Think of the one person at work who gets under your skin. Most people can name them within a second or two, which is itself worth noticing. Susan Schmitt Winchester has built much of her work around what happens next, because the instinct in that moment is nearly universal. We put our focus on the other person, and we blame them for our reaction. She is quick to say this is completely normal. It is also the reason the same dynamic tends to follow people from job to job.
Schmitt Winchester is the co-author of Healing at Work with Martha Finney, a keynote and TEDx speaker, and a former corporate executive whose career ran 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. That vantage point matters here. She spent decades watching how people lead, how they react under pressure, and how much of what they carry into a building has nothing to do with the building. Her argument in this conversation is a genuinely surprising one: the workplace, of all places, is a laboratory for emotional healing.
Everything Required to Flourish Is Already Available at Work
Schmitt Winchester starts somewhere unexpected, with the research of Dr. Martin Seligman, known as the father of positive psychology. His PERMA model describes the conditions needed to flourish, and her point is that every element of it exists at work if you look for it.
P is positive emotion. Schmitt Winchester notes that everyone has felt it at some point in their career, starting with the day they were hired, and that it fades quickly unless you actively watch for it. E is engagement, the state where you feel grounded and confident. She points out that most organizations care about this enough to spend real money measuring it.
R is relationships, and this is the one that resonates most for Schmitt Winchester personally. She has friends going back to her earliest jobs, people who came to her wedding and who are part of her holidays, people she never would have met otherwise. M is meaning, which for her came from supporting other people to be successful. A is accomplishment, the ordinary and extraordinary things that make us feel better when we finish them.
The concrete practice is a shift in attention. Schmitt Winchester challenges people to start watching for where these five things already appear in their week rather than waiting for the job itself to deliver them. She adds one honest caveat: if engagement is never there, that is information about the workplace, not about you.
Five Roles You Learned as a Child That Followed You to Work
The second framework Schmitt Winchester offers is a list of family roles that children take on, usually unconsciously, as survival strategies. Her observation is that we do not leave these roles behind when we start working.
The hero is the golden child who never causes problems and carries the weight of the family. At work, Schmitt Winchester says, the hero becomes the overachiever, and the cost is burnout, stress-related illness, and resentment from coworkers who feel they can never measure up. She counts herself here. Her father was a minister in a small community, and she felt she had to be on her best behavior at all times so no one would know how stressful things were inside the house.
The enabler, or rescuer, is the caretaker who feels responsible for everyone. At work, they become the parent of the team, the person everyone counts on to fix problems, which only increases the incoming problems. Schmitt Winchester describes the eventual reveal precisely: when the enabler finally quits, the team discovers it was a house of cards held together by one person.
The scapegoat acts out and becomes the family’s pressure valve. At work, they are seen as resistant, argumentative, the maverick. Schmitt Winchester is careful to name the upside, because scapegoats spot hidden risks and are not afraid to raise them. They often start the conversation nobody else will.
The lost child stays small and quiet to avoid being noticed. At work, they remain a wallflower, and Schmitt Winchester notes they are often steady B and C players nobody thinks to develop. She describes a woman at one of her companies who told her she had been there thirty years and had never spoken first until someone spoke to her.
The mascot is the class clown who uses humor to release tension. At work, the mascot is charming at first, Schmitt Winchester says, and becomes wearing when the jokes get in the way of serious work. She adds a fair caution: not every funny coworker is carrying something.
Schmitt Winchester’s instruction is a self-check rather than a diagnosis. What role did you play when you were small, and how is it showing up at work now? Every role has an upside and a downside. The loss happens when it runs unconsciously.
Why That One Person Sets You Off and Others Do Not
Here is the mechanism at the center of Schmitt Winchester’s work.
When someone at work triggers a reaction far bigger than the event itself, that person is very likely displaying traits that feel familiar to you from someone in your past. Schmitt Winchester is specific that it is not necessarily a parent. It could be a coach, a teacher, or anyone along your path.
She names her own hook without hesitation. She is exceptionally good at finding angry, aggressive authority figures, men or women, because that was her early experience of authority.
The two questions she uses are simple enough to ask yourself in a hallway. Is there anyone from my past who showed similar characteristics and upset me the same way? And what did I take that earlier experience to mean about me?
That second question is where the real information sits. Schmitt Winchester points to the book The Body Keeps the Score, describing how those moments become embedded in the body. Most of us never learned to regulate our nervous system in healthy ways, so we carry the reaction forward, and a present-day interaction lights the fire under something much older. As she puts it, it is like fuel on a fire that is so much bigger than what actually happened in the moment.
The practical use is to treat the size of your reaction as a measurement. When it exceeds the event, something older has been activated.
“Is it possible that what I’m taking it to mean about me has more to do with my past experience than what’s going on in front of me?”
Susan Schmitt Winchester, co-author of Healing at Work and former Chief Human Resources Officer
The Golden Retriever, the Grizzly Bear, and Taking Back the Room
Schmitt Winchester illustrates all of this with a story from her first vice president role, joining a business team that called themselves the pirates. For eleven months she tried to prove herself, and she felt that the harder she tried, the more she pushed them away.
Her coach ran an exercise rather than offering sympathy. She asked Schmitt Winchester to close her eyes, imagine she was seeing herself the way the men saw her, and name the animal they would use to describe her.
Schmitt Winchester burst out laughing at the answer. She was a golden retriever puppy. All she wanted was for them to pat her on the head and tell her she was a good girl, and that was not happening.
Then the coach reversed the exercise and asked her to describe the men the same way. One was a gorilla, one a grizzly bear, one a wolf with long fangs, and one a hyena circling. The coach asked how that arrangement was working, and then asked the question that changed everything: was it possible that her neediness was pushing them away?
Schmitt Winchester calls that the first time she took accountability for how much her past was shaping the relationship. She chose a different animal energy for herself, a lioness, and began having the conversations she had been avoiding.
The first was with the grizzly bear, who had never once attended a meeting she scheduled. She walked to his office unannounced, sat down shaking, and asked him directly whether he was too busy, did not value HR, or simply did not like her. He looked away, looked back, and said she was right and that he would never do it again. They became good friends. She stayed with that team for years.
What is instructive here is the size of the intervention. It took one unscheduled conversation and one direct question, asked calmly. Schmitt Winchester is clear that the fear does not disappear first. She still expects to feel worried before a difficult conversation, and her point is that doing the hard thing while afraid is precisely what builds the muscle.
How to Tell a Real Problem From an Old Trigger
Schmitt Winchester is careful not to let any of this become an excuse for bad behavior, and she offers a rough gauge she used on herself for years.
She names the upset by how long it lasts. An IOD is an issue of the day, something that stings and is gone by tomorrow. An IOW is an issue of the week, one that leaves you sad, anxious, or fearful for days because the collision was more significant. An IOM is an issue of the month. An IOC is an issue of a career, the kind where you believe you are about to be fired.
The scale sounds informal, but it works, because duration is a reasonable proxy for how much of the reaction belongs to the present. Something that occupies a week is rarely about the meeting that started it.
Schmitt Winchester names a second indicator that is harder to admit and more reliable. When you notice yourself reaching for unhealthy ways to soothe the feeling, that is a signal there is emotional work waiting rather than a colleague to be managed. Her current coach calls the goal being emotionally sober, meaning you take responsibility for cleaning up your own emotional state rather than carrying unprocessed pain into every interaction.
Both things can be true at once. Someone can behave badly, and the situation can be activating something old in you at the same time. Schmitt Winchester’s position is that the second part is the only part you control.
You May Not Choose the Trigger
Schmitt Winchester’s case for the workplace as a laboratory rests on something simple. You see the same people repeatedly, in situations involving authority, approval, and belonging, with real stakes attached. That repetition is exactly what makes practice possible.
And practice is the mechanism. When we become conscious of our reactions and curious about them, Schmitt Winchester says, we start taking back responsibility rather than blaming everyone around us. That is what neuroplasticity makes available. The brain can change, and the pathways can be reshaped by what we choose to do differently.
So carry one question into tomorrow. When something sets you off, before you decide what the other person is, ask what you are taking the moment to mean about you, and whether you have felt that exact way before.
Schmitt Winchester is honest that this is a journey rather than a fix. As she points out, the book is not called Healed at Work. It is called Healing at Work, and Susan Schmitt Winchester spent three decades and two Chief Human Resources Officer roles learning exactly how much difference that distinction makes.
