Building Capacity for When the Stress Doesn’t Stop: A Framework for Interpreters in High-Stress Systems

Interpreters do their hardest work in rooms designed for someone else’s crisis. This session is about the capacity that lets you keep showing up. Drawing from research on capacity-building in high-stress, high-empathy professions, we’ll look at four factors that amplify stress in their absence and build capacity in their presence. You’ll gain a clear vision of which factors you have and which you’re missing, and practical strategies to bolster each. You’ll leave with concrete capacity-building practices you can use this week to reduce the experience of stress even when you can’t reduce the stress itself.

Learning Objectives:

• Practical tools to implement the 4 RISE factors, so you can build capacity
• Skills in triaging stressful situations, so you can use the right tool in the right moment
• Awareness of how lack of factors can create traumatic stress, so you can build psychological safety

Presenter:

Elizabeth Vahey Smith holds an MA in Applied Linguistics and spent five years working on translation and literacy with the Mum language group in Papua New Guinea. Elizabeth has lived and worked traveling abroad with her family for over ten years and is currently residing in Vietnam. With ten years of leadership experience, Elizabeth conducted independent studies and field research over the past five years on emotional processing and trauma-informed leadership. Her work sits at the intersection of miscommunication and stress: how misalignment amplifies stress and how Unmiscommunication™ builds capacity. Elizabeth created the RISE Capacity Model, a four-factor framework for building capacity in high-stress work. She is the author of The Practice of Processing, a left-brain guide to emotional processing, and Trauma-Informed Leadership, a leader’s guide to psychological safety without sacrificing accountability.