By Michael Allison, Performance Coach and Developer of The Play Zone™
In the first of this two-part blog, Michael shared how his work evolved from wellness and post-rehab to performance coaching rooted in Polyvagal Theory — with safety, not pressure, as the starting point for change. He introduced the concept of Autonomic Agility™ and how coaching becomes most effective when it meets clients where they are in their physiology, helping them shift from protection to presence without forcing a state they’re not ready to enter.
Trust Is a Physiological State
For many high achievers who’ve found success through relentless competition, trust can feel elusive — even dangerous. From a Polyvagal perspective, trust isn’t a belief. It’s a bodily state, shaped by the ventral vagal complex and expressed through the Social Engagement System through voice, facial expression, body language, and the rhythms of heart and breath.
When the ventral vagus is active, it not only slows the heart and downregulates sympathetic activation, it also enables connection. It reintroduces rhythm and flexibility to internal systems. Physiological trust emerges from this coherence, when our breathing patterns, heart rate, and neural signals align within and between bodies.
Trust isn’t just in our heads. It’s a whole-body experience, one that evolved as a cornerstone of human survival and co-regulation. Our adaptive advantage wasn’t just communication, it was the capacity to convey that we were aligned, attuned, and safe with one another. This ability to co-regulate is not sentimental. It’s strategic. It supports health, adaptability, and performance.
This is where the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) enters the picture: as a way to begin rebuilding physiological trust from the bottom up. It can meet this challenge in two ways. Sometimes, we begin by matching a client’s current state, not by introducing language around safety or connection too soon, but by emphasizing tools for restoring control or confidence. For a system used to operating in fight or flight, the first shift might not be toward calm, but toward purpose, rhythm, or precision. Only after physiological defenses soften can the language of trust and belonging feel accessible.
Other times, we introduce SSP as a “stealth” resource. Clients may not be seeking connection, but they may begin to experience feelings of ease or safety that are unfamiliar, or even uncomfortable. These moments open a new doorway. We can then begin to explore the difference between protection and connection, not as concepts, but as felt experiences.
SSP isn’t just a temporary state-shifting tool. It’s a neural exercise. It gently and repeatedly moves the system in and out of states of safety and disruption, building capacity over time. Clients begin to experience that it’s safe to feel safe — and safe to feel unsafe. They don’t have to analyze their response or assign meaning. They can simply feel, without becoming overwhelmed by the story attached to it.
For some clients, SSP becomes the beginning of trust — in themselves, in you as the coach, in the body’s ability to shift. For others, it may be introduced later, once foundational resources are in place. Over time, SSP can become a tool for recovery, for performance preparation, or for restoring regulation in the midst of uncertainty, travel, competition, or change.
What Is Autonomic Agility™?
Autonomic Agility™ is the capacity to fluidly navigate internal states under pressure, to recognize what’s happening in your body, adjust in real time, and return to presence, connection, and performance. It’s not about controlling the nervous system, but about cultivating a compassionate and curious relationship with it.
Built on Polyvagal Theory, Autonomic Agility™ integrates core concepts such as:
- Vagal brake: the ventral vagal cardioinhibitory fibers that slow heart rate and downregulate sympathetic activation
- Vagal efficiency: how well we can modulate physiological state and metabolic output via the vagal brake, especially under low-to-moderate challenge
- The Performance Hierarchy: a framework for identifying, working with, and shifting through the continuum of states ranging from Safety, Play, Fight, Flight, and Shutdown
- Voice, breath, listening, posture, movements, and rhythm: cues and tools that guide the Social Engagement System to influence the ventral vagal complex in real time
Whether it’s a lawyer preparing for trial, a tennis player walking onto center court, or a parent navigating a difficult conversation, Autonomic Agility™ makes the difference between reacting from protection and responding from presence.
Listening Inward: Reconnecting to Safety, Trust, and Expression
We’re taught to project confidence. To speak up. Take space. Push through.
But we’re rarely taught to listen inward, to the rhythm of our breath, the tone of our voice, the movements of our body, the signals of our nervous system. When pressure hits, voice is often the first thing to tighten. And when it does, it disconnects us from our expressive capacity and narrows our ability to communicate and regulate.
From a Polyvagal perspective, voice is not just output. It’s feedback. It’s a signal of state. It’s also a guide.
Through breath, sound, listening, and rhythm, we begin to hear the body’s real-time responses. And through the SSP, we help clients access these inputs — tone, tempo, vibration — that signal safety. Over time, this practice supports a return to one’s authentic voice, not the one shaped by perfectionism, expectations, or protection, but the one shaped by presence, purpose, and authentic accessibility.
This is how we begin to transform pressure into play. Not by bracing to survive, but by expressing through it, one breath, one sound, one movement, one state shift at a time.
Safe and Sound Protocol as Neural Exercise and Portal to Regulation
The SSP isn’t effective just because we play it. It works when we co-create the conditions for safety: when the nervous system feels safe enough to receive and respond to the cues embedded in sound.
As coaches, our job is to meet our clients where they are: track state, honor thresholds, and support integration. From my perspective, SSP becomes most effective when layered within a larger framework that respects physiology — what I call the Container of Safety: awareness, attention, breath, sound, voice, imagery, listening, movement, posture, rituals, and relationships.
We don’t force regulation. We foster it. We find and feel who and what our body welcomes as reassuring and trustworthy. And when clients experience a shift toward safety in their own body, we help them begin to trust it.
Because ultimately, regulation isn’t something we do, it’s something we provide the conditions for. And when those conditions are grounded in rhythm, resonance, and relational trust, the body can begin to move fluidly and flexibly through its range of states — not rigid, not restricted, not trapped in patterns of protection, but responsive, adaptive, and alive.
Final Reflection: The Nervous System Speaks
Whether I’m working with an athlete on the edge of a match point, a leader navigating uncertainty, or a parent trying to stay grounded, the nervous system is always speaking. Coaching helps translate its signals.
The SSP gives clients the internal experience of regulation, and also fosters the flexibility and fluidity in the nervous system that form the foundation of Autonomic Agility™. By gently guiding the system in and out of states of safety and connection, SSP functions as a kind of neural rehearsal. Unlike relationships, which can be complex, unpredictable, and layered with history, SSP provides a clear, consistent stimulus that helps model the rhythm and challenge of real life in a more contained and tolerable way. In this way, it becomes a neural exercise that helps the body build tolerance for disruption and trust in recovery, skills that clients can then take into their lives and expand through real relationships, real challenges, and real-world conditions.
The Play Zone offers a framework for understanding and tracking physiological shifts.
Autonomic Agility™ is what allows those shifts to become embodied skills — reliable, flexible, and transferable in the moments that matter most.
That’s how we build trust.
That’s how we expand capacity.
That’s how we turn pressure into play.
From my Polyvagal perspective, coaching is not about what we do to our clients, or even what we plan to teach them. It’s about putting aside our agenda and meeting the body — ours and theirs — right where it is. This means tuning into voice, face, posture, body language, breath, muscle tension, and movement patterns. It means showing up in a way that matches their physiological state, so they feel seen, heard, and understood.
By attuning to these bodily signals, we can begin to map where someone tends to reside physiologically — how their nervous system has adapted for protection — and how they respond to cues of safety, connection, and trust. Some clients welcome those feelings. Others may turn away, resist, or react with vulnerability instead of accessibility. True coaching begins by honoring those responses as intelligent, adaptive, and protective, not as blocks to be dismantled, but as invitations to deeper listening, patience, and relational presence.
To offer this kind of relational safety, we must first cultivate Autonomic Agility™ in ourselves: meeting ourselves where we are, respecting our patterns of protection and our recipes for connection. Preparing our physiology to be a safe witness, a reliable cue of safety that their body welcomes.
We need to build our capacity to fluidly shift between physiological states of empathy and compassion, so we can create a foundation of physiological trust that can be felt and supports both self-regulation and co-regulation.
In a world that pressures us to perform, this is how we come home to ourselves — and each other.
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