Tag: mindfulness

The Stewardship of Fear: Trauma-Informed Leadership in an Age of Anxiety

By Jill Szoo Wilson

She is thoughtful, intelligent, good-humored, and consistently encouraging to her fellow students. She’s the kind of student who listens closely when others speak, offers quiet affirmation rather than competition, and seems genuinely glad when her classmates do well. She began the semester strong, delivering two solid speeches and attending every class. There was nothing tentative about her start.

Midway through the term, something changed. Her warmth toward others remained. Her generosity did not disappear. But her attendance became uneven. Absences began to grow to the extent that she missed one of her assigned speaking dates. From there, a pattern emerged that did not match her ability or her effort.

This student did not vanish or disengage as some do. Each missed class came with a morning email in which she apologized and asked what she could do to keep up with the rest of the class. Even as she struggled to be present in the room, she worked to remain connected to the course and accountable to its expectations.

On the final day of the semester, I pulled her aside before class began. This was her last opportunity to deliver the make-up speech she had missed earlier in the term. I asked a question I have asked many students before, a question meant to open a door rather than close one: “How are you doing? Are you ready to go today?” I could see the fear in her eyes drain into the rest of her body and turn into fight-or-flight level tension. Tears came first. Panic followed. We agreed that she could choose whether to deliver the speech privately, after the other students had gone, or not deliver it at all.

When the classroom emptied, we talked for a long time. In the end, she did not give the speech—she could not—and in that moment, I knew I needed to honor her choice. There are times when I will encourage a student to push through their fear. Knowing when not to is part of the work.

What unfolded in that empty room was a trauma response. Panic, dissociation, and fear overtook the student’s capacity to communicate as her nervous system shifted into a state of perceived threat. Her breathing became shallow and rapid. Her body held itself tight. Her words rushed forward, tumbling over one another as she tried to explain how desperately she wanted not to feel the way she did.

Anyone who works in a position of authority—teachers, pastors, physicians, supervisors—has seen this moment. Communication can become physically unavailable when fear takes over. The body tightens, language recedes, and access to speech narrows. When someone is in that state, it is important to remember that applying pressure to the one suffering amplifies distress. Performance returns only when the nervous system has time and space to settle.

There are moments when growth comes from learning that discomfort is not danger, and pushing through fear can be part of that work. There are other moments that call for a different response, as I will explain in the next section.

Fear, Authority, and the Return of Choice

Clinical psychologist David A. Carbonell has spent decades working with people whose lives are shaped by anxiety and panic. His work is especially instructive for those in positions of authority because it explains fear without shaming the person who experiences it and without requiring the leader to become a therapist.

Carbonell begins with a simple but destabilizing premise: anxiety is not a failure of reasoning. It is the activation of a survival system designed to move faster than thought. When fear arises, the brain’s alarm circuitry engages before the reflective systems responsible for language, planning, and explanation have time to come online. This system is meant to protect us, not to help us communicate well.

In moments of perceived threat, the nervous system does not pause to ask whether fear is reasonable or proportional. It acts. Muscles tighten. Breathing shifts into the chest. Attention focuses inward, and sometimes sight narrows. The body prepares for escape, defense, or collapse. Thought follows only if the body allows it.

This is why anxiety so often surprises both the person experiencing it and those witnessing it. A student who is prepared may suddenly freeze. A patient who understands their condition may struggle to answer basic questions. A congregant who wants to speak honestly may fall silent at precisely the moment language feels most necessary. These responses are not evidence of avoidance, deceit, or unwillingness; they’re evidence that the body has moved ahead of the mind.

Carbonell describes anxiety as a “counterintuitive problem” because the strategies people instinctively use to overcome fear often make it worse. Reasoning with fear, pushing through it, or trying to suppress it may appear sensible, but they frequently intensify the nervous system’s alarm. The body interprets urgency, control, or insistence as confirmation that danger is present. What sounds like encouragement to the leader can register as a threat to the person already struggling to regulate.

When I was struggling with heightened anxiety in 2013, I remember telling my longtime family doctor, who was familiar with my personality and profession, “Speaking exhausts me right now. I know what I want to say, but I just don’t feel like talking. It’s exhausting.”

This insight is critical for anyone in authority. When anxiety is driving the body, access to speech narrows as survival takes precedence. Communication returns as the conditions that support it are restored.

The AWARE Framework

Dr. Carbonell developed the AWARE framework while working with clients whose anxiety escalated quickly and overwhelmed their ability to stay present. Rather than asking people to conquer fear, the model offers a way to slow the moment down once fear has already arrived and to change how a person relates to that fear in real time. AWARE stands for Acknowledge, Wait, Allow, Repeat, and Engage. The sequence follows the nervous system’s own rhythm as it moves from alarm toward steadiness.

Acknowledge

Acknowledge begins by bringing attention to what is happening in the present moment. Fear often intensifies when it goes unnamed, especially when a person tries to reason their way out of it or push it away. My student described it this way: “The last time I did a speech, I kept thinking if I could run out of the classroom I would be okay, but then also telling myself I couldn’t run out of the classroom. The more I told myself to stay, the more panicked I felt.”

Acknowledgment interrupts that spiral. When fear is named as it appears, the body no longer has to work as hard to contain it. Attention shifts from escape to awareness, and the nervous system begins to loosen its grip.

In practice, acknowledging fear means noticing and naming what is present in real time: a tight chest, shallow breathing, racing thoughts, a sense of urgency. This naming does not analyze or correct the experience. It simply brings it into awareness. That attention eases the body’s demand for immediate action and signals that the moment can be tolerated rather than escaped.

Instead of asking, “How do I get out of this?” the question becomes, “Is this danger or discomfort?” When the answer is discomfort, fear can be acknowledged without being obeyed.

Acknowledgment slows the interaction and opens space for choice.

Wait

Wait introduces time into a moment that feels compressed. Fear collapses experience into urgency. Everything begins to feel as though it must happen immediately.

For my student, waiting would not have meant deciding what to do next. It would have meant staying with the sensations for a few seconds longer without acting on them. Feeling her feet on the floor. Allowing her breath to move as it could. Letting the urge to escape crest and fall rather than rushing toward resolution.

Even brief pauses give the nervous system crucial information. As seconds pass without action, the body begins to register that immediate escape is not required. Breathing steadies. Muscles soften. Attention widens enough for choice to return.

For leaders, waiting can feel counterintuitive. We are trained to move toward solutions, explanations, or outcomes. Carbonell’s work asks us to trust time itself as a regulating force. Waiting allows the body to recalibrate so that whatever comes next emerges from awareness rather than urgency.

Allow

Once fear has been acknowledged and time has been introduced, the next impulse is often to make the fear stop. This is where anxiety tends to escalate. The body senses resistance and responds by pushing harder.

In the student’s experience, this showed up as an internal struggle. She tried to calm herself, reason with herself, and override the urge to escape. Each attempt intensified her panic. Her body interpreted the struggle itself as evidence that something was wrong.

Allow changes that relationship. Instead of working against fear, the student lets the sensations exist without trying to fix them. The chest remains tight. The breath stays shallow. The urgency lingers. But the fight stops.

Allowing fear does not mean agreeing with it or surrendering to it. It means recognizing that the alarm has already sounded and does not need correction in order to settle. When resistance drops, intensity often follows. The body begins to regulate not because it was forced, but because it is no longer being fought.

Repeat

Fear rarely resolves in a single wave. It rises, softens, and often returns. When it does, the impulse is to interpret its return as failure.

Repeat offers a different response. When fear resurfaces, the student returns to the same steps without escalation. She acknowledges what she notices. She allows the sensations to exist. She waits again. Nothing new needs to be solved.

This repetition teaches the nervous system something essential: fear can come and go without requiring action. Each cycle weakens the urgency attached to the sensations. Over time, fear loses authority not because it disappears, but because it no longer controls the response.

Repeat builds tolerance, not toughness. Consistency, not control, carries the system toward regulation.

Engage

Engage comes after fear has been acknowledged, time has been allowed, and resistance has eased. The student does not wait for fear to disappear. She reenters the task while carrying the remaining sensations with her.

In the classroom, this means shifting attention outward. The student stands at the front of the room with a breath that is still shallow but workable. She looks up. She finds one face in the room. She begins with the first sentence she prepared.

Engagement does not require full calm. It requires orientation. Attention moves away from internal monitoring and toward the shared task of communication.

As the student speaks, fear may continue to rise and fall in the background. She does not evaluate it. She stays with the work in front of her. Each sentence spoken gives the nervous system new information: the body can remain visible, engaged, and unharmed.

Engage restores agency. Communication resumes not because fear vanished, but because attention found a place to rest outside the self.

What This Means for Leaders

Over the years, I have noticed that more students are arriving in my classrooms with nervous systems already shaped by repeated alarms. I see it in attendance patterns, in the way bodies brace before a speech, and in how quickly attention collapses inward once fear takes hold. This is not unique to my classroom. It is widespread and growing.

Recent data make that clear. A large national survey by the University of Michigan School of Public Health found that one in three college students reported moderate to severe anxiety symptoms, with more than a third meeting criteria for a diagnosable anxiety disorder (University of Michigan School of Public Health, 2023). The National Education Association reports similar findings, noting that anxiety now surpasses depression as the most frequently cited mental health struggle on many campuses (National Education Association, 2023). A global review in BMC Psychiatry echoes this pattern, showing that roughly one-third of college students worldwide experience elevated anxiety levels, with anxiety disorders among the most common conditions in this age group (Nguyen et al., 2023).

These are not abstract statistics. They describe the lived reality of the bodies and minds leaders stand before every day in classrooms, churches, clinics, and offices. Anxiety is shaped not only by individual history, but by cultural and academic pressures that accumulate long before people enter our spaces. For many, heightened vigilance is already the baseline.

That reality has direct consequences for communication. Bodies braced for threat do not speak as freely as bodies oriented toward engagement. When the nervous system detects danger, real or perceived, it redirects energy toward survival. Leaders trained to maintain momentum or secure outcomes may misread hesitation as resistance, silence as avoidance, or uneven performance as lack of preparation. Yet insistence on immediacy or efficiency can quietly confirm the very threat the nervous system is trying to manage.

Trauma-informed leadership begins with recognizing this dynamic. It does not require diagnosis, nor does it ask leaders to become therapists. Instead, it calls us to:

  • notice how fear shows up in the moment,
  • slow the interaction enough for regulation to begin, and
  • orient expectations around the body’s capacity before asking it to communicate under pressure.

This does not weaken standards. It strengthens people.
Honoring a student’s nervous system in a moment of acute distress does not eliminate accountability or academic standards; it ensures that evaluation reflects capacity rather than collapse.

A trauma-informed posture creates the conditions under which students and colleagues can perform to their actual ability. It allows them to remain present long enough for thinking, skill, and preparation to take shape. The goal is not to remove challenge, but to ensure that challenge does not exceed the body’s ability to participate.

When leaders understand fear as a physiological response rather than a personal failing, they interpret hesitation as information. They allow choice to reenter the moment. And they learn to meet fear not with urgency, but with timing, which is often the difference between collapse and communication.

In an era when anxiety is this pervasive, trauma-informed leadership is not an added skill. It is a necessary form of stewardship.

Afterword

This is a complicated topic to write about because so much of what we do in a classroom grows out of instinct and the kind of discernment that only time creates. It is hard to explain to a new teacher, or to a young professional in any field, when to hold a firm pedagogical line and when to let it soften in order to meet the human being in front of you. Students need different things in different moments, and those needs are often invisible until they surface in panic, silence, or retreat.

I was out of the college classroom for two years. When I returned this past semester, I noticed a marked shift in the students. I am not someone who says, “This generation is lazy” or “The kids are changing” as a complaint about the future. The students are changing, but they are responding to changes that began long before they entered our classrooms. They face a cultural landscape shaped by social media, constant comparison, economic pressure, and a world that asks them to “perform” in nearly every public and private space. Their nervous systems reflect the world that formed them.

I taught a student in 2013 who blacked out while giving a speech. He remained standing at the podium, but his words stopped. Just before he went silent, he began to stammer, and I watched fear move through him until it overtook the moment.

After class, we sat together and debriefed. I asked him what had gone through his mind just before the fear took hold. He said, “I pictured my mom in the audience. And she was telling me I would not amount to anything.”

In that moment, it was clear that no amount of pedagogy would help him. He did not need stricter deadlines or more detailed feedback. He needed encouragement. He needed someone to meet him in the present moment and remind him that the story he carried was not the story he had to live. I decided to let him give the speech again during the next class period so he could replace that frightening experience with a new one.

What happened next shaped the way I think about teaching. After he finished the second speech, the entire class stood and applauded. They were not applauding brilliance. They were applauding something much more important: courage. They had seen a peer face something that had once undone him, and they honored the strength it took to return.

That semester taught me to build classroom cultures rather than classrooms organized around performance. It taught me that skills grow best in environments where students trust that their humanity is seen and that their fear will not be used against them. I have never regretted that decision.

Further Reading

Carbonell, David A. The Panic Attacks Workbook: A Guided Program for Beating the Panic Trick. McGraw-Hill, 2004.

Carbonell, David A. The Worry Trick: How Your Brain Tricks You into Expecting the Worst and What You Can Do About It. New Harbinger Publications, 2016.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Press, 2024.

Sapolsky, Robert M. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. 3rd ed., Holt Paperbacks, 2004.

Slow Art: Unhurrying Your Mind

Museums invite looking, yet most visitors treat art the way they treat emails: a quick skim, a polite nod, and on to the next thing. We spot a recognizable subject or a pleasing color, think, “Ah yes, culture,” and keep walking. Studies suggest that viewers spend less than thirty seconds with a work of art before moving on. It is possible to tour an entire gallery without truly arriving anywhere at all.

Slow Art suggests another way to exist among masterpieces.

Rooted in the broader Slow Movement and formally organized with Slow Art Day in 2010, the practice encourages viewers to remain with a single artwork long enough for something meaningful to happen. The idea is simple: stop rushing. Stop conquering exhibitions like they’re errands. Let a painting interrupt the pace of your day.

Of course, the mind resists immediately. The moment we sit down and dare to look, our thoughts fling themselves into crisis: seventeen neglected texts, three unpurchased groceries, and the intrusive belief that productivity is our moral duty, and this bench is a crime scene. Apparently, stillness is very dramatic.

Yet if we continue to sit, the noise eventually settles. We start to notice the obvious things we missed when our thoughts were busy staging a coup: light falling across a shoulder, a line of color we would have sworn was not there a moment ago. Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that seeing is never passive; we do not merely observe the world. We are in conversation with it. Given time, a painting stops acting like an object and begins to behave like a presence. It answers back.

Meanwhile, neuroscience is offering evidence for what artists have always suspected. When we linger with an artwork, the brain does more than register shape and shade. Regions connected to memory, imagination, and empathy start sparking awake, as though the mind suddenly recalls it has a richer job than survival. Interpretation emerges. Emotion slips in without asking permission. You are no longer deciphering the art. You are encountering yourself.

Slow looking becomes a decision to let meaning unfold at its own pace.

It is a tiny rebellion against the cult of efficiency. Instead of demanding results from a painting — explain yourself, be profound, hurry up — we allow the experience to be unmeasurable. Sometimes revelation arrives. Sometimes quiet does. Both are victories over the museum sprint that ends with a gift shop purchase and no recollection of the gallery that preceded it.

This week, I sat with a painting of moonlit fields and distant wind. Nothing moved, yet somehow everything did. The air itself seemed to stretch across my skin, my breath eased, and the horizon widened inside me. It felt like remembering how to be a person rather than a calendar.

I answered the art’s invitation in the only way I know:
by writing.

Cloud Trails, by John Rogers Cox
Hush
By Jill Szoo Wilson

My dear, now hush. Unburden every care;
The silent fields invite your breath to slow.
The wind lifts strands of worry from your hair
And strokes your cheek with touches soft and low.

O moon, shine steady, hold your silver ground;
A lantern calm above the world’s unrest.
Pour down a peace too deep for any sound
And press a quiet knowing to the chest.

Kind wind — sweet wanderer — move as you will;
Let coolness glide along these open hands.
Brush thought from thought, invite my heart to still,
And ferry calm across the quiet lands.

Here, nothing strives. The wide horizon sighs—
At last, the soul grows spacious as the skies.

The Mind-Body-Emotion Circuit: Learning How to Respond on Purpose

By Jill Szoo Wilson

In acting, emotion is often treated as the goal. Many students arrive hoping to unlock a secret reservoir of feeling, as if tears or rage or heartbreak could be summoned by force of will alone. Yet experienced artists and psychological researchers alike know that emotion resists direct manipulation. The human heart refuses to be commanded. Instead, emotion tends to emerge as a consequence of the way we think and move through the world. This reality, long understood intuitively by actors, has now been documented in cognitive and behavioral science. As Meisner observed, performance becomes truthful only when the actor lives with authenticity inside imagined circumstances rather than attempting to manufacture emotional display on cue (Meisner & Longwell, 1987).

This understanding is essential in my work as an acting teacher. One of my current private students, whom I will call Paige, embodies the determination required to bridge intellect, body, and imagination. She asks thoughtful questions, listens without pretense, and possesses a grounded confidence that draws others toward her. In the studio, she is learning that the actor’s instrument is not the voice alone, nor the body alone, nor even the mind alone, but the constant interplay among them. When that interplay is disrupted, performance becomes flat and disconnected. When it flows, the actor’s work becomes alive.

To explain this interplay, I teach what I call the mind-body circuit, a cycle rooted in both performance pedagogy and psychology: thought → emotion → action → new thought → emotion → action, and so on. The sequence appears simple, yet it reveals something profound. The actor can enter it through thought or action, but rarely through emotion alone. Emotion depends on a catalyst. It responds to meaning and circumstance. This is why actors who begin with the desire to “feel sad” or “play anger” inevitably fall into generalization. They are grasping at the byproduct rather than engaging the cause.

Directors and psychologists alike recognize that embodied behavior shapes inner life. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes the body as a “theater of feeling,” where emotion is both generated and displayed through motion and sensation (1999). Onstage, this principle becomes visible in dramatic form. To demonstrate this, I once handed a student a hammer and instructed him to break scrap wood in character for thirty seconds. The task was intentionally physical, forceful, and resistant, because the body cannot remain neutral when exerting strength against an object that pushes back. There was no discussion of backstory or psychology. The action demanded urgency and focus, which silenced self-consciousness and awakened the nervous system. As the student swung the hammer, his breath shifted, muscles tensed, and emotion surfaced unbidden. Within moments, he found himself articulating thoughts and personal stakes that had felt inaccessible when he tried to intellectualize his way toward feeling. Stanislavski identified this phenomenon nearly a century ago: “In the beginning, you must not settle matters of feeling. Begin with the action” (1936).

There are other occasions when thought becomes the most generative entry point into the mind-body circuit. During rehearsals for Hamlet, Paige and I worked through a scene in which Ophelia confronts a lover who, until recently, adored her. Before this scene, Hamlet has pursued Ophelia with gentle attention and romantic promise. He has spoken of love and a future together. Then suddenly, with no explanation she can understand, he turns on her. He tells her she should enter a convent, that she should never marry, never bear children, never bring more life into a world he now condemns. At first, Paige named her character’s feelings: confusion, concern, hurt. These were legitimate emotional states, but they did not yet clarify what Ophelia believed was happening or what she needed in response. We returned to the text to articulate the specific rupture: this is not Hamlet being odd or distracted; this is Hamlet erasing their entire future with a single, devastating reversal. Once Paige understood that she was experiencing rejection not only of affection but of identity, legacy, and security, her body changed. Her posture leaned forward, breath tightened, and she instinctively reached toward her scene partner, trying to recover the man she once knew. Thought created meaning. Meaning triggered emotion. Emotion propelled action. The circuit closed into a continuous chain.

Psychologist Richard Lazarus offers a framework in which emotion arises from the mind’s effort to interpret and evaluate experience. He proposed that individuals engage in a form of cognitive appraisal, a rapid assessment of what an event means for one’s safety, identity, or sense of belonging, followed by an assessment of whether one has the capacity to respond (Lazarus, 1991). Through this process, emotion becomes a reflection of significance. Fear signals the presence of danger. Grief testifies to the worth of what was lost. Anger reveals a boundary that matters. These meanings take shape first in the mind, then move through the body as behavior and physiological response. Acting technique embraces this sequence. When the actor fully recognizes the stakes—the value of the moment, the cost of failure, and the depth of desire—inner life begins to organize itself accordingly. The heartbeat quickens, posture shifts, and voice carries urgency. Stella Adler emphasized this principle in her own vocabulary, insisting that powerful performance grows from vivid circumstances and clearly drawn stakes. “You have to have a life,” she wrote, “so that you can bring something to the stage” (Adler, 2000). Through this kind of interpretation, the actor does not strive for emotion; instead, the emotional experience grows naturally from an understanding of what the story demands.

The insights found in performance theory also apply broadly to human interaction. Consider a common moment of betrayal between friends. One friend learns that another has broken confidence. Immediately, thought begins to organize meaning: She violated our trust. That thought produces feeling: anger, hurt, humiliation. The emotion then provokes action: perhaps a confrontational text or a cold withdrawal. In ordinary life, we navigate this circuit constantly, often unconsciously. Acting simply requires that we notice, name, and render the process visible.

Actors become investigators of cause and effect, tracing the thread from impulse to action with the curiosity of scientists and the sensitivity of artists. Within the rehearsal room, questions take on the weight of inquiry: What shift redefines the moment? What desire rises beneath the surface of my breath? What force complicates that desire? Which strategy carries the greatest hope of success? These questions reach beyond technique. They cultivate a heightened awareness of the subtle negotiations between inner experience and outward behavior. Through this discipline, actors recognize emotion as a current generated by the convergence of thought, intention, and physical choice. When these elements align, audiences engage instinctively with the authenticity of the performance, sensing a unified direction in every gesture and word. Emotional truth grows from coherence, and the stage becomes a place where meaning moves through a living body.

When Paige recently completed a difficult scene, she paused and said with surprise, “I finally felt something I wasn’t trying to feel! That was amazing! And terrifying.” In that moment, she encountered the paradox that defines the work. Emotion, once chased, becomes elusive. Emotion, once approached through purposeful action and clarified meaning, becomes inevitable. The mind-body circuit had connected, and she no longer had to reach for authenticity. It arrived.

Actors remind us that the human body carries intelligence of its own. Thought shapes emotion. Emotion prepares movement. Action generates new meaning. The circuit continues, alive and responsive. When actors understand this relationship, they work with the grain of their own humanity rather than pushing against it. They can shape a truthful inner life by pursuing clear objectives, taking bold physical action, and recognizing what matters in each moment of the story.

This is the heartbeat of the craft. Acting trains us to observe how feelings arise, how impulses travel, how the body communicates meaning long before words appear. Performers practice this awareness with intention, so audiences can recognize themselves in the characters before them. The mind-body circuit is not only a technique; it is a reminder of how people operate in the real world. We feel because something has happened. We respond because something matters.

Paige experienced this discovery in rehearsal. She did not demand emotion. She followed the logic of the moment, committed to the physical truth of the scene, and allowed meaning to do its work. The emotion arrived when it had something to say.

References

  • Adler, S. (2000). The Art of Acting. Applause Books.
  • Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harcourt.
  • Lazarus, R. (1991). Emotion and Adaptation. Oxford University Press.
  • Meisner, S., & Longwell, D. (1987). Sanford Meisner on Acting. Vintage Books.
  • Stanislavski, K. (1936). An Actor Prepares. Theatre Arts.