Returning to Us
To help people who help people, the organization needs to be healthy and have practices in place that consider the trauma of those they serve. Lauren Spigelmyer and Jessica Doering have helped thousands of people who help people all over the world. Each week they'll explore tools, insights, and stories to help you lead and live with more clarity, calm, and connection. If you’re looking for support as you grow your organization’s capacity for caring for staff and the community, we would love to be part of that journey.
Episodes
237 episodes
Sound, Rhythm, and a Needed Pause
Lauren offers a gentle reminder that pausing is not a disruption, but a necessary part of regulation and sustainable leadership. As the podcast takes a short break, she encourages listeners to consider where they, too, might need to slow down a...
Repair without Weakening Authority
Repair is often where leadership breaks down, but it is also where trust is built. In this episode, Lauren walks through why rupture is inevitable in high stress environments and how avoiding it quietly erodes culture, connection, and accountab...
Revisiting The Regulated Team: Creating Cultures that Breathe
This week, we’re revisiting a past episode of the podcast, The Regulated Team: Creating Cultures that Breathe. As recent episodes have explored sustainable authority and the shift away from urgency driven leadership, this conversation ...
Why Accountability Feels Threatening
Lauren begins a new series on maintaining authority without escalation, focusing on why accountability can feel threatening in high-stress or trauma-exposed systems. When teams are already carrying chronic stress, even small moments of correcti...
How Regulated Leaders Make Better Decisions in High-Stress Systems
In this final episode of the Leading Under Pressure series, Lauren reframes authority as nervous system stability rather than intensity or control. She explains how regulated leaders build trust through emotional predictability, consistency, an...
Leading Through Conflict Without Escalation
After taking a week off to tend to personal matters, Lauren returns to the series on leading under pressure with a focus on navigating conflict without escalation. She reframes conflict as a nervous system event rather than simply a communicati...
A Fresh Look at the Five Ives Framework in the Workplace
In this earlier episode from Returning to Us, Lauren introduces the foundations of what would become the Five Ives framework, including the Five Ives continuum and the 4Ps (Policy, Practice, Practitioner, and People). Listening back now, this c...
Boundaries as Leadership Infrastructure
Lauren shares how clear boundaries serve as vital leadership infrastructure, helping regulate teams, reduce anxiety, and prevent burnout. She explains how predictable limits build psychological safety and support creativity and sustainable perf...
Clarity as a Safety Cue
Lauren explores why clarity is one of the most powerful safety cues a leader can offer in high-pressure systems. Rather than micromanagement, clear expectations help regulate the nervous system by creating predictability, reducing rumination, a...
When Leaders Become the Stressor
In this episode, Lauren explores how leadership stress can quickly spread through a team and shape trust, communication, and performance. She reflects on how awareness of your own regulation is a core leadership skill and why noticing tension e...
Episode 2: Authority Without Fear
In this episode, Lauren continues the Leading Under Pressure series by exploring how authority and power shape the nervous system and why leadership is never neutral. She unpacks how fear based practices drive compliance, silence, and ...
Episode 1: What Stress Does to Decision-Making
Lauren starts a new series on leading under pressure, looking at how chronic stress shifts the way leaders think, decide, and lead. She explains how dysregulation narrows perspective and pushes people into urgency, control, and short term think...
The Pause Between Now and Next
Lauren opens the new year with an invitation to pause between “now and next.” This episode creates space to reflect on the past year, release what no longer serves, and move forward with more clarity and steadiness instead of urgency or burnout...
Leading from a Regulated Core
In this episode, Lauren explores what it means to lead from a regulated core and why a leader’s internal state is the most powerful influence on culture, safety, and decision-making. She explains how nervous system regulation shapes teams long ...
Designing Rhythms that Regulate
Lauren explores how rhythm regulates both the nervous system and organizations, showing how predictable routines create safety, clarity, and capacity, while chaos increases stress and burnout.She shares practical examples of daily, weekl...
When Culture Dysregulates
Lauren explores how organizational culture acts as a nervous system and the signs that show when it’s stuck in survival mode. She explains how unclear communication, chronic urgency, and dysregulated leadership quietly shape how teams feel, fun...
Growth & Feedback Without Fear
In this episode, Lauren explores how leaders can promote growth and give feedback without triggering fear or threat responses. She explains why traditional evaluation systems dysregulate staff and why regulation, clarity and collaborative feedb...
Onboarding as Co-Regulation
In this episode, Lauren explores onboarding as a nervous-system experience rather than paperwork. She shows how predictability, belonging, clarity, and emotional tone shape a new hire’s first 30 to 90 days and influence whether they feel safe, ...
Policy as a Nervous System
Lauren shares how policies and procedures act like an organization’s neural pathways, shaping safety, trust, and overall regulation. Punitive or confusing policies create anxiety, while clear and compassionate ones build stability and support.<...
Meetings That Calm, Not Drain
Meetings set the tone for an organization. Lauren explains how structure, pacing, tone, and clarity can calm the nervous system and keep teams grounded instead of drained.She also shares simple practices like ritualized starts, sensory g...
The Regulated Organization: What It Means to Be a Regulated Organization
Lauren launches The Regulated Organization series, exploring how stress and regulation affect entire workplaces, not just individuals. She explains how an organization’s “nervous system” shapes culture, communication, and trust, and ho...
Retain: Sustaining Staff, Culture, and Capacity
In this episode, Lauren explores how organizations can move beyond burnout to build lasting staff retention through the Three M’s: Moments, Memories, and Meaning. She explains that small daily interactions, shared experiences, and a sense of pu...
Reinforce- Ensuring that Change becomes Cultural Muscle Memory
In this episode, Lauren dives into Reinforce, the third phase of the Staff Sustainability Program. After moving through relief and reset, this stage is about turning new, healthy patterns into lasting habits that define an organization...
Reset: Moving from Relief to Real Transformation
In this episode, Lauren explores what it means for organizations to truly reset after burnout. She shares how leaders and teams can move from short-term fixes to lasting change by addressing root causes, rebuilding trust, and fostering compassi...
Stage 1: Relieve — Stabilizing in Survival Mode
In this episode, Lauren explores why many organizations try to build sustainability while running on empty and how real change begins with creating relief. She shares how survival mode shows up through reactivity and disconnection and off...