Engaging with Little Me
Last week, I pulled a card from a deck called Cycle Breakers and Money Makers, which is made by my coach Mariela. I had pulled the card about Little Me, which said:
“Today I will speak to myself like I would speak to Little Me.”
I thought it was the universe speaking because that was the theme of my coaching last week. So let's talk about Little Me, share a little bit about what the concept is, and share a couple of examples of what that looks like in practice.
What is the concept of Little Me?
There's various research that's been done that shows that about 70% of the behaviors that we have as adults actually come from experiences that happen in our lives when we were younger. Some of those experiences taught us what was safe and was not safe. And from that, we now as adults tend to function in ways where we want to constantly keep ourselves safe.
Evolutionarily, if we weren't keeping ourselves safe, we wouldn't be here. So a lot of the patterns that we can notice in our behavior come from things that we learned to believe about what is safe and unsafe from when we were younger. So as we are growing in our lives, wanting to try new things, taking new leaps, sometimes when we're feeling stuck, or overwhelmed, or we're just kind of repeating the same thing over and over again, that comes from us still behaving and interacting with the world as our younger self.
When we're talking about listening and engaging with your Little Me, what we're talking about is, how do we catch up that younger self to know who we are now as a grown-up, what we have learned to be real and safe in the world, so that there's not this internal sabotaging.
I'm gonna illustrate this with some examples. The first is a client who, when they were younger, was unhoused and undocumented. All these things had happened in their life that put them in a place where they were in survival mode, they needed to hustle, they ended up selling weed, school was not a priority. They very much learned that life was about survival, hustle, and grinding.
At some point in high school, through some mentors and teachers, they were able to start seeing that there was a possibility in ways to change their life. They ended up graduating from high school, they got super involved in social justice work, and eventually launched a nonprofit.
When we met each other, they had raised $2 million, and told me, “I've got this nonprofit, I've raised all this money, but as a leader, I’m struggling to get along with the other leaders in the organization.” Health issues were also starting to come up because they struggled to slow down and function with a mindset of abundance, and see the possibility for there to be ease and collaboration and support from a group of people.
They came to me wanting leadership skill development. And while yes, there's definitely some skill development that's important for us as leaders, what we started to realize over time is they had not gone back and had interactions with that little younger self to help them to know, “We don't need to hustle anymore. We're not in survival mode anymore. We can move through the world in a completely different way.“
So over time, I started encouraging my client to start spending some time with their younger self. Because that younger self had learned “the only way I have a home, the only way I have food is if I am out on the streets hustling.” Now, as a person who was the founder of a nonprofit, raising millions of dollars, they didn't need to function in that same way. But when you've spent 20-something years of your life in hustle mode, it doesn't just turn off overnight because you raised some money.
Behaviors that had happened for 20 years needed to have somebody to come back and engage with them and to help them to know we are safe, we are in a totally different place in our lives., and these are all the ways that now I as a grown up, can be trusted to take us in a whole new direction, because I've learned new ways to bring safety to myself.
My client was really big on taking walks during the day, and I encouraged them to during that walk to speak to their younger self. Like, “Hey, younger self, guess what happened today? These are all the things I did to get us here. These are all the dreams and the excitement I have moving forward, I'm safe, you can trust me to take us in this new direction.”
Maybe writing it out if you want to journal it, journaling to that younger self and helping to catch them up, “hey, I want you to know what's been going on. And want you to know the ways that I was able to make this happen and hear all the things I'm dreaming about for the future and how I know I'm going to be able to continue to have safety in this ease and in this abundance.”
Essentially, what you're trying to do is help them to realize that we are no longer in that place that we used to be, we've changed, life has shifted. You're trying to bring trust back to that younger self, who learned one way of being and catching them up to where you are now.
I have another client who's been having some struggles at work with interacting with some colleagues. I told them, “I'd be curious to know what relationships in your life have looked like when you were younger.” So we did some exercises for them to explore that, via meditation and other exercises I have for mapping out past experiences. They drew me a diagram around their past experiences with relationships, and after I gave them some time to process it, we spoke about it.
They told me, “You're not gonna believe this. But I went back to when I was five years old.” They could vividly remember some experiences that happened in kindergarten with other kids and how it started to create this barrier of safety they had to put around themselves when interacting with other people, because people can talk about you, people can ditch you, people can not be safe.
My client said they really felt that experience, and felt like the situation when they were five was playing out right now, but with grown adults.
None of this is surprising. We learn how to see the world when we're young and we create these barriers for safety. Somewhere along the way, you learned that you had to create barriers, there were different things you had to do because you couldn't trust others, and so because of that these patterns keep replaying themselves over and over again.
We broke down what had happened when they were younger and what was happening now as an adult. And I said, “What do you think that younger self needs to know so that you can feel comfortable engaging in this workplace and with these people in a completely different way?”
We talked about how they have a voice now that they didn't have when they were younger, they now know how to articulate their needs and how to set boundaries, which they didn't know how to do when they were younger. My client started to establish all these things that they now know and how we could help that five-year-old self to know it's okay to start to slowly trust these people.
My client now has some tools they're going to explore around trying out new things and relationships, because they want to be able to engage with more people and have different relationships at work and not always have to assume that people are out to get them or things are not safe.
I'll give you one more example from myself. I was having a conversation with my therapist around some stuff that was not feeling safe in terms of new opportunities andexperiences coming my way. I wanted to lean into them, I wanted to do them, but something just wasn't feeling right and I wasn’t sure what the block was.
We spent some time exploring, and it took me back to middle school and some experiences that had happened around a parent-teacher conference. I could vividly remember the room, the teacher, everything that played out in the conversation. That younger 13-year-old Michelle was still playing out how horrible it was to not have straight A's, and how disappointed I felt people were in me.
That middle school Michelle still plays out today, as a 44-year-old woman. Sometimes, things don't feel like enough: why did I not get 100% on that? Why am I not getting straight A's in the way that I'm functioning in my life? There was so much that happened, a variety of experiences, but the one that I vividly remembered was that parent-teacher conference, where I learned that there was only safety when you did 100%, or people were not praising you. And so to be able to feel that safety, I've learned: I have to give extra, I have to do more.
But that's just not how I want to live my life anymore. I’ve known this for a while, it’s not like this was an ‘Aha’ moment for me—but I think it illustrates that even once we see the pattern, it can take a while for us to continue to have those conversations with our younger self, to retrain ourselves around what is safe, and helping to bring new experiences and behaviors into our life that slowly build trust.
That's what coaching is about, helping you to figure out what those blocks are, and what are the things that maybe are getting in the way of you moving forward in your life. :et's analyze where that comes from, dig deep and get curious, and then start to slowly begin to bring in new practices, new experiences, new behaviors that little by little start moving you in a new direction in the future.
It doesn't happen overnight. I've been on this journey for years. But it's getting better. Those clients that I just described are both on journeys that are not going to happen overnight. But they have started practices, they started new ways of engaging with themselves, that little by little will help them to see it's safe to try new things and let people in.
That is going to drastically change not only their experiences as leaders, but change the way they engage with the people that they work with. It'll change the way that they see the vision of what their leadership can be. And it will help them to have more balance in their lives, which is the healthy thing that we need, so that we can sustain leadership for as long as we choose.
If you are a person who is a leader who has been stuck in some old patterns, chances are there's something there to explore and get curious about. If one-on-one coaching sounds interesting to you and you would like to discuss that further, click here to book a discovery call.
Let's take some time on a call to just really get to know each other more and start to get some ideas of where there's a place to get curious to get deeper and to start shifting you towards the leadership that you want to lead with the vision that you have for what is possible for the work that you do and also just for your life in general.
