My talk from HR Transform 2022 (#HRTransform #HRT2022) was part of the "Human First" track and called Healing Trauma with Design Thinking. This was a very vulnerable moment and I’m honored that the conference organizers saw how important it was to share my story. My goal in sharing was that we can work to remove the stigma on mental health, build awareness and empathy for PTSD, encourage treatment, and remind everyone that it's possible to create trauma-informed work environments where survivors can thrive.
Session Description: Design thinking has emerged as an ubiquitous, repeatable and reliable process for driving innovation in a modern business context. One of the ways this is possible is through intentional and controlled induction of stress states on the body to drive innovation ideation. Through learning to harness stress, turn it on and off, and leverage it for problem solving, survivors are able to gain a new relationship with their trauma and foster positive self image and healing. Pulling from my own career experience as a top design thinking educator and innovation consultant and navigating my own personal healing journeying as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I will explore the positive linkage between these methods and how other survivors can harness the body’s defense against trauma for their own self-healing.
As in all things, representation matters. It is still pretty rare to hear business leaders talk about deeply personal struggles with serious mental health issues like PTSD. That makes it even harder for anyone struggling with PTSD to even think they can still achieve heights in their career. Not to mention that the term PTSD has lost a lot of it's meaning as it is being used colloquially in ways that minimize the severity of the experience of someone suffering from actual PTSD. But the reality is that a staggering 15 million adults suffer from PTSD at any given time in the US and at least 6% of the total US population will develop PTSD at some point in their lives – that's actually more that the total number of Asian Americans in the US. I am someone who suffers from cPTSD and anxiety disorder related to trauma from my childhood and I feel that if I speak opening about my struggles and journey, bring awareness to statistics about PTSD and explain how it works and what the symptoms are like, it will help anyone who might be suffering feel understood and bring awareness and empathy to the work world. Thanks for being kind enough to listen to my story and taking the time to understand a little bit what it is like to experience PTSD. And if you know someone who has PTSD but thinks there isn't any hope out there, I want them to know that there is! There are a variety of treatments that they can try and career fields and work environments where they can not only thrive but be a real asset!