Short excerpt from a YouTube video in which the speaker advises how to stay "above the line" by noticing and allowing one’s reactivity (fear), either self-regulating back to presence or candidly revealing the threat state to the group. Emphasizes that naming reactivity preserves group trust, reduces others’ anxiety, and is preferable to masking or superficially harmonizing while threatened.
So the response to the question is, your practice is to allow yourself to be reactive and to notice the reactivity and let it be okay that you're scared and welcome being scared. So, and then from there, and you can then acknowledge the group, I noticed I got scared with this question or that there's two options. One option is to see can you do your work inside to shift out of threat back to trust. And if not, you can reveal your threat to the group and say, I've lost presence, or I've noticed I've lost presence here because I've gotten reactive with the thought that that question's difficult for me to answer. And then you could practice your candor and to come into letting the group be being trusting, that the group might get uncomfortable with your response, and that that's okay. And then also the other thing I think is people know when people are trying to harmonize on top of disse, like on top of threat. And I think it actually creates more anxiety around one of us when we're doing that, because people can sense it. They can sense there's some reactivity going on underneath somebody smiling pleasantly and trying to be calm as they're answering the question. And then people wonder, like, why what's going on? That I feel like something's off, so it's better to name it so people don't have to then spend their own time and energy figuring it, trying to figure out what's going on. I think it actually helps the group if they can hear somebody reveal their reactivity rather than somebody trying to conceal it in the group, trying to figure out what's really happening for that person.
