Rewriting the script of my lineage

A personal post about breaking free of intergenerational patterns so I could embrace my purpose

NASDAQ recently asked me alongside a group of women entrepreneurs about times when we changed our minds. 

It prompted me to share a little about the biggest mindset shift that led me to this chapter of my career.

This piece is a (much longer) take on the same topic. A vulnerable story, that I hope invites a deeper, richer connection with my readers and my clients.

Just under a year ago, my daughter was nearly 6 months old and I was ready to slowly step back into the world of work. 

(I appreciate that to my European readers that sentence will feel normal and to my American ones it smacks of tremendous privilege - a topic for another post.)

I knew I wanted to work for myself and having my daughter sharpened my courage and sense of purpose. 

Not only did I want to do meaningful work, but it felt essential to make a good living and a real impact from my zone of genius. 

That’s how I could most powerfully show my daughter that the path was open to her.

I used an exercise I use with my clients - I looked back on my career to identify moments of peak flow, joy, and impact.

Two moments stood out:

First, brainstorming ideas and strategies at the right hand of one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs I’ve ever met. Specifically, fast-paced back-and-forths, building on ideas, stress-testing strategies, and getting to the heart of what mattered to the companies we were building. 

Second, coaching women, be it 1:1 or in workshops or at events. Something I got a taste for when I created a women’s network in London in my 20s, leaned into during the year I was CEO of a coaching company for women, and had the pleasure of doing during my time at Tory Burch where I held monthly office hours for Fellows in the Foundation’s program for women business owners. 

Putting these two elements together the answer was clear: Coaching for women entrepreneurs.

One problem. 

A really big one.

I was hugely embarrassed to publicly describe myself as a professional coach.

The idea had been knocking on my door ever since I’d done my coach training five years prior (with the goal of being a better leader - definitely not an actual coach!). 

I had resisted the call for a long time.

Why?

First, I come from a family where coaching is considered very “out there”, I could hear my grandmother’s voice in my head wondering why I couldn’t just use my multiple excellent degrees for a “sensible” job her friends would understand.

Second, I absorbed from a young age lessons about the importance of having a “serious job” to being a “serious person” -- something that it was existentially important for me to be. My previous jobs counted: research in a think tank, leading teams as a strategy consultant, running/helping to run start-ups, crafting comms for Tory Burch, and even CEO of a coaching business.

And third, I see myself as pretty countercultural, when “everyone” zigs I like to zag. And it feels like these days “everyone” is a coach. And so being a coach feels like a big zig into the mainstream, a mainstream where lots of people with no training are offering average-quality versions of the service I want to provide. And I’ll be mistaken for one of them.

Notice something here?

When we’re truly stuck about something we’re often holding two opposing beliefs - in my case, coaching simultaneously felt too mainstream to be boundary-pushing and not mainstream enough to be serious. 

The subconscious is smart. 

I’ve written before about how a part of you can slam a foot on the brake when it doesn’t feel it can handle the flipside of you choosing a certain course of action.

But when different parts of you are terrified for different reasons (or one sophisticated part of you is a really strong “hell no”) your mind will create a double bind. Beliefs that stop you from taking action from two directions in a mental pincer movement. This way every piece of evidence that might prove one side wrong, proves the other right and keeps you trapped exactly where you are.

What got me unstuck?

So first I looked at the reasons that were holding me back. 

They were mostly flavors of worrying about what people would think, alongside some concerns about my ability to make enough money fast enough. 

I evaluated each of my reasons carefully. 

Were any of these reasons practical things I could mitigate? 

And for the rest what was at the root of each mental block? 

The mental blocks were pretty much all rooted in two things: a deep fear that I would be judged and rejected by people whose love and respect matter a lot to me and a deep guilt that my mother and grandmother would disapprove of this venture - and of me using some of my inheritance to live on while I was in the process of setting up a coaching practice.

One exercise made a huge difference. 

It’s called a polarity integration. 

You lean into two opposing beliefs, both of which some part of you feels to be true. For example “People will laugh at me behind my back” and “People who love me support my choices”. Or “I’m not allowed to spend this money on this” and “all money is the same” and literally rewire your brain so you can’t think of one without the other.

20 minutes later I felt much much lighter and haven’t looked back.

One thing liberating vision unlocked the whole puzzle. 

As part of the exercise, you let a visual come to illustrate each belief.

The visual that came to me for “I’m not allowed to spend this money on this” was my grandmother as a child in the depression, wanting to buy something small and joyful in a store and being told she couldn’t have it. 

A moment I have never heard about, a vision from someone else’s life.

Throughout the period where I was releasing these beliefs I also consistently received images and feelings of my mother. 

The most powerful of all: The inner knowing that she thinks I am perfect in the same way I know my daughter is – and will always think my daughter is even if she does things I don’t understand.

It became abundantly clear that my mother and my grandmother lived in patterns that kept them and their ancestors safe in a world where women had to be small to be safe, and they had lovingly given these to me to protect me too. 

Thank god, the world has changed, and these patterns are no longer required. 

Instead, I now chose to honor their highest selves, their high dreams for me and my daughter, dreams of daily joy, of making money on my own terms, and of defining new patterns around money and worthiness.

This was a dream big enough to be worth a passing snicker from folks who think it’s “not serious” or “isn’t everyone a coach now”, a reason to try out brave new things in public, a freedom to do something new.  

And this is partly why, for now at least, I only coach women. 

We carry different stories, we need to heal different intergenerational trauma, 

And the world needs our light as a different kind of compass, in business, and everywhere else too.