Understand Your Family Ghosts At Work with Deborah Ancona

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2:51The Anxious Achiever: You may hear details in this episode that remind you it's from another time, but I guarantee that the advice you get will be as crisp and meaningful and the stories as resonant as before. If you have a favorite episode of the show, let me know. I'd love to air it again or even re-record it for you fresh. Enjoy this classic Anxious Achiever episode.

3:21The Anxious Achiever: There's a funny TV show called Ghosts. A young couple lives in a big old manor house full of ghosts from the varying centuries. And the ghosts have a lot of opinions. They have a lot to say. They have a lot of judgments. They're always present. I live in a very old farmhouse too. And I often wonder what ghosts live in my house and what they think of me and my family. MIT's Deborah Ancona says we all bring ghosts with us every day. Some are good and friendly, others not so much. The ghosts are the behaviors, the feelings, the associations from our past, from our families of origin. Today we're going to talk about how family systems theory affects us all at work.

4:11The Anxious Achiever: It's the idea that human behavior can be understood through the lens of the family unit as a cohesive system where each member plays a role. It's really a useful framework at work. We've talked about it before, but I love Ancona's work helping us unpack our ghosts, deciding which ones we want to shut away and which ones we're glad are with us. I found it really helpful in my own life because, you know, my ghosts are very much about a childhood where I felt like a lot was up to me. I was on my own to keep my sister safe, to keep things steady. Those are the ghosts that stick with me every single day and push me, make me controlling, make me a real pain in the you-know-what, but also have made me who I am.

5:04The Anxious Achiever: I think I'm on good terms with my ghosts now. I'm so excited to have Dr. Deborah Ancona on the show. She's a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, and she studied this topic in depth with students and in the literature. And in our conversation, we're going to explore the ways that family systems theory, our ghosts, impact our work and our leadership. I just want to start out, if you could define, who are our family ghosts? I think it's more actually the question of what are our family ghosts? So ghosts, as we define it, and we, Dennis Perkins and I, who did the work on the HBR article, view it as the fundamental attitudes and behaviors that evolved from our family of origin, and actually sometimes prior to family of origin, that follow you into the present.

5:58So these ghosts, these ways of thinking, these ways of behaving are not left behind. In fact, we bring them with us or we bring some of them with us. And there are some good ones and there are some bad ones.

6:13The Anxious Achiever: One of my favorite anecdotes, I think it was in your HBR article, was the anecdote about a man who had grown up to be a really successful leader, but he he couldn't handle when people weren't happy or if he wasn't making people happy. And he traced it back because when he was a kid, if you didn't have fun on the family vacation, damn it. You were going to have fun on that vacation. Damn it. And I just was laughing out loud because, frankly, my kids and I joke that we've never had fun on a family vacation. All right. Well, then you're creating. And that's interesting, too, to look at how the dynamic plays out.

6:51You are perhaps creating the opposite of what your family was like. And then your kids will go forward. And maybe when they're in the workforce, it will be problematic if people are having too much fun. Oh, maybe that's not the way it's supposed to be. And and those are the ghosts we carry with us.

7:11The Anxious Achiever: And sometimes they're nice ghosts. They're Casper, the friendly ghost. And sometimes they're not right. Absolutely. And I think it's important to really underline that point, because some people think that when they're going back in time, it's only to look at the demons. And I don't think that's actually a very useful orientation. We really, really stress that you have good ghosts, you have things that got you where you are today. And those are your superpowers. Those are the things you know how to do. Those are the things that come easily to you. And they're often probably part of what got you to where you are today.

7:53So you don't want to ignore your good ghosts, the things that you bring back. And, you know, we've looked at this for a lot of people and they're good ghosts like work hard, be determined, persist, resilience. These are all good things that come from family upbringing and the looking at your demons or your bad ghosts to understand that they may be getting in the way of some of the changes you want to make right now. And so it's a worthwhile experience to look at what they are and see if you can shift or mold them.

8:30The Anxious Achiever: And I think sometimes our ghosts are neither good nor bad, but they do shape us profoundly in good and bad ways. I've spent a lot of time on this podcast with people who sort of credit the hypervigilance they adopted from difficult childhoods, right? the sort of always looking ahead, always scanning for a threat as something that is painful and hard at times, but also has helped get them where they are. Well, so that's such a great point. What we find, particularly in leaders who have had difficult childhoods, come from alcoholic families or abusive families or just a hard time where they had to step forward in a difficult situation.

9:13They are fantastic at sensemaking. They know how to read the room because they had to read the room for a very long time to see was it dangerous or was it OK to to go there. So they are great at sensemaking. They are great at reading their room and reading the environment, which is so important for leadership today. and simultaneously there are some negatives that can go along with that. One of the cases we talk about is an executive who just has a lot of problems with interpersonal relationships because he had so many difficulties with an alcoholic father and when he tried to talk to his mother she sided with the father and so for him these were supercharged kinds of activity that he just stayed away from.

10:03And again, the good news is we can't deal with every single ghost or every single issue, but some things we can go ahead and adapt a different way of operating.

10:14The Anxious Achiever: Yeah. And have compassion also for ourselves. For ourselves and for others. I teach at one of the preeminent schools on the planet. And so So having taught for many, many years, I had an assumption about these executives and leaders who were in my classes, who were in the room, or even outside if I'm doing external consulting, that these folks were kind of better able to cope or didn't have such troubled backgrounds. And the surprise to me is how many people carry around so many wounds, so many demons, so many things that they have had to fight against and deal with over time. They are warriors as far as I'm concerned.

11:06And I'm not sure I had that depth of understanding of what was behind the successful veneer. And people coming out of my workshops or classes feel they too have more empathy for other people and what might be behind a serene look.

11:29The Anxious Achiever: Oh, I think that's so important, right? Because we're so quick to judge and our inner children can come out in really obnoxious ways at work. Absolutely. I always joke that, you know, we do bring our whole selves to work and sometimes that whole self is a jerk. So, you know, we have to have some compassion. So what was your personal interest in this work? Why did you decide to bring this into your repertoire of leadership teaching? For most of my career, I actually studied teams, high performing teams, and we call the X team model or distributed leadership, leadership at all levels. And how do we architect organizations to be more innovative?

12:17But then I decided that I wanted to go back to my roots, that the interest of the moment was going back to more individual psychology, which is my training originally. And another thing was that as I was teaching this class on what we call leadership signatures, your own unique way of leading, it turns out that when people want to change, there are certain changes that are really, really easy. They can do it, no problem. And others where they just get stuck. That example before of wanting to improve your interpersonal skills, just that really smart, capable person who has changed in so many different ways was just stuck.

13:01So certain things are harder than others. And I wanted to help people work through those kinds of issues, to have deeper kinds of transformations than the easy stuff, if you will. And I guess the other thing was, for those of us who are embedded in psychology, the notion of looking at your past, looking at your own behavior and how to change it is so deeply embedded. And for all of us, if we have problems in our marriage with our children, we go to therapists, we go to therapy, And we look at those kinds of dynamics. But somehow that mode of operating is kind of absent in the workforce. Oh, my God.

13:46Why? Yeah, well, so I thought about this a lot and I'm not sure I have a complete answer. But I think some of it is that in our workplace, people want to believe that we're operating rationally as opposed to emotionally. So why do we want to go and dredge up emotional kinds of things? I also think that we operate in the business setting in the here and now in the future. The idea that we need to go look at the past to see what's going on now is not really a prevalent view. But I also think that because we want to contain the emotionality in the workplace, we just don't want to go there. We want to put a box around that emotional side of things and push it away.

14:37That's for home. And at work, we do something else. Right. And we just act it out instead. That's right.

14:44The Anxious Achiever: It all comes out in one way or another. It all comes out. What are some of your own ghosts that you've discovered doing this work? So I guess one ghost is my mom was very ill for quite a while when I was young. And so I took on a lot of responsibility and I came to believe I am the responsible one. And my job is to help others. My job is to help everybody else and not think so much about myself. And that's fine. It's good to be altruistic. It's good to, but somehow then the question is, you lose track of what is your voice, right? So I asked, what is my voice and how do I bring it forward? And that kind of was put on hold.

15:31And again, part of the motivation for bringing this to work was the fact that I had worked on that in my personal life. But then all of a sudden, this kind of curtain opened up and I realized that those same dynamics, I'm running a center and I'm trying to please the deans and I'm trying to work on other people's agendas and I'm trying to do. And finally, it's like, OK, wait a second. And this is, you know, you've got to step forward with your voice, with your vision and make it happen. But that just wasn't happening. Again, in a position where I was already relatively senior, and yet here I was still looking at how to please others rather than bringing in my own voice.

16:15Now, of course, you need to please others. You get your stakeholders on board and fit into the larger vision that is given to you. But part of being a leader is coming out with your own voice. And part of adult development, as Bob Keegan would tell us, is go from socialized, where you are trying to please others, to self-authoring and even further, if you can, to figuring out what it is that you want to say. And so I think that ghost meant that some of that transformation took longer than it should have taken. Similarly, I was the peacemaker or peace broker in the family, which was great. I ran a lot of committees where I brought disparate people together and we created great things.

17:02And there was a lot of synergy and bringing folks together to create books or articles or papers was great. But again, is that really what I wanted to be doing all the time? Probably not. So part of where ghosts come in is that we are good at certain things and we gravitate to them. And what Virginia Satir would say is that we replicate our family patterns, even when they're not functional for us at the moment, but they're comfortable.

17:35The Anxious Achiever: And I think that's such an interesting point. And when you think about the juxtaposition of our ghosts in the adult development framework, some of our ghosts are stuck. They're immature. They never grew up. Right. And so we have different parts of ourselves, some of which are like me, 47. And I have some ghosts who are probably still 13. Absolutely. And some of those ghosts we need to celebrate, as I said. There may be a younger ghost who loves to play and loves to create and loves to invent. And, you know, getting further in touch with that ghost might be really, really useful. It's just when it doesn't get you where you want to go, that it becomes problematic.

18:23So as I look at the leaders that I've been working with over the years, there are certainly ghosts that get in the way. One woman, the role that she played in her family was kind of the joker, the jester. It was very serious. And she got everybody to be more comfortable. And she developed a really great sense of humor. And that mode of mastering her environment worked really well for her for quite a long time. When she became senior and part of the senior leadership team, that humorous role did not work so well for her. She found that people were looking at her in odd ways. And so it was, okay, I think this worked in this setting.

19:06It doesn't really work here. Or for a lot of people, it is adherence to authority. Yes. There is one way to be. We live in a, you know, some have power and some don't kind of world. What Satir calls a hierarchical model where some dominate and some don't. And when you're new to a senior leadership team, and that's part of your core belief system, then you can't speak your voice to authority. You can't interrupt. You can't say, I think you're wrong. And this is another way of thinking about it. Because your mind does not have a sense of an equality of membership. You think always in terms of the better and the worse, the powerful and the not so powerful.

19:55And that's just how your mind works.

19:58The Anxious Achiever: Right. And that part of you is doesn't have the adult agency, maybe literally to do it. Right. It's it's a new a new feeling. Yeah. It's also true that that may be operating. And a big piece of this is just looking at what the ghosts are. Sometimes these ghosts are automatic. You're not even aware that that's what's operating in you. You just know that you cannot, for whatever reason, speak up in those meetings. But why is a question that you can't necessarily answer. And so you need to look at it. That's a great plug for therapy, I would say. Yes. I have a new driver in my family. And as an anxious person, whoo boy, is it testing me.

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25:25The Anxious Achiever: And I rediscovered a piece of my teenage self, which was that I absolutely love to play physically. I love sports, like put me on any sport and I will try to have fun and learn my best and just dig in and get creative. And it was discovering this ghost that was such a piece of my identity for so many years, but ended painfully in sports and that I had sort of hidden that I let come out. And that competitive player, athlete in me is now again, a core piece of my identity. And I swear to God has made me a different leader, author, facilitator, everything. It's like I made friends with it again. I love that story.

26:12That is a great story. And it evokes emotion that I have so many times with people who are doing this kind of work. And by the way, the work does not have to be intensive therapy. You can make a lot of strides, even just following a framework and thinking through change. But how wonderful is that? And it is true, the folks in my workshops and so on will look at, well, how have you changed over time? And what are some of the ghosts that were left behind, or the forms of mastery that were left behind, or the things that you love that were left behind as you made other kinds of choices. And your story just perfectly fits in with that narrative of, oh, I'm taking up music again and I left it behind or it's the athlete or it's the I liked poetry or whatever it is that people find again.

27:06And it is enhancing. So how great is that? It's so great.

27:11The Anxious Achiever: It's so great. I want to get to your framework in a minute, but I have a few more questions just setting us up. I love your framework because it is so practical. But one of the questions I've been thinking about, and I've been talking about this actually with Sarah Green Carmichael at Bloomberg. She's been asking a lot about why are we drawn to work cultures that aren't good for us? And so I wanted to ask you from your perspective, if you think that either consciously or unconsciously, we pick organizational cultures that reinforce our family systems of origin. Again, part of it is it just may feel comfortable.

27:44I know how to operate in a toxic environment. I grew up in a toxic environment. I know how to keep my head down when I have to keep my head down. I know how to be a Machiavellian when I need to operate in that way. I know how to keep secrets. I know how to figure out what the winning team is. I know this. And when you know it, it's comfortable. And so you go in. I also think there are some more mundane kinds of reasons. it may be that it's a very toxic culture, but you get paid a lot of money. And for whatever reason, money is a prime motivator for you at a given point in time. Or it might be that there's a prestige associated with a particular organization, even if it has a toxic culture because of what it does or what it's accomplished.

28:35And so you want that piece and are willing to pay the price. what you think you are. Some people decide they're not once they're in. But I think there are a mixture of motives of why that happens.

28:49The Anxious Achiever: Right. And you and Dennis talk about the sort of symbols and words and values and expectations that cue us, right? You mentioned money, you mentioned prestige. Those are old value systems that we're acting out. Absolutely. And some of us, even senior executives, even presidents, even people who are making enormous amounts of money are still trying to please their parents, are still trying to show that they're of value, are still seeking the love that they think comes from accomplishment. And so these become arenas in which you are still replaying some, again, of those family patterns. So you mentioned you actually had some fun data.

29:40The Anxious Achiever: That's your word. Fun data on the patterns of ghosts you're seeing in your executive students. I'd love to hear any insights. Sure. And happy to share them. I do want to underscore the fact that this is a limited sample. These are the people that are coming to my classes, my workshops, etc. for executive education. So it is not everybody. And in fact, I was talking about ghosts with a friend one evening, and I was mentioning that I was looking at these patterns. And she said, well, you're really looking at the people who've adapted quite well because my ghosts have made it such that I didn't have any career at all.

30:24So I just want to kind of underline the fact that this is a particular set of people. So good ghosts. The number one, as we look at, these are just how many tallies of how many people mention these as good ghosts. And the number one is hard work and determination as well as being persistent. So these are the folks who know how to really try their best, get it done. They can execute. They don't disappoint. They feel like they can get almost anything done. So these folks are great. They're the good ghosts because they help them to succeed in the organization. Another high score is do it yourself, be self-reliant and independent.

31:09These are folks who often had to be independent at a very early age and they feel like, okay, I don't have to wait for orders. I don't have to be told what to do. I can just go out and do it. And in this world of distributed leadership where that's exactly what we're expecting people to do, these folks are thriving. Yep. Resilient and adaptive is number three. So I know how to go with the flow. And often with that goes this, I can read others or read the environment. So folks who have had difficult childhoods very often fall into this category. And some of them just feel this amazing ability to just deal with whatever's thrown at them.

31:55And that gives them a sense of power and ability to deal with challenges in the workplace. I have a quote here actually from one of my students who said in a paper, no matter the situation, you have the power to change your situations. Setbacks should never deter you. You can move ahead. Wow. That is an amazing good ghost. So resilient and independent, self-reliant. And then the next one or the last on my list of the highest scorers are taking care of others. People who know how to have empathy and compassion, they're a really good fit with servant leadership. They're generous. And so they can play that particular role quite well in organizations.

32:42Now, the other side. The other side. And interestingly, the other side is sometimes just too much of the good ghost becomes a bad ghost, which is kind of interesting. So number one is the workaholic. and of course we this is written about in many different places but these are the folks who can't stop it's never good enough I have to max out on everything enough is never enough I do it ever it takes if I have to give up part of my family life if I have to stay in the office till 2 a.m it doesn't matter I'm gonna get it done and I don't know how to turn off that spigot The second and related piece is you are just not enough.

33:27You're not enough. You have to be perfect at all costs. These are people who have to always be proving themselves. They fear disappointing other people. They can't recognize their own accomplishments. They can't accept compliments. It's just a sense of always trying to perhaps get that love and attention that they never got. And they're still trying to get it. Right.

33:56The Anxious Achiever: Or the only way they know how to get love and attention is by getting the gold stars. And, you know. Exactly. Another bad ghost is the play it's safe. Don't take risks. Tradition over innovation. Don't go against authority. And these are often people who have had really difficult childhoods in terms of perhaps the family went bankrupt and they were destitute and had a lot of difficulties. And so they learn to play it safe. But playing it safe is only good for some jobs, particularly at this moment in time, this turbulent world. You probably have to learn how to innovate. And that means taking more risks.

34:37That's getting out there. that is challenging authority. And for these folks, that's very, very difficult. And they find that it constrains their career mobility. So two more, conflict-diverse, where people avoid difficult conversations, they can't give negative feedback, they don't want to share their feelings. Again, in this world right now, there are lots of conflicts that need to be managed and dealt with. There is a lot of controversy. and not being able to give people feedback, negative feedback means that you may have underperforming people with you and you haven't said anything to them.

35:18Right. Because you just don't want to say anything and then you're stuck with underperformers. That is not a good current situation. And lastly is the folks who can't ask for help. They just take responsibility for everything. They don't want to bother others. They don't want to delegate to others. So again, a lot of these mean that people are being so overburdened. This, I think, is part and parcel of some of your anxious achievers that here they are and they can't delegate in a world where that's what you have to do, where you have to work with others, where you can't do it all yourself. And so it's real anxiety producer for folks who have these ghosts.

36:02And and yet the conditions are the way they are.

36:06The Anxious Achiever: Right. As you're going through these, there are so many feelings that I'm feeling on behalf of the ghosts, you know, anxiety, shame, the burden of maybe keeping secrets. It's I'll never forget one of my recent interviews. You know, he was a United States congressman and chair of the U.S. Armed Services Committee. And his therapist said to him, you don't think you have the right to exist. Oh, my goodness. That was the ghost that he had been carrying all the way to the top of the U.S. government. Yeah. But it gave him an incredible career because he was constantly proving. But at what cost? It came at a great cost to his health, his mental health, his relationships.

36:55Well, and that point, which is, it's such a good story. That point is why sometimes it's so hard to get rid of these ghosts. Because what happens if you take away the motor that has gotten you to where you are? Yeah. So people are very afraid of that.

37:14The Anxious Achiever: Let's dive in. Let's dive in. I mean, I know we're not going to fix anything in a few minutes, but can you talk us through how you help people get started? So the first step is to just identify what your ghosts are. Just what are they? And the way to do that, and I don't want to go through all of the pieces of ghosts right now. But in the HBR article, we outline, you know, values, beliefs, secrets, triangles, etc. And you can go through that list and then sit back and say, okay, from all of the things that I've just written down, what are the things that are really, really, really true for me right now?

37:55What are my good ghosts and what are my bad ghosts? So the first step number one is, is identify them. Step number two is choosing one thing that you want to change. What is just one thing that you want to change? Because you can't change everything all at once. It becomes too difficult. So it's really, really important to pick one thing.

38:17The Anxious Achiever: And how might that thing bubble up? You know, is it something that you are hearing in a performance review? Is it feedback you're getting? Is it just something that you've noticed as a pattern? Like, you know, and no offense, a lot of us have the more than one ghost. So we have many ghosts and we have many things we want to change. We just can't handle 10 changes at once. It's just too much. So learn how to do one thing and then you can apply that process again and again and again. And I always say when you're choosing something to change, don't pick something that's easy. Like I need help with time management.

38:53So I'm going to get a time management system. That's not the kind of change we're talking about. So I talk about outside in and inside out kinds of changes. So an inside out is looking within and say, who is the leader I really want to be? And what one thing would make me that much closer to being the leader I want to be? or as I think about what's hampering me at this moment, the biggest thing, if I could make some traction on that, that would make the biggest impact. So I'm looking inside to say what would be a meaningful change. The other way is outside in, all of our students take this X360 and they get feedback.

39:32So what did the feedback say? What do others think of as the things that would make the biggest impact if you changed? So look at that feedback. Think about the people that you trust and like. And if they were to give you advice on what they think would make the most impact, what do you think that they would say? So you look at both what you want and what the outside is and put that down and think about it a little and then just pick something.

40:02The Anxious Achiever: Yeah, right. So just get started. Yes. and then we actually take people through the immunity to change framework the keegan and leahy which i'm not going to do right here but suffice it to say you want to look at given a ghost what are some of the assumptions and cognitions that get in the way of the change that you want to make and what are some of your fears about actually making the change. And then the core is to first try to reframe what you want to do in a way that doesn't set off your ghosts and doesn't set off that immunity to change. So, for example, the person we talked about earlier who was great as a strategy and task leader and at sense-making but was really, really having a hard time with an interpersonal part of leading because it conjured up uncomfortable interactions with his parents and so on.

41:09He was able to reframe his change from, I want to improve on my interpersonal skills, which brought up all these ghosts and memories and triggers, Two, he wanted to improve his ability to move the organization forward by building shared vision. And that required interpersonal interaction. So reframing is really an important part of how to get through some of these things. And the students are really, really good at reframing what it is that they have to do and thinking of very creative ways. For a lot of people, women in particular, there is a ghost of I'm being selfish or I'm just taking too much power if I talk about my own vision.

42:04And yet for many of them entering senior leadership, that's exactly what you have to do. You have to articulate your vision and say it. But just a simple reframe from I'm going to bring my vision to the organization is I'm going to represent my team and help all of us to change the way the organization operates for the better.

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46:41The Anxious Achiever: That's$50 off your first year at monarch.com with code achiever. Although it's probably important to say that a lot of these ghosts have intersectional and systemic bases, right? So you may be getting messages that you can't ask for what you need, you know, because your parents have told you, like, or communicated to you, like, we're not the kind of people who get what we need, right? Or society doesn't treat us that way. Yes, that's true. And there are a lot of, I don't mean to claim that this model covers everything. I mean, it's not just family, it's culture that is responsible for many of these things.

47:22And it's not just your religious culture or your national culture. It also is your organizational culture that might be sending signals. So yes, all of that has to be considered as you move ahead. But at any rate, first thing is to reframe so that you're more comfortable moving ahead. And then the next thing is to say, okay, if I were to, let's say, improve my organization's ability to move forward, and part of that requires interviews with all of my direct reports. Well, if this is a weak muscle, well, how do I strengthen it? And here I pull on Herminia Barra's work on coming up with selves that are just for the moment.

48:09So how can I change? What can I change? I want to look at some role models who seem to be able to do what I want to do and don't fall prey to what scares me about doing it. Right? So I have a friend, she's so good, so good at getting what she wants. We both go into exec ed. People ignore me. When she comes in, they say, oh, can we get you some tea? Can we get you some coffee? Do you want some chocolate? Oh my God. She's so good at getting what she wants. So I look at her and I said, how does she do that? Right, right. What is it that I can borrow or try on from that person that can help me? Now, some of them I don't want.

48:53I actually don't want the staff to be running around serving me. It feels wrong at some level. But I can sometimes say, okay, well, she asked for outrageous things. And then people don't even think they're outrageous. So then I can practice, well, what if I asked for one thing more than I would normally ask for? And what happens? Right, right. Do people say, oh, you're horrible? Oh, you're asking for too much? Oh, who do you think you are? Or do they just do it? So you collect data on trying on these new selves and see what happens and then take on one new behavior, one new way of talking. And it could be verbal.

49:33It could be nonverbal. What do they say? How do they say it? How do they hold themselves? What tone do they have? You have to be a real detective to say, hmm, what is it? A lot of people want more poise. And so I will show a tape of Christine Lagarde, say, OK, let's watch three minutes. What does she do that you could borrow to be more poised? Because she is totally poised, even under big stress situations. I just choose her because a lot of my students chose her as a role model. So she doesn't get ruffled. She doesn't respond emotionally even when she's attacked. She sits back. She's calm. In the interview, somebody says, well, you elbow your way in.

50:20And she just sits back and she says, no, I don't elbow my way in because that means I push people aside. I stand my ground. How good is that? That you reframe, that you calmly think about your response and then do it. So it's about being a detective and looking at these role models and saying, what can I do differently? Let me try it on.

50:44The Anxious Achiever: And listeners, a big foundation of the anxious achiever is playing detective, right, is starting to tune in, as Dr. Ancona is saying, right, is tuning in to physical cues, to your triggers, to why things keep happening, right? That act of playing detective is so powerful. Exactly. And as you say, it's detective of looking at others and it's detective of looking at yourself. What's happening inside of me? Yes. Debra, I want to close out here on relationships at work. And obviously so much of family systems is about the relationships we grow up with. You know, what psychologists call dyads, right?

51:26The Anxious Achiever: Two people in a relationship. In my experience, and a lot of the listener mail that I get is about someone who feels like they keep getting stuck in a certain kind of relationship at work. Often this is with a certain kind of boss, maybe a boss who's controlling or a boss who's chaotic, who they feel like they have to take care of, right? It's sort of the wherever you go, there you are. What is your recommendation or how do you deal with students who are in a particular relationship at work that has them just feeling completely stuck, desperate, sick, anxious? How does your framework play into that?

52:04So one, again, I think that it's important for them to understand their ghosts. So often we say, oh, the boss is to blame for everything. Right. And yet we know that in some of these relationships, it's not about one person. It's about the dyad, as you say. It's about the interaction. And so you want to think about, you know, how do you play into that? Two is I suggest again that they look at if I have a problem with my boss, does everybody have a problem with my boss? If not, what are some other people doing? Are there some strategies that I could borrow from other people that seem to be working?

52:46And what might those look like? I would suggest not doing the same thing all the time, replicating the same behavior. If you're getting a bad result, then rather than get locked into a pattern that's dysfunctional, might you step over into doing something else? Another thing is thinking about triangles. So many of the family theorists talk about the triangle, not the dyad, as the primary relationship that we're born into, child, mother, father. Or it could be in my family, child, mother, child. Absolutely. Yeah. And children play parents off of each other. Very often there's like the good child and the bad child, or one becomes a student and does all that work where the, so that leaves it.

53:38So the other one could be the athlete and not have to fulfill that expectation of the parent or the two parents have different expectations. And so it all gets played out in these triangles, these interwoven triangles. So could you do the same with your boss? In other words, if your boss is acting in a particular way, would it make sense to invite someone else to the meeting so that there are three of you rather than two of you? Sometimes couples fight, but if there's a grandmother present, they don't. There's a whole different dynamic. So think in terms of triangles, not just pairs. And think about the assumptions you're bringing into the relationship.

54:18are those all correct? And if not, how do you need to change them? Are there tapes playing in your head? Those are those assumptions. Those are the critics that are playing out in your brain saying, don't do this and don't do this. And this is what, or whatever. Are those playing into what's happening in that relationship? Last of all, do you need to step away? Do you need to say, you know, I've been putting up with this for a very long time. It's not good for me. I don't see a way out that maybe it's time to go, that you don't have to feel like you must make this work, like you must stay here.

55:03Now, I don't want to say, okay, quit tomorrow. Obviously, you want to do it in a way that can you find another kind of environment or another boss or another culture that would bring out other kinds of behaviors in you and that would be more helpful to you. But if you try all these different things and nothing is working and you just feel so stuck and there's no other way out, then maybe you need to start anew. Right.

55:33The Anxious Achiever: And you can say this isn't good for me based on who I am. Absolutely. And sometimes people feel guilty because they see someone else who can handle the boss. Yeah, but that's not you. And we all get to make our own choices in this world about what we're willing to put up with and what we're not about what becomes our vision for ourselves at any given moment in time. And for us to say, well, that worked for me before. And it could work for other people. But this is not what works for me right now. It's not because I failed. It's because it's just making a different choice.

56:11The Anxious Achiever: That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.

56:42Thank you.