“How does psychological safety add value to my workplace? Does investing in psychological safety reduce the ability to deliver on quarterly deadlines? There’s no time!” These are actual questions and statements I’ve heard recently from leaders who are so concerned about delivery they feel like they can’t invest in the value of their people. The fear of not hitting dates and deliverables becomes the driving factor of decisions, and things like psychological safety get looked at as an “extracurricular activity,” or perhaps a function of HR. Many individuals don’t recognize that by enabling and empowering people they’re actually immediately creating high performance teams, helping them get to what they’re looking for faster. Psychological safety is directly related to performance and is something actionable that can be practiced every single day, as certainly a lack of psychological safety is often felt by people every single day as well. Scoping projects, creating stories, roadmapping sessions, code reviews - let alone performance reviews and tracking velocity - all require us to interact with other people. Real psychological safety is something we can build a consciousness around within our ecosystems. This workshop is going to ask you to look at yourself first and the role you play on your teams within your organization. It will introduce models of the parasympathetic nervous system to allow you to track what happens in the body when we interact with others and what it’s trying to tell you. From there we’ll walk through interactive practices with radical candor and boundaries to create awareness of what you put out into the world with your teams and how that impacts their dynamic with you. We’ll also walk through real-life scenarios to pinpoint ways that we might stay aligned with our intentions (emotional agility and core values), and how we can continuously improve the awareness of our own behavior by actually measuring where we are as teams and organizations. These methods and practices lead to more intentional leadership, more honest relationships and ultimately higher performance through the ability to show up as ourselves.