What’s Your Origin Story?

“Your Solution Is in Your Past.”
—Pam Manfredo Curtis, The Origin of a Leader

Years ago, I was struck by a migraine so intense that I ended up in the hospital for a week. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was happening. Eventually, I went to see Dr. Avivah Sayres, my psychoanalyst and, in many ways, my second mother.

I worked with Dr. Sayres for more than thirty years, nearly until her death at the age of ninety-three. I can still summon her face and the feeling of sitting across from her. She was warm and loving, but she had no particular interest in helping me hide from myself. On this particular day, after listening to me struggle to explain what was happening, she finally asked, with a touch of exasperation, “What are you not saying that you need to say?”

That question has guided me ever since.

Dr. Sayres had another bit of advice that also stayed with me. When I worried about repeating with my own children some of the patterns I’d inherited, when I was afraid that I was doing to them what was done to me, she’d reassure me that parenting well was easier than I’d imagined. “Just give them words,” she’d say. Give them the ability to name what’s happening. Give them language for what they’re feeling. Give them permission to speak the things that might otherwise become secrets.

Looking back, I can see how much of my life’s work grew from those conversations with her. Looking back, I see how, even today, part of what I do as a coach is simply to give my clients the words to say what needs to be said.

This is one reason why Pam Manfredo Curtis’s new book, The Origin of a Leader, felt so familiar. Pam has spent more than thirty-five years working with senior executives, and her central premise is both reassuringly familiar and deceptively simple: our leadership doesn’t begin when we become managers. It begins much earlier, in the families and systems in which we first learned how to be human.

As Pam and I spoke, I found myself thinking less about leadership styles and more about origin stories. Before you became a founder, a CEO, an executive, a parent, a partner, a teacher, or a coach, who were you told you needed to be?

Maybe you learned to be competent because competence brought praise. Maybe you learned to take care of everyone else because somebody had to. Maybe you became funny because laughter interrupted anger. Maybe you became invisible because being noticed felt dangerous. Maybe you learned never to need anyone. Or maybe you learned that love was abundant and disagreement survivable.

Children are astonishing observers. They notice what gets rewarded and what gets punished. They sense whose feelings matter, whose anger carries weight, which truths can be spoken, and which truths threaten the system. And because children need love, safety, and belonging, they adapt.

In my own work, I’ve sometimes called these adaptations “subroutines”: programs written under one set of conditions that keep running long after those conditions have changed. In my conversation with Pam, I offered a deliberately absurd example: Strong leaders don’t admit that they don’t know what to do.

Somewhere, sometime, a belief like that may have been enormously useful. It may have helped you survive the family in which you grew up. It may have gotten you through school. It may have helped you win love, secure belonging, get promoted, or even build a company. Then, one day, the very strategy that helped you succeed becomes the strategy that prevents you from growing.

Learning to live with that paradox is part of the work. The same childhood adaptation can become both gift and constraint. Fierce self-reliance can become courage and an inability to ask for help. Hypervigilance can become perceptiveness and exhaustion. Caretaking can become empathy and a compulsion to rescue. Certainty can become decisiveness and an inability to listen.

The task, then, isn’t to condemn the person you became. It’s to become curious about how that person came to be, so that you have more choice about who you’re becoming.

Here are a few journaling questions to sit with:

• What did you learn, as a child, that you had to do to be loved?
• What did you learn you must never do?
• What belief about yourself helped you succeed?
• Where does that same belief limit you today?
• What need was the strategy trying to meet: love, safety, belonging, competence, control?
• What part of that strategy still serves you?
• What might you be ready to let go?

This is where self-inquiry can become uncomfortable, because once we understand the origin of our behavior, it’s tempting to stop there. I behave this way because of my father. I can’t trust people because of my mother. I avoid conflict because of what happened when I was a kid.

All of that may be true. Understanding our past can help us feel compassion for behaviors we’ve spent years judging or trying to eradicate. But compassion isn’t the same thing as exoneration.

One of the central questions of my life is: How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? I don’t mean: How is everything my fault? I mean: What am I bringing into this system, often without realizing it? What assumptions am I making? What old strategies am I deploying? What am I doing today because, long ago, doing that made sense?

You didn’t choose the family system into which you were born. You didn’t choose the beliefs a frightened eight-year-old developed to make sense of the world. But as an adult, you have more choices than that child had. Looking backward isn’t meant to trap us in biography. It can help free us to respond to the present rather than unconsciously reenact the past.

During my conversation with Pam, she reminded me of one of my own adaptations. I have a tendency as a coach to go deep, fast. At our bootcamps, people have sometimes described it as my turning on the high beams. I’ll sense something beneath the surface and feel an almost irresistible urge to look someone in the eyes and name what I see.

As a child, I often sensed things happening around me that nobody seemed willing to name. I learned to watch carefully. I learned to notice what was going on beneath the words people were saying. Today, that sensitivity is one of my greatest strengths as a coach. It helps me hear the question beneath the question and notice what might otherwise remain unseen. But, unchecked, that same sensitivity can cause me to push too hard or too fast, before another person is ready.

There it is again: gift and constraint, born from the same place.

I don’t think maturity requires us to eradicate these old strategies. I’m not sure we could even if we tried. I think the work is to develop a wiser relationship with them: to thank the child who learned to be vigilant without requiring vigilance to govern every encounter; to honor the competence that carried us this far without insisting that we always know the answer; to cherish our capacity to care for others without assuming responsibility for everybody’s happiness.

And, as Dr. Sayres taught me, we can give ourselves words.

• What are you afraid to say?
• What are you afraid might happen if you say it?
• Whose voice do you hear when you tell yourself, Don’t say that. Don’t need that. Don’t let them see that you’re afraid?
• What might become possible if you could turn toward the child who first learned those rules and say: Thank you. You got us here. I’ll take it from here?

Your origin story matters. It deserves to be understood, honored, and perhaps even loved. But the point of knowing where you came from isn’t to remain bound to what happened there. It’s to become more free to choose who you’ll be next.