Where Your Patterns Come From

And why understanding the origin changes everything about how you lead

The morning after I arrived at the Hoffman Process, I went for a walk.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting from the week ahead. I knew I was in pain. I knew I was there to do some kind of deep work. I knew I had patterns — I’d been coaching long enough to know that much about myself. What I didn’t expect was what happened on that walk.

I noticed, for the first time, that every single thought I was having was about someone else.

What they needed. How they were feeling. What they thought of me. Whether someone was okay. What I should text someone to ensure a response. Every thought — outward. Not one pointed inward. Not one genuine check-in with myself. I didn’t even know what I was feeling. I just knew what everyone else was.

For a leadership coach who’d spent years helping others develop self-awareness, that was a significant moment of reckoning.

And it was just the beginning.

The car ride that started it all

A few days into the process, something surfaced that I hadn’t thought about in decades.

I was maybe nine or ten. My mom and I had spent the day at the mall — one of those good days, the kind you want to hold onto. Shopping, lunch, just the two of us. On the ride home I went quiet. Not sad. Not upset. Just... full. Needing to decompress the way some of us do after a lot of stimulation and connection (though I didn’t have this awareness at the time).

When we got home, my mom looked at me and said: “Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down? You’re tired.”

She was right. She knew before I did.

And she said it with love — because that’s who my mom was. Attuned, caring, always paying attention. There was nothing wrong with what she did. But in that moment, and in a hundred small moments just like it over the years, a quiet lesson got installed without anyone intending it: someone else will tell me how I feel. I don’t need to check.

So I stopped checking.

By the time I was an adult — a coach, a leader, someone paid to help others develop self-awareness — I had almost no access to my own inner world. I was brilliant at reading everyone else’s. I just had no idea what was happening inside me.

While I have not had children of my own, Koko is my greatest gift — my child in his own right. And even now, I hear myself saying the exact same thing to him – “you had a big day at the vet, lay down and rest.” It’s wild how this stuff sticks.

That’s not a personal failing. It’s a pattern. And like most patterns, it was formed by someone who loved me.

This is how patterns form

Here’s what I’ve come to understand after years of this work — both on myself and with hundreds of leaders:

Many patterns don’t form because something went terribly wrong. They form because something happened — and your young self made a decision about the world that made complete sense at the time. A conclusion that became a strategy for staying safe, loved, connected, or in control.

And then you grew up. And the strategy kept running.

In fact, once you’re an adult, this strategy starts to look a lot like your personality. Making it even harder to spot as something driving the car behind the scenes.

I have another example that makes this embarrassingly clear.

I fell off my bike at age five. Never got back on. My mom loved to remind me that after tumbling a bit down the hill, I made it very clear to everyone that was the end of the lesson. Done.

At age two I fell into a pool. I don’t remember it, but what I do know is I’ve feared water through most of my adult life — despite years of swim lessons, despite knowing cognitively that I can swim. My body didn’t care what I knew intellectually. Every time I got near open water, something older and faster than thought took over. The original moment of fear fired again.

This is what makes patterns so hard to override with intellect alone. You can’t think your way out of something that isn’t living in your thoughts. It’s living in your nervous system — in the automatic, instantaneous response that runs before you’ve had a chance to choose.

What this means for your leadership

Think about the leaders you know — or the leader you are — and look for this same logic underneath the behavior.

The leader who no longer takes the big swing because of one early, very public failure. The leader who over-prepares for every meeting because uncertainty has always felt like danger. The leader who reads every room brilliantly and can’t tell you what they actually need. The leader who gives endlessly — to their team, their organization, their direct reports — and quietly wonders why they feel so depleted.

These aren’t character flaws. They’re not even really personality traits. They’re strategies — formed young, reinforced over time, mistaken for identity.

And here’s the part that changes everything: the strategy made sense once. The child who fell off the bike and decided never again was being completely rational. The kid who went quiet in the car and let someone else name their feelings was learning how to belong. The young person who decided that performing, achieving, helping, or staying small was the way to be loved — they were right, in the world they were living in at the time.

The problem isn’t that you formed these patterns. The problem is that most leaders never stop to ask whether they still apply.

Curiosity, not blame

I want to be clear about something: this work is necessarily about going back and interrogating your childhood. It’s not about finding someone to blame — not your parents, not your teachers, not the coach who cut you from the team. Though when you do choose to unpack the past, working with a trained therapist can make all the difference

What I’m suggesting is this work is about getting curious — genuinely, compassionately curious — about why you are the way you are. My mom naming my feelings before I could wasn’t damage. It was love. The pattern that formed wasn’t her fault or mine. It was just what happened — and for a long time, it worked. Until it didn’t.

Ironically, it was losing her in my early 30s very suddenly to Cancer that began my journey of trying to figure out my own feelings. Talk about a catalyst moment.

When I finally understood where this pattern came from, it didn’t make me angry. It made me free. Because once I could see the origin, I could finally see the strategy clearly enough to ask: does this still serve me? Or is it time to update the code?

That question — asked honestly, without judgment — is one of the most powerful things a leader can do.

Not because it fixes anything overnight. But because it starts the process of leading from choice rather than from pattern. And when you do, you then get to lead from your core essence.

The Work of You

Think about one pattern you keep bumping into — in your leadership, your relationships, your work.

Ask yourself — where did it start? What was the original moment — or the quiet accumulation of moments — that taught you this was the way to be? What conclusion did your younger self draw about the world, about love, about safety, about what it took to belong?

You don’t have to have the full answer. You just have to be willing to ask.

That’s where the work of you begins.

If this resonates and you want to go deeper on how your patterns show up in your leadership, I have a FREE 30-minute reflection coming soon to help you determine the hidden layers running your leadership. In the meantime, for more on the Hoffman Process and what I learned there, listen to Season 1 Episode 4 [Breaking Free from the Patterns That Hold You Back] on The Work of You podcast.