2. Overcome Limiting Leadership Patterns from Your Family of Origin
Do you get overly emotional or triggered in certain work situations and you’re not sure exactly what’s behind it? Do you notice yourself falling into familiar patterns of behavior with your colleagues that limit your potential as a leader? The answer to these questions lies in understanding your family of origin and the unconscious beliefs and behaviors you developed in childhood.
It’s truly mind-blowing how our family dynamics and our upbringings shape our leadership styles and the roles we tend to play in our organizations. Once you begin understanding the patterns instilled in you since birth, you can uncover the blind spots holding you back and start expanding your range as a leader.
Tune in as I share real-world examples of how family of origin plays out in the workplace, common roles people fall into, and actionable steps you can take to break free of limiting patterns that started in your childhood. You'll come away with greater self-awareness and you’ll learn the tools required to consciously evolve your leadership.
If you haven’t already, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review to let me know what you think. I'm creating this show just for you, so I want to know what you would like to hear about in the coming episodes. Find complete instructions here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
How your beliefs and behaviors are shaped by your family of origin, especially from ages 0-7.
Why you may find yourself getting triggered by certain people or situations at work.
Common family roles like peacemaker, rebel, and golden child, and how they translate to the workplace.
How playing a narrow role limits your leadership potential and leads to frustration.
The importance of identifying your unconscious patterns in order to expand your range as a leader.
Questions to ask yourself to gain clarity on your family of origin dynamics.
Actionable steps to consciously change your patterns and evolve your leadership style.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
If you haven’t already, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review to let me know what you think. Find complete instructions here!
Full Episode Transcript:
Do you ever feel like old family patterns show up in how you lead? You're not alone. In this episode, we're unpacking the concept of family of origin and how our early childhood experiences shape our behaviors as leaders. We'll discuss common family dynamics and their impact on leadership as well as practical tips for breaking negative patterns.
Discover how understanding this can empower you to lead with greater clarity, authenticity, and confidence. Let's dive in.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hi everyone, welcome. Today's episode is one about family of origin and how crucial it is for you to understand your leadership developments. I'm going to dive in much deeper into the subject and walk you step by step on how you can start using this understanding of family of origin to uncover potentially blind spots in your leadership style and also maybe unconscious behaviors or drivers that you weren't even aware of.
One of the things that I do with my clients when we start working together is to dive into this work because part of being able to create lasting confidence and emotional wealth within ourselves is to truly understand where we come from and how where we come from is impacting us.
We are very complicated human beings, right, with lots of life experiences. But what happens in our childhood, especially these early years from the ages of 0 to 7, we are starting to form our beliefs about the world. What is safe? What's unsafe? What can I expect from my authority figures? What do they expect of me? What can I expect from my siblings or peers?
And so we're working out a lot of things and basically your matrix is being formed, right? The way you see the world, the way that you're internalizing the external system that you're in internally. And what happens as we grow up is that we use these set of thoughts and behaviors to excel. And this is how we relate to the world.
So all of these things that happened in our past, this family of origin where you were a child and you had your caregivers, this is how you relate to the rest of the world. So then you go to work, and in the work world, you have your boss, and you have other senior leaders who represent kind of like mom and dad, right?
They tell us what to do, they give us direction. Then we have our siblings that are either kind of like our direct reports or our peers, depending on their level of seniority. But we start seeing things in the way of a system and we make sense of it and we relate to it and it is like our family system. That's the best system that we know of. That was the system that we came from.
So what happens oftentimes is we get into dynamics at work and oftentimes people don't understand why they feel so strongly about something or they're arguing really strongly about something and they're having a really hard time seeing another perspective because they feel like they are almost very self-righteous about it. It can feel so important to them. So we're going to talk about some of those roles, but I wanted to give you an idea of how it might show up for you in your workplace.
It may show up where you are in a meeting and you notice yourself getting really emotional. So you kind of get from zero to 60 And it might be even a really innocuous example, but you notice yourself triggered, or you notice yourself having really strong emotions and wanting the behavior of the system to be a certain way. So you just want to notice if that's happening, because it's very likely that there is some family of origin pattern or behavior or rule playing out, right?
So I'm going to dive into different layers of this, but we'll start with common family dynamics and their leadership impacts. Then we're going to talk about roles people play in their family and talk about the negative patterns that might be identified from that and what you can do about it.
So let's start with the family dynamics. And oftentimes it can relate to birth order. And I'm going to speak in generalizations but this is really for the purpose of you kind of starting to expand your thinking and perspective. If something doesn't feel right to you, like for example, if you are the oldest, but you have a sibling that is many years younger, maybe they're 10 years younger, then you may be more like an only child than the oldest, right? Or if you are the middle child, but there was a big difference between you and your oldest sibling, like a 10-year difference, then you may have attributes that are more similar to the eldest child, right?
So in terms of leadership styles, typically the eldest child is one that wants to take charge, take a lot of responsibility. And sometimes in family systems, the dynamic is that the authority figures or the parents expect the eldest to take charge. There might be some gender pieces too. So I'm going to give an example of one of my clients.
She was feeling like she was responsible for so much at the workplace and she had this pattern of taking on a lot and also beating herself up. And what she noticed when we started diving into her family dynamics is that she was the oldest, she had two little brothers, and her parents would oftentimes hold her responsible for the younger kids. So she felt a lot of responsibility and when the younger kids didn't behave, if they weren't dressed or if they didn't act accordingly to how the parents wanted, they wouldn't go and talk to the kid. They would actually go and blame her.
So She was noticing a lot of emotional triggers coming up for her when her CEO would talk about the head of product and the head of engineering not relating well with what she was saying and not doing the things that they needed to do because they were relying on her data team. So what happened was she was sort of transformed back into that state and really emotionally charged up, feeling like it was all of her fault. So that was just a showing of how that pattern was playing out, right, in that eldest child.
Another pattern that could happen is being a middle child, you might learn to adapt and your leadership style might be more diplomatic. You might be more of a peacekeeper because you are kind of in that middle zone and focused on making sure everybody's happy. You're also, as a middle child, sometimes scared of the spotlight because you're not used to that much attention. That's kind of, you know, people kind of make a joke of the middle child syndrome.
And then as the youngest child, you are really creative. You might influence through innovation. You might be more risk-taking because there's less strict rules put on you. I am the youngest in my family. I have three older brothers, and we were all pretty close in age. My oldest brother was five years older, but my other two brothers were only one year apart. And in some ways I had a lot of entitlement because I was the only girl in the family, but in other ways I had more responsibility because of my gender.
And I noticed when I started working in the corporate world and as I started taking on bigger leadership roles, how this dynamic of being little sister was changing. So I was really comfortable being little sister and picking a field of finance, I found myself with a lot of men.
So you could consider I was always with my big brothers through most of my career until I started taking on those leadership roles and people started reporting to me, people who were older than me. And so I started playing this part of big sister and I remember it specifically because I had gotten promoted and noticed, wow, this is really different to have these direct reports. I no longer feel like just one of the gang I was leading. And I noticed some discomfort with that. And that discomfort was coming from that change of family dynamic and that pattern. And I was quite aware of that at that stage, so it helped me to step into more of my authority and also be kind to myself when I felt uncomfortable because this was a new way of being.
So these family patterns are really interesting because they can help us be more compassionate to ourselves as we're taking on different roles and as we're stretching ourselves to be more of an impactful, purposeful leader. But if we're always playing the same part and playing out the same pattern, it is very career limiting.
So let's talk about some of those patterns or roles people play. One of the roles that I see a lot of women play is peacemaker or rescuer. A lot of corporate women are really great at reading other people, taking on other people's emotions, and fixing things, right? So they're great at fixing things and maybe they were the person in the family that the mom entrusted to help bring all of the boys together or all of the men together. I'm kind of talking about myself because I had a lot of role in helping to gather people. I almost felt like it was a duty or a job of mine, right?
But what I find in a lot of the women that I coach that are playing that peacemaking role is that oftentimes they play this role so much that people in the corporate world, their senior leaders don't want them to leave that role because they're so good at fixing things. But often what happens is they are fixing things and meanwhile, their counterparts are getting the bigger jobs, the bigger promotions, the cooler projects, the more strategic projects, and they are tasked with fixing things versus creating things and strategically driving the business forward in a commercial way. This is where that role of peacemaker, if you notice yourself in it, could be really limiting.
It feels almost right because you feel comfortable in the role, but it also feels frustrating because you know you could be doing other things. And when you notice yourself in this particular role, you oftentimes are taking on the emotional load of people around you to an extent that is more than you are responsible for. And this oftentimes leads to burnout as well in many people.
That's just one role. There could be other roles like golden child, rebel, a disruptor, those types of things, achiever, somebody who's always an achiever, or black sheep, for example. I know that it feels like in these roles there's a good role or a bad role, but really what's happening is when you're stuck in a role, it's kind of dysfunctional because it basically says, this is your box in this family system and you're not allowed to step out of the box, otherwise it disrupts the whole system.
And oftentimes with these roles, there's different emotional ways of being. So if you're the disruptor or the rebel, then you might be used to airing out your needs, being connected with your anger, talking about it openly, right? Whereas if you're the peacekeeper, you're used to holding back, making sure everybody else feels good, right?
And really the opportunity here is to try on different roles and to give yourself the freedom to stretch and expand as a leader. For me, in my career, the biggest thing that helped me excel was being more of a rebel and a disruptor, right? It was something I was really scared of stepping into, but it helped me show up as the leader I truly am authentically and not stuck in a family pattern that kind of had me doing the same thing really well, but not showing up as a true leader with my recommendation.
And this is really where the pattern is showing up negatively when you're over-abusing it and you're not conscious of it and you're not conscious of the position you're holding and the way you're creating outcomes for yourself by being unwilling to try out different roles, right? By being unwilling to potentially look bad or be the black sheep because you want to be the golden child, right? But by being the golden child, you don't want to make mistakes and you're scared of making mistakes, and so you may limit yourself because you're not willing to get messy, to put your thoughts out there, to disagree with your parents or your authority figures, right? So you want to notice what are these patterns and they become negative when we overuse them and they're unconscious to us.
All right so we went through a few different things first talking about that family of origin and how it shapes our beliefs and our behaviors and also the emotional world that we have internally, what's okay, what's not okay, and how it shapes our leadership style as well as the roles that we can unconsciously play out at the workplace without being really aware. And then we talked about these negative patterns that could ensue if we're not conscious to that.
And so let me dive into a real-time leadership challenge and I want you to notice if you relate to this. So I have a client who came to a session very stirred up. She was explaining how when her and this new CEO come together for meetings or try to work on things together, things get very contentious very quickly. And she notices that she becomes very territorial. She noticed that she wants to control the situation. And she also notices that she is being quite competitive with this CFO.
And I had asked her, how has this shown up before in your childhood? And it took her a while to think about, right? If you're noticing this question for yourself and kind of drawing a blank, I want you to consider that this is not easy, especially if you are just at the very beginning of exploring this. So sit with the question for a bit.
And she did that. She sat with the question, and the way that she answered it was actually around her relationships with her siblings. She said, I have an older sister and I have a younger sister and I was very competitive with them and I wanted to make sure that I got my dad's attention. Her dad was very authoritative and he was not very generous with his affection. And so there was like a limited amount of affection that he would give to the kids. And she, consciously or unconsciously, right? When you're a child, you're always going to try to figure out the best way to get attention, whether it's good attention or bad attention.
Oftentimes, kids are trying to figure out how to get attention in the family system. And for her, she performed. She got a lot of positive attention from her dad, and that also made her highly competitive with her sisters. So this was playing out with her and the CFO. Because when we were able to identify the pattern and she was able to step out of the pattern, we could talk about other things that mattered that weren't about that interpersonal relationship, which was, how can the CFO help you? How can you and the CFO work together to actually create a better outcome for the company?
But it's really hard to see that when you get tangled up into these family patterns. And even though there's a family pattern, right? You also just want to notice, is this pattern helping me or hurting me in this situation? In this situation with the CFO, it was hurting her because she couldn't see a bigger picture beyond that. And she was having a hard time with understanding why she was so charged up about it.
But by understanding this and how she wants to have this special relationship with the CEO, she noticed that instead of dealing with the problem head-on, she was getting really mixed up with the emotions around what the CFO was saying and getting really competitive. So it can feel really messy in the moment and it's hard to understand where this dynamic might have come from, but if you take a moment and step back and reflect on your family dynamics, then it'll give you more insight.
And with that insight, you can ask yourself some questions about how do you want to show up, right? If I'm not competitive, then what am I? What is the vision for myself? How do I want to step into this different role? And what might that require of me? Is it to give up the role of being the golden child in order to expand my leadership beyond playing a role and being the special one.
So you want to notice that and look at your experience. So I encourage everyone who's listening to this show to number one, inventory. Are there things at work where you feel super triggered? There's a theory that we end up recreating our family because we are trying to grow and heal ourselves. So we keep getting attracted to that person. It's kind of like the example of women with daddy issues, right?
You're going to keep dating the bad boy, the wrong person for you until you can heal yourself and get clear on what that would look like to overcome that. It is similar, this pattern, right? You want to be able to recognize it and ask yourself, what is the role? How is this role influencing and impacting my leadership style? And what might I do to change it? What might I take on to change this? Is it displaying a different emotion? Is it taking on a different role or is it really just stepping out of the pattern itself and asking myself what is best for the company?
So those were a few things that you could start doing to create more awareness around this family of origin dynamic for yourself. I'd love to hear how that goes for you. Please share on social media or via email. I want to know how your leadership style is impacted and changed with this new insight.
All right, so next week's episode is on the power of self-validation and I'm going to dive much more deeply into how important it is that we have a strong relationship with ourselves. Until then, continue to lead with confidence and purpose.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Discover how understanding this can empower you to lead with greater clarity, authenticity, and confidence. Let's dive in.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hi everyone, welcome. Today's episode is one about family of origin and how crucial it is for you to understand your leadership developments. I'm going to dive in much deeper into the subject and walk you step by step on how you can start using this understanding of family of origin to uncover potentially blind spots in your leadership style and also maybe unconscious behaviors or drivers that you weren't even aware of.
One of the things that I do with my clients when we start working together is to dive into this work because part of being able to create lasting confidence and emotional wealth within ourselves is to truly understand where we come from and how where we come from is impacting us.
We are very complicated human beings, right, with lots of life experiences. But what happens in our childhood, especially these early years from the ages of 0 to 7, we are starting to form our beliefs about the world. What is safe? What's unsafe? What can I expect from my authority figures? What do they expect of me? What can I expect from my siblings or peers?
And so we're working out a lot of things and basically your matrix is being formed, right? The way you see the world, the way that you're internalizing the external system that you're in internally. And what happens as we grow up is that we use these set of thoughts and behaviors to excel. And this is how we relate to the world.
So all of these things that happened in our past, this family of origin where you were a child and you had your caregivers, this is how you relate to the rest of the world. So then you go to work, and in the work world, you have your boss, and you have other senior leaders who represent kind of like mom and dad, right?
They tell us what to do, they give us direction. Then we have our siblings that are either kind of like our direct reports or our peers, depending on their level of seniority. But we start seeing things in the way of a system and we make sense of it and we relate to it and it is like our family system. That's the best system that we know of. That was the system that we came from.
So what happens oftentimes is we get into dynamics at work and oftentimes people don't understand why they feel so strongly about something or they're arguing really strongly about something and they're having a really hard time seeing another perspective because they feel like they are almost very self-righteous about it. It can feel so important to them. So we're going to talk about some of those roles, but I wanted to give you an idea of how it might show up for you in your workplace.
It may show up where you are in a meeting and you notice yourself getting really emotional. So you kind of get from zero to 60 And it might be even a really innocuous example, but you notice yourself triggered, or you notice yourself having really strong emotions and wanting the behavior of the system to be a certain way. So you just want to notice if that's happening, because it's very likely that there is some family of origin pattern or behavior or rule playing out, right?
So I'm going to dive into different layers of this, but we'll start with common family dynamics and their leadership impacts. Then we're going to talk about roles people play in their family and talk about the negative patterns that might be identified from that and what you can do about it.
So let's start with the family dynamics. And oftentimes it can relate to birth order. And I'm going to speak in generalizations but this is really for the purpose of you kind of starting to expand your thinking and perspective. If something doesn't feel right to you, like for example, if you are the oldest, but you have a sibling that is many years younger, maybe they're 10 years younger, then you may be more like an only child than the oldest, right? Or if you are the middle child, but there was a big difference between you and your oldest sibling, like a 10-year difference, then you may have attributes that are more similar to the eldest child, right?
So in terms of leadership styles, typically the eldest child is one that wants to take charge, take a lot of responsibility. And sometimes in family systems, the dynamic is that the authority figures or the parents expect the eldest to take charge. There might be some gender pieces too. So I'm going to give an example of one of my clients.
She was feeling like she was responsible for so much at the workplace and she had this pattern of taking on a lot and also beating herself up. And what she noticed when we started diving into her family dynamics is that she was the oldest, she had two little brothers, and her parents would oftentimes hold her responsible for the younger kids. So she felt a lot of responsibility and when the younger kids didn't behave, if they weren't dressed or if they didn't act accordingly to how the parents wanted, they wouldn't go and talk to the kid. They would actually go and blame her.
So She was noticing a lot of emotional triggers coming up for her when her CEO would talk about the head of product and the head of engineering not relating well with what she was saying and not doing the things that they needed to do because they were relying on her data team. So what happened was she was sort of transformed back into that state and really emotionally charged up, feeling like it was all of her fault. So that was just a showing of how that pattern was playing out, right, in that eldest child.
Another pattern that could happen is being a middle child, you might learn to adapt and your leadership style might be more diplomatic. You might be more of a peacekeeper because you are kind of in that middle zone and focused on making sure everybody's happy. You're also, as a middle child, sometimes scared of the spotlight because you're not used to that much attention. That's kind of, you know, people kind of make a joke of the middle child syndrome.
And then as the youngest child, you are really creative. You might influence through innovation. You might be more risk-taking because there's less strict rules put on you. I am the youngest in my family. I have three older brothers, and we were all pretty close in age. My oldest brother was five years older, but my other two brothers were only one year apart. And in some ways I had a lot of entitlement because I was the only girl in the family, but in other ways I had more responsibility because of my gender.
And I noticed when I started working in the corporate world and as I started taking on bigger leadership roles, how this dynamic of being little sister was changing. So I was really comfortable being little sister and picking a field of finance, I found myself with a lot of men.
So you could consider I was always with my big brothers through most of my career until I started taking on those leadership roles and people started reporting to me, people who were older than me. And so I started playing this part of big sister and I remember it specifically because I had gotten promoted and noticed, wow, this is really different to have these direct reports. I no longer feel like just one of the gang I was leading. And I noticed some discomfort with that. And that discomfort was coming from that change of family dynamic and that pattern. And I was quite aware of that at that stage, so it helped me to step into more of my authority and also be kind to myself when I felt uncomfortable because this was a new way of being.
So these family patterns are really interesting because they can help us be more compassionate to ourselves as we're taking on different roles and as we're stretching ourselves to be more of an impactful, purposeful leader. But if we're always playing the same part and playing out the same pattern, it is very career limiting.
So let's talk about some of those patterns or roles people play. One of the roles that I see a lot of women play is peacemaker or rescuer. A lot of corporate women are really great at reading other people, taking on other people's emotions, and fixing things, right? So they're great at fixing things and maybe they were the person in the family that the mom entrusted to help bring all of the boys together or all of the men together. I'm kind of talking about myself because I had a lot of role in helping to gather people. I almost felt like it was a duty or a job of mine, right?
But what I find in a lot of the women that I coach that are playing that peacemaking role is that oftentimes they play this role so much that people in the corporate world, their senior leaders don't want them to leave that role because they're so good at fixing things. But often what happens is they are fixing things and meanwhile, their counterparts are getting the bigger jobs, the bigger promotions, the cooler projects, the more strategic projects, and they are tasked with fixing things versus creating things and strategically driving the business forward in a commercial way. This is where that role of peacemaker, if you notice yourself in it, could be really limiting.
It feels almost right because you feel comfortable in the role, but it also feels frustrating because you know you could be doing other things. And when you notice yourself in this particular role, you oftentimes are taking on the emotional load of people around you to an extent that is more than you are responsible for. And this oftentimes leads to burnout as well in many people.
That's just one role. There could be other roles like golden child, rebel, a disruptor, those types of things, achiever, somebody who's always an achiever, or black sheep, for example. I know that it feels like in these roles there's a good role or a bad role, but really what's happening is when you're stuck in a role, it's kind of dysfunctional because it basically says, this is your box in this family system and you're not allowed to step out of the box, otherwise it disrupts the whole system.
And oftentimes with these roles, there's different emotional ways of being. So if you're the disruptor or the rebel, then you might be used to airing out your needs, being connected with your anger, talking about it openly, right? Whereas if you're the peacekeeper, you're used to holding back, making sure everybody else feels good, right?
And really the opportunity here is to try on different roles and to give yourself the freedom to stretch and expand as a leader. For me, in my career, the biggest thing that helped me excel was being more of a rebel and a disruptor, right? It was something I was really scared of stepping into, but it helped me show up as the leader I truly am authentically and not stuck in a family pattern that kind of had me doing the same thing really well, but not showing up as a true leader with my recommendation.
And this is really where the pattern is showing up negatively when you're over-abusing it and you're not conscious of it and you're not conscious of the position you're holding and the way you're creating outcomes for yourself by being unwilling to try out different roles, right? By being unwilling to potentially look bad or be the black sheep because you want to be the golden child, right? But by being the golden child, you don't want to make mistakes and you're scared of making mistakes, and so you may limit yourself because you're not willing to get messy, to put your thoughts out there, to disagree with your parents or your authority figures, right? So you want to notice what are these patterns and they become negative when we overuse them and they're unconscious to us.
All right so we went through a few different things first talking about that family of origin and how it shapes our beliefs and our behaviors and also the emotional world that we have internally, what's okay, what's not okay, and how it shapes our leadership style as well as the roles that we can unconsciously play out at the workplace without being really aware. And then we talked about these negative patterns that could ensue if we're not conscious to that.
And so let me dive into a real-time leadership challenge and I want you to notice if you relate to this. So I have a client who came to a session very stirred up. She was explaining how when her and this new CEO come together for meetings or try to work on things together, things get very contentious very quickly. And she notices that she becomes very territorial. She noticed that she wants to control the situation. And she also notices that she is being quite competitive with this CFO.
And I had asked her, how has this shown up before in your childhood? And it took her a while to think about, right? If you're noticing this question for yourself and kind of drawing a blank, I want you to consider that this is not easy, especially if you are just at the very beginning of exploring this. So sit with the question for a bit.
And she did that. She sat with the question, and the way that she answered it was actually around her relationships with her siblings. She said, I have an older sister and I have a younger sister and I was very competitive with them and I wanted to make sure that I got my dad's attention. Her dad was very authoritative and he was not very generous with his affection. And so there was like a limited amount of affection that he would give to the kids. And she, consciously or unconsciously, right? When you're a child, you're always going to try to figure out the best way to get attention, whether it's good attention or bad attention.
Oftentimes, kids are trying to figure out how to get attention in the family system. And for her, she performed. She got a lot of positive attention from her dad, and that also made her highly competitive with her sisters. So this was playing out with her and the CFO. Because when we were able to identify the pattern and she was able to step out of the pattern, we could talk about other things that mattered that weren't about that interpersonal relationship, which was, how can the CFO help you? How can you and the CFO work together to actually create a better outcome for the company?
But it's really hard to see that when you get tangled up into these family patterns. And even though there's a family pattern, right? You also just want to notice, is this pattern helping me or hurting me in this situation? In this situation with the CFO, it was hurting her because she couldn't see a bigger picture beyond that. And she was having a hard time with understanding why she was so charged up about it.
But by understanding this and how she wants to have this special relationship with the CEO, she noticed that instead of dealing with the problem head-on, she was getting really mixed up with the emotions around what the CFO was saying and getting really competitive. So it can feel really messy in the moment and it's hard to understand where this dynamic might have come from, but if you take a moment and step back and reflect on your family dynamics, then it'll give you more insight.
And with that insight, you can ask yourself some questions about how do you want to show up, right? If I'm not competitive, then what am I? What is the vision for myself? How do I want to step into this different role? And what might that require of me? Is it to give up the role of being the golden child in order to expand my leadership beyond playing a role and being the special one.
So you want to notice that and look at your experience. So I encourage everyone who's listening to this show to number one, inventory. Are there things at work where you feel super triggered? There's a theory that we end up recreating our family because we are trying to grow and heal ourselves. So we keep getting attracted to that person. It's kind of like the example of women with daddy issues, right?
You're going to keep dating the bad boy, the wrong person for you until you can heal yourself and get clear on what that would look like to overcome that. It is similar, this pattern, right? You want to be able to recognize it and ask yourself, what is the role? How is this role influencing and impacting my leadership style? And what might I do to change it? What might I take on to change this? Is it displaying a different emotion? Is it taking on a different role or is it really just stepping out of the pattern itself and asking myself what is best for the company?
So those were a few things that you could start doing to create more awareness around this family of origin dynamic for yourself. I'd love to hear how that goes for you. Please share on social media or via email. I want to know how your leadership style is impacted and changed with this new insight.
All right, so next week's episode is on the power of self-validation and I'm going to dive much more deeply into how important it is that we have a strong relationship with ourselves. Until then, continue to lead with confidence and purpose.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, RSS, or wherever you listen to podcasts!
