In this week’s coaching reflections video I take a look at how our parental relationships and childhood experiences play out at work.
For more of these, check out my YouTube channel.
Intro
[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: How does the environment you grew up in influenced the way you show up at work?
My name is Andy Polaine, and every week I spend my days coaching design leaders. And in these videos, I reflect upon the common themes and questions that come up in the week.
And in this one, I want to get a bit more personal and talk about your childhood.
Parents
[00:00:17] Andy Polaine: You know, our parents are the first people we encounter who are in charge around here. And so they’re the first role models we have some kind of leadership. Not only that you’re also dependent on them for survival as a child, so you quickly learn to shape your needs to theirs. Those patterns often surface later in life in all relationships, including work. And we have this idea that work is not personal, it’s just business, which I think is the biggest lie in work.
But of course, wherever you go, there you are. So you take your baggage with you, including the way you relate to people and the way you relate to people in authority. Work also has this hierarchy and structure and we displace our complexes on top of them. So a complex is really sort of bundle of some unconscious emotional responses to things. And so if you find yourself having an overreaction to something where something really gets under your skin and you go home or that night, you keep thinking about it’s looping around your head. Or someone just really pushes your buttons and winds you up. There’s going to be a complex underneath there that’s being triggered in some way. And it’s really important to look into that stuff, particularly if you’re in a leadership role, because if you’re responsible for 20, 30 other people and you have a bad day, those 20 or 30 people also have a bad day as well.
The stepmother moment
[00:01:32] Andy Polaine: I’ve got a good example of this and my coachee gave me permission to share this. She had been working for a company and the new CEO who she then ended up working with .By and large, they had a decent working relationship, but occasionally it would really clash and she felt like her boss would micromanage her or jump in or not see the good work she was doing and things like this. And we talked about it came up quite often and it came up in a very strong, emotional response for her. And at some point we were talking about when she had felt like this in the past, and then the tears came and there was this moment, she realized it was her stepmother, who she now has a good relationship with, but back then when she was a teenager, her stepmother did the classic thing of wanting to know where she was all the time and querying her about the clothes she was wearing and all of that stuff.
You can see that even though these are completely unrelated. What it was doing was producing that emotional response. And what happens in those moments, you are back as a child, you’re a teenager or your young child, having that emotional response that back then you did not have the ego and the emotional resilience to deal with. Whereas now, of course, you’re an adult. 30, 40, 50 something. And you’re in a very different position, but you get emotionally dumped back to that point and that’s why it gets under your skin and pushes your buttons.
Journal it
[00:02:45] Andy Polaine: So I’m not doing therapy in my coaching, and I’m very careful to maintain that boundary that if something really is problematic, I’ll suggest someone does do therapy. I think that’s the thing that everyone should do. I’ve done it for the last 27 years and I’m married to a therapist too. But it’s very important to spend some time reflecting on that.
A very simple thing you can do is do a little bit of journaling. I don’t mean writing pages and pages and pages. You can do that if you want. But sometimes if you’ve had a moment like that, where someone’s really wound you up or pushed your buttons, just write down a little bullet points. What was the context? What was the person, what was going on there and how are you feeling about it? And if you regularly do it, you’ll often see there’s a pattern that starts to emerge around that, that you can then explore further, either in coaching or in therapy.
Companies are not families
[00:03:30] Andy Polaine: And finally it’s really important to remember a company is just an idea. It’s a legal entity. It’s not a person. It’s an abstraction. It’s a collection of people doing their jobs. And it’s certainly not a family.
We are asked to be really loyal to companies. And sometimes, particularly in creative agencies, we talk about it being a family. But actually that loyalty goes one way. If you’ve been recently laid off, you’ll know. One of the things is you don’t really fire people from the family. And so you might want to have a familial structure, but remember that’s a very loaded term to be using because it sets up a mental model in people in the way that they relate. It isn’t actually reflected in the reality of the situation.
Outro
[00:04:09] Andy Polaine: I hope that that’s useful for you.
If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it’s at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the link below. And if you’ve got any of your own tips or thoughts about this or experiences, please post a comment below. I’d love to hear them.
Thanks very much. And I’ll see you again soon.
