Leading with Critical Stress: How to Regain Capacity without Self-Blame

If critical stress is affecting your work, there are two words you need to know and understand: trait and state.

I’m Dr. Shalini Jebasingh, a trauma-informed Critical Stress Management Coach and developer of the SCRIBE Framework for restoring work capacity under critical stress and trauma. In this article, I’ll show you how the trait vs. state distinction reduces self-blame and helps leaders regain capacity.

Many leaders under stress quietly blame themselves for changes in how they are functioning. Here, I share a common but harmful misunderstanding that fuels this self-blame—confusing who you are with what state you are in.

That confusion can further erode work capacity, confidence, and leadership effectiveness. But it is also something you can understand and correct.

Trait vs. State: A Crucial Distinction

There is a difference in how we think, feel, and act based on three factors:

• Time – whether a pattern shows up consistently over long periods

• Inner drive or intrinsic motivation – what fuels the behavior

• Context – the situations in which the behavior appears

When a pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving shows up repeatedly over time, is fueled by the same underlying inner motivation, and appears across many different situations, we are usually looking at a trait.

But when one or more of these elements is missing—when the behavior is situational, temporary, or context-specific—we are far more likely looking at a state of being.

States are temporary ways of functioning when we are exhausted, under critical stress, grieving, traumatized, or facing something that is simply too heavy to carry alone.

Know Yourself: Are You Generous or Selfish?

Let me explain this difference with a positive and a negative example.

If you need something, a generous person

▪ May offer it freely as a gift

▪ With generous terms, as a loan

▪ Tell you they cannot give, without putting you down

They are truthful in their motive, honest in their assessment of their capacity to give, and relate to you as equals. This is generosity as a trait.

Now selfish person may also give. But:

▪ If it’s a loan, there is disproportionate harshness in how it is handled

▪ If it’s a gift, there is an unspoken expectation of repayment—emotionally, mentally, or even physically. You end up exhausted trying to “pay back” a gift.

A selfish person gives, knowing they will take back more than they gave. That is selfishness as a trait.

Over time, we can recognize patterns. But if the patterns are cloaked in manipulation, it is very hard to recognize whether someone is giving out of love or to get back more than they gave. This is because we cannot see a person’s motive.

Understand Yourself: Living as You Are or In a State of Being

If you are a good leader, you may have been naturally generous. Others may have experienced your generosity. You simply lived it. But under critical stress, grief, trauma, or something else adverse, your capacity to be generous may decrease.

Unfortunately, under critical stress or trauma in personal or professional life, a morally good and generous leader might misjudge themselves, or their temporary inability to give, as selfish, and the selfish person as generous. But if they took a moment to honestly look within themselves, they would understand whether their past pattern of giving came from a place of love and care or from a need for control or advantage.

Under critical stress, the body shifts into survival mode. There are real physiological changes involving the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. The sympathetic nervous system activates, preparing the body to fight, flee, freeze, or appease. In this bodily state, there is very little capacity left for generosity or other high values you hold dear.

At work, you may find yourself brushing aside a colleague’s request or withdrawing without even realizing it. The tragedy is this: many otherwise good leaders misinterpret this state-based decline as their trait, as who they truly are.

It is not.

State-based decline is not your character. It is not who you are. And the high values you hold can be regained as stressors resolve, as you work through stress, or as you pursue healing from grief, trauma, or other hard-to-bear experiences.

The Cost of Living a Lie

When leaders who hold high values confuse state with trait, two things tend to happen.

First, they move into self-criticism. Instead of restoring capacity, they expend their state-based limited energy trying to prove they are still a “good person,” rather than reducing stress, managing triggers, or adjusting systems.

Second, they try to push through to live out their high values, and their problem-solving capacity declines further. Stress directly affects the prefrontal cortex, which in turn affects attention, judgment, and executive functioning. In this state-based decline, pushing harder to “be good” instead of taking time to understand and restore capacity, only deepens exhaustion and decreases executive functioning.

When leaders recognize the truth that they need time to stabilize, not self-punishment, they can adjust expectations and protect their work while reducing stress or healing from trauma. If they don’t, the nervous system stays on high alert, thinking shuts down further, and productivity continues to fall.

Regaining Capacity with the SCRIBE Framework

So how do you protect your work while working your way out of critical stress? There are many approaches. One framework I use in my critical stress management coaching is the SCRIBE Model:

• S – Situational Scan

• C – Context Scan

• R – Reframing Findings

• I – Identifying and Accepting

• B – Balancing by prioritizing and managing

• E – Engaging in truth

Each step is examined through four organizational frames: People, Operations, Vision, and Culture.

This model does not try to “fix leadership,” but to restore capacity. It helps you recognize what is happening, understand it, accept it, and prioritize next steps without fear or false guilt.

Truth is strength. When you name state-based limitations and recognize them as temporary, your nervous system begins to settle. You move away from temporary periods of calm into a grounded calm. Soon, this creates the conditions not just for recovery, but for thriving again.

Dr. Shalini Jebasingh is a trauma-informed Critical Stress Management Coach and Values-Based Organizational Trainer, the Founder of Eirene Group and Bible at Work, and the developer of the SCRIBE Framework and the Love in Leadership Assessment.

 Explore: SCRIBE Framework | Love in Leadership Assessment | Bible at Work | To invite Dr. Shalini Jebasingh to speak at a conference or to your team at work, email hello@eirene-group.com.