Psychological Safety in Our Personal Lives

by Jade Garratt

At Psych Safety, our focus has always been on psychological safety in the workplace – helping teams and organisations become more inclusive, equitable, and high-performing through psychologically safer, more human ways of working.

But what we work on at work isn’t neatly separated from our personal lives.

In our workshops, we often see this crossover between psychological safety at work and home happen naturally. People reflect not just on their teams, but also on family dynamics, parenting, friendships, and the social spaces where they feel able – or unable – to share their ideas, ask questions, admit mistakes or speak up when something doesn’t feel right. Psychological safety is woven through the way we relate to the people around us.Social Groups, Reputation and Pressure

There are interesting, and sometimes unexpected, dynamics that we can explore through considering psychological safety in different contexts. For example, when I was researching student transitions through university, one finding in particular stuck with me. I’d fully expected that students would find it harder to speak up in lectures where they didn’t know other members of the audience. And among strangers, some students did feel more exposed. But several students told me they felt more able to speak up in lectures when their friends weren’t there. 

At first, this seemed strange. But actually, it makes perfect sense.

When we’re with our social group, we often have a role or a persona to maintain. We might be the one who ‘knows everything’ and always gets things right, or the one who doesn’t try too hard, or the one who’s ‘too cool’ to ask questions. When we step away from this it can be liberating, taking away the pressure we feel to perform, or conform to, a certain identity.

Photo by Stanley Morales

It’s a dynamic that echoes across personal relationships too. Sometimes, the people we’re closest to are the ones we feel the most vulnerable with – and the most afraid of getting it wrong. The stakes can feel higher (and therefore our perceived psychological safety can be lower) when we really care about the opinions of the people we might be disappointing or letting down if we get it wrong, or say something wrong.

Family Dynamics and Psychological Safety

Family dynamics are a particularly interesting one. Families – in all their myriad shapes and sizes – are, at their core, a kind of social contract. This social contract is often unspoken, but brimming with expectations, behavioural norms and assumptions. We probably wouldn’t talk about “high-performing families” (that feels a little dystopian!) but we do talk about healthy families, functional ones – families where people feel safe to express themselves, to be heard, to mess up and still be fundamentally accepted and valued. 

At best, family may offer a space where, to use Carl Roger’s original reference to psychological safety in 1954, we feel that we possess “unconditional worth”. But of course in many cases, family does not offer that space, and we may, as adults, seek out alternative groups and spaces where we can feel psychologically safe enough to share more of ourselves and our voices. 

Parenting with Psychological Safety

There are also suggestions that psychological safety can itself facilitate a healthier family and home life. Research by Schoppe-Sullivan et al. (2016) explored how supportive co-parenting relationships can act as a kind of haven of psychological safety – especially during the intense and uncertain transition to parenthood. When parents have a relationship with each other with a high degree of psychological safety, they are better placed to manage the transition to being parents and offer a secure base for each other as well as their child or children. Parenting isn’t easy (understatement!), and we need space to figure it out – to work together, ask questions, get things wrong and course correct. It makes sense that psychological safety is one of the factors that helps us do that better. 

And more than that, for parents or other caregivers, one of the most important things we can cultivate is a relationship where children want to come to us, especially as they get older. Where they feel safe enough to share their ideas, their mistakes, their worries, even if (especially if) it’s the sort of thing that they might fear could get them into trouble. Better that they bring those to us, than carry them alone – or have them surface later through teachers, peers, or in ways that are harder to address. 

The Ripple Effect

So while our work on psychological safety is focused on the workplace, these ideas ripple outwards.

The need to be psychologically safe enough to share our ideas, questions, concerns and mistakes isn’t limited to the workplace. I’d argue it goes much deeper than that – it’s a human need – and perhaps one of the foundations of any meaningful relationship, at work or at home.

Further Reading

• Schoppe-Sullivan, S. J., Settle, T., Lee, J. K., & Kamp Dush, C. M. (2016). Supportive Coparenting Relationships as a Haven of Psychological Safety at the Transition to Parenthood. Research in human development, 13(1), 32–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/15427609.2016.1141281 
• Wanless, Shannon. (2016). The Role of Psychological Safety in Human Development. Research in Human Development. 13. 6-14. 10.1080/15427609.2016.1141283. 
• The History of Psychological Safety
• Social Contracts
• Reducing power gradients

Psychological Safety in Practice

Blameless Reviews

This is a great piece by Fischer Jemison about the practicalities and reality of running “blameless” incident reviews. Fischer makes some excellent points, and I love this extract:

“…systems constantly run in a degraded mode, humans constantly adapt to changing circumstances, and accidents happen when normal operations collide with environmental factors that make failures possible. Put a little more simply: people generally don’t do things they think will cause accidents, so people’s actions are rarely sufficient to explain why incidents occurred.

Put even more simply: human error doesn’t exist.” To put this into practice, Fischer suggests a few things:

• Use agentive language: name who did what, but contextualise why.
• Focus your review on each participant’s mental model and step‑by‑step actions. (Consider their Local Rationality)
• Refer to facilitation resources, e.g. the Howie Guide and Etsy’s Debriefing Guide, to structure conversations.
• Avoid passive voice in the review itself (such as “the change was deployed”) and blanket “human error” labels. Make a conscious decision whether to include names in documentation or not.

Whether you run “blameless” or “blame-aware” reviews, these are good suggestions. 

And in a similar vein, here’s a neat article from Jake Mazulewicz in The Sentinel, on a blameless event review process.

Belonging and Psychological Safety

Gordon Ryan, Director at Prism Work Psychology has conducted a very in-depth Critically Appraised Topic on the relationship between Belonging and Psychological Safety, which surfaced a few interesting (though not necessarily surprising) points:

– Psychological safety is well defined in literature and practice, but belonging is not – some see it as an organisational identification construct whereas others see it as an interpersonal construct.

– Studies on belonging tend to be highly quantitative, resulting in a narrowness within and across studies. There is not a great deal of robust evidence to show that the two concepts are linked. In practice, however, at least from a qualitative perspective, we know they are – we just can’t define a quantitative measure of correlation.

– Studies on belonging and psychological safety help us understand more about relationships but less about impact and relevance because they focus less on organisational performance and more about employee experience (which we could argue are related, of course!).

– There is a perception in academia that there is little evidence for the success of interventions and resultant improvements either in psychological safety or belonging. This again reflects the lag between practice and study, where (necessarily) the world of practice is significantly further ahead of the research.

Trust and Psychological Contracts

This is a great paper from Professor Nicola Burgess, on Building and Maintaining Trust ‘Even When Things Aren’t Going Well’: Meta-Regulation Through an Explicit Psychological Contract.”

Their analysis shows how the intentional and consistent use of an Explicit Psychological Contract (EPC – similar to a social contract or team charter) fosters greater trust, even in the face of challenges, promoting better collaboration and service delivery.

Key insights:
– Traditional hierarchical regulation often leads to superficial compliance rather than genuine, sustainable improvement.
– An EPC acts as a powerful tool in fostering an adaptive, reciprocal, and trust-based relationship by clearly articulating mutual obligations.
–  Embedding the EPC into regular meetings focuses attention on the ‘fulfilment’ of the EPC in a routine way, which builds trust.
– When a breach of the EPC occurs, one or both parties assess potential risks and benefits for trust relations, and may choose to trigger (or not) a collective discussion to understand why one or both parties failed to uphold the EPC’s obligations.

Psychological Safety Practice Playbook: Feedback

Feedback can make or break psychological safety. Our brand-new Feedback Practice Playbook is packed with practical tools, real-world scenarios, and thoughtful approaches to help you and your team give and receive feedback in ways that truly support psychological safety.

Use it to:

• Strengthen your feedback culture
• Avoid common pitfalls
• Practice with confidence
• Try alternatives when feedback isn’t the right fit

It includes our non-violent communication model with worked examples, team exercises, a feedback checklist, and a bonus section on what to do instead of feedback.

Available now as an add-on to the Psychological Safety Action Pack and included in the complete Psychological Safety Bundle.