Safety is a balancing act

I have conflicting perspectives on "psychological safety".

Part of me thinks: yes, this is very important, for creativity and for well-being. I've been in work environments in which I've clammed up, and not done my best work, because of a bumpy interpersonal dynamic. And I've had the opposite experience too - of finding myself at my most energised, engaged and creative because of good, grounding, open connections. I’ve also observed these patterns in other people.

Part of me is resistant, and sees that life is full of risk - and that the journey is learning to live with it, rather than trying to remove it. “Safety” is the wrong goal. If we focus too much on making people safe, we risk them becoming more anxious as their risk tolerance decreases.

In the end I think it is a balancing act. Being ‘too safe’ as as bad as being ‘not safe enough’. We need to feel we have a secure base to go back to in order that we can take risks (connection is the best basis for resilience).

I guess there's a developmental thing here too: at different stages in the development journey, how you get a sense of safety changes. And it's an ongoing problem in the world of work (and the world more generally) of: how do we support people at the stage they're at, without holding them back from the discomfort that would prompt them to grow into the next stage? Becoming more mature, more broad, more complex versions of ourselves is not a ‘safe’ process. It involves leaving behind a reality, and a self, that we are familiar with in order to reach out into something as yet unknown. And when we do become more mature, we see that ‘feeling safe’ is not something in the gift of other people.