9. Observe, Experiment, Reflect: Home for the Holidays Leadership Lab
What if going home for the holidays wasn't just about family dinners and catching up? What if it was a chance to grow as a leader? I want you to think about how your family system has shaped who you are, and how you've carried over some of those patterns into your personal and professional lives, whether it's conscious or unconscious.
This holiday season, you're not just going home, you're going home with an assignment, turning your experience into a Leadership Lab. This is about viewing your life as an experiment with new behaviors and ways of being. Instead of being reactive to situations, you're more intentional and curious, testing out different leadership strategies, communication styles, and behaviors in your everyday interactions at work or at home.
Tune in to learn how to transform your holidays into a real-world leadership experiment. You’ll learn how to consciously evolve and refine your leadership style in real time, gaining greater insight and building resilience along the way. This mindset turns life into a continuous opportunity to learn and grow, leaving you less worried about making mistakes once you’re back at work.
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 to observe family dynamics with intentionality and purpose during the holidays.
Why experimenting with new behaviors in low-stakes environments can boost your leadership skills.
The importance of reflecting on what works and what doesn't in your leadership experiments.
How to identify and unlearn patterns and habits that no longer serve you as a leader.
Why treating life as a leadership lab can increase self-awareness and confidence.
How to consciously adjust your behaviors to align with your desired leadership outcomes.
The power of delegation and asking for help in both family and work settings.
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!
2. Overcome Limiting Leadership Patterns from Your Family of Origin
Full Episode Transcript:
This holiday season, don't just go home, go home with a purposeful assignment. How can you use going home for the holidays to boost your influence and impact as a leader? In today's episode, we're turning your family visit into a Leadership Lab. Observe family dynamics, experiment with new ways of leading, and discover what you can bring to work or leave behind. Stay tuned and transform your holidays into a real-world leadership experiment.
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.
Welcome listeners. Imagine this, what if going home for the holidays wasn't just about family dinners and catching up? What if it was a chance to grow as a leader? I want you to think about how your family system has shaped who you are, and how you've carried over some of those patterns into your personal life and professional lives, whether it's conscious or unconscious.
This holiday season, you're not just going home, you're going home with an assignment. And this is where I wanna introduce the idea of a Leadership Lab. The Leadership Lab is an approach where you can start viewing your life as an experimentation with new behaviors and ways of being much like a scientist in a lab instead of being reactive to situations. You're more intentional. You're curious. You test out different leadership strategies, communication styles and behaviors in your everyday interactions whether it's at work or at home, or in this case, home for the holidays.
This mindset turns life into a continuous opportunity to learn, to grow, and you feel less worried about making mistakes. So the reason why this is important is because oftentimes we stop ourselves from experiencing life in this way because we are just automatically reacting and we're afraid of showing up differently, but this is an invitation to do so, trying on a new behavior that you can practice and refine in low stakes environments. It's not like because you start acting a different way in your family system that you are going to get punished or fired. I mean, people might have feelings and things like that, and I'll talk about that more as this episode goes on, but it's low stakes.
We are gonna walk into doing this assignment in a number of ways, which one is just observing intentionally with purpose, another is experimenting with new behaviors, and the third, which combines really the first and second, is learning how to unlearn some of these things and how to see this pattern as something that could either support you in certain circumstances or hurt you in other circumstances. The way of thinking about life as this Leadership Lab can give you more opportunity, more space to not be so attached to your patterns and habits, but more from a place of curiosity and an ability to consciously adjust and align your behaviors with your desired leadership outcomes.
We are gonna be doing more of this Leadership Lab as time goes on. I'd love for you to share with me what you like about it. I wanna do it quarterly, but we can start doing it more often if I am hearing from my listeners that you guys are getting a lot out of it.
So the whole point of Leadership Lab is it encourages self-awareness, right? It gives you this opportunity to identify typical responses that might not serve you and experiment with alternative approaches. It also helps you to cultivate confidence and courage, stepping outside of your comfort zone because you have this assignment, so you want to work on it. And when we're working on something, we are more interactive with it, and we're more playful with it, and we're more willing to make mistakes.
So it might look like asserting your opinions more confidently or leading with more empathy, but it's allowing you to step outside of your normal way of being and test something out. There's also a lot of growth through reflection. After each experiment, you wanna reflect on the results. What worked, what didn't work, what would you try differently next time?
So this gives you also a different way of looking at life so that you are interacting and engaging with it consciously. By treating every day like a Leadership Lab, you can consciously evolve and refine your leadership style in real time, gaining greater insight and building resilience along the way.
It also helps us to connect with ourselves because you're gonna be asking yourself, how am I feeling in this moment? How did that work for me? And you'll start realizing that you have much more agency over your day-to-day life and reactions than you thought, because you are starting to experiment with it.
All right, so let's talk about the family system and its influence. And when I say the family system, I'm really talking about our family of origin, because that is where a lot of our foundations of our behaviors were formed, really through the ages of zero to seven in developmental psychology. There's a lot of talk about how this time was really formative.
You learn about what you can expect from the world, what you can expect from authority figures, what can you expect from yourself in this time and this dynamic. And if you are really curious about this, you can also listen to episode two, which is all about how your family of origin, how it shapes your leadership patterns. But I'm just gonna give you a little bit about it in this first piece as we talk about this assignment for you.
If you think about your family patterns, you wanna notice, are there certain roles that you play in your family? Are there certain roles that other family members play? For example, are you the peacekeeper who avoids conflict? Do you wanna notice that in yourself when you're in your family system? Or are you the over-functioner? Are you always solving people's problems and you take on too much work and you take on too much responsibility, is that you? Or are you the rebellious one or the black sheep, the always like the contrarian one, always poking at other people and getting a rise out of them or saying the contrary thing just to see how your mother reacts.
You wanna notice yourself in this family system and frame this holiday visit not just as a way of connecting with your family, but also observing these patterns in action and reflect on how they might be influencing your leadership behavior, right? You wanna notice when your dad comes into the room, does everybody clear the way for him? Does he have his special seat at the table that everybody knows is his, right? Does he start eating dinner first and everybody waits for him? You just wanna notice what are these patterns and how do these patterns show up? Are you noticing yourself waiting for the CEO to come in, take his seat before everybody else talks? Are you noticing how you show up in terms of maybe waiting for others to act before you react, right? Waiting for mom and dad to take that first step.
So this is again a way for you to start observing with intentionality and purpose and seeing what's happening around you, these automatic responses. I'm gonna share with you something that I observed a lot when I was dating back in the day and I would go to, sometimes I would be invited to like my boyfriend's house for family holiday. And I would observe myself and my partner, my boyfriend at the time. I would notice myself being really relaxed. I would notice myself really engaging with the family members.
They would ask me all these questions about me. I loved that experience of sharing about my work and who I am and talking. And oftentimes I would just notice my partner being quiet, way more quiet than he usually is. And then like just doing lots of tasks and getting a lot of work done.
So it was interesting, because when he would come over to my family, what he would experience is that opposite situation where I would not be the one being asked questions. I was like the worker. I was there washing dishes, getting things prepared, making sure everybody was happy. And I realized I didn't really enjoy myself, but this was part of my pattern.
Like when I was with my family system and there was new people over or visitors, I would just take on this role of hosting and being that person that is making sure everybody else is comfortable. And I just noticed also in my leadership style that I am like that. When there's a new member of my team, I'm very much like, hey, let me take ownership, let me do things for you. And I didn't set back a lot. I didn't always feel comfortable in my own environment, in my own home environment, sitting back and relaxing and enjoying the time.
You wanna notice when you think you have a duty, when you're noticing yourself in a certain role, do you like that? Do you not like that? I mean, for some things I would like it because I wanna be helpful and I wanna be a supportive member of the family. But at the other time, at the other side of it, I also wanted to enjoy. I also wanted to be taken care of.
And when I noticed this dynamic of me going to my own family for the holidays versus me going to my boyfriend's house was really where in certain systems, I would get more nourishment for myself and more joy because I was just allowing myself to be more versus doing, like task-oriented.
And in my leadership style, I realized that I was holding duty as such a big, important thing. And I didn't allow myself to sit back, being taken care of, really expect people around me to support me and to be curious about me.
So knowing that this is a pattern of mine, getting overly into my duties and overly into responsibility versus having fun, connecting with people, building rapport, I knew that when I went back to work, I really wanted to stretch this.
I wanted to give myself more permission to have fun, to relax, even while I was doing my task or doing the duty, right? I knew I had an over-bias to task and getting things done, and I didn't allow myself the joy and the fun and the curiosity and the more building rapport and trust with my colleagues. I was so focused on getting that task done.
So I want you to be able to take this observation piece with you into your family holidays and notice what emerges. You want to notice how do you react? Are you like the worker bee? Are you avoiding conflict? Is it like walking on eggshells with your parents? Are there certain subjects you don't allow yourself to talk about? Or is there like a black sheep? Is your little brother like the problem child and everybody focuses on him?
You wanna notice what's happening, both being in it, but also observing it and noticing the part that you're playing. This is really the part of leadership growth that gets really interesting. And the more you focus on yourself and not just the people, the more empowerment you're gonna feel, right?
Oftentimes when I'm talking to my clients, I am sharing with them different ways of being or different ways of thinking about situations. So for example, one of my clients said to me, you know, every time I'm with my mom, she ends up gossiping about my brother, complaining about him. He's like the black hole of the family. And I get really resentful because I start talking about this too. And then all of a sudden, we've had a whole hour together where she hasn't asked me anything about me, she hasn't connected with me and all we've done is talk about how my brother is not a good person and why his behavior is a problem.
And she was explaining like, I feel like I'm a hostage to this conversation and I just have to sit there and listen to it. And then I wanna drink more because I don't really wanna be in the conversation. And I use the alcohol to help me to stay present, but I really don't even wanna be there.
So that is like for her, right? Going and observing, noticing that. Because I also noticed like, hey, what you do with your mom is what you do with your boss. Isn't it interesting when your boss goes on and on about his vacation and you're not really listening, you don't really care, you pretend to listen, but you just don't even feel like you're part of that conversation, right? You're not building more trust and rapport, you're kind of just that hostage, listening to your mom or listening to your boss, and it doesn't have anything to do with you.
So the other part of the assignment is not only to observe the pattern, but this is the next level. The next level is to see if you can do something about it. In my client's case, this is something that's happened over and over again. So I said, hey, next time you can try new things out.
You can, number one, say, hey, isn't it interesting that every time we talk, it's about you complaining about my brother and I don't get to talk about myself and I don't get to connect with you about my life and what's happening with me and my husband and my kids. So there's a way she could intercept and share what she wants more of. That is also a possibility.
There is also setting boundaries if that is where you feel like you want to experiment, where you're like, mom, I know that you're having issues with John, but I cannot do anything about it. I mean, you and him have a relationship and I just don't wanna be part of the gossip around it. So I think you should just talk to him and I want you to spend time when you're with me, talking to me and I want to know about you outside of your frustration with him? What else is going on in your life? And I want you to be curious about me.
Again, that's another way, setting boundaries and asserting yourself and practicing new skills. This is all about having a low risk environment to test ways of thinking and being. And I know it could feel, especially if your mom is like, have a very strong personality, you disrupting the pattern might not yield great results, but the more that you think about it as an experiment, the less triggered you will be by her reactions.
So she might just be like, what do you mean? I always talk to you about your brother. You could say, I know, but I want something different for our relationship, right? You can bring it back to the vision that you want.
And experiment with that. Like this is all about trying things on. It's not all or nothing. This is just tweaking how you are reacting. So, you know, even the example that I shared with you all about me being with my family, part of my thing was not to not do anything at all, but to consciously spend time connecting with people and giving myself permission to socialize and to have fun and to ask people to do more things, right?
So also if you noticed you're somebody who is doing a lot of things in your family system, an assignment for you might be to ask people to help, to delegate, to say, hey, can you help me with this? And to do it in an inviting and fun way, right? And if you practice this skillset, it might be something that you start practicing at work as well.
We're really just wanting to notice ourselves in these experiments. It's kind of like those nature videos that you might've remembered back in the day where it's like National Geographic, like you're kind of looking into this animal and they're like interacting with their young kids and the rest of the herd. And it's just really curious and you wanna see what happens.
This is the invitation. This could be fun. You're just noticing yourself and observing yourself. And if you have a partner or a boyfriend or a husband or wife, you might wanna notice them too. And if they're willing to play this with you too, you can both observe each other and be like, wow, when your mom said that, you totally shut down.
And instead of it being like this uncomfortable thing, you guys could like dive more into it and say what happened there? Like, what were you thinking or feeling when she said that? And you could also share, this is what I was thinking. I thought what she said was really rude, or I thought what she said was actually really curious and empowering of you in terms of your leadership because she was so curious about what you wanna do next in your job, right?
It just gives us more consciousness and more substance to play with our life. And it gives us the power of unlearning. This is the next thing is like, the more you notice those patterns, right? Whether it's people pleasing, avoiding conflict, over functioning, being the peacekeeper, it gives you an opportunity to be conscious of it and practice unlearning these behaviors and noticing like, who am I if I'm no longer the person doing all of the things? Who am I if I am the person who actually gives myself permission to enjoy my life, to connect with people, to value being with people over doing things for people, right?
This is really where peeling back that onion, allowing yourself the ability to experiment to do different things, right? And it could even be something little, like maybe you decide, instead of all of the seating arrangement being the way that it needs to be, you can mix it up. You can just be like, hey, for dessert, we're just gonna switch chairs and see how that feels. Even little shifts like that can really change an environment, especially if it's been a really fixed environment. And it's like, dad sits here, mom sits here. We can't switch the seats around, right? But you can say, hey, let's just give an opportunity for other people to talk to each other, let's just switch the seats around or play different games.
And then this will allow you to observe yourself and to observe other people and to notice the impact you're making to the environment around you. And then you can take this into your work and see what else happens, right? But really using this as a way of consciously engaging and experimenting can have really powerful results and can help you to be more intentional with your family and to notice what you like and what you don't like and what you like in terms of observing yourself and what you don't like as well and the ways that you want to unlearn things.
So I encourage you to take this assignment seriously, but to have so much fun as well. Journal on what you observe, revisit what you learned, notice where you're consciously choosing to do a pattern. Maybe for me, it was like, I'm still gonna wash all these dishes, but I'm gonna be more conscious of it. I'm gonna be conscious of myself while I'm doing it. I'm gonna be listening for other people. And maybe it's a choice that I want to do differently where I ask my sister-in-law, hey, can you do these dishes with me? I don't wanna be alone here and I wanna chat with you.
That could just be something very different, right? And then when I go into work, instead of just head down doing whatever, I might invite my team in and say, hey, we've got this project to do. I was gonna do it by myself, but I think it'd be more fun if we do it together. Let's just do a brainstorming session. This is how you can start using this Leadership Lab to influence and impact your life and your leadership.
The final thought is leadership is everywhere, not just at work. This is your chance to grow even in the most familiar places. So go out into your holiday season with your family and notice those patterns, intentionally observe, try on new behaviors. Remember it's low risk and mistakes are allowed. This is just an experiment.
And then notice what are some of the things you wanna unlearn? What are some of the things you wanna give up? You wanna notice for yourself, like what are some of the patterns and habits that helped you maybe get to where you are now, but not to where you wanna be in the future? You wanna start engaging with your life in this way and building that self-awareness and that leadership because this is really where you are starting to have a lot more fun, a lot more flexibility and create more confidence by understanding yourself better.
So let me know how it goes. I wanna hear what experiments you tried, how it worked, what your thoughts were, and how you're growing and learning from this. And I'd love to hear how you like this idea of Leadership Lab for your life. So share with me, DM me, follow me, leave reviews. I wanna hear all about it.
Just remember that Leadership Lab is a way of being in your life, giving yourself permission to try on new behaviors, giving yourself permission to enjoy more, make more mistakes, and get more connection. You know, what are the things that you want? Because part of what we're working on here is to be who you want to become is to create those new behaviors and those new patterns. We can't just continue to have the same pattern over and over again and expect to be a different person.
And when I say a different person, I mean changing towards the person that you wanna be, the life that you wanna have, the results that you wanna have, the enjoyment that you wanna have, the success that you wanna have, the confidence that you wanna have.
So think about that for yourself. All right, go and enjoy your holiday season, learn a ton, have fun, and I can't wait to hear more about it. I will see you next week. Take care for now.
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.
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.
Welcome listeners. Imagine this, what if going home for the holidays wasn't just about family dinners and catching up? What if it was a chance to grow as a leader? I want you to think about how your family system has shaped who you are, and how you've carried over some of those patterns into your personal life and professional lives, whether it's conscious or unconscious.
This holiday season, you're not just going home, you're going home with an assignment. And this is where I wanna introduce the idea of a Leadership Lab. The Leadership Lab is an approach where you can start viewing your life as an experimentation with new behaviors and ways of being much like a scientist in a lab instead of being reactive to situations. You're more intentional. You're curious. You test out different leadership strategies, communication styles and behaviors in your everyday interactions whether it's at work or at home, or in this case, home for the holidays.
This mindset turns life into a continuous opportunity to learn, to grow, and you feel less worried about making mistakes. So the reason why this is important is because oftentimes we stop ourselves from experiencing life in this way because we are just automatically reacting and we're afraid of showing up differently, but this is an invitation to do so, trying on a new behavior that you can practice and refine in low stakes environments. It's not like because you start acting a different way in your family system that you are going to get punished or fired. I mean, people might have feelings and things like that, and I'll talk about that more as this episode goes on, but it's low stakes.
We are gonna walk into doing this assignment in a number of ways, which one is just observing intentionally with purpose, another is experimenting with new behaviors, and the third, which combines really the first and second, is learning how to unlearn some of these things and how to see this pattern as something that could either support you in certain circumstances or hurt you in other circumstances. The way of thinking about life as this Leadership Lab can give you more opportunity, more space to not be so attached to your patterns and habits, but more from a place of curiosity and an ability to consciously adjust and align your behaviors with your desired leadership outcomes.
We are gonna be doing more of this Leadership Lab as time goes on. I'd love for you to share with me what you like about it. I wanna do it quarterly, but we can start doing it more often if I am hearing from my listeners that you guys are getting a lot out of it.
So the whole point of Leadership Lab is it encourages self-awareness, right? It gives you this opportunity to identify typical responses that might not serve you and experiment with alternative approaches. It also helps you to cultivate confidence and courage, stepping outside of your comfort zone because you have this assignment, so you want to work on it. And when we're working on something, we are more interactive with it, and we're more playful with it, and we're more willing to make mistakes.
So it might look like asserting your opinions more confidently or leading with more empathy, but it's allowing you to step outside of your normal way of being and test something out. There's also a lot of growth through reflection. After each experiment, you wanna reflect on the results. What worked, what didn't work, what would you try differently next time?
So this gives you also a different way of looking at life so that you are interacting and engaging with it consciously. By treating every day like a Leadership Lab, you can consciously evolve and refine your leadership style in real time, gaining greater insight and building resilience along the way.
It also helps us to connect with ourselves because you're gonna be asking yourself, how am I feeling in this moment? How did that work for me? And you'll start realizing that you have much more agency over your day-to-day life and reactions than you thought, because you are starting to experiment with it.
All right, so let's talk about the family system and its influence. And when I say the family system, I'm really talking about our family of origin, because that is where a lot of our foundations of our behaviors were formed, really through the ages of zero to seven in developmental psychology. There's a lot of talk about how this time was really formative.
You learn about what you can expect from the world, what you can expect from authority figures, what can you expect from yourself in this time and this dynamic. And if you are really curious about this, you can also listen to episode two, which is all about how your family of origin, how it shapes your leadership patterns. But I'm just gonna give you a little bit about it in this first piece as we talk about this assignment for you.
If you think about your family patterns, you wanna notice, are there certain roles that you play in your family? Are there certain roles that other family members play? For example, are you the peacekeeper who avoids conflict? Do you wanna notice that in yourself when you're in your family system? Or are you the over-functioner? Are you always solving people's problems and you take on too much work and you take on too much responsibility, is that you? Or are you the rebellious one or the black sheep, the always like the contrarian one, always poking at other people and getting a rise out of them or saying the contrary thing just to see how your mother reacts.
You wanna notice yourself in this family system and frame this holiday visit not just as a way of connecting with your family, but also observing these patterns in action and reflect on how they might be influencing your leadership behavior, right? You wanna notice when your dad comes into the room, does everybody clear the way for him? Does he have his special seat at the table that everybody knows is his, right? Does he start eating dinner first and everybody waits for him? You just wanna notice what are these patterns and how do these patterns show up? Are you noticing yourself waiting for the CEO to come in, take his seat before everybody else talks? Are you noticing how you show up in terms of maybe waiting for others to act before you react, right? Waiting for mom and dad to take that first step.
So this is again a way for you to start observing with intentionality and purpose and seeing what's happening around you, these automatic responses. I'm gonna share with you something that I observed a lot when I was dating back in the day and I would go to, sometimes I would be invited to like my boyfriend's house for family holiday. And I would observe myself and my partner, my boyfriend at the time. I would notice myself being really relaxed. I would notice myself really engaging with the family members.
They would ask me all these questions about me. I loved that experience of sharing about my work and who I am and talking. And oftentimes I would just notice my partner being quiet, way more quiet than he usually is. And then like just doing lots of tasks and getting a lot of work done.
So it was interesting, because when he would come over to my family, what he would experience is that opposite situation where I would not be the one being asked questions. I was like the worker. I was there washing dishes, getting things prepared, making sure everybody was happy. And I realized I didn't really enjoy myself, but this was part of my pattern.
Like when I was with my family system and there was new people over or visitors, I would just take on this role of hosting and being that person that is making sure everybody else is comfortable. And I just noticed also in my leadership style that I am like that. When there's a new member of my team, I'm very much like, hey, let me take ownership, let me do things for you. And I didn't set back a lot. I didn't always feel comfortable in my own environment, in my own home environment, sitting back and relaxing and enjoying the time.
You wanna notice when you think you have a duty, when you're noticing yourself in a certain role, do you like that? Do you not like that? I mean, for some things I would like it because I wanna be helpful and I wanna be a supportive member of the family. But at the other time, at the other side of it, I also wanted to enjoy. I also wanted to be taken care of.
And when I noticed this dynamic of me going to my own family for the holidays versus me going to my boyfriend's house was really where in certain systems, I would get more nourishment for myself and more joy because I was just allowing myself to be more versus doing, like task-oriented.
And in my leadership style, I realized that I was holding duty as such a big, important thing. And I didn't allow myself to sit back, being taken care of, really expect people around me to support me and to be curious about me.
So knowing that this is a pattern of mine, getting overly into my duties and overly into responsibility versus having fun, connecting with people, building rapport, I knew that when I went back to work, I really wanted to stretch this.
I wanted to give myself more permission to have fun, to relax, even while I was doing my task or doing the duty, right? I knew I had an over-bias to task and getting things done, and I didn't allow myself the joy and the fun and the curiosity and the more building rapport and trust with my colleagues. I was so focused on getting that task done.
So I want you to be able to take this observation piece with you into your family holidays and notice what emerges. You want to notice how do you react? Are you like the worker bee? Are you avoiding conflict? Is it like walking on eggshells with your parents? Are there certain subjects you don't allow yourself to talk about? Or is there like a black sheep? Is your little brother like the problem child and everybody focuses on him?
You wanna notice what's happening, both being in it, but also observing it and noticing the part that you're playing. This is really the part of leadership growth that gets really interesting. And the more you focus on yourself and not just the people, the more empowerment you're gonna feel, right?
Oftentimes when I'm talking to my clients, I am sharing with them different ways of being or different ways of thinking about situations. So for example, one of my clients said to me, you know, every time I'm with my mom, she ends up gossiping about my brother, complaining about him. He's like the black hole of the family. And I get really resentful because I start talking about this too. And then all of a sudden, we've had a whole hour together where she hasn't asked me anything about me, she hasn't connected with me and all we've done is talk about how my brother is not a good person and why his behavior is a problem.
And she was explaining like, I feel like I'm a hostage to this conversation and I just have to sit there and listen to it. And then I wanna drink more because I don't really wanna be in the conversation. And I use the alcohol to help me to stay present, but I really don't even wanna be there.
So that is like for her, right? Going and observing, noticing that. Because I also noticed like, hey, what you do with your mom is what you do with your boss. Isn't it interesting when your boss goes on and on about his vacation and you're not really listening, you don't really care, you pretend to listen, but you just don't even feel like you're part of that conversation, right? You're not building more trust and rapport, you're kind of just that hostage, listening to your mom or listening to your boss, and it doesn't have anything to do with you.
So the other part of the assignment is not only to observe the pattern, but this is the next level. The next level is to see if you can do something about it. In my client's case, this is something that's happened over and over again. So I said, hey, next time you can try new things out.
You can, number one, say, hey, isn't it interesting that every time we talk, it's about you complaining about my brother and I don't get to talk about myself and I don't get to connect with you about my life and what's happening with me and my husband and my kids. So there's a way she could intercept and share what she wants more of. That is also a possibility.
There is also setting boundaries if that is where you feel like you want to experiment, where you're like, mom, I know that you're having issues with John, but I cannot do anything about it. I mean, you and him have a relationship and I just don't wanna be part of the gossip around it. So I think you should just talk to him and I want you to spend time when you're with me, talking to me and I want to know about you outside of your frustration with him? What else is going on in your life? And I want you to be curious about me.
Again, that's another way, setting boundaries and asserting yourself and practicing new skills. This is all about having a low risk environment to test ways of thinking and being. And I know it could feel, especially if your mom is like, have a very strong personality, you disrupting the pattern might not yield great results, but the more that you think about it as an experiment, the less triggered you will be by her reactions.
So she might just be like, what do you mean? I always talk to you about your brother. You could say, I know, but I want something different for our relationship, right? You can bring it back to the vision that you want.
And experiment with that. Like this is all about trying things on. It's not all or nothing. This is just tweaking how you are reacting. So, you know, even the example that I shared with you all about me being with my family, part of my thing was not to not do anything at all, but to consciously spend time connecting with people and giving myself permission to socialize and to have fun and to ask people to do more things, right?
So also if you noticed you're somebody who is doing a lot of things in your family system, an assignment for you might be to ask people to help, to delegate, to say, hey, can you help me with this? And to do it in an inviting and fun way, right? And if you practice this skillset, it might be something that you start practicing at work as well.
We're really just wanting to notice ourselves in these experiments. It's kind of like those nature videos that you might've remembered back in the day where it's like National Geographic, like you're kind of looking into this animal and they're like interacting with their young kids and the rest of the herd. And it's just really curious and you wanna see what happens.
This is the invitation. This could be fun. You're just noticing yourself and observing yourself. And if you have a partner or a boyfriend or a husband or wife, you might wanna notice them too. And if they're willing to play this with you too, you can both observe each other and be like, wow, when your mom said that, you totally shut down.
And instead of it being like this uncomfortable thing, you guys could like dive more into it and say what happened there? Like, what were you thinking or feeling when she said that? And you could also share, this is what I was thinking. I thought what she said was really rude, or I thought what she said was actually really curious and empowering of you in terms of your leadership because she was so curious about what you wanna do next in your job, right?
It just gives us more consciousness and more substance to play with our life. And it gives us the power of unlearning. This is the next thing is like, the more you notice those patterns, right? Whether it's people pleasing, avoiding conflict, over functioning, being the peacekeeper, it gives you an opportunity to be conscious of it and practice unlearning these behaviors and noticing like, who am I if I'm no longer the person doing all of the things? Who am I if I am the person who actually gives myself permission to enjoy my life, to connect with people, to value being with people over doing things for people, right?
This is really where peeling back that onion, allowing yourself the ability to experiment to do different things, right? And it could even be something little, like maybe you decide, instead of all of the seating arrangement being the way that it needs to be, you can mix it up. You can just be like, hey, for dessert, we're just gonna switch chairs and see how that feels. Even little shifts like that can really change an environment, especially if it's been a really fixed environment. And it's like, dad sits here, mom sits here. We can't switch the seats around, right? But you can say, hey, let's just give an opportunity for other people to talk to each other, let's just switch the seats around or play different games.
And then this will allow you to observe yourself and to observe other people and to notice the impact you're making to the environment around you. And then you can take this into your work and see what else happens, right? But really using this as a way of consciously engaging and experimenting can have really powerful results and can help you to be more intentional with your family and to notice what you like and what you don't like and what you like in terms of observing yourself and what you don't like as well and the ways that you want to unlearn things.
So I encourage you to take this assignment seriously, but to have so much fun as well. Journal on what you observe, revisit what you learned, notice where you're consciously choosing to do a pattern. Maybe for me, it was like, I'm still gonna wash all these dishes, but I'm gonna be more conscious of it. I'm gonna be conscious of myself while I'm doing it. I'm gonna be listening for other people. And maybe it's a choice that I want to do differently where I ask my sister-in-law, hey, can you do these dishes with me? I don't wanna be alone here and I wanna chat with you.
That could just be something very different, right? And then when I go into work, instead of just head down doing whatever, I might invite my team in and say, hey, we've got this project to do. I was gonna do it by myself, but I think it'd be more fun if we do it together. Let's just do a brainstorming session. This is how you can start using this Leadership Lab to influence and impact your life and your leadership.
The final thought is leadership is everywhere, not just at work. This is your chance to grow even in the most familiar places. So go out into your holiday season with your family and notice those patterns, intentionally observe, try on new behaviors. Remember it's low risk and mistakes are allowed. This is just an experiment.
And then notice what are some of the things you wanna unlearn? What are some of the things you wanna give up? You wanna notice for yourself, like what are some of the patterns and habits that helped you maybe get to where you are now, but not to where you wanna be in the future? You wanna start engaging with your life in this way and building that self-awareness and that leadership because this is really where you are starting to have a lot more fun, a lot more flexibility and create more confidence by understanding yourself better.
So let me know how it goes. I wanna hear what experiments you tried, how it worked, what your thoughts were, and how you're growing and learning from this. And I'd love to hear how you like this idea of Leadership Lab for your life. So share with me, DM me, follow me, leave reviews. I wanna hear all about it.
Just remember that Leadership Lab is a way of being in your life, giving yourself permission to try on new behaviors, giving yourself permission to enjoy more, make more mistakes, and get more connection. You know, what are the things that you want? Because part of what we're working on here is to be who you want to become is to create those new behaviors and those new patterns. We can't just continue to have the same pattern over and over again and expect to be a different person.
And when I say a different person, I mean changing towards the person that you wanna be, the life that you wanna have, the results that you wanna have, the enjoyment that you wanna have, the success that you wanna have, the confidence that you wanna have.
So think about that for yourself. All right, go and enjoy your holiday season, learn a ton, have fun, and I can't wait to hear more about it. I will see you next week. Take care for now.
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.
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