By Lyssa deHart and Jake Mannino
Published on July 28, 2026
Psychological safety keeps coming up. In webinars, in conversations with leaders, in mentor coaching sessions — it keeps surfacing. Honestly, we don't have a perfect solution for it, but it is an important conversation to keep exploring. So let's get into it.
What seems to be happening is that people are afraid to speak up, and the higher you go in an organization, the worse it gets. There's less oxygen up there, and people keep their mouths closed. Maybe it's because the higher up you go, people have more responsibility, more visibility, more to lose if they say the wrong thing at the wrong moment. And right now, layered on top of all of that, there's just this ambient fear — the economy, job security, all the uncertainty that none of us have any real control over — that is probably impacting people even more, and making them a bit more reluctant than usual to raise their hand and say something's wrong.
It's been coming up a lot in coaching sessions this year. Coaches are working with leaders and employees who are genuinely scared of losing their jobs. They are sitting in a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty. And that fear is changing how people communicate at work, not always in good ways.
Waiting Until the Last Minute
Here's an example of what this looks like. In sales there's a pipeline — they live by forecasts, quarterly numbers, commitments that roll up through leadership all the way to the board and the shareholders. And, when someone has a deal or two that are slipping, most likely they have known for a few weeks to a month that they are not going to make their numbers. And yet they wait, and then they wait some more. Sometimes they wait right up until day 89 in that 90-day cycle that most organizations operate on, right until the absolute last minute, to communicate the reality of what is happening in their book of business.
Why? Because saying something early means getting the why questions. "Why didn't you, XYZ?" It's unpleasant to find yourself sitting in a conversation where your manager is asking how you let it get this far, why you didn't flag it sooner, what happened. And that conversation, even with a decent manager, can feel a lot like you're a kid who didn't clean their room. In our heads, all we hear is, "I'm in trouble." Except the brain doesn't stop there — it escalates into, I might lose my job, my kids are in college, my spouse just got laid off, my mortgage. What started as a missed forecast has become a full fight, flight, freeze, fawning, freak-out situation, and now the person's brain is completely offline, and their capacity to have the actual conversation they need to have is compromised.
And here's the irony of it — waiting makes everything worse. Because if you walk in on Friday with no good "why," no context, no sense of what happened or how it happened, you look like you either don't know your business or you were hiding something. Neither of those is good. It's a bit like a mechanic who notices your brake line is leaking and doesn't tell you. You find out when you go off the cliff. As you're barreling along a windy mountain road, it's the wrong time to find out the brakes are out. Telling people what's going on along the way — even when it's not great news — is how you build trust, and it's also, genuinely, how you protect yourself. Brené Brown said, "Clear is kind." We'd add that clear communication is you being kind to yourself first, not just to the other person. Clear communication protects you; there aren't any ugly surprises that then activate your boss. And, come on, no one needs two people now pinging with the fight, flight, fear, and freak-out at the same time.
The Only Things You Can Actually Control
So, what do you do with this, especially if your boss really is difficult? Because some of them are. Some of them do fly off the handle, do make you feel interrogated, and do handle bad news badly. Let's not pretend otherwise, we've all had this boss a few times in our careers.
Yet, you can't control the boss. For that matter, you can't control the economy or the geopolitics or AI, or any of the bigger forces driving everyone's anxiety. Think back to Stephen Covey's take on locus of control, you have the big outer circle, your circle of concern. And, you have the inner circle, which is the circle of influence. And, things that are genuinely inside your circle of influence, in Covey's language, are what you think, what you say, and what you do, only those three things. That's the whole list of what you have control over.
And this is really where coaching has something to offer. Not in helping people fix their boss or wish the market were different, but in helping them find where they actually have power. Because if someone is sitting in the thinking of "I'm not safe, this is a disaster, this is the worst thing that's ever happened" — the emotions that follow that thinking are going to be anxiety, helplessness, anger, and maybe avoidance and shutdown. Thoughts and emotions are connected that way. It's very hard to have one without the other tagging along. So the more we can help someone shift the thinking — even a little, even just toward "this is going to be uncomfortable and I'll survive it" — the more room there is to actually do something.
What Your Body Already Knows
There's a body piece to this, too, that we need to talk about. Your body is always telling you stuff. When you're activated, it cues you long before your brain has caught up — notice your jaw clenching, shoulders up around your ears, heart starting to race, face going hot, that specific stress sweat that is distinctly not the regular kind. These are early signals, and the question is whether you catch them early enough to use them.
Most people don't. Most people don't notice these signals until they're already overwhelmed and pinging, and then they try to apply some calming technique, and "Wow, this doesn't work!" and they feel even worse. Of course, it doesn't work — it's sort of like everything: if you've never practiced something when you're calm, your body doesn't know how to do it under pressure. If we haven't made it a habit, then it's not available in that moment of crisis. This is something that came up a lot in anger management — you can't wait until you're upset to practice the thing that's supposed to help you when you're upset. The practice has to happen in the boring, ordinary moments. Think about a thing you do 10x a day, for instance, every time you go to the bathroom, every time you get a cup of coffee, yes, 10x a day, don't judge us. Those are the times to practice breathing or calming your thoughts. BJ Fogg calls it tiny habits — linking something new to something you're already doing to build a new habit. And the reason it works is that, over time, you actually train your body's response system so that when you walk into the hard situation/conversation, your body already knows what to do.
It's a bit like training for a marathon, no one just wakes up one morning and runs 26 miles. You've got to train, maybe start with a walk, then jog, then run, stretching out the distance, and creating calluses on your heels, and as you train your capacity gets built gradually, before you need it for the actual race.
And as coaches, the goal as you partner with the thinker in the conversation who is navigating this stressful situation is not to hand someone a menu of techniques. That turns you into a teacher, and people glaze over — you turn into the Charlie Brown teacher. All they hear is "Wah, wah wah wah." What is more useful is asking what's already worked for them in the past. When have they navigated something really stressful well before? Even if it's weirdly only once in their life. What did they actually do? Because most people already have something — usually some version of breathing, taking a walk, distracting themselves, or sometimes something more idiosyncratic (there was a person in an anger management group who said what worked was rubbing their stomach, which is its own logistical challenge in a meeting, but the principle holds). Draw it out of them; most people have some technique that they have used. What they come up with themselves, from a past success that they remember, is most likely something they'll actually use.
The Turtles All the Way Down Thing
There's a parallel process that shows up in coaching that's worth looking at as well. On a recent call, a coach/consultant who works with coaches, who themselves work with educational leaders, raised a struggle with us. The coaches she was coaching had clients who, due to all the same issues as mentioned above, were struggling with sales. They had numbers they needed to meet, metrics, development plans, and pressure from the administration, the board, and the parents.
The coaches themselves were under pressure to support the education leaders in being successful; they had ROI, value propositions, metrics, and numbers as well.
And then the person on the call, who was working with the coaches, had the same pressures.
Everyone in the scenario is having some version of the same experience. Which means the internal work we're describing — building self-regulation, building the capacity to stay present in challenging moments — isn't just for the person you're coaching. It's for all of us, including us, and it tends to ripple outward in ways we don't always see directly in the moment, but is impacting all of us.
Before the Hard Conversation
A couple of practical things worth naming for anyone heading into a conversation they're dreading.
One is take the time to get to know your boss — actually knowing them, not just knowing their title. How do they like to receive information? What level of detail do they want? What cadence? These insights and understanding of the person you are working with are fundamentally important. And the best way to find out is to ask them directly. It sounds obvious, and still people sometimes forget to ask. "How would you like me to present my updates? What frequency works for you?"
Most managers will tell you their preferences. That seems to be how useful questions work: you ask one, and people tell you what you asked about.
And once you know what they want and how they want it, you can stop guessing and start communicating in a way that actually supports you to speak up more regularly. Remember, clear is kind.
Another thing is to go into any conversation with a goal in mind. Not a goal of "I just need to survive this" or "I will avoid the bad news and only talk about what's working," but an actual answer to: what do you need to walk out of this conversation with? What would a good outcome look like? What does my today self need to say, to protect my tomorrow self?
A sailboat tacks back and forth in the wind, but you need to know what direction you're headed. Going back to Covey, begin with the end in mind. Without that, every hard conversation can feel threatening, and you may waste energy and have little to show for it. With a goal in mind, you have something to tack toward. "Begin with the end in mind" is really one of the most useful things you can do before a hard conversation.
Psychological Safety Is Really an Inside Job
There are situations where the environment is genuinely unsafe — where speaking up has real dangerous consequences, where the boss retaliates, where leaving is the right answer. So, pay attention to the difference between real threats and existential threats. Real threats require a different strategy and we're not minimizing it. But a lot of what looks like a danger may not be a psychological safety problem at work, but maybe it's a self-regulation and choosing to be 1% braver in difficult conversations. We get it: when your boss is difficult, the stakes feel high, and the nervous system — which cannot tell the difference between a scary quarterly review and an actual tiger — responds accordingly. And from there, everything feels harder than it is.
The work, whether you're the person in the difficult situation or the coach working with them, is to build enough internal stability to stay in the room. To stay in the conversation. To stay connected to what you actually want even when your body is doing its best to convince you to run. That capacity doesn't come from reading about it. It comes from practicing it, quietly, in the small moments before you need it.
By Lyssa deHart, LICSW, MCC, BCC and Jake Mannino PCC, MBA for NEXGEN Executive Coaching Academy
NEXGEN Executive Coaching Academy was founded in 2026 by Lyssa deHart (LICSW, MCC) and Jake Mannino (MBA, PCC) to address a specific gap in the professional coaching education market: the absence of programs that combine ICF-credentialed coach training with practical business-building skills.
According to the World Economic Forum, over 85 million jobs may be displaced by automation by 2025 — accelerating demand for human-centered skills like executive coaching.
NEXGEN's programs are designed specifically for accomplished working professionals who want to become credentialed ICF executive coaches and build sustainable coaching businesses — without leaving their current careers to do it.
Disclaimer: This article was originally published on LinkedIn on July 27, 2026.
Original LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/psychological-safety-work-day-89-problem-kjilc
