Brené Brown recently quoted America Ferrera, who said: “I can’t be the leader I am meant to be without all the parts of who I am.” She was talking about identity and integrated leadership. And about the importance of being able to bring all of who you are to your work, whatever that work is.

That made me think that not only do we need to do this in the outer world and through our external leadership, we also need to be able to do this in our inner world and through our inner leadership.

It is becoming more commonly accepted that human beings do not contain a monolithic psyche, but rather a system, composed of Self and Parts. These Parts have their own energy and hopes and fears.

The challenge that we have is that when we were young, our Parts picked up burdens, i.e. beliefs and painful emotions. Burdens are a result of growing up with the big or small traumas we experience along the way. They also can be a result of things we craved, but that did not happen. Think about the times when you didn’t get the love or attention or compassion or praise you wanted, and the impact that that has had on your life.

In the present, we experience the burden of our Parts as limiting beliefs or triggers: things that hold us back or send us into fight, flight, or freeze mode. Ultimately they constrain us. They hold us back from showing up fully and authentically, out of a misplaced belief that by doing or not doing something, we can avoid the recurrence of the situation that hurt us when we were younger. Moreover, they hold power over us whether we are, or are not, fully aware of that situation.

Our Parts are not saboteurs. On the contrary, our Parts’ intentions are always good – to protect us. While their strategies might neither be helpful nor healthy,  banishing or ridiculing or minimising them is neither effective nor loving.

Leadership coaching should therefore not treat the symptoms of Parts like they are gremlins to be eliminated. Quite the opposite. Our Parts need to be brought into relationship with our whole system. They carry gifts which, when integrated into our leadership, help us to forge healthy relationships, teams, organisations, and communities.

At Choose Leadership we support leaders to show up fully in the world and to navigate the internal and external complexities they face every day.

Image by Daniel R from Pixabay