From safe spaces to brave spaces

Susie Heywood, Health Improvement Manager / Suicide Prevention Implementation Support Lead, shares her thoughts on why creating safe spaces is only part of the journey.

In this blog, she explores the concept of brave spaces and how making room for honest, respectful and compassionate conversations can help us learn, grow and strengthen our collective approach to suicide prevention.

I’m sure pretty much all of us have been part of a training or event where there’s been discussion around how we make sure it’s safe and beneficial for everyone involved. It’s usually called things like ground rules, ways of working, or a group agreement. I’m sure if I gave everyone a sheet of paper and asked them to write what they would contribute to this kind of agreement, we would come up with pretty much the same thing.

Creating safe spaces when we are talking about suicide prevention is important. It’s an emotive topic, the work is complex and the conversations can be too, and almost always there will be lived experience in the room, whether that’s openly expressed or not.

Over the last couple of years though, I have come to believe that safe spaces are not enough.

I first came across the idea of a brave space on a podcast episode from Brené Brown – and I was immediately struck by how useful this was in my line of work.

Brave spaces contain all the usual things we might see in a group agreement aimed at creating a safe space: looking out for ourselves and each other, respect, participation, comfort, confidentiality. But the idea of a brave space addresses something important: that sometimes we won’t agree, and that that’s not only ok, it’s helpful.

The jobs we do can feel like way more than just a job. While for me this can help me get out of bed in the morning, it can also mean that things feel pretty challenging at times, particularly where there’s conflict or disagreement.

I can be annoyingly over opinionated and a bit stubborn. I might not always want to listen when someone is saying something that doesn’t fit with the narrative in my head about what we should be doing or how we should be doing it. I hope though, despite this, I have always been kind, and I am grateful for people who don’t mind me sharing my thoughts or frustrations from time to time. We all need those kind of people around us – the ones who just listen and validate our thoughts and feelings. The ones who give us time and space to sort our jumbled up thoughts and ideas.

But we also need to be challenged sometimes, and that’s not always comfortable. My own “stuff” means that sometimes when someone disagrees or is critical, I can take it personally. I can be easily demotivated by disagreement or being told I can’t do something – my inner middle child taking over maybe.

I know I am not alone. I have had wonderful honest conversations with many people over the last few years. I’ve seen that we all have our own ideas, opinions, challenges, complaints and frustrations. This year has been tricky for many of us, for lots of reasons. Work stuff, life stuff, work/life stuff (because it can be hard to separate the two). As much as we’d like to leave it at the door when we come to meetings or events, we carry all this stuff with us everywhere we go.

Because at the end of the day, we are all just folk – folk with important jobs to do of course – but still just folk. With thoughts, ideas, passions, histories, opinions, gripes, motivations and feelings.

The brave space idea recognises all that. Brave spaces create safety while still allowing room for us to gently and compassionately challenge each other and disagree. It never gets personal – it’s always respectful and curious. It allows others time to talk, space to grow and compassion and understanding when challenges or frustrations are aired. And from that comes learning and growth, new insights and new ideas.

We should be unafraid to disagree, but we can do this while treating each other like the wonderful humans that we are, who are all trying our hardest to make progress around a shared goal. We might have different job titles, we might be from different organisations or sectors, we might have different priorities or plans, different motivations and experiences, but we are all one team with a vision of preventing suicide and making lives in Scotland more liveable.