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Are you the mini-me of your mum or dad?

18 Sep 2013

When I was were getting married my then fiancee and I attended marriage classes with our vicar. At our first meeting at the vicarage he sat us both down and after a short time discussing the history of the church and its bats, he placed down his teacup and saucer and said in a quite matter-of-fact way:

“You’re aware aren’t you that most marriages fail? Do you know why? It’s because the people we marry are not the partners we end up living with. When we’re young, we’re headstrong and romantic and see only the good in each other. But the partners we end up living with will become very much like their parents. So what I’d like you to do, Peter, is to write down for me on this paper all the things you like and all the things you dislike about your prospective parents-in-laws.  Marie, you do the same for yours. If when you’ve finished your lists of likes outweigh the dislikes then that’s great. If not, then I’d like you to think long and hard about whether you can live with these dislikes.”  

It was an insightful exercise. We made a commitment not to be mules for our parents’ baggage, not to take on their projections, needs, bad habits or expectations, but to support each other in finding and being our authentic selves. 

Self belief - and authenticity - comes from consciously knowing and choosing who you are – choosing your beliefs, values and behaviours. If you fail to choose, then all the unconscious projections and expectations of others will be in control, at the steering wheel with you as the idle passenger. And whether you choose to recognise it or not, your parents or guardians have been the most influential people in your life. Even if you come from a single-parent family, what you believe to be the missing parent – the ideal mother or father – will have affected how you see the world too.

There are people who will say: ‘It’s was good enough for me, then it’s good enough for my children.’ ‘I turned out all right.’ Well, we all have things we could work on it's only the arrogant or self-absorbed with low levels of self awareness that fail to register the importance of self reflection and personal development.   

Of course, the majority of parents have the best of intentions, believe they know what’s best for their children and try to avoid the mistakes of their own parents. One of the greatest and most painful journey’s in our lives is our attempt to break free from our parents' shadow, to avoid living their unlived lives, to overcome the failings of our upbringing, and build an authentic life free from our parents’ expectations. It can be a drawn out process for many, which is why having children when you’re too young is said to be a cause for concern. Most people reassess their relationship with their parents either when their parents die or when they have a midlife crisis, which is normally in the late thirties or forties. Someone who had children in their twenties therefore will have children approaching their teens at this age, and the really important years, 0-7 when children build their views of the world, have already passed and will have absorded their parents and grandparents failings.

Before we execute our parents, we should remember parenting involves incredible sacrifices and most parents behave to the best of their ability and deserve our admiration and thanks. It’s just that so few parents question whether what they’re passing down from generation to generation is healthy.

Exercise: How are you like your parents – how is history repeating itself?

As we’ve seen in previous blogs, to begin unravelling our ideal self we need to understand how our parents affected how we see ourselves. These are important questions:

  1. In what way am I the same as my father? In what ways different?
  2. In what way am I the same as my mother? In what ways different?
  3. Am I more like my mother or father, and why?
  4. What values that I learnt from my father do I want to keep? Which do I want to free myself from?
  5. What values that I learnt from my mother do I want to keep? Which do I want to free myself from?

By Peter Willis

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Lequin Leadership Development provide customer service training, executive coaches, business coaches, executive business coaching, coach training courses, coach training, coaching skills for managers, coaching culture programmes, board coaching, outplacement support, executive coach, coach supervision, executive coaching, talent management, change management, change management training, leadership coaching and leadership development.

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