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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.