Breaking Patterns: Triggers, Self-Awareness & the Superloop at Work

Part 2 of our 4-part conversation on the Superloop framework.

Your relationship with yourself determines how you show up as a leader. Susan Leger Ferraro — speaker, executive coach, and bestselling author of Superloop — shares why triggers aren’t setbacks, but signals for growth. Discover how to use self-reflection, emotional hygiene, and conscious interruption of your Superloop to build resilience, confidence, and clarity in leadership.

And connect with me for more great content!

• Sign Up for R@W Notes
• Subscribe on Youtube
• Follow on Linkedin
• Follow on Instagram
• Follow me on Threads
• Follow on TikTok
• Email me anytime

Transcript

Russel Lolacher: I'm gonna follow your path here a bit in how we navigate the rest of this conversation with the, the I, we, and all. And, and I really wanna start with ourselves because to get into a Superloop, I think self-awareness is, well, I've said it tons on the show.

It's everything. It's, it is, the relationship with yourself is the most important relationship we have in the organization. How can you recognize you are in the SuperLoop? How can you, how can you look at yourself going, I'm in it? Good or bad? Maybe good. You can reinforce these habits or bad and try to derail yourself.

Susan Leger Ferraro: Yeah, it's a great question and, and, and it, so many people ask me this, Russel, right? And, and what I say to them is this, when you look at areas that there are chronic complaints in your life, from your life partner, from your friends, potentially from your parents, from your employee employer. telling you all the time, you're, I, you're really great at this, but this other thing, right?

You're late all the time. You don't follow through when you say you're going to. Your significant other asks you to do something and they're frustrated with you chronically because you say you're gonna do something and you're not and, and you are going to have whatever excuses that you have around all of these things.

But that is where that human behavior is giving you an opportunity with a red flag going, Hey, right here, this is where you can do some work. That's gonna make a huge change in your life. But what we do is we make excuses, we avoid it. We may, we, justify it. We get defensive, all the things that humans do really.

And, and, and let me take it one cut deeper, which is, we, we now have created this term that was typically used in, in the psychology and, and social worker field about triggers. Okay? And so now it's become, layman's terms in the last five years and that triggers me, or you trigger me.

And what we don't understand about triggers is triggers are actually a wonderful thing. It's your neurology telling you that there's something here for you where you could get better at it, but you're gonna have to take a step back. Do some self-reflection. Okay. Another really important executive function skill.

I'm gonna reflect on that. Why is it that bothers me? And, and I think, you said you read the book. One of the stories that I share in there is about, two coworkers that you know Marguerite and Katie, and you know, Katie, uh, Margarite is um, Katie's supervisor. And this, this was a real thing that happened to me in one, in one of my schools. And marguerite was really, really harsh. She was tough to work for, but she was brilliant. Okay. And, and Katie came and wanted to be like, she's wrong. She shouldn't treat people like this, da da da da da, right? And I just stepped back and one of our human vibes at G3 is I'm never upset for the reason I think.

Okay. And, and that principle is correlates with what we want people to understand about triggers. That when you are heated at a way that that is more elevated than the people around you, that is a great sign for you to go, Hmm, this, this is here for me, this is learning from me spiritually, emotionally, in my human relationship and to go, why does that bother me so much?

In this situation with Marguerite and Katie, what bothered her so much was she realized that she had a third grade teacher that was really controlling and really abrasive, and that this person, her leader Marguerite, was triggering that in her. And instead of like owning it and going, wow, like that is bothering me and I need to think about that third grader that was overwhelmed by this controlling teacher and heal that instead of projecting it on Margarite and going, let's just fire her. And all of these things that we do. And so that cue of looking at places that are consistent themes coming up in our life. That's it. That's the place where you intersect the your own SuperLoop work and say, I'm gonna do this.

I'm just gonna practice it with this one thing. And, and what I tell people, I have journaled my entire life. Every single morning I get up and I journal, and when there's something going on that I'm particularly stressed about., Once a month, I will take time on a Saturday and give myself three hours, Russel, and I just go, all right, this thing, and this is what I'm interpreting from it.

This is how it impacted me, and this is what I'm not going to do anymore. And it, it is your own work. You can do it by yourself. You can do it with a therapist, you can get a support group. There's all kinds of ways, but not doing it keeps us stuck.

Russel Lolacher: I'm so glad you clarified some things people can do. 'cause I know immediately any leader's, like I don't either ha, don't have the tools to do the self-reflection to understand themselves well enough. They're too busy, and I'm using air quotes for anybody that can't see my fingers because, again, too busy is a thing that you are putting on yourself or your culture is putting on yourself, and you're not bound providing boundaries to allow yourself the time to do these really important things.

So I was really curious as to what you'd recommend that's sort of been the, I guess, move the needle for a lot of leaders who are giving you excuses for them not to do the work.

Susan Leger Ferraro: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And, and I, I think the other, salient point is and my, my brother Jack Daley talks about this all the time. He, he has a few great books out there Hyper Sales and, we all have the same 168 hours in the week, all of us, right? Whether it's Richard Branson, whether it's Brene Brown, whether it, we all have the same amount of time.

And yes, there's some of us that have had environments and upbringings that give us more access to resources. It gives us more, access to those experiences. But we are grownups now and we can make different decisions. And so understanding that. This gets to be as important as taking a shower and brushing my teeth.

This is about emotional hygiene. It really is and, and, and owning that same responsibility that we have to our physical wellbeing. We call it mental health Russel, which I think is such a ridiculous term because we're doing it because emotions are, are, are funky and people don't like them.

They're messy, they're complicated. You feel, you feel young, you feel like inadequate, but it is emotional wellbeing and emotional help. It's not mental. It's really not. But mentally, right? Yes. You've gotta discipline yourself to organize and prioritize those things, but even in relationship when we're doing supervisions with within our teams, right?

When you think about the team aspect of this work, the I is doing your own work, the teamwork is, let's say the unsaid, another term that we use at G3 because we are so conditioned in this society to not say what we're thinking. One, because we're not good at communicating. Challenging conversations and we get to get better at it so we don't feel confident.

And two, it's a lot of work and I'd rather just come to the meeting, keep my mouth shut and walk outta here so I can get work done. And so we, we are creating the environment that we don't wanna be in anymore, and that doesn't work.

Russel Lolacher: What would you say to those that may be blaming external factors? So, for instance, I work a really stressful job. What it sounds like from a beliefs, biology and behavior standpoint is it's all internal, but there are things outside of me that I can't control, which is a horrible boss or unrealistic expectations.

So I have no control over that. And I know I have control over the SuperLoop, but that influences it. How do you, how do you respond to that?

Susan Leger Ferraro: Great question again, and because that, that is true, that is an absolute truth for everyone, right? That you cannot control what's out there. It, it, it can influence you, but it only controls you if you let it. So what, what we talk about in our coaching work, when we coach individuals and at G3, we not only coach individuals, but we find it more important to coach teams, collectively.

So we do independent coaching, and then we do what we call on the field coaching, which is the entire team together because so often in the world of coaching, people commit to doing something individually, and then they show up the same way on their teams. Because trying on something new is hard. And so what, what I say to them is, what could you do?

Give me three actions that you could do that would get empower you. You are trying to give yourself agency and empower yourself. Have you talked about it in a way that that other person, that mean boss, that terrible boss actually understands how they're impacting you? Have you done that? Well, I feel like I have, and enough people have, and there's all of this dancing around it.

It's like, no, no, no, no. Have you done it? Have you dedicated the time to make sure that that person understands, when you interrupt us in the middle of a meeting and you, say that's not what it is and you cut. That is really discouraging to the whole team. I don't know if you're aware of it and, and the B-part of this Russel, which is really important. Okay. We are all human beings. Trying to make it through this world, and although your boss may be a lousy human. At most of the time, they are still humans and they are fighting a fight that you had no idea about. And could you give them a place to show up differently? Could you create an environment where they felt heard and seen and loved and supported?

Because I promise you, they don't. I promise you they don't. I work with them, right? They are fried outta their minds because of all the people that are reporting to them and they're trying to do the best that they can. They don't know what else to do, and they just need someone to give them an opportunity to do that.

You may be that person. And if you're not, at least you can say, I did everything I tried. When you give your notice and you learn something from that and take it with you, because those are circumstances, Russel, and, and we all have those circumstances around us. We are in marriages that maybe that person does this thing all the time, right?

This is the human condition that we live in, and so we, we get to figure out a way to move these things forward gently, yet firmly.

Russel Lolacher: I love the idea of empathy and compassion up as much as leaders. We are responsible for our teams accountable to our teams. But as I've certainly learned on the show very early on, leaders need leaders and a lot of leaders have had no leadership development. They've just been put as a bum in a seat to go now you're responsible. You have no tools, but figure it out. And. I've been in those situations with horrible bosses and I paint them this, I give them the horns and the mustache immediately. I'm like, they're evil people. Immediately that's the, that's because that's my beliefs that I am perpetuating based on my own experience as well or how, how they're showing up.

So thank you for that.