The Practice of Checking In
Red, Yellow, Green Check Ins — A Summary
By Virginia Bauman
Red, Yellow, Green Check Ins are an extremely simple self-awareness process that we get to do for ourselves and share with the team in one to ones and meetings. When sharing with the team the process is consent driven. Participants get to define what they share. We create language with broad meaning to improve communication.
First you center and take a couple deep breaths. Create stillness to feel how your body is doing.
You check in with yourself and if you are
- 🟢 Green: You are present, you feel resourced and able to tackle difficult emotions.
- 🟡 Yellow: You are preoccupied somewhat, a little rattled.
- 🔴 Red: You are on full alert. You may not be able to pay attention or be present.
You can do this process right away with yourself. You can note your color and how that corresponds to certain types of work, certain events in your life and what it takes to take care of yourself in each instance.
After you identify how you're feeling, it can help to ascribe why you might be feeling that way. What is present for you? What have you dealt with lately? What are you thinking about?
Checking In With a Team
If you are rolling this process out to a team, teach it to them first. In a meeting, you will simply do the check in yourself, share your color, share the why behind the color to the degree you feel comfortable, then go around the table. Letting people in on the why is powerful for modeling vulnerability and acceptance as you are accepting your state verbally in real time.
Important: If people don't want to share the why or don't want to share how they are doing, they can pass altogether or simply pass on the why. Vulnerability is powerful, but don't lose sight of the outcome this is meant to create: safety. Sometimes the emotion behind a state for one person isn't safe to communicate to another person. Simply sharing your state is powerful and everyone should feel comfortable not divulging the why.
Once you have gone around the table, that's it. There is nothing more.
If there is a really vulnerable and difficult share, it's helpful to express thanks. Often in personal relationships we say things like, "I understand," and I would caution you to simply look at this process as a means of witnessing. The following phrase is often more respectful to the very real human experience of another person at work:
"I see you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing," and be genuine.
Often we hide emotions. Certainly we acknowledge them less in workplaces that don't create space for them intentionally. By doing this process before one to ones and meetings, you acknowledge the emotion of the humans around you. Then, you get to work.
Additional Links
The beauty of naming your inner state is that you don't have to do anything with it. You just have to name it, account for it, and include it in your experience (versus pushing the feelings away).
— Allison Schultz, Murmuration
It normalizes open vulnerability. As the CEO, I always start. I want to make it okay that we talk about how we are and how we feel. Empathy is one of our core values at Travis CI, and we accept that feelings are an important part of a conversation. Vulnerability also helps build trust in a team, as it fosters being completely open with each other.
— Mathias Meyer, Start Meetings with Personal Check-ins
Red means that I'm in a hyper-sensitive, lizard brain, emotional state. This could be sad. This could be angry. This could be emotional. This could also mean that my body is just a mess, or I'm sick or injured.
Yellow means that I'm a little bit on edge. My body might be tired, or there could be some level of tension emotionally. Perhaps my thoughts are slightly jumbled and I'm distracted.
Green means that I'm calm. My body feels good. I feel rested. I feel like I can think clearly and lucidly.
— Bart Lorang, FullContact
p.s. It's good for one's personal life, too. Ever had a family situation where someone said, "I wonder what's up with [mom/dad/brother/sister]?" Imagine how things would be if that person you're wondering about said up front how they were feeling and why so you didn't have to speculate?
— Chad Dickerson, The Magic of the Personal Check-in
Background Information
The Vagus Nerve at Work
The vagus nerve is a major component of the parasympathetic nervous system. It powers our ability to be present. It is connected to (among other things) our lungs, our heart, our face, our stomach, our gut.
Effectively it's the part of our nervous system that helps regulate how we breathe, how our heart beats, how we digest. It's also connected to our immune system. It plays a significant role in inflammation responses throughout our body. And it has a role in autoimmune disorders. It is critical to our health.
The vagus nerve is responsible for a measurable embodied response to our environment called the vagal tone. The vagal tone represents how our nervous system is affecting the body (parasympathetic action).
Another way that many people explain the vagal tone: it is a measure of how our body is regulating emotion. Calming abilities amidst emotion is the domain of the vagus nerve.
And our calmness is reflective of safety.
Components of Trust
Trust is a relationship-centered measure of safety. When creating safety in teams, when creating safety in one to one situations, when creating safety in relationship to power, trust is essential.
The five components of trust are outlined below.
- Reliability — Integrity, dependability and a measure of esteem
- Acceptance — A lack of judgement
- Openness — Receiving and giving of each others' experiences readily
- Straightforwardness — Sharing our truth
- Caring — Demonstrating that others matter with actions and words
Innovation at Work
Safety is one of innovation's fundamental prerequisites. You simply can't innovate without safety. If you aren't safe, you can't take risks. If you aren't taking risks, you can't innovate.
If you don't invest in trust in a big way, your business will avoid conflict and have a significantly higher chance of not finding the success you wish to find.
How This Relates to Oppression and Power
When in positions of power, the components of trust and safety can be tricky. We are not building symmetrical relationships with our team members unless they are 50/50 co-founders who are co-CEOs. On top of that, we may be operating from another place of privilege. We are often an agent of power. So we must create infrastructure, a container, for our team, and ourselves as leaders to share emotions but in a way that allows everyone to know what to expect, how to expect it, and how to take care of themselves.
This container is part of the foundation around creativity and inner resources our team must access to do their job brilliantly. The more diverse the backgrounds of the team, the more important the container to normalize the environment and improve equity.