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Generational Influence

What can we learn from the generations that have gone before us?

I recently was sent a copy of a letter my mother wrote to my grandmother and great grandmother, just months after my birth. My mother had migrated to Australia, her family all in South America. Back then, no smart phones, no video chats, just letters and expensive international calls. The letter gave such insight to my mother as a new mum and how much she loved me. I got to share this letter with my children recently, as they remember my mother with very loving memories.  

I have travelled to South America many times to meet with my family and learn the stories of my family.  I love that I can ask some of the elders of my family about the stories of my grandparents, my great grandparents and my own mother and her growing up experiences. I have been able to draw a family diagram of the extended family, and I can tell you I have a lot of 5th, 6th and 7th cousins. One of my aunts even asked for a copy of this family diagram as she said I knew more than her about the extended family! 

Are you involved in a Family Office, or supporting a family enterprise or family succession plan? What about the idea of commissioning an oral history or visual archive project in which older family members share their life stories with younger ones. This helps to create both a lasting legacy and a context for genuine intergenerational relationships.  

I often say to people – every one’s story matters, and everyone’s family story matters.

Understanding our family story can help us be better leaders. Leadership is about being able to work well with people, lead people and be able to make decisions that are in the best interest of the group. A lot of people think a good leader is like a ‘lone wolf’ character, who is doing life on their own and making decisions without consulting anyone else. That they were just born to be a leader and don’t need anyone else in their orbit to help them in their leadership role. But what we actually know about good leadership, is that the people who know what their resources are, their own limits, and the people they can lean on and ask for help are the ones who really emerge as the leaders. They are clear about what they are willing to do and not willing to do, and what is okay and not okay. They have clearly defined principles, and are able to communicate them with others, without needing to have ‘one up’ on others or be in the ‘one down’ position either. They can just be themselves and let others be themselves too.

Not all of us learnt what good leadership is in our families that we grew up in. But when we get to work on understanding ourselves and ourselves in the contexts of our families better, then we can see better what the members of our family were up against in life, how they did the best they could with what they had. And then we don’t see the ‘devils and angels’ that we might have heard about at family gatherings. Instead, we see our parents as humans, with strengths and weaknesses…just like us.

What emerges is that we often want to work our own ‘self’, how we can manage ourselves better in our relationships, get clearer about our values and what is important to us. Then we get to emerge as a leader in our family, workplace, community, sports groups or places of faith. Seeing the bigger picture of our family story helps us understand ourselves better. We get to see the patterns across the generations and by understanding the generational influence it helps us understand ourselves and what we might want for the next generation and beyond.

I hope you get a chance to understand your own story better and your family story as well. I would invite you to get to know more of the stories of your family, the actual data of events in the family and to draw your family diagram as you explore who’s who in your extended family. How far back can you go in your family diagram?  I can go 4 generations back and then I get stuck for more information. Some people can go back more than 20 generations! 

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