The Leadership Language We Inherit: A Father's Day Reflection on Breaking Old Patterns
Amidst an incredibly busy week in New York, the Euda team and I carved out intentional time to attend the Future of Fatherhood Summit in Manhattan. The speaker lineup was stacked, but one insight from Dr. Becky Kennedy stood out: "The only thing that comes naturally in parenting is how you were parented."
She compared parenting to language acquisition. If we were raised speaking English and suddenly needed to speak Mandarin to our kids, we wouldn't expect fluency overnight. When under stress, we all revert to our native tongue ("back to English" as she puts it), no matter how much "Mandarin" we've been practicing.
As is so often the case with an insight like this, it’s not just for parenting.
When stress hits, we all speak our first language
Despite years of intentional work to become the father I want to be, I catch myself reverting to familiar patterns when pressure mounts. We all do this. Under stress, parents and leaders abandon the styles they've studied and fall back to how they were first parented and led.
I first encountered this concept in Marine Corps training. When complexity and time pressure spike, even experienced leaders make obvious tactical blunders, reverting to basic patterns despite knowing better. Neuroscience backs this up across domains. Schwabe and Wolf's 2009 study in the Journal of Neuroscience demonstrated that stress shifts our brains from flexible, goal-directed behavior to rigid habit systems.
Dr. Dan Siegel, who wrote "The Whole-Brain Child," explains this through what he calls the "upstairs" and "downstairs" brain. The downstairs brain (our instinctual center) is fully developed and active from birth. It handles fight-or-flight responses, strong emotions, and automatic reactions. The upstairs brain (responsible for rational decision-making, empathy, and self-control) isn't fully developed until our mid-twenties and goes offline under stress. Whether flying combat helicopters, leading business teams, or parenting, pressure can drive us back to our downstairs brain, even when our upstairs brain would recognize this as counterproductive.
Know yourself and seek self-improvement
One of my favorite Marine Corps Leadership Principles is "Know yourself and seek self-improvement." This principle acknowledges a fundamental truth: we can and do change and evolve. A setback under duress isn't the end of the journey — it's something we can prepare for.
This explains why carefully studied leadership techniques sometimes evaporate during organizational crises. Our leadership "training" may have begun before we ever heard of emotional intelligence. It started with how we were led throughout our lives. Dr. Becky's insight about self-compassion proves crucial here. She emphasizes that falling back to our "native tongue" isn't failure — it's neurology. Just as we wouldn't berate ourselves for accidentally speaking our first language under pressure, we shouldn't spiral into shame when we catch ourselves leading the way we were first led.
Marines under pressure fall back on their most deeply ingrained training: the patterns we practice until they require zero cognitive load. To be effective under stress, we must develop new skills not just to a cognitive level, but until they become much more innate. And we must forgive ourselves in service of personal growth when we fall short.
The Monday morning implications
So what does this mean for your next team meeting? Your next difficult conversation? Your next crisis?
Expect the reversion. When stakes get high, you'll likely default to the leadership language you learned first (probably from managers who themselves were figuring it out as they went). This isn't weakness; it's wiring.
Practice the language you actually want to speak during low-stakes moments. That feedback conversation with a strong performer is a perfect time to rehearse curiosity over control. The routine project update is ideal for practicing psychological safety over performance pressure. Military and aviation training have known for decades that skills must be "overlearned" to the point of automaticity to remain accessible under pressure.
Build environmental cues that trigger intentional rather than inherited patterns. Change your physical position during difficult conversations. Use different language to frame problems. Design your calendar to include reflection time before and after high-stakes decisions.
Practicing for the moments that matter
Dr. Becky's framework offers profound hope for parents and leaders alike: This is all learnable. We're not doomed to repeat the leadership patterns we inherited any more than we're stuck with the parenting we received. But it requires approaching the challenge with rigor and self-compassion.
The research converges on a simple truth: Under stress, our downstairs brain is ready and waiting to speak in our native tongue. The question for leaders is whether we're willing to put in the reps to become fluent in the leadership language we actually want to speak.
This Father's Day, I reaffirm my commitment to the practice, not to perfection. To catching myself mid-sentence when I hear old patterns overriding my intentions. To building the neural pathways that will serve every team I'll ever lead far better than my factory settings ever could.
The journey isn't easy. But as all good pilots know, the best time to practice emergency procedures is before the engine fails in flight. Our teams are watching, learning, and imprinting their own leadership language from every interaction we have with them.
What language do we want them to inherit from us?