Your playbooks weren't built for this.
Internal Calms™ is a trauma-informed approach to employee communications — designed for the world your employees are actually living in.
featuredThe Steady Work
The official Internal Calms practitioner series.
Three workshops. One curriculum. A completely different way of thinking about your work.
The Steady Work is the full Internal Calms practitioner training — a series of three workshops that can be taken individually or as a complete curriculum. Together, they move you from understanding why trauma-informed communication matters, to anchoring your practice for perpetual uncertainty, to reimagining your strategies to match the world your employees actually live in.
This is how change begins — with small, steady steps toward communication strategies that keep people grounded, even when the ground keeps moving.
The Arrival
the neuroscience behind today’s employee experience and an introduction to Internal Calms
The Anchor
how values, community, and honest communication will help organizations survive uncertainty
The Assembly
a primer on channel strategy and information architecture for humans at capacity
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Capped at 10 participants per workshop.
Price: $349 per workshop, or pay $899 for all three and save 15% when you bundle.
Custom team and organization training is available, virtual or offsite. No budget shouldn’t mean no access. Sliding scale is available for those who need it. Contact Ellen for details.
The Steady Hour
One hour. Director-level advising. Two or three ideas to build from.
Bring your most pressing communications challenge. In 60 minutes, you’ll leave feeling supported — with clarity, a framework, and a path forward, without a long-term commitment.
60-minute working session via video
Pre-session brief so we use every minute well
Notes and recommended next steps within 48 hours
Price: $299.
The Steady Audit
A trauma-informed evaluation of what your communication strategy is actually doing.
Before you redesign anything, you need an honest picture of what your current strategy is doing to your employees — not just what it’s delivering to them. The Steady Audit is that picture.
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Most organizations have a listening problem that looks like a communication problem.
They send surveys. They hold town halls. They open the floor for questions at all-hands. And then they wonder why trust is still eroding.
Performative listening — asking for input with no communication infrastructure to act on it — is worse than not asking at all. Employees who have been ignored once are harder to reach the second time. Employees who have been ignored repeatedly have stopped believing the exercise is real.
Organizational psychologist John Amaechi calls real listening “sonic stewardship” — treating communication as a reciprocal exchange that requires mutual investment and care. That’s not a survey. That’s a practice.
The Steady Voice is built to make that practice real. It’s two-way by design — because listening isn’t data collection. It’s dialogue.
SERVICE OPTIONS
Listening audit: assessment of your current listening infrastructure and where it’s breaking down
Survey design: trauma-informed survey development that creates conditions for honest responses
Focus group facilitation: structured conversations designed for psychological safety and genuine two-way exchange
Listening strategy: a roadmap for building sustainable listening infrastructure employees will trust
Sense-making reports: synthesized findings that translate employee voice into actionable communication strategy
THIS IS FOR YOU IF
Your engagement scores don’t match what you’re hearing informally. Employees have stopped responding to surveys. You’re collecting data but not sure what to do with it. You want to build something employees will actually believe in — not another listening exercise that goes nowhere.
Price: Depends upon project scope, timing, and deliverables.
The Steady Voice
Employee listening infrastructure that employees actually believe in.
Most organizations have a listening problem that looks like a communication problem. They ask. They survey. They invite questions. And then nothing changes. The Steady Voice is built to close that gap — with tools designed for honest, two-way dialogue.
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Most channel strategies were built for volume and reach. Not for nervous systems.
A different channel for each type of communication. Unpredictable cadences. Messages that land in an already-overwhelmed inbox — and brain.
These aren’t neutral delivery mechanisms — they’re either calming or activating the people inside your organization.
The Steady Assessment is a structured evaluation of your internal communication strategy through the Internal Calms lens. It examines your channels, your cadence, your content, and your cognitive load — and gives you a clear, evidence-led picture of what’s working, what’s working against your employees, and what a trauma-informed approach would change.
Before you redesign anything, you need to know what you’re actually working with.
WHAT'S INCLUDED
Channel audit: inventory and assessment of current channels against the six Internal Calms principles
Content review: analysis of message volume, complexity, and cognitive load
Cadence mapping: how your current rhythm — or lack of one — is landing on activated nervous systems
Stakeholder conversations: structured interviews to surface what employees and practitioners are actually experiencing
Gap assessment: where you are versus where trauma-informed communications would take you
Recommendations report: actionable, prioritized next steps with clear opportunities and risks
THIS IS FOR YOU IF
Your organization is experiencing low trust, high communication volume with low engagement, or practitioners who are burned out and not sure why. You want evidence before you pitch a new approach. You need a starting point that leadership will take seriously.
Price: Depends upon project scope, timing, and deliverables.
ADD-ON OPTIONS
Full fiscal-year strategy development
You’ve got the findings. Now let’s build the plan. Working from the Internal Calms assessment, we’ll develop a full FY communication strategy that delivers against your goals intentionally.
Tech stack review and recommendations
More tools don’t mean better communication. This review examines your current technology against the Internal Calms principles to surface tool-specific tactics.
Information architecture redesign
When everything is urgent, nothing is. This service takes your current content structure — how information is prioritized, organized, and surfaced to employees — and rebuilds it around the Internal Calms principles.
Manager toolkit
development
Your managers are the last mile of every communication you send — and often the least supported. This toolkit gives them the language, frameworks, and practical guidance to extend your communications practice into their teams, in a way that keeps people steady instead of spinning them up.
Price: Depends upon project scope, timing, and deliverables.
Not sure where to start?
Start with a Steady Hour. Bring your biggest communications challenge and we’ll figure out together what you actually need.