Only as an adult pushing into middle age was I able to recognize just how good my parents, especially my Dad, were at holding us (the kids) to high standards while maintaining psychological safety. He was a college professor and expected us all to excel at school, and yet there was never any sense that he would withhold his love if we failed. No yelling or getting angry. Maybe some disappointment, but accompanied by a plan to help us get back on track. My mom (also an academic) was sometimes more stern, but I never had any doubt that she loved me.
My older siblings modeled their behavior on my parents, and thus I had four supportive older people in my life. It's clear to me now that this environment shaped my priors on psychological safety, such that my default is to feel psychologically safe and it takes quite a lot to shake me from that position.
But that's the thing: psychological safety is not only a property of a particular situation, it is also colored by each individual's priors, so that one person might struggle in a situation where another feels perfectly safe.
It's interesting to consider what are the obligations of a boss or other authority figure to support adults with very low priors for psychological safety in a workplace or some similar adult space? The current trends seem to be to say that everyone must be supported no matter what, but supporting outliers rarely comes without costs. It doesn't make sense for a whole group to become risk averse to avoid triggering one person who comes in with a default "unsafe" prior.
My older siblings modeled their behavior on my parents, and thus I had four supportive older people in my life. It's clear to me now that this environment shaped my priors on psychological safety, such that my default is to feel psychologically safe and it takes quite a lot to shake me from that position.
But that's the thing: psychological safety is not only a property of a particular situation, it is also colored by each individual's priors, so that one person might struggle in a situation where another feels perfectly safe.
It's interesting to consider what are the obligations of a boss or other authority figure to support adults with very low priors for psychological safety in a workplace or some similar adult space? The current trends seem to be to say that everyone must be supported no matter what, but supporting outliers rarely comes without costs. It doesn't make sense for a whole group to become risk averse to avoid triggering one person who comes in with a default "unsafe" prior.