Kelly Sayre, Author at The Diamond Arrow Group

5 Things Every Company Needs to Know About Domestic Violence

by Kelly Sayre | Mar 29, 2021 | Tips from Kelly

Before the pandemic, it was easier to miss the signs of domestic abuse in employees because the physical line between work and home was tangible. The mindset was also, domestic violence is a personal matter and not something a company should get involved in.

During the pandemic, as many employees worked from home, the signs of abuse had an increased chance of being spotted in the virtual realm. But co-workers didn’t know what to do with that information, let alone employers.

This change brought to light a new challenge. I’ve heard it best stated by Steve Crimando, MA, CTM “it may be the employee’s home, but it’s the employer’s workplace”. The challenge is now that employees are working at home, what liability do employers have when that home environment is dangerous? What happens if an employee is hurt, or even worse killed, while working from home?

In an article on Domestic Violence and Its Effects on the Workplace:

“Domestic violence is no longer a private affair when the office becomes the setting for continued abuse through stalking or harassing phone calls. However, when this happens, victims of domestic violence are more likely to share their experiences with a coworker.

For this reason, some companies choose to train their employees to recognize early warning signs of domestic violence. For example, employees learn to look for the following signs:

Decreased employee morale
Reduced work interest and productivity
Lashing out at coworkers or clients
Constrained co-worker relations

When supervisors fail to recognize these signs as symptoms of domestic violence, the affected staff member could be dismissed. This can increase replacement, training, and recruitment costs.

However, companies can develop plans for addressing such situations while ensuring confidentiality and safety for the staff member involved.

The 5 things every company needs to know about domestic violence:

1 in 5 adults is a current victim of physical, sexual, or psychological abuse
25-40% of all workplace violence is domestic violence related
Roughly 18,000 acts of domestic violence in the workplace each year (1 in 4)
57% of all mass shootings are related to domestic violence
Domestic violence has no boundaries and can happen to anyone

Domestic violence effects the motivation, productivity, and morale of all employees, not only the victim. As business owners and leaders, there are things that can, should, and must be done to support employees. Making the effort in the workplace to address domestic violence is a win-win both for employees and companies. Here is an online calculator that gives companies an estimate of the financial impacts of domestic violence in the workplace. What does DV cost your company?

As I’ve been talking to anyone and everyone about this new concern, with so many companies considering keeping a work from home/hybrid workforce, I hear over and over again…

“I never even thought of this from the business responsibility aspect! What do I do? How do I make sure my company is complying with Minnesota state employment laws? What considerations do I need think about when it comes to risk management? How do I know what resources are available in my area? How do I handle this with confidentiality and in accordance with HIPAA?”

For a company to ask one person to shift through the mountains of information online, search for regulations and standards that apply to the company, and create a comprehensive plan and strategy for training going forward, is a lot.

That’s why The Diamond Arrow Group has partnered with Melinda Gau of Quinlivan & Hughes, a MN employment law expert, Mahowald, a commercial risk management company, and Anna Marie’s Alliance and VictimsVoice, two phenomenal organizations focused on providing services to victims of domestic violence, to offer a virtual working workshop on Emergency Preparedness Planning for small to mid-sized businesses in Minnesota.

The purpose of an Emergency Preparedness Plan is to facilitate and organize employer and employee actions during workplace emergencies, natural and man-made. A poorly prepared plan, likely will lead to a disorganized evacuation or emergency response, resulting in confusion, injury, and property damage. While the workshop will provide an overview of all considerations in emergency planning, we will also spend time focusing on domestic violence and its effects on the workplace.

Not only will attendees be provided a short presentation on the most up to date MN employment law considerations for small to mid-sized businesses, they will also have time to review their company’s current emergency preparedness plan and make changes in real time. Providing a virtual workshop that allows attendees time to actually work on the document, while having access to experts to get their questions answered in real time.

All for less that the cost of working with a lawyer individually for one hour.

The virtual workshop will be held next Tuesday, April 6^th from 8-12pm. Companies can register for one flat fee and have their entire risk management department or committee attend. If you are a business owner, get signed up now by clicking on the link. If you are an employee, forward this to your supervisor. If you would like me to talk with the decision maker at your company to let them know about this virtual workshop, send me an email with their contact information and I’d be happy to follow up with them.

If you read my last blog post, you know that I know of a bright, beautiful, smart woman who is in a domestic abuse situation right now. As you are reading this, she is in a personal hell that is unfathomable. I will do anything within my power to help her get safe, because I also know of a woman who became a victim of her personal hell.

In honor of Sharon Love, former employee of Mahowald.

Let’s Get Rid of Pedestals

by Kelly Sayre | Mar 1, 2021 | Tips from Kelly

This past weekend, I was made aware of a woman experiencing some really horrible things. My heart broke for her. Not out of pity, but because of the work I do studying violence against women, I recognized all the factors making it hard for her to know what action to take. Does she have the answer inside of her? Absolutely. Does that make it easier for her to take action? Not at all.

“But Kelly, what factors could possibly be so big that someone would hesitate to take action?!?”

Money

Child(ren)

Pets

Her home

Her routine

And the big one…

Shame

Brene Brown says “secrecy, silence and judgment: those are the three things shame needs to grow exponentially in our lives.”

When anyone is experiencing a traumatic event in their life, it can be paralyzing. There are so many questions they ask themselves. How did this happen? How did I not see the early warning signs? What will people think of me when they find out? People think I’m so great in other areas of my life, how did I screw this part up so badly?!? They want to hide their pain because the pain of other’s judgment feels suffocating and isolating.

In my opinion, social media has amplified the power of shame. It’s the double-edged sword of seeking connection by sharing parts of our lives with others and the dopamine hit of getting likes and affirmations in the comments. We want people to like us, so we continue to refine our public image to keep the good feelings flowing. To share the not-so-great moments of our life and be “real” in the virtual world gets shoved in the closet. The lines between real life and the virtual world are so blurred, that shoving embarrassment in the closet starts happening in our relationships with the people in our physical world. During the pandemic, I found myself not wanting to talk about my struggles online or in person because a.) Everyone was struggling with something, if not everything, in their life so I didn’t want to add to the weight of the world and b.) I strive to maintain a high level of personal responsibility so working on myself to get through the tough times makes me look inward for answers. While that may seem noble, if I’m not careful, I stop sharing my pain with the people who love me unconditionally. I keep the messy parts of myself secret because in the past, the judgment of those I thought would be there for me no matter what, was crushing. I was ostracized by those closest to me and left to fend for myself. (teaser: I dive more deeply into this in my upcoming book. Gah! Being vulnerable was scary but so therapeutic!)

I look at life’s difficult times as lessons, so while I wouldn’t wish my experiences on anyone, I see the silver-lining in what I learned by getting through it. My increased empathy for others, my refusal to judge anyone by their past, and the belief that no one’s life is perfect. My mother tells me when I was a little girl, if I got hurt, I didn’t want to be held. By her account, I would lash out and want to be left alone. In reality, I did want to be consoled, but on my terms. I see the same behavior in my youngest. When he gets upset, he wants to be alone. I wait a beat, then I sit close by and let him know I’m there for him whenever he’s ready to talk or needs a hug. I stay quiet and I hold the space for him. It usually doesn’t take long before he tells me why he’s mad and ends up in my lap for a hug.

The woman I mention at the beginning of this post is in the middle of a storm. What she doesn’t need is anyone making her feel ashamed, feel like it’s her fault, or pass judgment. She needs to know her closest circle of people loves her unconditionally and will hold space for whatever feelings she needs to work through. She needs to know that when she asks for help, she won’t be told what to do, but instead will be given any and all the resources to take action.

No one is perfect. We’ve all got our own shit. Thinking someone else has it all together and finding yourself jealous of YOUR perception of them is toxic. Twisting jealousy into judgement to make yourself feel better is a shitty thing to do. On the flip side, don’t feel like you have to air your dirty laundry in public to be “real” either. It’s your rules. It’s your mental boundaries. Live life on your terms.

“Can we get rid of the pedestals already?

I don’t need to tell you all the times I fucked up in my life so you can feel better about yourself.

You don’t have to pretend you’ve got all your shit figured out for me to respect you.

The grave equals all.”

-Kelly Sayre

Who Do You Trust?

by Kelly Sayre | Dec 7, 2020 | Tips from Kelly

A couple of months ago, a friend asked me if I trust everyone from the start, or if I trust no one until they’ve earned it. My gut response was I trust everyone. I believe most people are inherently good and if you start the relationship on a positive note, it gives the opportunity to create a better foundation.

Her response was she trusted no one until they proved they were trustworthy. It was an interesting conversation starter, but we were both tired from training that day and simply left the conversation with those two viewpoints.

Now, weeks later, I find myself wondering if I truly trust everyone when I first interact with them. I strive to remain curious in my daily life, and that includes questioning if what I believe is something I truly believe, or if it’s been programmed in my head from some social construct.

Do I really trust every new person I meet? What exactly does it mean to trust someone? Are there varying degrees of trust?

After pondering these questions and testing them against my initial response to her, I found that it’s not so much that I trust other people, it’s that I trust my intuition in evaluating others.

Humans, especially women, have unbelievable intuition skills. Women have been traditionally raised to be the caretakers. To be good caretakers, we need to be empathetic. To have empathy for another person, you need to be able to really hear and see and feel what they’re saying. It’s not always what a person is saying, it’s how they are saying it. Reading the other person’s non-verbals are just as important as actively listening to what they are saying. I once heard a speaker describe it as “the audio matching the video”.

Does the person say they’re happy and content with a sad face and droopy shoulders? If that’s the case, I don’t believe what they’re saying. It takes a lot more effort to fake body language than to fake the words coming out of their mouth.

From a personal safety perspective, it is vital for women to be able to read a potential attacker’s true intentions. The quote by Margaret Atwood, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them” comes to mind. To me, that statement seems extreme. Have I really walked around my whole life, wondering if every man that crosses my path might kill me?

Yes, I’ve interacted with male strangers that made me leery of their presence. Something about their body language told me they had the potential to cause me harm and I needed to pay extra attention to them and their proximity to me. But most of the time, they were strangers in a public setting. In that instance, I did not give them the benefit of trust. In fact, it was more in line with my friend’s response of “I trust no one”. So, did that mean I don’t actually trust everyone from the start?

That’s where I decided to dig deeper.

I don’t walk around in paranoia, fearful that every stranger wants to kill me. I don’t walk around paranoid period.

I’m alert and aware of the energy of a place and the people in it. I establish a baseline of what I would normally expect to see, hear, smell in the situation, and then I pay attention to anything or anyone that doesn’t fit that expectation.

I watch for anomalies.

If no one appears to be outside the baselines I’ve established, then I trust that they have no ill intent planned and mean me no harm. That falls in line with trusting strangers.

If I see someone behaving outside my baselines, my trust that their intentions are good, decreases. My intuition tells me I need to pay attention to them to gather further information. Even though my trust in them decreases, they could still have good intentions and mean me no harm. I do trust my intuition telling me to watch them and their actions. There’s still a level of trust there. I trust that their body language is projecting their true intentions. I trust that they do mean to cause harm or disruption of some sort. In essence, I do trust them, it’s just not in the harmless sense.

Learning to listen to your intuition and understand what it’s trying to tell you is essential in building your self-confidence. To move forward and live life the way you want, you need to trust yourself first and foremost. It starts with building trust in your intuition. As with most things in life, you have to start with what you have control over-you. By trusting that your intuition has your best interest in mind and the signals of intuition are always in response to something, whether you consciously or sub-consciously recognize the signals, you will build self-confidence in your ability to make smart decisions to keep yourself safe.

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

-Rumi

Unchartered Waters

by Kelly Sayre | Nov 23, 2020 | Tips from Kelly

This Thanksgiving week looks different.

I toggle between being grateful for the things in my life that haven’t changed in the pandemic (home, family, friends) and frustrated by the things that 2020 has destroyed.

Yes, destroyed is a strong word, and that is exactly what I mean. I don’t need to list my frustrations because we’re all in a place we didn’t expect to be at the beginning of this year. It’s not necessary to compare ourselves to others in order to say, “I’ve had it worse” or “I guess I don’t have it as bad as the other person”. My pile of poo may be different than your pile of poo, but we both have a pile of poo to deal with.

I’ll refrain from pretending this is article is motivational, all shiny and happy, and simply share what I’m focusing on right now. The three words I live by are: Bold, Curious, Kind. Throughout 2020, how I applied those words changed. Considering we are under constant change right now, it’s good to be fluid.

Bold.

An author I follow posted a status over the weekend that smacked me upside the head. To paraphrase her post, 2020 has been a year of “wait, what?” so why not make some ridiculous goals and crazy plans? WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO LOSE?

Absolutely nothing.

I could hunker down and play it safe with my goals for next year, or I could be bold and put out to the universe that I’m not going to play small. What big, hairy, audacious goal (or goals) can you set?

Curious.

As humans, we can be selfish. “It’s all about me! My life sucks! I have it so hard!” I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong. Your perspective is your truth, and back to my earlier comment, we all have our own pile of poo.

I could either stare at my pile of poo and complain about its size and smell, or I could stop having tunnel vision and be curious about what’s in my peripheral view. What areas of your life could you focus your curiosity on instead of having tunnel vision on your pile of poo? What’s something you’ve always wanted to explore, but never focused on before?

Kind.

So. Much. Hurt.

I’m hurting. I see others hurting. I see people hurting each other. There’s a lot of people walking around without noses because they’ve cut it off to spite their face. Figuratively speaking of course.

It’s dumb.

The biggest lesson 2020 has taught me is I can only control myself. I know, I know- that mantra has been around for a long time, but 2020 FORCED me to feel it in my bones. You can rah, rah, rah at me all day long like a motivational speaker from stage, but when you’re done talking, my response is “that’s cool, but I’m gonna go back to trying to control everything because that neural pathway is firmly established”.

I could continue on my path of insanity (you know, doing the same thing and expecting a different result), or I could start being kind to myself. Focusing on myself may seem hypocritical of my early comment mentioning how humans are selfish, but it’s not.

In the past, I’ve only thought of kindness as it relates to the way I treat others. Through my work with #500rising training and surrounding myself with amazing humans at Violence Dynamics, who I’ve let myself be raw and vulnerable with (like legit ugly cry in public-not my usual M.O.), I’ve realized the person who needs the most kindness right now is me. What can you do to be kind to yourself today?

The upcoming weeks and even months look differently for DAG. I’m having to let go of a lot of things and with that comes some grief. It feels like loss. I wish I could tell you what it will look like on the other side, or even when I will get to the other side, but I can’t. That would be my old neural pathways of trying to control everything and I’m currently destroying those old habits. (maybe I CAN learn new tricks! 😉)

I don’t know what the future holds for me or DAG, but what I know is I’m going to be Bold, Curious, and Kind.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

-Mary Oliver

Shifting Perspectives

by Kelly Sayre | Nov 9, 2020 | Tips from Kelly

I love to read. This habit has helped me gain tons of knowledge on how to hone my situational awareness skills. One thing I realized, are the skills that help keep me safe, are the same skills I use in business.

How are they the same? Consider these specific skills for a moment. In business, being able to communicate my thoughts effectively, read body language to understand non-verbals, and being able to adapt and respond to changing dynamics of a situation, are the keys to success.

If I can show you how to use skills you already have, in a way that improves your personal safety, it greatly shortens your learning curve. You can make small changes in your daily habits that will have great impact immediately. I want to help you see these skills from a different perspective, so you have the confidence to live life on your terms.

Not only are the skills universal, the warning behaviors that signal something is wrong, are universal in personal and professional relationships.

Consider this sequence of events:

Evaluating you as their target
Testing your boundaries
Learning your vulnerabilities
Gaining your trust
Slowing manipulating the relationship to gain control
Gaslighting your concerns to disguise their intent
Denying your evidence of wrongdoing to avoid personal responsibility

Which leaves the following options:

They end the relationship suddenly to avoid persecution

And/or

You are forced to walk away with nothing to escape the toxic relationship

From your perspective, what am I describing?

An intimate personal relationship?
A friendship?
A business partnership?
A co-worker relationship?

The reality is, I could be describing the patterns of toxic behaviors in any of those relationships.

Society is set up to recognize abuse in silos. Being abused greatly impacts our mental and physical health, and healing can take months, even years. Depending on the relationship of the people involved, the warning signs they are taught to look for come from that silo’s tunnel vision. In my opinion, advocates get so specialized in their silo, they can’t help survivors learn to recognize similar behavior patterns in other areas of their life.

When someone is a survivor of domestic abuse, in hindsight, they may see the early behavior warning signs from that relationship. Advocates and therapists will help them do the work to make sure they don’t find themselves in another abusive relationship. But if they are only looking through the lens of an intimate relationship, they may not recognize abusive behaviors in a professional work environment.

Who will teach them to recognize early signs of dominant behavior in the workplace? If their knowledge of warning signs only pertains to intimate partners, they may miss the warning signs of dominant behavior in a new boss. The submissive responses they created as a coping mechanism to survive, may start happening subconsciously with how they respond to the boss.

What do I mean?

One aspect of the Violence Dynamics training that had a great impact on me is the focus on building principal-based, physical self-defense skills. The instructors preach that if you focus solely on learning technical skills, when you are facing a real and potentially violent threat, technical skills may go out the window and do you no good.

Real predators, intent on causing you harm, are not reading from a Hollywood script.

(Predator is found lurking in the dark shadows of the alley, waiting for the victim to appear, while ominous music plays)

Predator: Hey Victim, I’m going to throw a right hook, followed by a shoulder grab, pulling your chest to my upward thrusting knee. Got it?

Victim: Okay. I’m going to dodge your right hook by leaning back slightly and to the left, which also puts my shoulders out of your reach, while I send a left jab to your kidney.

AND ACTION!

Real violence is scrappy. There are no rules and predators fight dirty. If you think having perfect technical skills are the end all, be all to your self-defense training, I recommend reading “Facing Violence” by Rory Miller.

What does my segue story have to do with how patterns of toxic behavior are siloed? If society is only teaching the technical skills of recognizing toxic behavior through a silo’d lens, based on the relationship between the individuals involved, we are failing. Dominating behavior is dominating behavior. Gaslighting is the same coming from a partner or a boss.

There needs to be a change on how we educate society on recognizing warning behaviors in other human beings. We need to stop creating silos of knowledge based on the relationship label we attach to the individuals involved.

It’s much easier to dismiss what your intuition is telling you because the person exhibiting the warning signs and toxic behaviors is your co-worker, not your friend/partner. Just because it’s your boss that demeans you and constantly says your work is shit, doesn’t mean it’s not abusive behaviors.

Whether your intuition alarm bells go off from your significant other, your new business partner, or that creepy co-worker, focus on their behaviors, not who that person is to you.

“I can’t control your behaviors; nor do I want that burden…but I will not apologize for refusing to be disrespected, to be lied to, or to be mistreated. I have standards; step up or step out.

-Steve Maraboli