Last week, I started the series introducing all the “Parts” of me that I have met, nurtured and learned from during my journey to deep inner “Self-Leadership”.
This work became the cornerstone of what eventually grew into Living Oak Leadership.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FIRST INSTALLMENT.
As both a practitioner and a client of Internal Family Systems (IFS), this modality didn’t just improve my life in a surface-level. It altered it tectonically.
IFS helped me reorganized my identity. It helped me see my own growth rings… the imprints, wounds, adaptations, teachers and protectors inside of me not as flaws, but as formative layers of development and information.
Because of IFS, I can write this series from a place of integration rather than fragmentation. These parts are not liabilities. They are not just “wounded inner children.” As the founder of IFS, Dick Schwartz, says in one of his most profound teachings: there are No Bad Parts.
They are the very rings that formed my triggers, protective layers, strengths and abilities… all of it! And now I have relationship with those parts and learn more about them each day.
They are what allow me now to be a wholly embodied Self, leading from clarity, compassion, courage, confidence, creativity, and calm… instead of operating as a constantly triggered stick of dynamite waiting for the next spark.
(I’m a Jersey Italian girl, so trust me when I say I was like a loaded gun 24/7 for much of my life!)
It is because of this work that I can truly unlock my leadership clients as well.
Strong outer leadership requires integrated inner leadership.
This second installment of what I call my “Oak Leaves” series is about the importance of Internal Family Systems in helping me identify all of my parts and how without it, I would never have built the kind of deeply aware relationship with my Self-leadership, which allows me can teach it and hold space for others.
IFS has unlocked my clients when traditional executive coaching hit a ceiling.
It has helped break generational cycles that no amount of performance strategy could untangle.
It creates strong inner leaders and strong inner leaders become conscious, effective, emotionally regulated leaders of people.
I believe we need that right now more than ever.
In the first installment, I introduced you to “Curly” my 3-year-old part who believed she had killed her eight-month-old sister by holding open the basement door the day she fell down the stairs. That imprint of “When I open doors, bad things happen” , followed me into adulthood. Every promotion. Every risk. Every expansion. Every time I reached a new height.
But this chapter is not about another “Freeze” response.
It is about the fire of knowing who you were meant to be and trying to convey that to the world.
This is where I met 5-year-old “Lil’ Blu”. Named after this famous blue velvet dress she was made to wear, and which is immortalized in a picture still hanging on family walls.
By age 5, I was beginning to know my own preferences and what I liked and what I didn’t.
I didn’t like dresses.
I liked to run.
I liked to move.
I had a deep inner sense of “knowing” I was loved and destined for big things.
It made Lil’ Blu feel at ease knowing that. She knew her purpose, even though she couldn’t verbalize it, she just knew it intrinsically.
Yet that year, she was required to wear corrective shoes due to a problem they said she had with her arches. (Turns out those shoes created a life-long chronic back issue. That’s a story for another day).
Forced to wear ugly, bright red, structured orthopedic shoes that felt louder than my voice. Not to mention, the hot and heavy blue velvet dress ….stiff, formal, constricting that she despised every time there was a holiday or an event.
It felt like being dressed for someone else’s idea of who I (“Lil’ Blu”) should be.
And yet…
Lil’ Blu never believed she was broken.
That’s the part that still undoes me.
She knew the shoes were for her good. She understood, instinctively, that the adults were trying to help her body align. She didn’t internalize the defectiveness. She didn’t collapse into shame.
But she also didn’t confuse her attire with her identity.
She had a quiet, immovable knowing.
‘I am here for something big. No matter what they tell me to wear or what to be.”
Not ego. Not grandiosity.
Just a calling.
It was as if she carried ancestral memory in her bones. Or a divine whisper that never needed proof. She felt guided. Placed. Intentional.
Not all we inherit harms us as much of popular therapy likes us to believe.
I am trained clinical therapist and traditional “talking therapy” does have its’ place in my opinion, but not until we know which parts exist and what actions they drive.
Most people think our youngest parts are fragile and need the protection. It’s often true.
But IFS taught me something radical.
Some of our youngest parts are our prophets, our guides.
They hold clarity before conditioning. They hold instinct before fear. They hold Self-energy before the world teaches us to outsource it.
Lil’ Blu was one of those parts.
And as I grew up… I abandoned HER, not the other way around.
As I grew, I developed coping mechanisms of:
- I traded knowing for approval.
- I traded clarity for caution.
- I traded intuition for corporate playbooks.
- I traded safety for being chosen.
In short, I let Curly’s fear of “opening doors” override Lil’ Blu’s certainty that I was meant to walk through them.
And she got angry.
Not hurt.
Angry.
During a healing retreat years later, I decided to write a letter to my five-year-old self. I expected to console her. To apologize for the shoes. The dress. The ways I assumed she must have felt small.
What came back stunned me.
She told me she never felt small.
She told me she never thought anything was wrong with her.
She told me I was the one who stopped listening.
And she was pissed about it.
Pissed that I shrank in rooms she would have owned.
Pissed that I diluted my voice when she would have spoken plainly.
Pissed that I confused fear with wisdom.
IFS teaches that there are no bad parts. Many of them are wounded, but sometimes we have parts that exist to remind us of our greatness, if we are open to the right kind of listening!
It also teaches that our parts are not problems to manage. They are relationships to tend.
Lil’ Blu did not need to be healed by me. She needed to be heard by me.
She needed me to take actions she knew we were destined to take. But for most of my adult, I chose safety and security over doing what was the right thing for me, that she was trying to tell me.
As I began consciously reconnecting with her, something profound shifted in my leadership.
- I stopped waiting for permission.
- I stopped apologizing for ambition.
- I stopped equating compliance with safety.
I began leading from the knowing I had at 5-years-old
Think about that.
Before the performance reviews.
Before the comparison.
Before the subtle corrections of “tone it down” or “be more agreeable.”
We knew. Our parts always know.
Lil’ Blu knew that a velvet dress could not define her. She knew orthopedic shoes did not mean she was defective. She knew restriction was circumstantial, not existential.
That distinction changes everything.
When I guide leaders through their own parts work, I see this pattern constantly. Beneath the hyper-achiever is a visionary child.
Beneath the perfectionist is a creative force.
Beneath the controller is a scared protector guarding brilliance.
And beneath all of it… there is always a part who remembers who they were before the world edited them.
Self-leadership is not about re-constructing confidence.
It is about restoring relationship with all our parts.
Lil’ Blu now sits as one of my Oak Leaves not as a wounded child, but as an advisor. She reminds me that divine knowing is not arrogance. That alignment feels calm, not frantic.
That big things are not achieved by shrinking.
She also reminds me that anger from a part is often grief over being ignored.
Today, when I feel hesitation rise… I ask her.
Are we shrinking again?
Her answer is rarely gentle.
And I am grateful for it.
Because in this growing council of parts…Curly, Lil’ Blu, and the many others to come, IFS did not fragment me.
It made me whole.
And the 5-year-old who once hated the blue velvet dress?
She is now the woman who helps leaders take off the costumes that were never theirs to begin with either.
What part of you should you be listening to more?
Stay tuned for the next chapter and meet 8-year-old Self.
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