Psychological Safety is a feeling

We do feel it viscerally when we have psychological safety and when we don't. So when we have it, we feel energized, we feel creative because we know that our ideas are welcome. We know that we don't have to mask who we are. We don't have to pretend to be someone we're not, and we're free to do our best work, honestly. So there's this sort of energizing, free feeling about psychological safety. And when we don't have it, I kind of feel my body constricting when I think about it because we are very guarded. We are worried about every word we say. We even think, should I speak? Should I not speak? And we often conform to the behavior and the way everyone else behaves in the group because we don't want to stand out as different. And so that can be very damaging to people because when we don't have psychological safety, we're so worried about every word we say or don't say that we can't be creative and we can't do our best work and we suffer.