cord that’s frayed in some places and it’s like you never know what kind of damage it’s going to cause. Right?

Kelly Campbell (03:04): That’s a great analogy. That really is a great analogy when a cord that’s electrified gets cut and it almost has a mind of its own, right? Yeah. Something else driving you. And so that’s why sometimes you might have a reaction or a response that feels to the other person very just not in line with what the reaction should be or what they’re expecting, and sometimes it’s because of that loose wire that you’re talking about.

John Jantsch (03:29): I don’t want to be a complete downer, but I’m getting ready to be the statistics on some horrible things that happen to people that cause trauma are pretty sad. But as a whole, especially since you’ve definitely broadened the definition of trauma, how many in 10 people that are in, especially as you apply to leadership, leadership roles, I mean, is this really impact how big a deal is this, I guess is what I was saying?

Kelly Campbell (03:54): Yeah, 10 out of 10.

John Jantsch (03:56): Yeah,

Kelly Campbell (03:56): It’s 10 out of 10 because here’s the deal, none of us have had a perfect childhood, and this isn’t about blaming your caregivers or your parents. This is about really understanding how trauma impacts all of us, and that could be what some people call Big T trauma, those big impactful, more obvious things. Maybe being in a household where your parents were getting divorced or maybe you grew up in a war torn country where safety, physical safety was a big deal and not available to you. So things that have shaped your worldview that were very impactful, that’s what we typically call big T trauma. We think about those things along the lines of the ACEs study, the CDC and Kaiser Permanente study from the late 1990s, and it kind of gave us a framework of 10 to 12 things, two of which I just mentioned, but that’s not where it stops.

(04:51): So if it stopped there, then maybe we could say, all right, well that might’ve impacted two thirds of people. If we broaden that a little bit and understand the reality of the situation. My nervous system and your nervous system are two different nervous systems. So what might be impactful to you might not be to me and vice versa. So when we’re younger and we have what we might call small t traumas, things where or experiences where we’re made to feel embarrassed or shame or abandoned or betrayed or humiliated, all of these other, I would call them maybe like death by a thousand paper cuts, right on their own, they might be impactful, but many times the small T traumas are continuous. And so that’s where it really starts to erode our sense of self and really becomes the foundation for how we see ourselves in the world.

John Jantsch (05:42): Well, I’ve always felt that leadership, good and bad is really an act of or lack of self-awareness. And there’s a whole lot of people that I suspect listen to this. I threw myself in this category, frankly, say, nothing really bad happened to me. I mean, I can’t identify really anything, and I was never hungry. I was never bullied, those kinds of things. So somebody who maybe is thinking that, how do you uncover the fact that you’ve said every single one of us has this at some level?

Kelly Campbell (06:14): Yeah. Well, you’ve touched upon it a little bit already. You are automatically thinking, I never went hungry. I was never neglected. I never maybe had physical abuse. Those are only big T traumas. So you’re not thinking about all of the other times when

John Jantsch (06:29): I did have a teacher that told me I would never amount to anything one time, I do remember that one. And

Kelly Campbell (06:33): The fact that you can recall that lets me know that actually did impact you. And there might’ve been other things along those lines where even if they were just verbal, we tend to downplay, oh, well, it was just verbal or get over it kid, or that made you tougher or you had to overcome something. This whole resilience culture, those things over time really do impact. And so what you touched upon before about self-awareness, if you’re self-aware enough to understand that when you get feedback, for example as a leader and all of a sudden you feel angry, you feel defensive, you want to be right, you want to challenge it. That might indicate that there might be something in your past where that a similar situation had occurred and maybe you feel like you’re being, I don’t know, accused of something that isn’t true. So I would kind of maybe try to trace that back. If it’s me, I’m going to try to trace that back a local functional detective, but that’s not really what matters. What matters more is, are the ways in which you’re showing up as a leader creating psychological safety for other people? Are you showing up in ways where you’re inviting curiosity and innovation and collaboration with your teams? And if you’re reactive versus responsive to different things, then you’re not creating those environments. So that self-awareness piece is really important.

John Jantsch (08:00): So how have you seen some of the things we’re talking about show up in maybe good ways and bad ways for people that are either aspire to be leaders or in some cases thrust into leadership roles?

Kelly Campbell (08:12): Yeah, yeah. I mean, emerging and established leaders we’re all human, so it’s just one has a little bit more experience than the other. Some of the ways I see this sort of manifest, and I talk about in the book, I talk about this bifurcation between, or not even bifurcation. It’s really a spectrum between people, pleasing leaders and people controlling leaders. And you and I can be each of these things or pieces of these things on any given day. So people pleasing might look like taking on a lot on your plate, maybe because you’re taking so much on and you’re trying to make sure that everyone else has a great experience, making sure everyone’s happy on your team, you’re going to take on so much that some things are inevitably going to fall, and so you become a little unreliable. You might also be pleasing to other people with a little bit of an underlying motivation.

(09:09): Again, this is subconscious. You’re not doing this consciously, but you want the attention or praise or gratitude from your employees. And so if you don’t get that, if you’re pleasing and trying to make their lives happier and you don’t get that respect or even reciprocation, you might start to get resentful, then you might become a little passive aggressive. There’s all of these really interesting and very nuanced ways. Sometimes they’re not as visible as others. So that’s more on the people pleasing end, on the people controlling end of the spectrum. It’s a lot more obvious and it’s a lot more predictable. So these are your authoritative, get over it. We don’t have time for those emotions in the workplace. Taking credit for other people’s work, making sure that some people don’t get promoted because they maybe are too much of a threat to your authority or your power. Speaking down to other people, making sure that you keep that balance of power at all times. Again, sometimes these things can be conscious, but most times they’re not. So lots and lots of ways that shows up. And then of course that trickles down into the organization, whatever kind of organization you run.

John Jantsch (10:25): Would you say that these trait traits, behaviors that you’re describing, I mean aren’t unique to the workplace? I mean, they show up at the little league manager and they show up at church. I mean, it’s kind of just people being who they are, conscious or unconscious. Would you say that’s true?

Kelly Campbell (10:43): A hundred percent. And that’s a great point is that this isn’t just relegated to a boardroom or something like that. This really is the little league coach who’s power hungry and yelling at the kids. We’ve all seen these things and many times we have been these things or are these things. So it’s easy to see it in other people. It’s a little harder to recognize it in yourself.

John Jantsch (11:10): So far, at least we’ve probably been talking about at the personal level. Let’s talk a little bit at the organizational level. People bring you into organizations to maybe work with folks that maybe they’ve identified something that needs to be worked on, or