In this episode of Leading Below the Surface, LaTonya Wilkins speaks with trauma coach Blythe Landry about how trauma affects leadership. Discover how unresolved trauma can lead to authoritarian or avoidant leadership styles and what you can do to create a more supportive and effective work environment.

What You’ll Learn:

  • How trauma impacts leadership styles
  • The difference between avoidant and authoritarian leadership
  • Strategies for leaders to address their own trauma
  • How to create a psychologically safe workplace
  • The link between childhood trauma, burnout, and imposter syndrome

Key Discussion Points:

  • Trauma Statistics: Over 60% of adults experience a traumatic event in their lifetime, impacting their leadership and work life.
  • Leadership Styles: Unresolved trauma can lead to authoritarian or avoidant leadership, affecting team performance.
  • Emotional Intelligence: Leaders with high emotional intelligence create teams that outperform others by 20-30%.
  • Childhood Trauma: Linked to increased workplace burnout and imposter syndrome.

Actionable Steps for Leaders:

  • Seek Help: If you recognize traits of avoidant or authoritarian leadership in yourself, seek professional help.
  • Self-Awareness: Understand how your past trauma influences your behavior and responses.
  • Vulnerability: Be open with your team about your journey to create a more trusting environment.
  • Mindfulness Practices: Incorporate meditation and energy work to manage stress and improve emotional regulation.

Resources from Today’s Episode:

Connect with LaTonya and Change Coaches:

And, if you loved this episode, please rate and share it!

Transcript:

00:00:01 – LaTonya Wilkins Hey folks, Latanya here. I am so excited to tell you about a new offering that we have here at Change Coaches. Last year, I decided to get an ICF coach training certification for Change Coaches. Woohoo. We have that, and our first program we are launching is Coaching Below the Surface.

What is this program? Who is it for? It’s for experienced leaders who do coaching in their role. It’s for coaches who are credentialed already and want to do continuing education to renew their credentials. It’s for people that are coach curious. What will it help you do? It’s going to help us relate to people around us better. Did you know that Gen Z is rising, and relating to Gen Z has been one of the number one leadership issues that our clients talk about.

Disability and neurodivergence are big workplace issues, and identities are becoming more multidimensional. What does this mean? How will Coaching Below the Surface help you? It’ll help you because you get ICF coach credits, and we will be in a cohort-type environment where you can learn about psychological safety, belonging, and coaching joy in coaching, and how to think differently about our client bases. What will this get you? It’ll get you more clients, make you a better coach, and get you better ratings as a coach.

It will bring you up to speed with today’s workplace. For those of you who are interested, there is a link in the show notes, so please join our waitlist. If you have any questions, you can email us at [email protected]. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Leading Below the Surface podcast. I’m LaTonya Wilkins, your host, executive coach, founder, and CEO of Change Coaches, and author of Leading Below the Surface. Today, I have a repeat guest with us, and I’ll tell you the reason why I asked this guest to come back, and we will be having a conversation and so let me tell you a little bit about why I asked this guest to come back.

00:02:13 – LaTonya Wilkins We are recording this episode in February of 2025, and if you are in the US, you are very close to some big changes that we’ve seen in the world in the political and business environment. We’ve been seeing all these changes. By the time this episode is released, it’ll change. There’ll be different things, but there’s just been a lot going on, and it’s not just politically. There’s this ripple effect, and it’s affecting all of us in our leadership making decisions.

00:02:55 – LaTonya Wilkins And it’s just been very tough for people, so I invited my good friend Blythe Landry, who is a trauma coach. She does all kinds of things, like trauma coaching and speaking. She’s a licensed therapist.

00:03:10 – LaTonya Wilkins She is amazing, and I’m really excited to bring her in. We’re going to talk a little bit about trauma and how it affects how we lead. If you are someone that is going through this right now, you don’t have to be in the C suite or a senior leader.

00:03:35 – LaTonya Wilkins If you’re leading right now and you’re wondering why it’s hard for you, why you keep getting stopped, or why maybe you’re not leading in the way you want to, this episode is for you. If this isn’t you and you know someone that is in this situation, pass this on because this episode is for them, and they will truly thank you. Before I introduce Blythe fully, there are a couple of stats that we’ll be talking about.

00:04:10 – LaTonya Wilkins The first one is over 60% of adults report experiencing at least one traumatic event in their lifetime, which Blythe is nodding her head because we do. A lot of times we think this is going to be left at home, but it’s not. I’ve seen this over the last couple weeks here at change coaches. Nearly 70% of employees believe their leaders don’t handle stress well, and I’ll be vulnerable.

00:04:42 – LaTonya Wilkins I’ve been told that by my team, so it’s understanding that and being open to that feedback and understanding the why behind it and how to shift that. This one is really interesting because I think we’re seeing this one playing out. Number three, leaders with unresolved trauma are more likely to default to authoritarian or avoidant leadership styles. That is a lot.

00:05:12 – LaTonya Wilkins Avoidant people are really hard and challenging for me to deal with, and Blythe and I will get into that and leadership. The last one that I will actually, there’s five, so I’m going to share all of them. Four is leaders with high emotional intelligence create teams that outperform others by 20 to 30%.

00:05:36 – LaTonya Wilkins Understanding yourself, self-awareness. The last one, Blythe, you’re going to love this one, but childhood trauma is linked to increased levels of workplace burnout and imposter syndrome. I can tell you that my journey on working through all that stuff, yes, this is very true.

00:05:58 – LaTonya Wilkins I would be burnt out and spinning my wheels, going back to something in my childhood. Let me introduce Blythe, a good friend of mine who wrote Trauma Intelligence.

00:06:19 – LaTonya Wilkins She coaches, is a therapist, speaks, and has worked with amazing organizations. Welcome, Blythe. What did I leave out?

00:06:27 – Blythe Landry Nothing, other than I do trauma and grief work, which are often commingled. You did a great job introducing me.

00:06:36 – LaTonya Wilkins Tell us what you’re excited about right now.

00:06:39 – Blythe Landry I moved to Pennsylvania a year ago, a big change for my partner and me, but I’ve integrated with her family. I have five step-grandchildren now, which I never saw coming. I am a childless grandparent, which is amazing. I’m obsessed with my dogs. I have two awesome dogs, and one just had surgery.

00:07:04 – Blythe Landry I’ve created a program for people who have experienced grief and trauma. It teaches them to take their pain and turn it into a purpose. We know that while we cannot control what befalls us, we have a choice in how we respond. I’m super excited about this program.

00:07:29 – Blythe Landry I’m training people to be trauma-informed grief coaches and couldn’t be prouder of the community. That’s what I’m most excited about.

00:07:38 – LaTonya Wilkins I’ll leave that link in the show notes. I might even do that with Blythe because she’s one of the best. I’ve been able to watch Blythe, and it’s interesting because I love and talk about the book Let Them a lot.

00:07:58 – LaTonya Wilkins I liked that book and just finished it. When I think about Blythe moving to Pennsylvania and having this new life, her book talks about friendships and how they change, and you let them be happy for them. I used to be scared, thinking she was going to disappear. This is one of those things where you let them grow and thrive.

00:08:28 – LaTonya Wilkins It’s been fun to see that with you, Blythe.

00:08:31 – Blythe Landry I love that. I just finished that audiobook yesterday, Let them. At the end of the book, she’s talking about the workplace and how we bring our childhood into the workplace. That book is outstanding. I love that piece about friendship and work as well.

00:08:52 – LaTonya Wilkins You talk about these grief coaches, the therapy, and the coaching you do. How many leaders or people come to you around leadership? How aware are people of their trauma and how it’s affecting them in day-to-day life?

00:09:18 – Blythe Landry This is an interesting, small percentage of the population. Everyone that comes to me has had grief and trauma and is looking specifically to turn it into a purpose. This population is very conscious of what’s going on with them.

00:09:36 – Blythe Landry Looking at the larger world, we’re not taught how trauma applies to every area of our lives. How we grow up informs everything going forward. It informs how we think, feel, and respond. You shared vulnerably about yourself, how we respond to stress, the environment, and how we perceive the world.

00:10:09 – Blythe Landry Even if we don’t think certain things that happened in childhood, like abuse, neglect, or growing up in a home with addiction, informed our behaviors, it absolutely does. Even if we’re not reacting to those past things intentionally in the present, how we perceive the people before us informs how we respond. If I grow up with a very fearful view of authority figures and I work in an environment where someone looks or sounds like them, or even suggests that I might need to improve on something, I may take that as an ultimate attack and be unable to receive that information.

00:10:54 – Blythe Landry If I am C suite, one of the largest leaders, and I was raised to feel like nothing I ever did was good enough, and I have a star on my team, instead of feeding that, supporting them, and helping nurture their development, I might subtly or overtly minimize them or reject them. I might be so insecure, regardless of my status, that I don’t support my team member and I hurt them so that I look bigger or more powerful than they do. Those are things that happen every day in the workplace.

00:11:34 – Blythe Landry I’ve had a boss like that, and it’s a horrible thing to experience. I can’t emphasize enough the importance not to shame yourself, but to really be aware of how people feel around you and the thoughts and the feelings that are going on inside in relationship to your team, because these relationships are a direct reflection of what you perceive about the world, of what you perself and what you perceive about what you can and cannot hanger in the world.

00:12:04 – LaTonya Wilkins That’s interesting how you might just ignore something or evade something. The way you respond is based on your history. We do a lot of workshops on resilience, and one of the things that often comes up is people find it hard to have empathy for people that are upset that they didn’t get Taylor Swift tickets or their favorite pair of Nike sneakers.

00:12:50 – LaTonya Wilkins I want to talk about what is a traumatic event and how should we be thinking about that? I wonder why I’m asking this. We’re in an interesting place in the world, and I think some of it is people can’t have empathy for each other. What is a traumatic event, and is that defined?

00:13:24 – LaTonya Wilkins Who defines that?

00:13:25 – Blythe Landry I want to distinguish between a traumatic event and traumatic experiences, like long-term experiences. A traumatic event is something in which the person feels unsafe, out of control, in danger, terrified, or surprised in a way that is very scary or painful.

00:13:48 – Blythe Landry If I’m looking at childhood, I’m looking at neglect, abuse, sexual molestation, feeling like nothing I ever do is good enough, constantly being yelled at, constantly getting mixed messages. Those are traumatic events, and constantly getting mixed messages bleeds over into traumatic experiences. There’s a one-time event, and then there are things that go on over and over. That’s where I’m getting that complex post-traumatic stress disorder piece where people are always in a fight or flight mode based on how they were raised. In terms of adulthood, a traumatic event is something big.

00:14:39 – Blythe Landry Something like a car accident, seeing something violent, experiencing a traumatic loss of somebody due to a car accident, murder, or something like that. Having a family member incarcerated, witnessing someone you love passed away and walking in on that. Traumatic events are a big deal. It’s all relative because based on how I perceive the world, how I grew up, and my understanding of what is hard and not hard, I may perceive something as much more catastrophic than someone else who has had a lot of trauma.

00:15:26 – Blythe Landry Someone might think something I think is catastrophic is not that bad. But to your point about getting Taylor Swift tickets or sneakers, that is not a traumatic event. It didn’t cause the person a lack of safety, security, or ability to choose if they were in or out of a situation. But if someone is looking for why they can’t have empathy for that, perhaps look at the thing in the person that you can relate to. Find something about that person that you like, that you find compassion for, and relate to them from that event. Let’s say I had a lot of trauma, and my trauma was, let’s say I grew up in an attic home where there was always disappointment. Maybe in my mind, going to that concert is something I really want, and I am disappointed that I didn’t get tickets. A lot of people with trauma also look at things that are disappointing as despairing events.

00:16:31 – Blythe Landry Because they feel like it’s just another disappointment. So that’s another way that you can relate to someone. If you’re not having that empathy, be like, in context, this was just another disappointment for them.

00:16:43 – LaTonya Wilkins It’s like that saying, what you’re reacting to is not what’s going on right now, maybe it was going on 10 years ago. I’d love to hear what you think of the phrase collective trauma. I wonder if we all are experiencing that because the world’s getting harder.

00:17:08 – LaTonya Wilkins I wonder if Taylor Swift tickets might be related to what you said, it’s additive.

00:17:20 – Blythe Landry I remember one time when I was in my 20s and my life was falling apart. I was getting divorced, moving out, and changing everything. I had a new job, which is not traumatic, but it’s another change.

00:17:43 – Blythe Landry I was at a restaurant I frequented because one of my trauma responses is to have rigid routines that are familiar, which is not uncommon for people with trauma. I was at dinner, and they were out of the bread I always got there. Tears streamed down my face. One might think that’s insane, but I just wanted to find something familiar.

00:18:15 – Blythe Landry Everything in my life was not going the way I wanted, and this was a metaphor for everything in my life. Was I overreacting? No, not if you look at the whole context of my life at that time. But to someone who didn’t know my life situation, that would have been ridiculous.

00:18:40 – LaTonya Wilkins I didn’t mean to laugh at you. I was laughing because now you’ve taught me something.

00:18:45 – LaTonya Wilkins I went to a sound bath a couple weeks ago, and there was a woman there. It’s snowing in Chicago, it’s freezing, and she refused to take her shoes off. She was yelling at the instructor.

00:19:12 – LaTonya Wilkins It was going to be wet for us, and it probably wasn’t going to be a good experience for her, but he ended up letting her keep her shoes on. I felt bad for him because of the way that she was reacting.

00:19:27 – Blythe Landry Maybe she was just not a nice person. Maybe her spouse had just had an affair, her child had gotten a DUI, and there was this confluence of events that made her really get obsessed with something irrelevant.

00:19:43 – LaTonya Wilkins Yeah.

00:19:43 – Blythe Landry We don’t know.

00:19:44 – LaTonya Wilkins I was really trying not to say anything, but I was like, wow, this guy is making this event for us and she’s behaving this way.

00:19:56 – Blythe Landry Depending on his experience, that could have been traumatic for him.

00:19:59 – LaTonya Wilkins Yeah, probably. I think he was trying to get in his flow. He had a room full of people.

00:20:08 – LaTonya Wilkins It was really nice. That’s been a big solace for me. I’m really happy to live in Chicago because there’s so much and it’s diverse.

00:20:20 – LaTonya Wilkins The third thing I want to talk about, I’m an attachment styles nerd. I read these books. I’m really into them. The third one is that leaders with unresolved trauma are more likely to default to authoritarian or avoidant leadership styles.

00:20:42 – LaTonya Wilkins What is an avoidant leadership style? How does that compare to being avoidant in a relationship in any relation, not just romantic, but friendships as well?

00:20:53 – Blythe Landry How we do one thing is typically how we do everything. If I’m an avoidant leader, I’m someone who doesn’t like to have conflict, that has any emotion involved, which is hard to do when you’ve been working with someone for a long time or you’re there every day, all day. There can be a coldness in resolving conflict or bringing information to someone. Let’s say somebody comes to your office and they’re overly emotional about something going on in their life, and you’re trying to talk to them about work. You could be very dismissive. You could be very repulsed by that behavior.

00:21:29 – Blythe Landry Someone who’s avoidant is terrified of being consumed. On the flip side of that, they’re also afraid of abandonment. Things that seem unnecessarily emotional, things that seem inefficient.

00:21:45 – Blythe Landry Things that seem less work-focused and more relational can trigger someone avoidant. Avoidant attachers have trauma and often grew up with neglect, being ignored, or inconsistent parenting, so these things feel like threats.

00:22:09 – Blythe Landry It’s not something you can change by noticing; you must work on it through deep personal, professional help. Avoidants tend to get their needs met outside relationships.

00:22:28 – Blythe Landry Achievement, work, busyness, athleticism, and travel do not require deep emotional bonds. They crave emotional bonds, but once they’re in it, they don’t like it until worked on. The flip side is someone with an anxious attachment style.

00:22:52 – Blythe Landry They’d constantly seek reassurance from their supervisor or team, overworking to make everybody comfortable so people love them, over-giving, and having their team walk all over them. Both avoidant and anxious attachment styles can cause problems in work environments and are trauma responses.

00:23:16 – LaTonya Wilkins Thank you for talking about anxious too. But what makes an avoidant leader authoritarian?

00:23:23 – Blythe Landry Those are two separate responses. Authoritarian leadership, like how Trump is leaning.

00:23:32 – Blythe Landry It’s well known that he grew up with trauma, an extreme amount of trauma. So, I’m in charge, no one is more powerful than me, I’m going to take over everything.

00:23:45 – Blythe Landry I am the biggest person in the room. I give no one a choice. It’s a deep sense of insecurity and immature emotional immaturity and a desire to never feel small or vulnerable or take accountability, which can also be a major trauma response.

00:24:08 – Blythe Landry When you get into personality disorders, being avoidant doesn’t make you have a personality disorder. Being authoritarian absolutely does. Then you’re looking into other mental illnesses that cause that behavior.

00:24:27 – LaTonya Wilkins It’s interesting with being authoritarian and having trauma. And then you said with avoidance is getting everything fulfilled outside of work?

00:24:40 – Blythe Landry No, outside of relationships.

00:24:42 – LaTonya Wilkins Outside of the relationship, outside of the team.