Leading through trauma is tough even at the best of times — at the holidays, it can feel overwhelming. As a leader or manager, how do you support yourself and your people through the holidays?

How will you know when it’s time to leave the role you’re in? Whether we like it or not, our jobs form a significant part of our identity: they provide for ourselves, our families, and hopefully for our futures. They can be amazing or miserable or both, but they are also familiar and known, and leaving for the unknown can be incredibly unsettling.

How do you lead in times when you don’t feel certain yourself, you don’t have any more answers, and you are just as anxious as everyone else? There are a few strategies I rely on, and that we teach here at the Center for Trauma and Leadership.

When faced with difficult criticism, it might be tempting to dismiss the feedback as pure distortion, or chalk it up to a certain group of problematic people whose feedback you don’t really care about anyway. I encourage you to engage your curiosity to see if there is something — anything — that can support your growth.

Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence, and emotional intelligence is the foundation of leading through trauma. Self-awareness is what allows you to know where you are, and this offers you the choice of deciding where you want to go, and how you want to get there.

You know you dread those one-on-ones . . . the ones with “The Crier.” Tears are conceptually fine, you think, but really? Tears at work? And you’ve asked me, “What am I supposed to do when my employee starts crying?”

While loss is always difficult for us as humans to deal with, leading through loss is particularly challenging because you are charged suddenly with two crucial (and somewhat competing) tasks: supporting yourself and your team through grief and getting the work of your business done. Regardless of the grief that you and your team are experiencing, you still have fires to fight, or patients to see, or bridges to build.

A Letter to Leaders explores the issues that matter most to leaders. In her monthly letter, Carolyn Murphy (CEO, Center for Trauma and Leadership) examines challenges that frequently arise for leaders working within the context of trauma, and offers tips to make sustainable change.

We often mistake certainty for stability. Certainty masquerades as stability. It gives us the illusion of solid ground. But stability is actually a much more fluid and flexible state.

Some of us come to our jobs with a history of trauma, some of us have been dealing with trauma or vicarious trauma for years. We need to know ourselves and “go gentler” so we can be more effective.

Talking about trauma in the workplace can be confusing — the word trauma gets used interchangeably for all situations, but not all trauma is the same. The definition of an acute or single-incident trauma is “an experience or event that overwhelms our capacity to defend or protect ourselves.” The hallmarks of trauma are helplessness and fear.

The connection between leadership and trauma has always been personal for me. The day my therapist diagnosed me with PTSD was both a relief and a turning point that takes on more significance as I look in the rearview mirror. The relief came from having a name and an explanation for what I was experiencing. The turning point was leaving a career I loved.

If you work in spaces of trauma, you sacrifice part of your worldview and part of your inner experience to your work. You cannot unknow the hard and awful things that exist in the world and you cannot unknow your own fragility and powerlessness in the face of such tragedy and despair.