Susan Schmitt Winchester says there is one thing about the brain she did not learn until recently, and it changed how she teaches everything else. The limbic system, the part of the brain where emotions are stored, has no capacity for language.
Sit with what that means for a moment. When you are upset after a meeting, and you try to reason yourself down, explain to yourself why it was not personal, or remind yourself of your track record, you are speaking to a part of the brain that does not process words. Schmitt Winchester is a keynote and TEDx speaker, an executive coach, and the co-author of Healing at Work with Martha I. Finney, a USA Today bestselling author of thirty books on leadership and workplace culture. 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. What she teaches now is a three-step process called the Rapid Power Reclaim, and the reason it starts where it does comes straight from that piece of anatomy.
Why Your Best Thinking Goes Offline Exactly When You Need It
Schmitt Winchester opens with an observation about corporate life that is hard to argue with once you hear it. Almost all the training we receive at work teaches us how to manage other people or how to be more effective at the job itself. Very few organizations spend any time at all on how to manage yourself.
That gap matters, because the skill it leaves out is the one that decides how the rest of the day goes. She is also clear about what this is not. It is not a promise that you will stop getting triggered. We are human, we work alongside other people, and the crashes will keep happening. The skill is in what comes after.
Before the three steps, Schmitt Winchester walks through three parts of the brain, because the sequence of the process depends on them.
The first is the survival system. She uses the image of a lion crossing the savanna after a zebra, and the zebra running immediately. That is the amygdala doing its job, and it does not consult you first.
The second is the limbic system, where the emotions are stored, and the part with no language capacity. This is why talking yourself down fails so reliably. You cannot reason with a system that does not read.
The third is the prefrontal cortex, the executive, problem-solving part of the brain. Here is the part worth underlining. When you are in fight, flight, or freeze, or when you are emotionally charged, the prefrontal cortex is not able to function well. You cannot come from your highest functioning self while making decisions or solving problems in that state.
The practical consequence is simple, and it explains a great deal of professional regret. The moment you feel most compelled to act is the moment you are least equipped to. Schmitt Winchester’s advice follows from that directly, and she says it plainly: we cannot make good decisions from fight, flight, or freeze, and you never quit on a bad day.
Step One, Create Choice, Happens in the Body
The first step of the Rapid Power Reclaim, the process she teaches in Healing at Work, the book she wrote with Martha I. Finney, is called Create Choice, and Schmitt Winchester is specific that nothing else can happen until it does. You cannot do anything until you release the energy charge that is inside you.
She starts with a question that is easy to answer and useful every time. Where am I feeling this charge in my body right now? Hers felt like an elephant sitting on her chest, the anxiety radiating through the middle of it.
The release itself follows what she calls a simple recipe: sound, movement, and breath. Those three, she says, are the only channels the limbic system has for letting go of a charge, which is exactly why words do not do it.
One technique she teaches comes from an organization called Pathways to Successful Leadership, where she participated for years and later served on staff. It is called the silent scream. You stand, reach up as high as you can, and pull the emotion down with force, using breath and sound the whole time, then throw it out behind you. She credits Sue Page with the technique, and points out that you can do it in an empty office or a restroom without making noise.
Another is even less dignified and just as effective. She keeps a five-dollar plastic baseball bat and hits a padded chair or a couch with it while yelling. Other times she jumps, does jumping jacks, or sings at the top of her lungs. She mentions that zebras shake their bodies after escaping a lion, releasing the adrenaline of the near attack.
There is no right or wrong way to do this. What matters is the signal that it worked, and Schmitt Winchester describes that clearly. You will feel calm. The heaviness in your gut or chest or neck will have released.
“We can’t talk our way out of that charge. We have to release it.”
Susan Schmitt Winchester, co-author of Healing at Work and former Chief Human Resources Officer
Step Two, Elevate Action, Can Be a Sticky Note
Once the charge is discharged, the second step is Elevate Action, which Schmitt Winchester defines as choosing a response from your highest functioning adult self rather than repeating the pattern you have always run.
Her own example is remarkably small, which is what makes it usable. Years ago, during a week of business strategy presentations, a colleague with real influence kept making comments questioning whether the company had a talent strategy at all. By Wednesday, she was rattled. She and her team finished their slides at midnight. She woke at four in the morning in tears, frightened to stand in front of that group.
So she did the discharge work first, jumping and yelling until the fear and smallness had moved through her. Then she sat down with a pink sticky note and wrote four things: this is the best HR team you have ever worked with, this is the best HR strategy you have ever created, you are highly marketable, and no matter what happens, everything is okay.
She kept the note on her notebook during the presentation. That was the whole intervention. She walked into the room from a different place than the one she occupied at four in the morning, and the colleague who had been dismissive all week ended up high-fiving her team afterward.
The takeaway is not the note itself. It is that an elevated action can be almost trivially small and still change the state you bring into the room.
Step Three, Celebrate and Integrate, Is the One People Skip
The third step surprises people, and Schmitt Winchester is emphatic about why it is not optional.
When you do something differently, the act of celebrating it is what integrates it into your identity. You are laying down a new neural pathway over the old one. Skip it, she says, and you lose the effectiveness of everything you just did, which makes you more likely to repeat the old pattern next time.
She admits she was terrible at this. Her own executive coach opened every single session by asking what they were celebrating, and Schmitt Winchester’s honest answer for a long time was that she did not know how. She now asks her own coaching clients the same question at every meeting, and they laugh because they know it is coming.
What counts as celebrating is smaller than most people assume. After the strategy presentation, she walked out of the building on a June day, looked up at the blue sky, felt the breeze, heard the birds, and stood there marking what she had done differently. She remembers the moment vividly years later, which is the point. Making it rich is what embeds it.
Her other suggestions are equally ordinary. Step outside for sixty seconds and notice one beautiful thing. Put a hand on your heart and say out loud that you did that differently. Text a friend who knew you were walking into something hard. Take your family out to dinner.
When You Cannot Leave the Room
Most of the above assumes privacy, which meetings do not offer. Schmitt Winchester has a shorter list for that.
You can excuse yourself and say you need a quick break, then get cold water on your face and take some deep breaths. She favors box breathing: four counts in, four counts held, four counts out, and points out you can do it in the meeting itself without anyone noticing.
You can also name what is happening internally. I am triggered, and the limiting belief coming up is this one. For her it was that she was not good enough and that she deserved to get into trouble.
Grounding works too. Feel your feet on the ground. Sit up with your shoulders back. Look around the room and notice specific things, a light, someone’s brown shoes. Nobody hears you doing it, and your nervous system begins to settle.
Then tell yourself you will do the full process later. Schmitt Winchester describes these as small, simple acts of kindness toward yourself in the moment, which is a more accurate description than technique.
Your Reaction Is Your Property
Underneath all three steps is a boundary Schmitt Winchester returns to, borrowed from Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go and a reading called Property Lines.
Your property is your reactions to other people, your decisions, your choices, your actions, and the things you say. The other person’s behavior is theirs. She is honest that plenty of people at work are difficult, and that this is no secret. What she will not do anymore is hand them responsibility for the state of her own nervous system.
She names her own trigger without hesitation. She is easily activated by angry, aggressive authority figures, because she grew up with an unpredictably angry father and lived in a state of hypervigilance. Her old habit was to point the blame outward, and she is clear about why that stopped working. Blame keeps you stuck.
The version she recommends instead is curiosity. I am really angry that this person said that. What is going on with me?
What You Are Actually Reclaiming
Ask Schmitt Winchester what people get back from doing this work, and she does not lead with productivity or performance. She says freedom.
Less time ruminating. Less time beating yourself up. Less of the exhaustion that comes from managing your image instead of doing your work. She describes it as no longer being at the whim of everybody else’s behavior and reaction to you. She is also honest that it is not a finish line, only a practice you get better and more confident at over time.
So take one thing into tomorrow. The next time something at work knocks you sideways, before you answer the email or replay the meeting for the eleventh time, ask where you feel it in your body. That question costs nothing, and according to Susan Schmitt Winchester, it is the doorway to every other step.
