If you Google the phrase, “Attachment Theory,” you’ll find much information. The concept was introduced to me in a book entitled, How We Love by Milan and Kay Yerkovich.

“Attachment Theory” at its heart, speaks of children watching parents or significant adults modeling for them ways of being in the world.

Children attempt to express emotions only to find that certain emotions cause the parents to be uncomfortable.  When the parents are uncomfortable, they take a couple of steps back – withdrawing their nurturing from the children as well. The children take note of that and say, “I won’t be expressing that emotion again.”

Perhaps it’s when a child is angry that the parent becomes uncomfortable and steps back. The child then learns to not show his or her anger. When that child grows up, they will have great difficulty showing anger. Their comfort zone will be very small around the subject of showing anger to others since they had so little practice in their home of origin.

In my role as an Executive Coach it’s not unusual at all for me to speak to people and ask them how they felt when a particular event occurred.  Some will then stare back at me blank-eyed. I will show them this poster and tell them that they can “take their pick from any of the emotions that are there.” And they’ll look it over. And sometimes they’ll say, “Well, I guess I felt confused.”

Here is a situation where they had not practiced that feeling nor the expressing of that feeling of confusion. They weren’t comfortable with the feeling of being confused. They probably weren’t allowed to express it or have it modeled for them by significant parents in their past. And consequently, their comfort zone around that was very small.  They might not even have had a vocabulary for that emotion.

Our comfort zones are shaped by our family of origin, unless there’s a traumatic event in our life, which also can have great influence over the shaping of our comfort zones.  As a result of their experiences, they may grow up to be avoiders. For example, the husband whose wife comes and says, “I’m wanting to visit about this.” And the husband says, “I need to go work in my garage.”

He goes out to the garage. The wife comes out with a dish of ice cream. He says, “What are you doing here?” She says, “I thought you’d like ice cream.” He says, “No.” He does not want to talk about it. With that, she puts the ice cream down on the workbench, stomps into the house and slams the door. He takes a deep sigh. He goes into the house, follows her and they finally discuss it.

Here, you have an avoider, married to a people pleaser. The cycle gets repeated again and again. It becomes a pattern . . . a dance.  You might have a vacillator who gives nurture and then withdraws it. The more chaotic the home life, the greater the chance that you’re going to have a victim or a controller.

The more extroverted person seeks to control the environment by extroverting/dominating their control over the environment. The victim controls the environment by introverting and becomes a victim – controlling using that technique.

Attachment Theory speaks much to how our own comfort zones are created. As the leader seeks to grow, he or she must learn not only how their comfort zones are shaped, but how they’re going to expand their limited comfort zones.

Our comfort zones are limited intensely by what we saw in our home of origin. But they can’t be allowed to stay that way if a leader is truly going to expand his/her leadership skillset.

Categories: Response To Change

Tags: change