Susan Schmitt Winchester has a name for the moment everything turns. You are cruising along, the day is going well, and you walk into a meeting where someone interrupts you. In a single second, you are caught off guard, and underneath the interruption is a feeling that what you were saying did not matter. She and her co-author Martha I. Finney call this a Bumper Car Moment, after the ride where you are laughing and having fun until a friend slams into you from behind. Nobody planned it. It still knocks the wind out of you.
Schmitt Winchester is a keynote and TEDx speaker, an executive coach, and the co-author of Healing at Work with Finney, a USA Today bestselling author who has written or co-written thirty books on leadership, workplace culture, and personal development. Over a career of more than 36 years, she served as Chief Human Resources Officer for two public companies, a Fortune 500 and a Fortune 150, for a combined sixteen and a half years. She estimates she has had thousands of these moments across her own career, and she is direct about why she teaches this rather than something tidier. What happens in the thirty seconds after the crash, she says, will make or break how you experience the rest of your day.
Your Body Tells You Before Your Mind Catches Up
The first practical skill Schmitt Winchester teaches is recognition, and she starts with the body rather than the thoughts.
You know a Bumper Car Moment has happened because there is an emotional response, and it has a physical address. For her, it lands in the chest. For other people, it is the neck or the throat. For others, it is the stomach. The feelings arriving with it are familiar to almost everyone: angry, upset, afraid, stupid, unworthy, unimportant. All of it crashes together in the single second it takes for someone to cut you off mid-sentence.
Knowing your own physical signature matters because it arrives before the story does. The tightening in your chest is available to you a beat sooner than the sentence your mind is about to construct about what the interruption meant. That beat is where the choice lives.
Schmitt Winchester also points out that you can spot one from the outside. When someone reacts in a way that seems far bigger than the situation warrants, that gap is the tell. Their nervous system is wired for that particular input, and what you are watching is not really about the meeting.
The Emotion Lasts 90 Seconds. The Story Lasts as Long as You Feed It.
This is the piece of the conversation that reframes everything else.
Schmitt Winchester cites Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist who studied what happens in the body during an emotional reaction. The finding she draws on is that the emotion itself, once triggered, stays in the body for about ninety seconds physiologically.
Sit with the arithmetic of that. If you are still upset three hours later, the original emotion cleared your system before you left the room. What is left is the story you have been telling yourself since, and Schmitt Winchester is unusually blunt about the implication. Hang on to that story longer than ninety seconds, and you are the one perpetuating the feelings that are upsetting you.
She knows the pattern from the inside. She used to categorize her own upsets by how long she carried them. An issue of the day meant she went home and worried about it for a day. An issue of the week meant a full week of ruminating. An issue of the month was a big one. An issue of a career was the kind where she thought she was going to be fired.
The instruction that follows is gentler than you might expect. She is not telling anyone to suppress the feeling. Go ahead and feel it, she says, then release it. The ninety-second number is not a demand to be calm. It is permission to stop treating a passing physiological event as a verdict that requires days of processing.
“If we hang on to the story we’re telling ourselves longer than 90 seconds, we’re the ones that are perpetuating the feelings that are upsetting us.”
Susan Schmitt Winchester, co-author of Healing at Work and former Chief Human Resources Officer
What to Actually Do in the First Thirty Seconds
Schmitt Winchester is clear that in the moment right after a crash you are not trying to solve anything. The entire goal is buying yourself time so you do not say something you regret or go home and spend the night rebuilding the conversation in your head.
She describes her own version from a meeting years ago where she was badly triggered. She excused herself and said she needed a quick break. She went downstairs to a rarely used bathroom, splashed cold water on her face, and did box breathing, four counts in and four counts out. Five minutes later she was back in the meeting. There is nothing wrong with stepping out, she notes, and nobody thinks anything of it.
When you cannot leave the room, she offers smaller versions of the same idea. Feel your feet on the floor. Feel your shoes. Tap your feet quietly. Take a gentle inhale and exhale that nobody will notice. Put a hand on your heart, which almost no one registers. Then say something to yourself along the lines of: I am having a reaction right now, I will look at this later, and I am not making any decisions in this moment.
She is precise about what these techniques are and are not. They are not avoidance. You are buying a little time while your nervous system is in major activation, which is different from pretending the moment did not happen.
One more rule from her own experience, and it is the one that saved her career on a team she nearly walked away from: never quit on a bad day. Her coach told her she could quit the following week, but that they would figure out what was happening first.
Schmitt Winchester has since collected these techniques into a list she calls 34 ways to feel better instantly, working through every strategy she could think of for the moment when you are upset and still have to function. The number itself is the useful part. There is no single correct response to a Bumper Car Moment, and having thirty-four options means you are far more likely to find one that fits the room you are actually standing in.
The Question That Separates the Past From the Present
Underneath the calming techniques sits a single diagnostic question, and Schmitt Winchester returns to it repeatedly.
When you are upset, ask whether you are reacting this strongly because of something old rather than something current.
She illustrates it with a leader she worked with who had a reputation for a hair-trigger temper. During one meeting he became so angry that he threw a notebook, which shook everyone in the room. When she talked with him afterward, she asked what he had taken the situation to mean about himself. His answer was that he felt disrespected. She then asked whether there had been moments in his past when he felt disrespected and got very upset, and he named two, one from childhood and one from his college years. Disrespect was a theme. The past had acted as fuel on the fire of a fairly ordinary meeting.
Schmitt Winchester’s framing throughout is that this is information rather than indictment. Nearly two thirds of us, she notes from the research she and Finney reviewed, grew up with significant dysfunction. So while we believe we are bringing our adult professional selves to work each day, we are also bringing a childhood reality along, and so is nearly everyone else in the building. Given that, the collisions are not a sign that something has gone wrong. They are what happens when that many histories share a conference room.
Her practical recommendation is to keep a journal and track it. When do you get upset at work? What triggers you? She describes this as getting ahead of the car crash, so that when a familiar situation arrives you already have a plan rather than a reflex.
Why the Repair Matters More Than the Harmony
The most hopeful idea in the conversation comes from research Schmitt Winchester encountered while she and Finney were writing the book.
She draws on the work of Dr. Ed Tronick and Dr. Claudia Gold in their book The Power of Discord. The finding she highlights is that people are generally only in sync with one another about a third of the time. The rest is misreads and missteps. And what builds secure human beings, in the phrasing she quotes directly from Tronick, is not the harmony. It is the repair.
Schmitt Winchester says the word rupture landed hard for her personally, because her own childhood had a great deal of rupture and almost no repair. What a child learns in that environment is that when something goes wrong, it stays wrong. Many adults are still carrying that belief into their working relationships without ever having examined it.
That is why her suggested action here is so small and so effective. Go back to a colleague and say you were short with them yesterday and you are sorry. Every time you do that, she says, you are rewriting the story. The rupture already happened and cannot be undone, but the repair is the part you still get to choose. And if you blew it, you are not behind.
Your Job Is to Validate You
There is one more shift Schmitt Winchester wants people to make, and it is the one she says took her the longest.
She spent years believing everyone else got to determine her worth, and that her job was to earn their validation through perfectionism, people pleasing, and overwork. She describes a period on one leadership team where she behaved, in the image her coach helped her see, like a puppy waiting to be told she was a good girl. What she had never considered was that validating herself was her own job and nobody else’s.
She tells a story that shows how small the fix can look in practice. A man new to the company came to her office genuinely upset because nobody was greeting him in meetings, and he was ready to conclude he did not belong. Her suggestion was to imagine that every person in that room might be feeling exactly the same way he was, and then to be the one who initiates. Ask how everyone is doing. Turn to the person beside you and ask about their morning. Even if they do not respond, you have taken back the part of you that was waiting on them.
Schmitt Winchester is not dismissive about recognition. She acknowledges that praise from someone in power delivers a real hit of adrenaline and that it feels good. Her caution is simply not to get too drunk on it, because you already know whether you did a good job.
Getting Triggered Is Not Failing
The heart of Schmitt Winchester’s argument is that a Bumper Car Moment is normal. We are human, we work alongside other people, and we are going to get upset. The trigger is not the failure.
What changes everything is what you do in the thirty seconds after. Pause before the email goes out. Ask whether this belongs to your past or your present. Feel your feet on the floor and breathe. Decide to look at it later, when your system is calm enough to actually see it.
Carry one question into tomorrow: when something knocks the wind out of you at work, ask what you are taking it to mean about yourself, and whether you have felt that exact way before. Susan Schmitt Winchester spent more than three decades and two Chief Human Resources Officer roles learning that the moment that pushes your biggest button is also the one that hands you the clearest look at what still needs your attention.
