If you attended the October Ancestral Echoes event, you’ll remember that your ancestral histories and how you relate to their stories affect how you show up in your own personal leadership. The level of unconscious connection you feel to past ancestors can influence your ability to break through challenges, navigate conflict, and really give your team and organizations you are part of the space to grow and evolve. 

This is incredibly relevant to our ability to find new pathways to lead from a place of freedom. In the last 500 years, our colonial experiences have tied us all together in incredible ways. Reconciling some of the experiences of our past, is tied to some of the most common leadership issues, like burnout, perfectionism, disconnection, and loneliness.  

As a coach, I spent many years chalking it up to the somatic muscles we need to build to navigate the internal voices that have developed over my time on this planet. But what if all the voices don’t belong to us? What if they are tied to the experiences of an ancestor we feel connected to, whether we knew them in this life or not? 

I know now that ancestors are often reaching out from the past, trying to get our attention, mostly because they have somehow been excluded or isolated from our family system. Sometimes, they are reaching out to help us remember that their historical experiences are not ours to relive. 

When you carry the weight of your excluded ancestors, you often pursue relationships where you can resolve what is not yours. Here are some examples:

• – Leaders who take on the role of parents in their family tree will exert command and control at work even when it’s not needed or wanted. 
• – Directors who acted as mediators among their siblings hide their point of view because it feels safer to avoid conflict than to express what they truly want. 
• – Staff who are afraid of not belonging will work until the project is “perfect,” leaving little room for other teammates to grow their own skills.

The symmetry of love in family constellations invites us to question whether these desires of control, perfection, and conflict avoidance exclusively belong to us. When we question if a behavior belongs to us and we find that it is not the case, we can release burdens of family history that do not belong to us and instead engage in a Balanced Exchange with our professional goals, mission, teammates, clients, and partners. 

A healthy organizational system is sustained by the dynamism of giving and taking. An imbalance—where one person consistently gives too much, or conversely, takes too much—creates systemic friction between coworkers, and that balance must be restored.

In organizations, businesses, and networks, conflicts around autonomy, power, and hierarchy are often at the center of systemic constellations that need resolution. These conflicts are born of the origins of organizational Founders and Directors’ own family systems, which often are connected to the same unresolved collective conflicts facing our businesses, projects, and government systems. 

In order to restore a balanced exchange, we have to understand some of the workplace archetypes we fulfill and how to navigate them. Here are three to get familiar with:

1. The Overgiver: Overgivers regularly face burnout. These leaders are often excessive caregivers, like those who may be the first to navigate systems for their family and then carry that pattern into their workplace. Overgivers are often challenged with questions of perfectionism, needing things to “happen a certain way.” Reconciling with questions of care and resetting the order of arrival in our family system often results in direct changes in behavior around control and perfectionism.  
2. The Unsatisfied: Those who are unsatisfied at work expect co-workers or leaders to give more than what they have available. When a coworker projects unrealistic expectations and tries to force others to adapt to how they “see the world,” that leader begins to exert judgment over others. Reconciling with questions of isolation and loneliness in the family system can be a key to resolving the need to judge everything, allowing that leader to expose more of their identity and generate deeper, more meaningful relationships at work.
3. Being Bigger than the Boss: Another form of imbalance exchange is refusing to “take” from predecessors (i.e., founders, managers, original project architects) due to personal judgments we have over the elders in our own family system. In family and systems constellations, it is so important to accept that you come from predecessors whom you may not agree with. It is the very nature of acceptance of difference in your family system that can teach you diverse ways to navigate radically different relationships and also to learn to ask for help from others. When you accept what is, you free yourself to make decisions that are in favor of the project, the systems, and the natural order.

By taking up your appropriate place in the flow of the organizational system and accepting what others are able to provide, you free both yourself and the entire collective to move forward with greater ease and clarity.

To learn more about how ancestors influence leadership, write to Ana Polanco at [email protected] or check out the upcoming launch of thelineagelab.org in 2026.

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