In this instructional video, Susan Britton MCC explains how vagal tone—a measure of the heart’s ability to recover from stress—relates to coaching effectiveness. She introduces Dr. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, which identifies three distinct vagal circuits that the body involuntarily activates in response to perceived threats: the Social Engagement circuit (the desired "blue zone" of calm, high heart‑rate variability, natural smiling, and attentive listening), the Mobilization circuit (the older fight‑or‑flight response that can be adaptive—quickly returning to social engagement—or maladaptive—prolonging stress, causing muscle tension, tight eardrums, rumination, and anxiety), and the Immobilization circuit (a shutdown response leading to fainting or dissociation in extreme threat). Britton emphasizes that coaches should recognize when they or their clients have shifted out of social engagement, especially into maladaptive mobilization, and use simple breath techniques to re‑oxygenate the body, relax muscles, and restore the parasympathetic state, thereby enhancing presence, listening, powerful questioning, and overall connection.
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We've been talking about vagal tone, and in a prior video we discussed that vagal tone is really how— a measure of how the heart can respond to stressors. And good, strong, high vagal tone means that when you've had a stressor, your heart can quickly return to normal, whereas low vagal tone means that if you've been stressed by something, it's going to take a lot longer for your heart to be able to return to that normal state. And low vagal tone is often associated with poor emotional control and and a greater sensitivity to stress. So as it relates to coaching, we wanna understand that vagal tone really is gonna help us be in the parasympathetic nervous system. That's that blue zone that we love to talk about. And the parasympathetic nervous system really has to do with sort of the rest and digest, tend and befriend state, where we feel much more calm, much more comfortable, able to respond to challenges in front of us, without getting sort of nervous or anxious or wigged out about things. So there is a theory called the polyvagal theory that was developed by a psychologist and neuroscientist, Dr. Stephen Porges, and it describes how our physical body involuntarily responds to different stimuli. And that stimuli can be external stimuli like a car coming at us that we didn't expect, or it could be in the office setting. That external stimuli could be something that a coworker says could be any number of things that cause us to kind of react and think, "Uh-oh, this is something I have to be careful about," or "I have to defend myself around," or it's perceived as a threat. And Porges really makes the point that this is an involuntary response. Our body is doing this, but we may not be aware that the body is doing this. And then dependent upon that response, he talks about how we have actually 3 different vagal circuits, and that we can be kicked into as a result of what the body is unconsciously perceiving. And those 3 circuits are called the social engagement circuit, the mobilization circuit, and the immobilization circuit. So in the social engagement circuit, that's the place where we would love to be, you know, most of the day. That's the place where we have a lower heart rate, our heart rate variability is high, and that's a good thing to have high heart rate variability. It helps us control our emotions. You can tell when somebody's in that social engagement vagal circuit because they laugh, they smile naturally, you can see the crinkles around their eyes when they have that natural-looking smile. It's not a plastered-on, fake-looking smile. They can also listen more actively and subtly and listen for intonation and pace and breathing and that sort of thing. They're much more able to be able to have eye contact as well in that process. So there's a lot of good things that are happening when we're in that mobilization excuse me, when we're in the social engagement space. That's where you want to be as a coach because that's where you're going to be able to have the ability to connect more deeply, listen more carefully, think more clearly, to ask the powerful questions that you've been trained to be able to ask. So your body's going to help you do those things. The second circuit that Porges speaks about is called the mobilization circuit, and think fight-or-flight when you think about mobilization circuit. So again, the body is sort of subconsciously detecting risk or danger, and so this is apparently an evolutionarily older vagal circuit that is in the system. And we have two options that happen when we have this mobilization circuit happening. We can either have an adaptive response to it, or we can have a maladaptive response to it. So the adaptive response would be something that helps us shift back very quickly into the social engagement circuit. So there's oftentimes more of a curiosity, a mindful awareness, there's greater emotional agility so that we can calm the body and regulate the heart and the respiration and get us back into that social engagement circuit. The second place that we can go when we're in mobilization, not adaptive, is maladaptive. And so maladaptive really has to do with perpetuating that stress response. So instead of being able to kind of shift ourselves out of that and get back into calm, we just perpetuate it by By staying longer there, we either start ruminating on whatever it was that we saw or we heard. We're agitated. We get anxious. We kind of like loop around there. We might start telling stories to ourselves about how you were either inadequate or you were wronged or you were caught by surprise and so-and-so shouldn't have done that. So there's a lot of stories that can be going on in that state. The other interesting thing that happens physiologically when we're in that maladaptive state, just like I mentioned that in the social engagement circuit you've got that natural-looking smile when you're feeling the social engagement, when you're in a maladaptive state your body tenses. We know that. You may have tighter shoulders, tighter neck, and the other piece that gets tight is your eardrums. So when your eardrums are tighter—and there's research around this—you do not listen as carefully and you cannot comprehend things as well. So I'm sure we've all been in situations where we got caught by surprise, we heard something, and it was such a shock to the system that now you've stopped concentrating on what the person is saying, or you start misinterpreting what the person is saying. And part of that is just a physiological response that your eardrums are not vibrating as, as malleably or as pliably because you're in that mobilization maladaptive state. So super important for us to know as coaches the difference between that social engagement vagal circuit and the mobilization vagal circuit. I did say that there's a third circuit, and that is the immobilization vagal circuit. Not likely that we'll see that very often in coaching, hopefully, but that's the circuit that actually sort of shuts down everything when we hit something that's such a big threat response. So that's— now you either faint or you dissociate when you're in that immobilization vagal circuit. That would be something really crisis-like. Let's say that you're in an airplane and you're afraid that the plane might be going down, or, you know, some really severe threat comes to you, and so your body just shuts down as a way to protect yourself, as a way to be able to not have to deal with what is happening in your world. So bottom line, the faster that we as coaches can get ourselves back into social engagement when we know that we might have gone into that mobilization state is going to be really important because that's where we're going to have the best presence, we're going to have the best listening, we're going to have the best powerful questions, we're going to have the best ability to be there and connect with the client in that process. If you notice that you have kind of slipped into mobilization and not in social engagement when you're in a coaching conversation or in any conversation where you want to be present is to just take a breath. And because that breath is going to help re-oxygenate the rest of the organs, it's going to calm down the muscles, and it's going to give us that mindful pause that we talk about and get us back into the blue zone, out of the red zone of mobilization, back into the blue zone of social engagement. Enjoy practicing getting back into social engagement so that you can be all that your clients need you to be and all that you want to be in the world as a coach and a beautiful human being.
