The Family You Grew Up In Is Still Sitting in Your Meetings

Most people who come to executive coaching arrive with a work problem. They can't delegate. They avoid a certain conversation. They get quietly furious at one particular colleague in a way that seems out of proportion even to them. They want a technique.

What usually turns out to be true is that the pattern is older than the job. Much older. And it was learned in a place that had nothing to do with work.

The office is a family system

Esther Perel, the psychotherapist best known for her work on modern relationships, has spent recent years turning that same lens on the workplace. Her podcast How's Work? is built on a premise most leadership training ignores: the dynamics that play out at the office are relational dynamics, and we learned our relational patterns long before anyone gave us a title. Perel has argued that we carry our entire relational history into work with us, and that a great many conflicts which look like disagreements about strategy are older arguments wearing a blazer.

If that sounds like a stretch, notice how workplaces actually talk about themselves. We're like a family here. He's the golden child. She's everyone's work mom. Nobody is being poetic. They're describing structure.

Family systems theory got here first. Murray Bowen, working decades before anyone used the phrase workplace culture, described how emotional systems organize themselves the same way regardless of setting. Two of his ideas travel to the office almost without translation.

Differentiation is the capacity to stay connected to people while remaining a separate person with your own position. Low differentiation looks like either fusing, where you can't hold a view your team doesn't share, or cutting off, where you go rigid and stop listening. Both are anxiety management, not leadership.

Triangulation is what happens when two people in tension pull in a third instead of dealing with each other. Every organization runs on this. It's the Slack message about a colleague rather than to them, the manager asked to referee something two adults could resolve, the venting that never becomes a conversation.

What this looks like in practice

A few patterns show up again and again in coaching:

You can't delegate. In a household where things fell apart when you stopped managing them, you learned that letting go is dangerous. That belief doesn't announce itself. It just makes handing off a project feel physically uncomfortable, and you call it having high standards.

You keep the peace at your own expense. If conflict at home meant something bad was coming, you got very good at smoothing things over early. Now you agree in meetings and resent it in the parking lot, and your team has no idea what you actually think.

You over-function. You absorb the work other people drop, then feel bitter about carrying it. This one usually traces back to being the reliable child in a system that needed one.

One person gets under your skin. There's a colleague who provokes a reaction that even you find excessive. That intensity is almost always a sign that they're occupying a role someone else held first.

Why insight alone doesn't change it

Here is the part that frustrates people who are good at learning things. You can recognize all of this, name it accurately, explain it to a friend over dinner, and still do it again on Monday.

That's because these aren't beliefs. They're regulation strategies. They kept you safe in a system where they were genuinely the right move, and your nervous system does not care that the system changed twenty years ago. Understanding a pattern and being able to do something different in the moment your chest gets tight are two different skills, and only the second one changes anything.

Which is why this work is practical rather than archaeological. The point isn't to explain your childhood. It's to widen the gap between the trigger and your response until you have a choice in it.

Executive coaching in Charlotte, NC

I'm Ryan Wishart, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Licensed Clinical Addiction Specialist, and I've practiced in Charlotte for more than fifteen years. I work with executives and leaders both in person in Dilworth and remotely.

The family systems training is the reason I coach differently. Most executive coaching starts with behavior and works outward: here's a framework, here's a communication model, here's how to run a better one-on-one. Useful, and often not enough, because it treats the pattern as a skills gap when it's usually a relational one.

Coaching is not therapy. It's structured, forward-looking, and focused on how you operate now rather than a full excavation of where it started. It isn't billed to insurance. And if something surfaces that belongs in a clinical setting, I'll tell you plainly rather than coach around it.

If you've read this and recognized yourself in one of those patterns, that recognition is worth something. It's also, on its own, not going to be enough.

If you want to discuss working together, connect with me here!