How Business Families Can Overcome the Tyranny of Fame

Opening
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Tom Skotidas: We’ll be talking today about how family business fame and reputation, whether at a local, national or international level, can create public scrutiny and psychological impacts on family members, and influence their individual and interpersonal patterns. I’m joined here by my friend and partner, David Werdiger. David, would you like to introduce yourself?

‍David Werdiger: Tom, I’m excited to be doing this. This is going to be a lot of fun. I’m a family enterprise adviser. What does that mean? I help families navigate intergenerational wealth transition, whether or not they have an operating business. My focus is on succession, governance, communication, boards, quality decision-making by the family, and family dynamics. But I’m not a therapist.

This is a really important topic now because families need to manage a public brand alongside the brand of their enterprise, which they may or may not have. It’s particularly relevant in this age of social media, where many of us are living public lives.

‍Tom Skotidas: Thank you, David. I’m a family business psychotherapist. I specialise in business families and wealthy business families, and I help them with psychological and interpersonal patterns at the individual level, the duo or couple level, and the family level. I also work with advisers, and I’m very privileged to be working with you here today, David. There are many on the call as well with whom I’m collaborating, so it’s a privilege.

David, would you like to share what you see in your clients who are impacted by their fame and reputation? Again, that can be at the local, city, state or national level. I’d love to hear your experiences of the symptoms and what you observe.

‍Primary Fame and Secondary Fame

David Werdiger: Really important point. We had the idea to talk about this from the Beckhams. They’re a very public family with a global brand. But the fact is that all families have brands, reputation and fame.

We use the term fame, but it could mean being famous in your community, your suburb, your city, your state or your country. Those are all degrees of fame. The fact is that you’ve got a reputation and you’ve got a brand.

One distinction I make is the difference between primary fame and secondary fame. Primary fame is the key person or the key people. In a family, that might be the parents, the patriarch, the matriarch, the wealth creator, the person who first made that surname a known surname. Secondary fame is something that’s attributed to everybody else associated with that person. That might be siblings, children or cousins. A lot of it is driven by surnames, which can create an interesting dynamic between males, who tend to keep the surname, and females, who often don’t.

That’s an important distinction because the people with secondary fame didn’t create that fame. They’re along for the ride, for better or worse, as we’ll discuss.

‍When Public Reputation Becomes a Hidden Stakeholder

David Werdiger: In addition to that, we’ve got families that are in the business of fame. I’ll start with extreme examples like the Kardashians and the Beckhams, who are famous for being famous or have famous brand names. But there are also families whose business is a household name. They’ve got a public narrative as well as the business itself, and that’s something that has to be actively managed.

The issue is that these things can adversely affect the family because sometimes the public story becomes a hidden stakeholder. You think, who’s making decisions here? Is it the family, or is there another stakeholder we might call public opinion? “How will this look?” becomes a stakeholder in decisions.

Then you can get a number of cascading effects. In meetings, people become a bit performative. They’re careful about what they say. As soon as people are not able to say the things that need to be said in a meeting, you get another spillover effect. Instead of the board, or in addition to the board, committee or decision-making body, you have these side corridor conversations, distorted retellings of what happened in the meeting, and decisions aren’t being made by the group that’s supposed to be making them.

They’re being made by little collectives that are exerting power, not through official subcommittees, but informally. Then you get decision delay and avoidance. “Do we really have to deal with this now?” is a huge issue in families. It sounds like, “Let’s put this on the back burner. It’s not urgent.” But that indecision is avoidance behaviour.

Saying, “Do we really need to do this now?” often means, “I don’t want to make this decision now, so I’ll do everything I can to procrastinate.” Procrastination often comes from fear. Then decisions like succession become distorted. Who decides the successor? Is it driven by optics, or by who’s the best person for the job? These are the ways these factors can affect family decision-making.

‍Social Media, Visibility and Invasive Technology

David Werdiger: And if that wasn’t enough, I’m going to throw in another one, and that’s social media. I’ve started to use the term invasive technology because these little devices are such a part of our lives. They’re connected to us, and we’re almost like cyborgs, connected to millions of people, some of us.

A lot of what we do is public. We’ve got a connection with a lot more stakeholders. People are always online, and that means, by extension, their families might be always online. The algorithm rewards conflict and high emotional engagement. It scores exciting situations more highly, especially those likely to go viral.

So those are the things I’m seeing in families as the effects of family brand and reputation. Tom, what’s your perspective on this?

‍The Family’s Best Self

Tom Skotidas: Thanks, David. We know from family enterprise literature that a family’s reputation and identity is a key part of what we call socioemotional wealth, that key asset, and it drives major decisions. But I’m called in when decisions made in service of that socioemotional wealth move the family away from its best self.

In my practice, I simplify things by saying that whatever we do is either a move towards our best self, which is our core values, sharpened core values, and who we want to be on this planet, or a move away from our best self.

So when a family is moving away from its best self and letting its reputation and identity influence decisions in that direction, that’s when I come in. I don’t come in when the family is making sober, values-aligned decisions.

I work bottom-up. I look at nervous system impacts. I look at trauma and how decisions are made, or how people show up in meetings. I look at avoidance patterns. David, I’m all about patterns. I see patterns. If a pattern is forward-moving and values-aligned, I see that. If it’s moving away from our values, I see that as well.

For example, micromanagement and a need for over-control are usually movements away from our best self. Why do we need to control? It could be fear of getting it wrong, fear of saying the wrong thing, fear that it could impact interpersonal relationships in the room because of our reputation or identity. It could be fear that something I do might hurt the family.

This creates a lot of self-editing, which is driven by fear or the potential shame we might feel. But my clients often avoid discussing their fear or shame directly. Instead, they move into behaviours that might seem productive but are actually counterproductive, like over-controlling, anger, dismissal or withdrawal.

There’s also a threat at the individual level. If you do not know who you are, if you don’t have a clear sense of your own identity, core values, and who you want to be on this planet and within this family, then you can suffer what psychology calls enmeshment. The reputation of the family, the fame, becomes enmeshed with your own identity, and that restricts how you show up as an individual.

‍David Werdiger: Tom, I just want to pick up on that. I love the term you use, “your best self”, because when I work with families, we ask questions like, “What’s the wealth for?” For some families it is to create more wealth, but I put it to families that wealth should empower everybody to live their best life, and that means being their best self.

Families sometimes lose sight of that. The family’s most important asset is its human capital, the people themselves. If everybody’s not living their best life, then what’s the point of all the money and everything else that comes with it if they’re internally struggling?

‍Tom Skotidas: Wow. I love that.

‍David Werdiger: Sorry, keep going.

‍Triangulation, Avoidance and Emotional Substitutes

Tom Skotidas: I love that, David. Thank you for that. These patterns are not just individual. They also occur in dyads, key duos or key pairs. You often see triangulation, which is a classic pattern when two key people have the opposite of relational intimacy. There is avoidance in the relationship, and instead of speaking through fear, sadness or shame, which are relational emotions, they speak through anger, contempt or avoidance.

Triangulation is a core concept in psychotherapy. One of the key theories, Bowen Family Systems Theory, talks about triangulation. When you and I, David, are not able to communicate properly because we avoid each other, we may recruit a third party to provide emotional regulation. That’s called triangulation.

It’s a well-known clinical concept. And by the way, as you said with social media, social media and your followers can act as that triangulation. You can post something, like Brooklyn Beckham did, or like any family member might, and then followers respond and say, “Your family are a bunch of mean people.” Then I can say, “David, check this out. My followers agree you’re wrong and I’m right.”

So triangulation is a classic pattern that I work with, and the antidote to that is helping key duos work through their avoidance. Avoidance is the root of almost all issues in my practice.

‍David Werdiger: Yes. When you say “recruit”, it’s interesting, because it’s not as if one person in a couple says to somebody else, “The two of us are having some issues. Can you help us?” That would be active recruitment. This is more like, “I’m venting to you about the person I should be speaking to directly, but I can’t.”

‍Tom Skotidas: That’s right, yes. And by the way, in a clinical and research sense, venting is not therapeutic at all. There is only short-term relief. Triangulation might feel helpful, but it actually denies you self-mastery. And the denial of your own self-mastery, which includes engaging the other person through the right emotional communication, effectively erodes your identity as well.

It’s almost like you need a third party to feel full, to feel complete, and that’s a problem.

Within families, I also see interlocking alliances. I use a therapy model called psychodrama, which includes a technique called sociometry. In sociometry, I get the family to fill out a questionnaire about who they rely on most for key decisions, so we can see the alliances that form there. Then I’ll introduce the question: if there’s a reputational threat, who do you go to and who do you not go to?

That helps reveal where those interlocking alliances are, because we need the whole family communicating. That’s what I see, David.

‍Short-Term Pain, Long-Term Gain

David Werdiger: Yes. You talk about venting being a short-term fix, and I think one thing our work has in common is that, for families, we are often giving short-term pain for long-term gain. We all rush for the quick fix. I could talk about our phones as well, being a constant quick fix. But the conversations we facilitate for our family clients are really hard, and that’s why nobody wants to do them.

But the gain you get from being able to say things clearly, and say the things that need to be said in front of the people who need to hear them, including yourself, is what leads to long-term gain and clarity for the family as a group.

‍Tom Skotidas: And for the advisers on this call, your ability to confront your own avoidance of conflict, and your fear of rupturing a client relationship, is key if you’re going to have these conversations with your clients.

You’ll see that your ability to do that acts as a role-modelling device for your clients, helping them engage and start having those conversations themselves.

I hope today’s session, especially this third part we’re covering now, helps you do that. Please put questions in the comments and we will get to them. David and I will keep talking until about 12:35, so we’ll leave 25 minutes for Q&A.

David, can you share your strategies for helping clients who are impacted by their reputation to overcome that and start thriving?

‍Strategy One: Start with the Children

David Werdiger: Yes. I’ll share four strategies.The first is starting with the kids. Very often, primary fame sits with the incumbent generation, the parents. Secondary fame sits with the children. It’s important to raise children in that context and make sure they understand that their family and its reputation is a double-edged sword. It’s not all privilege.

A lot of privilege comes with reputation: the ability to open doors, the way people treat you. But equally, it can be a rock around your neck because it can constrain you and hold you back from being yourself.

This is one of the classic issues for families: maintaining a healthy balance between the collective and the individual. The collective here is the family reputation. The individual is each person within the family, with their own boundaries. Tom spoke about people who have a brand, but it’s not their brand, so they don’t really own their own identity. That’s not a healthy place for anyone to be.

So we need to be open with kids and say, yes, we acknowledge that this is our life. But at the same time, we need to give them a voice and affirm their agency. We need to say things like, “You matter. What matters to you? You are important.” That is such an important thing for every child to develop.

‍Tom Skotidas: By the way, David, just to interrupt for a moment. The fact that so many kids feel they don’t matter is something I see all the time in my clinic. It’s the narrative of shame: “I’m not enough. There’s something wrong with me. There’s something defective about me.” My job is to help them reclaim that sense that they are enough. So yes, it absolutely starts at the kids level. Thank you for bringing that up.

‍David Werdiger: Yes, and if it’s not addressed in childhood, it requires a lot of work later. In business families, where the business looms large or the patriarch and matriarch loom large, the effect on the children can be, “You don’t matter, because everything’s about them.” I could go into this much further, but it’s so important how we treat our children and how we give them a voice. You can give them a voice without giving them a vote. They can sit at the table and be heard. That matters.

‍Strategy Two: Boundaries and Consent

David Werdiger: Second strategy: boundaries.

Again, this means acknowledging primary and secondary fame, and clarifying consent. The kids didn’t ask to be part of this family. They won the genetic lottery, or it was an accident of birth, however you want to put it.

We need boundaries. For example, if you’ve got a well-known surname, you might say, “Don’t use that on social media.” The kids might say, “What’s wrong with it? It’s our name.” And the answer is: there’s nothing wrong with it. In family work, I often say there’s no right or wrong, only consequences. If you want to say the things you want to say, what are the consequences of airing them in a forum like social media, where they can follow you forever?

We also need to define the limits of public interest versus family life.

And again, when I say public interest, I’m not just talking about globally famous families like the Beckhams or major sports families. I mean anyone with a reputation, because other people often think your life is open slather, and it’s not.

It’s okay to say, “Sorry, that’s private.” It’s okay to call somebody out when they cross a boundary. It’s okay to define your own boundaries and say, “No, this is a safe space.”

‍Strategy Three: Governance, Values and Decision-Making

David Werdiger: The next strategy focuses on governance. As I said before, there’s this hidden stakeholder, the optics factor, in governance. My approach to governance is to build on communication first, then shared values and purpose. That’s where I use a fabulous tool called Values Edge, with these beautiful coloured cards, to take the family through a process of articulating their values: what is important to them in life.

We all have values, but not many people go through a process to understand what they are, and also to recognise the extent to which they’re actually living them.

We can say, “My value is such-and-such,” but if that doesn’t translate into how you live, is it really your value? Another thing we can do is recognise aspirational values. With the deck of cards, people sometimes say, “I’d like that to be my value. This is how I’ve been living, but I want to live according to this value. How do I do that?”

This is a fantastic process with families. It gives them an amazing language to talk about what’s important in life. And what’s important in life isn’t money. It’s what we do, the meaning we make of life, and the impact we can have on those around us, closest to us and sometimes further out.

Then we look at where the family brand sits within those values. For some people, the brand itself is part of the values structure. If you’re born into a family with a brand, that brand can loom very large.

Maintaining that family brand may matter deeply. Then we move into the nuts and bolts of an agreed process for decisions that might have a public impact, or where there are external voices. What we do there is scenario-test. “What if this happens? How would we deal with that?”

Often it’s something like a social media post going viral for the wrong reasons. What do we do? We workshop it. We scenario-test it. Who does what? Do we hunker down and ignore it? What do we do if the media calls, which sometimes they do?

That’s the governance side of things: good decision-making by the family, proactively led by the family and its key stakeholders, with the family’s interests put first.

‍Strategy Four: Getting Algorithm-Free

David Werdiger: The final strategy is getting algorithm-free.Social media platforms affect our social lives. They’re part of our lives. They’re embedded in our lives. That’s why it’s more important than ever to have a safe family space. The family meeting becomes a sacred space where people can say the things that need to be said without recrimination, where they can listen to each other and learn how to communicate well.

That means communicating with curiosity, which is one of the key things I coach families and individuals to do. It’s so important because, unfortunately, in the absence of full information, we tend to make negative assumptions. Those assumptions eat away at us.

That family forum, where we step back from public life, is where we can agree on rules for how we want to be in public. It gives us the power of pause, of stepping away from the life that’s connected to everybody and, from time to time, connecting only to the people closest to us. From there, we can look back at that public life and ask, “How do we actually want that to be?” Because when you’re in it, you can’t make decisions about it. You’ve got to step back from it.

That’s the fourth strategy. Tom, over to you.

‍Therapeutic Interventions for Individuals, Dyads and Families

Tom Skotidas: Thanks, David. As I said earlier, I approach this bottom-up, and I look at three key formats: individual work, dyad work with key pairs, and family work.

I’ll share some of my interventions, and I also want to mention that advisers on the call are welcome to contact me afterwards if they want me to walk them through these. But please be aware that these interventions can trigger trauma in people who are undergoing them, so I recommend having a trained therapist with you if you’re going to attempt them.

For individuals coping with fame, a key intervention I use is the empty chair. It’s a big part of my individual work. I’ll have my client sit in one chair and bring an empty chair in front of them, and in that chair we place fame.

I might even put a second chair there for the patriarch or matriarch, if they’re associated with the pressure the client is feeling because of fame. Then I’ll have the client speak to that empty chair. I’ve said this before: about 80 out of 100 clients say, “This is ridiculous. I’m talking to an empty chair.”

But when they give it a go, after the first few minutes, everyone forgets it’s an empty chair. They bring in all of their thoughts and emotions. It’s an incredible privilege to see that happen.

As I guide them through emotional lenses like fear, sadness, shame and anger, what they say changes them. They can never unsee what they’ve seen themselves say and do. They can never unhear it.

I’ll also invite them to sit in the fame chair and speak back to themselves. Again, most clients think, “This is ridiculous. I’m not fame. How would I know what to say?” Then two minutes into it, they’ve embodied fame and they’re speaking to themselves.

That kind of perspective-building is invaluable. It helps the client see who they are and what they’re capable of saying. I keep checking with core values, too. Everything they say gets checked against their values. I don’t want the process going off the rails. I want the client aligned with their values in everything they do.

And if they don’t want to do the empty chair, I’ll sometimes play fame myself, or in some cases the patriarch or matriarch. They’ll coach me on how fame would speak, or how the patriarch or matriarch would speak, and I’ll stand in another part of the room and speak to them as fame. We’ll have a real exchange. They know it’s an enacted exercise, but the nervous system is still activated. That allows me to hold the space and help them develop their voice through that process.

I’m checking in with their emotions, whether their heart is racing, whether they want to run out of the room. These are the patterns they become aware of.

‍David Werdiger: Tom, I think you mentioned to me that sometimes the empty chair might even be a person who’s no longer alive, and it still works.

‍Tom Skotidas: Correct. That’s right. It can be someone from the past, someone deceased, or someone living. It doesn’t matter, as long as that person still impacts them today. That’s where a lot of my trauma training comes in, to hold the space in the room.

When it comes to dyads, I’ve recently begun using a new technique. Even with two people, I’ll have one of them do the empty chair while the other key pair watches. The witnessing of one person doing the empty chair can be profoundly transformative for the other person watching.

I also like to rewire patterns. That’s a key part of what I do. Rewiring patterns means that if you and I had conflict, David, and we said, “I’ve had enough of you,” and walked out of the room, I as the therapist would come in and say, “What would it be like if, instead of walking out, you actually leaned into each other?” We then rescript different moments based on key points in the interaction.

The rescripting can be uncomfortable, but it changes people because it rewires them in the room. I use a lot of emotion-based work to do that with key dyads.

Finally, interventions for the family. The first thing I like to recommend is something I borrowed from Jeff Bezos. When he was CEO of Amazon, he always had an empty chair representing the customer. He would point his executives to that chair and say, “Does this suit our customer? Will this help our customer?” That’s how he promoted a customer-centric environment.

I’ve adapted that into what I call the reputation chair. I advise my business families to have a permanent empty chair in the room during family charter meetings, governance discussions and family office discussions. Whenever you contribute while looking at that chair, ask yourself: was what I contributed values-aligned? Was it stated with awareness of fear, sadness or shame? Or did I self-edit because of that chair over there?

That’s one intervention I like to use, adapted from Amazon. In a more pure psychotherapy sense, I also often use miracle signs. I like the family to share with each other what would count as a miracle when it comes to our reputation, identity or fame. How would you show up in a simple way that would be different from what you’ve always done? That would be a miracle to me.

I can’t tell you how often clients say, “I don’t know what I want, but I know what I don’t want. I don’t want him to keep telling me about our family identity.” That’s useful, because it tells us what you don’t want. But what do you want instead?

That’s often where clients, and really all humans, struggle: actually describing the behaviours they do want. But when you’re able to do that, it’s transformative for both the speaker and the recipient. Then, once agreed, I get them to do live rehearsals in the room, actually practising the miracle behaviour if it’s feasible, to begin the rewiring process.

So those are examples of interventions I use at the individual, dyadic and family level. David?

‍Looking Forward Instead of Complaining

David Werdiger: Great. Thank you. I love this idea of miracle signs. It’s very true: we’re very good at complaining and saying what’s wrong. But what would success look like? What would this look like if it wasn’t like this? It flips things around in a much more positive and forward-looking way, and that’s so important for families.

Families carry so much legacy, and sometimes legacy is a burden. Shifting the perspective and saying, “Hang on, let’s look forward. We can’t change the past, but we can decide together what the future looks like,” is powerful.

‍Tom Skotidas: That’s right. And often people who think psychotherapy is just about the past and just about trauma are surprised to find out how much of psychotherapy is about present-moment awareness, present-moment interactions and future pacing based on hope and miracle signs. They’re often surprised by how comprehensive psychotherapy is as a discipline.

Okay, team, thank you, David. We’ve reached the point of Q&A.

‍Q&A: Family Values and Divergent Paths

Tom Skotidas: We have one question from John Williamson. It says: “When articulating family values, do you get individual values input from individual family members? And what next if some of those individual values are, one, significant, and two, opposed to one another?”

‍David Werdiger: Fantastic question. I love doing the exercise with families because you never know what’s going to come out. But that’s the point. We don’t go in saying, “You have to be values-aligned.”

I’ve got a lovely example: parents in their sixties, two kids, both there with spouses. The father had already semi-retired from the business. One of the kids was really engaged in the business. The other one wasn’t. When we mapped the values, it brought home for everybody that one of the kids was really driven to succeed and make an impact in the world and in the business, to take the business from here to here. The other was genuinely happy and content and wanted to live a life of enjoyment. There’s nothing wrong with that.

We’re all individuals. As my father-in-law used to say, just because two people came out of the same womb doesn’t mean they’ll get on.

Articulating these things matters because they are conversations families often never have. I’ve seen families have discussions they’ve never had before about their values. There are no right or wrong answers. The prompting question is really important. It’s about how values have informed decisions you’ve made. Then we compare values within the family. We do little discussions around who shares similar values and who has different values. It’s a fantastic exercise. It can go for two or three hours, and then we do follow-ups.

Where values diverge, we talk about it and we acknowledge it, because we don’t expect everyone to have the same values. Sometimes that values-based discussion ends with the family saying, “We went into this thinking we all had to stay together. Maybe we actually need to create a bit of space for individuals.”

One of the big decisions for some families is whether they keep the wealth together or split it up. Again, there’s no right or wrong answer, only consequences. Having a group of people connected by genetics and shared assets, but who see the world very differently, and insisting they stay tied together, may not lead to good consequences.

‍Tom Skotidas: In my practice, David, and to answer John’s question directly, I have both a private practice and a family business therapy practice. Often the work I do is transformative for the client to the point where they realise they actually have different values and no longer belong in the unit.

It happens with couples who come to me to save their marriage. I have no vested interest in whether they stay together or not. My only vested interest is in helping them achieve their goals. If the goal is to stay together, I work towards that. But often the identity development is so significant that they realise, “We have different values. We are different people,” and it ends in divorce.

In my family business work, there’s about a 10 per cent ratio so far of family members who decide, “I don’t want to be part of the business.” And that’s a celebration, because when an individual develops enough of a strong identity to realise that they love their family but are meant for a different path, their best self is on a different path, the family should know about it and they should be allowed to live that.

It can be hard to watch because everyone wants the Hollywood ending, but it doesn’t always work out that way. I support families who realise that, at some point, departure might be the right move, as long as it’s values-based and sober.

A values-based decision does not mean the absence of pain. You can make a decision to leave and it can be full of pain, but in the long term it may still be a move towards your best self.

I want to remind everyone that movement towards your best self is lifelong. On your deathbed, looking back, did you make the right decision? Did you make the one that helps you smile on your deathbed? That is key in my work with clients.

‍Q&A: Individuation, Enmeshment and Other People’s Dreams

David Werdiger: I want to tell you a quick Jay Hughes story. A number of years ago I was at an event with Jay Hughes. If you’ve heard of him, great. If you haven’t, look him up. He’s considered the father of the family office. He was speaking about a member of the rising generation in their fifties, and he said, “It looks like you are a custodian of somebody else’s dreams rather than a creator of your own dreams.”

I loved the way he expressed that so succinctly. When I heard it, I had a bit of a penny-drop moment. I suddenly understood why I had done everything I had done professionally over the previous 30 years.

Again, this goes to individuation: being your own person within a family and striking that balance between the individual and the collective. What am I if I’m completely subsumed within the family identity? What’s my identity? On the other hand, if it’s all about me, what have I lost by not taking what has been afforded to me by virtue of my family, and I don’t just mean financially? Striking that balance is what I call the Goldilocks zone.

‍Tom Skotidas: And for everyone on this call, I would recommend looking up the terms enmeshment and confluence. These are two key terms that refer to a human becoming enmeshed, where their identity becomes entangled with another person or entity. That’s how they lose themselves, or how they were never allowed to fully develop.

A certain level of enmeshment can be beneficial in a soccer team, where cohesion matters, and in some strategic parts of a family business it can help as well. But if it comes at the cost of your own identity, if it erodes who you are, that becomes dangerous, both for the individual and for the family business.

‍Q&A: Gender Patterns in Family Business Systems

Tom Skotidas: Next question. Richard asked about differences in gender. I’ll take this one very quickly. Yes, in my work I do often see significant gender differences. I don’t think they’re mainly biological, though biology may play a part. I think they’re much more cultural.

The biggest one I see is people-pleasing. I often see clients, especially women, demonstrating a people-pleasing pattern, which is effectively something many of us learned as children. A child says, “No, I don’t want that,” and the parent says, “What did you say? You’ll do what I told you to do.” That threat creates nervous system overwhelm, and the child learns to comply: “Okay, I’ll do what you say I should do.” That’s one of the origins of people-pleasing.

If that happens over years and hundreds of repetitions, you’ll see the pattern clearly when someone signs off on a family charter and then, six months later, people say, “She signed off on it,” or “He signed off on it. Why are they so angry now? Why can’t they just go along with what they agreed to?”

The answer is that what they signed off on may have been based on an unconscious response: “Let me please.” That’s where I come in. I often help clients undo what they’ve done because they realise it was a people-pleasing response, one they had a blind spot around.

That’s one of the biggest reasons for psychotherapy: we all have blind spots, enormous blind spots. Free will is overrated. When you see what I’ve seen in the therapy room, you understand that free will is overrated and that we often run on scripts and templates. It’s hard to watch, but it’s critical that we realise those patterns.

Yes, Richard, I do believe that pattern shows up more often in women than in men. But other patterns show up more often in men. For example, working long hours can be a shame response. Workaholism often appears more in men, and that can be an acute avoidance of deep shame, the feeling that they don’t matter.

I hope that answers your question, Richard. David, I don’t know if you want to add anything.

‍David Werdiger: Yes, I do. I also want to pick up on a couple of things you said. I love that line about free will.

So much of what we do is driven by what’s under the hood, the subconscious, and that includes attitudes to money. We’ve all got a money psychology, a money script. What does money mean to you? That’s a product of our upbringing, and it drives our financial decisions.

For some people, money is safety. For some, money is opportunity. For some, money is freedom. But for some, money represents an absentee workaholic father. If you grow up around that and develop that script without being consciously aware of it, it will drive you. The work that Tom and I do, Tom obviously in a therapy environment and I in more of a governance and family enterprise environment, is to bring those things into consciousness.

Only once something is conscious can you actually have the self-awareness and capacity to change it. First, you have to be aware of it. If you’re not aware of it, you’ve got no chance of changing it.

So understanding what money means, what wealth means, matters. And I’ll remind everybody that the original meaning of the term wealth is wellness, not just money and not just financial wellness.

Back to the original question, which was about gender: yes, absolutely. It very much depends on family culture. Families still tend to be, even in a country like Australia, quite patriarchal. That can mean glass ceilings for women within families. Birth order is also a factor. And, of course, surname matters too. Sometimes women don’t end up with the family surname. All of these things are factors. So yes, gender can be quite significant.

‍Q&A: Why Venting Does Not Heal

Tom Skotidas: Thank you, David. Narell asked, “If venting is not helpful, how come?”

Narell, from a clinical perspective, venting is unfortunately often a replaying of the templates we developed growing up for dealing with core emotions. There are four major emotions that, if you can communicate through them and withstand the physical impact they have on your body, you can heal and relate well: joy, sadness, fear and shame. Those are the big four. They are biological body signals that help us survive.

Venting is usually, almost always, a secondary emotional approach. Anger, contempt and withdrawal are the big three avoidance mechanisms, and they are often what show up in venting.

Why? Because they are avoidant moves. The question is: what are you avoiding? Usually, you’re avoiding a deep-seated fear, shame or sadness that is hard to sit with. Because those emotions felt dangerous growing up, because they were pushed out of you verbally or physically, you move to secondary emotions. They become refuge emotions: anger, contempt and withdrawal.

So venting has only very brief value. It lasts about five minutes. It can feel pleasurable in the moment, but from a clinical point of view it brings no real benefit unless you are in a mentoring or consulting context trying to work out business strategy.

On an emotional and interpersonal level, in my opinion and in my work, venting helps zero per cent beyond a few minutes of relief. It actually continues your lack of self-mastery. And that self-mastery is required if you’re going to shine. It requires actual engagement with the person or entity you’re venting about.

That’s my view.

‍Q&A: Founder Identity, Exit and Emotional Preparation

David Werdiger: I’m going to speak to Jason’s question.

Jason’s question about enmeshment is interesting. Do business founders struggle through transitions or exit because their identity is linked to the business? And when is the right time to address that?

Identity and family business are so important. I’ve founded several businesses and sold several businesses, and I went through this myself. The business is often an embodiment of your personal values. You hire people around you who are similar to you, and you create something that is almost like a whole being. It’s all about you as the founder.

Families that are heading towards an exit may hire McKinsey, if they want to spend a lot of money, and McKinsey will help them with the financial, operational and structural aspects of the business. But they won’t help them with the emotional aspects.

The business is a financial asset for the family, yes, but it is also tied to the identity of the family, and particularly to the identity of the founder. If your business is everything, then you’ve got to ask yourself: who am I without my business?

To Jason’s question about timing, it is very important to do this work early enough in the process so that you are prepared for that moment, the liquidity event, the change of control. The last thing you want is the day after settlement to have a large amount of liquidity in your bank account and a matching hole in your heart because you feel a loss.

I experienced this myself when I sold my last operating business last year. I had an internal moment where I thought, “They don’t want me any more.” Then I reflected and said, “Hang on, I’ve been working on this for 20 years: first, to make sure this business would be worth something to somebody else, and second, to know what’s next for me.”

That’s the work founders need to do, and families need to do, to individuate and to say, “Yes, I am more than this business.” But most importantly: what comes next?

It is the fear of the unknown, of what comes next, that holds families back from making these transitions. That applies across the board, whether it’s wealth transition, selling an operating business, or any major change. Uncertainty about the future is what makes us procrastinate. It makes us unhappy.

‍Tom Skotidas: And I’d add to that, David, that if a client of yours is thinking of selling and they’re stalling your work as an adviser, from a specialist psychotherapy perspective I would invite the client into a session of pre-mourning.

I haven’t used this yet with a business family, but I would if it came up. In psychotherapy, pre-mourning means identifying that there will be a loss. For example, if a parent is ill, you might intentionally create a quiet afternoon where you engage in pre-mourning rituals to build resilience for what is coming.

It’s the same with a business.

I’ve also done this with private therapy clients who are trying to work out, “Do I stay or do I go? Do I move to Sydney or Melbourne? Do I leave my spouse or stay?” I’ll interview two parts of them. I’ll interview the version of them that sold the business 12 months ago. “How’s life? What happened?” Then I’ll interview the version that held on to the business. “How’s life? It’s been 12 months since I last saw you.”

That might sound ridiculous. How do you speak as your future self 12 months from now? Again, many clients say, “I have no idea.” But two minutes into it, they’re talking as though it really has been a year.

These are examples of interventions I recommend because they tap into something deeper and allow the expression of things that have been unsaid, or not even consciously known.

‍David Werdiger: So, to add to that, one of the things I do is use the construct of the rite of passage. This is very important in transitions of all kinds. It’s usually associated with becoming an adult, but it also applies to the death of the patriarch or matriarch, or the transition from an operating business to a non-operating structure. These are transitions, and rituals give us comfort in dealing with them.

The other thing is coaching people to design the future for themselves. I don’t usually use one year. I use five to ten years, and for families I often use 25 years. Imagining the future and having tools that engage not just the head but the heart is what matters.

‍Closing Remarks

Tom Skotidas: David, thank you so much for collaborating with me today. It’s been a privilege. Team, that’s our session today.

‍David Werdiger: Thanks very much, Tom. This has been everything I expected and more. I hope everyone else enjoyed it and got something out of it.

‍Tom Skotidas: Thanks again everyone - have a great day.