Safety, Belonging and Mattering: Give Your Tribe What They Crave

To become resilient and shift to our Smart State (where we more easily navigate change, experience reduced stress, and perform at our very best), we must have safety, belonging, and mattering. But how do you know who needs what, when?

Very often you don’t even have to ask if a team member needs safety, belonging, or mattering; their behavior says it all. Here’s our SBM (Safety, Belonging, Mattering) Behavior Decoder to help you give your team what they need:

(click image for downloadable PDF)

Safety, belonging, and mattering are essential to your brain and your ability to perform at work, at home, and in life overall. The greater the feeling of safety, both emotional and physical so we can take risks; likewise, the greater the feeling of connection with others, or the feeling that we’re in this together and we belong together; and the greater the feeling that we personally matter and make a difference and are contributing to the greater good; then the greater the success of the company, the relationship, the family, the team, the individual.

In every communication, in every conflict, we are subconsciously either reinforcing or begging for safety, belonging, mattering or a combination.

It’s neurological… it’s primal… there is nothing you can do to override or change this subterranean subconscious programming as much as you may try.