👋 Hi my name is Roslyn, I’m a 2x founder and executive coach. I help founders fall in love with building their companies again. Learn about working 1:1 here.

Hi there,

I’m so happy to be in your inbox today. Although I am one day late!

This is something my inner perfectionist probably would have used to feel uncomfortable about. But, because of Parts Work — the topic of today’s newsletter — my inner perfectionist has chilled out a little bit lately.

Today as we kick off the inner work of building startup teams, we’re starting with Parts Work:

• What is Parts work?

• How can Parts work support founders in most of the team building challenges they face?

• How do you practice it?

This is a modality that has been greatly benefiting my clients. And, as I talk about in the last section of my deep dive, it’s been meaningfully changing my own life in recent months.

I can’t wait to share more.

Where we go deep on the outer work or the inner work of building a startup.

Parts Work for Leaders

As we shift gears from the outer work to the inner work of leadership, I’d love to start off with a modality that can be incredibly supportive to many aspects of navigating challenging leadership dynamics and moments: Parts Work. 

Parts Work is a therapeutic and coaching approach that helps people explore and integrate the different “parts” of themselves — the inner voices, roles and personalities that make up their inner world.

We all have multiple parts inside of us. For instance:

• A perfectionistic part that pushes us to achieve

• A fearful part that wants us to avoid risk

• A people-pleaser part that tries to ensure we are liked by all

In my experience of coaching founders, I find that some of the most common challenges that come up are around how to skillfully navigate relationships with teammates. 

Part of what makes these situations challenging is the involvement of their Parts. 

For instance:

• When navigating an employee’s raise request, a founder may have a people-pleasing part arise that wants to keep that employee happy and pleased with them as a leader. They may also experience a fearful part, who’s concerned with running out of money and worries about giving this raise. And another fearful part, that’s scared that if they don’t give their employee the raise, they’ll quit. And maybe they also experience a perfectionistic part, that doesn’t think the employee’s work is excellent enough to deserve a raise. 

• When trying to delegate more work, a founder might have an inner perfectionist come up that says things like “They can’t do it as well as I can” or “I’ll just have to re-do their work”. They may also have an overwhelmed part that knows they need to start delegating work in order to stay sane and focus on what matters. These two parts that want opposite things can leave the founder feeling frozen.

• When starting to lead a bigger team, a founder might have an inner critic who doesn’t think they know enough, or come across enough “like a CEO should”. This inner critic keeps the founder from admitting when they don’t know the answer. Or it pushes the founder to exchange their authenticity for a mask of a more “professional” or “buttoned up” leader, which feels forced.

You get the idea. 

Let’s take a step back and talk about how these parts emerge in the first place.

PARTS WORK 101*

HOW DO OUR PARTS COME TO BE?

Our Parts form when we are emotionally wounded, during the formative years of our personalities, from birth to ages 9-12 (or older, in traumatic circumstances).

In these instances, we inwardly split into a Part that remembers feeling hurt (a Hurt Part) and a Part that tries to keep you from ever feeling that way again (a Protector Part).

Hurt Parts remember what it’s like to feel emotionally wounded and how hard it was for you to deal with that at the time. Some examples of emotional wounding you may have experienced include feeling: unlovable, worthless, criticized, rejected, shamed, bad, inadequate, humiliated, unsafe, abandoned, powerless, unseen, not good enough (and many more).

Protector Parts try to protect you from ever feeling hurt again by keeping your Hurt Parts hidden. There are two kinds of Protector Parts:

• Proactive Protectors that use controlling and managing strategies to protect you from experiencing the wounding remembered by your Hurt Parts (think inner perfectionists, inner critics, inner harmonizers, inner controllers).

• Reactive Protectors that come to rescue you when Proactive Protectors fail by numbing or dissociating. This makes you unable to feel hurt, but it also makes you unable to feel anything at all (think behaviors like drinking, overeating, scrolling social, distracting yourself, putting a wall up and numbing out).

POSITIVE INTENTIONS, NEGATIVE SIDE EFFECTS

As you can see, your Parts have positive intentions. They want to keep you from feeling hurt ever again. However, Parts also create unintended negative side-effects when they get triggered. 

The negative side effects of Hurt Parts is that you identify with being hurt or wounded and are caught in recurring reactions to your history. Every time you get hurt again, it just reconfirms the self-deficiency you learned from your original wound. As a result it’s hard for you to be sensitive and responsive to what’s happening in the present. 

The unintended negative side effect of Protector Parts is that their defensive tactics often wind up hurting you in some way and blocking you from embodying your innate resourcefulness, creativity, connection and wisdom. 

For example:

• The people-pleaser pushes the founder to approve a raise that doesn’t make sense based on the company’s finances nor their broader compensation policy, meaning it's not fair to other employees.

• The perfectionist keeps the founder from ever delegating energy-draining, time-consuming tasks, so that she can be freed up to do higher impact work. Her progress on strategic priorities slides and she starts to burn out.

• The inner critic keeps the CEO from showing up vulnerably and authentically with her team, and as a result, their trust in their leader starts to erode. The culture becomes one where everyone masks up and avoids asking for help or admitting when they don’t know the answer.

So as you can see, the intentions are positive, the consequences are often negative.

Plus on top of that…

IT’S HARD TO SEE CLEARLY

It’s hard to see the world as it truly is when we have these constellations of Protector and Hurt Parts that we unconsciously identify with and project onto others. Through this lens, the world feels threatening and hurtful and so our natural tendency is to act in protective ways. 

• We avoid taking risks, even when those risks are key for upleveling. 

• We avoid displeasing others, even when clear boundaries and honest feedback are necessary for trust and progress.

• We avoid making investments that are critical for company growth. 

• We try to keep everything within our control, when delegation is needed for the next level. 

• We overwhelm our team by saying yes to too much work because we’re scared we’ll run out of money.

When we allow our Parts to unconsciously run the show, we struggle to perceive ourselves as we truly are. We fail to recognize our innate wholeness, resourcefulness and creativity, the qualities that will allow us to navigate the uncertainty and challenging moments that entrepreneurship presents.

So what can we do?

*These Parts Work concepts come from Steve March’s work for the Aletheia Advanced Coaching Program. 

WORKING WITH PARTS

Parts Work works by noticing your Parts and relating to them from Presence (or Self as it’s referred to in Internal Family Systems), allowing them to be seen, understood, loved and valued exactly as they are. 

DEVELOPING AWARENESS OF PARTS 

A helpful first step for starting to understand and work with your Parts is simply to identify them.

When a Part gets triggered, it pretends to be all of you. You fully identify with the Part. So you may notice “I’m feeling [self-conscious, nervous, frustrated] or “I’m trying to [get them to like me, make sure this email is perfect, end this conversation]”. 

So the first step is to notice how you’re feeling and thinking, and then change the wording to recognize that this isn’t you, it’s just a part of you. 

For example:

• I’m noticing a part of me is feeling self-conscious. This part is trying to get them to like me by being overly friendly and helpful. 

• I’m noticing a part of me is feeling nervous. This part is trying to make sure this email is perfect so that we can try to get the best possible outcome.

• I’m noticing a part of me is feeling frustrated. It’s trying to end this conversation by shutting this person out.

See how you’re not identifying fully with the feeling and action? You’re recognizing this is just a part of you.

Exercise: If you want to build this muscle, try this. 

1. Over the course of your day, observe how you’re feeling, thinking and acting. (If you don’t pause and do this naturally, set a timer for a few times a day to remind you). 

2. Notice the Parts of you that are driving these thoughts, feelings and behaviors, and start to name them (like in the list above). 

3. Write them down. I personally like to keep a list of my Parts and their thoughts/feelings/actions in the Notes app on my phone. 

LOVING YOUR PARTS AS THEY ARE

The next step is to start to develop an empathic relationship with your parts. For this step, I would consider either finding a coach or therapist trained in Parts Work who can help you navigate this. Or, if you’d like to do this work on your own, I would recommend reading and trying the meditations in No Bad Parts or Self-Therapy and/or working through the Internal Family Systems Workbook.

I’ll still describe the next step here so you can get an understanding of what this work entails.

The next step is to relate to your parts from Presence, and love them exactly as they are without any agenda to change them. 

Presence is who you are at your best. When you land in yourself as Presence, you feel grounded and confident, resourceful and creative. You’re able to intuitievly take the lead in your own life.

You relate to Parts, first, by establishing contact with a Part. You might experience a Part as a sensation in your body, an emotion, an image in your mind’s eye, a voice in your head, or in some other way. A coach can help you ensure that you’re relating to this part from Presence, instead of from another Part. (Parts have relationships with one another, so if you feel annoyed with a Part, or notice you want to change it, this means you’re not relating to it from Presence, you’re likely relating to it from another Part.)

From there, you’ll want to get to know and develop an empathic relationship with your Part. Parts only ever unfold, soften and relax in an empathic relationship. Observation, rational analysis, and trying to change or improve them won’t work —  this usually just invites resistance and the Parts double down on their behaviors in response.

Instead, we let Parts be exactly as they are with no agenda to change them. In doing so, Parts can enter a relationship in which they feel safe, seen, and trusting of Presence. When Protector Parts feel this way, they often start to soften and melt, relaxing their protective behaviors. 

When Hurt Parts feel safe, seen, understood and loved by Presence, healing can occur. When we as Presence can be there for and care for Hurt Parts in ways that they didn’t receive at the time of the original emotional wounding, we’re actually able to edit the emotional learning that we retained from a memory. 

When our Protector Parts see that we’re able to be with these challenging emotions and to comfort these Hurt Parts from Presence, often they will see that they don’t need to do their jobs anymore.

Through this work we can literally reconsolidate our memories. We’ll still have the memory, but it won’t have the feeling of unbearable wounding attached to it, which means we won’t get (as) triggered by present day dynamics. And we start to relax the behaviors that try to protect from or avoid feeling that underlying sense of deficiency.

How incredible is that?

MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH PARTS WORK

I’m so enthusiastic about sharing Parts Work because I have seen firsthand and secondhand how transformational this work can be.

I’ve been practicing Parts Work over the course of the last year and my life is changing in a way that is so meaningful it’s hard to put into words. When I went through founder burnout, I developed this insatiable hunger to deeply understand and heal the parts of me that led to that painful experience. I pursued healing in so many different forms — coaching, nervous system work, meditation, plant medicine, breathwork, rage journaling, EMDR, family therapy, all the things. 

I desperately wanted to not move through the world in the way I had up until that point. 

All of those modalities have undoubtedly significantly contributed to my healing. But Parts Work is a practice that I have found to be both most accessible (with a coach/therapist AND on my own) and that I have felt immediate relief from. I have found that after one or two sessions, Protector Parts that have run my life for years and years — my inner perfectionist, people-pleaser, inner critic, controller, the parts of me that numb through alcohol and social media — have started to relax, to soften, to become less dominating. 

The controlling part that keeps me from getting back to sleep because it feels the need to run through my to-do list, has quietened.

The people-pleasing part that’s had me compulsively putting the needs and preferences of others ahead of my own has softened.

The fearful part that’s wanted me to stay hidden, small, and out of the public is starting to relax.

I’ve found I’m less inclined to reach for a sugary treat or glass of wine in order to dissociate from feelings I want to avoid.

If I’m honest, these parts haven’t completely disappeared. Many of them are still there, waiting in the wings. But at least they’re giving me the space to unfold naturally, instead of jumping into action out of fear or avoidance.

Through this work, I’ve also been able to more deeply understand the ways in which I have been hurt in my life and to care for those Hurt Parts from Presence. 

I have been able to access inner healing resources and wisdom through felt senses and images, and to drop into deeper levels of presence. This has left me feeling more whole, more content, more inherently worthy than ever. 

And I’ve witnessed this with my clients too. 

I’ve seen them experience new clarity and awareness of why they think and behave in the ways they do. I’ve seen them uncover and relate to Hurt Parts that have been buried deep in their subconscious. I’ve witnessed the emotion that’s been able to be felt, compassionately witnessed, and released. And I’ve seen them emerge on the other side with more lightness, more presence, and more wisdom. 

It has been an incredible privilege to experience and witness this moving work.

So with all of that said, if any of this resonates with you or you feel called to go deeper, I encourage you to take a step in this direction. 

I’ve shared resources in the next section where you can take a step — as big or small as feels right to you.

READ

• No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz: For if you want to go deeper on Internal Family Systems, a mainstream form of Parts Work.

• Self-Therapy by Jay Earley: All about creating inner wholeness using IFS through a step-by-step guide. 

• Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation. If you’re interested in learning more about memory reconsolidation, this book explains it.

LISTEN

• How to Handle Your Demons with Richard Schwartz on the 10% Happier Podcast

• Martha with Dr. Dick Schwartz on the Gathering Room Podcast

• No Bad Part w/ Richard Schwartz on the Psychology Podcast

HEAL

• Coaching: If you want to try coaching with Parts Work, you can book an informational session with me to learn more. You can find other Aletheia coaches (also trained in this methodology) here.

• Therapy: Find an IFS therapist here. Working with an IFS Therapist is more appropriate when you’d like to address Big T trauma (major events like physical or sexual abuse, violent crimes, death of a loved one) or complex trauma (repeated and prolonged exposure to traumatic events, typically involving interpersonal abuse, englect or violence).

• 1:1 Coaching: I want to help you fall in love with building your company again. Book a free coaching consultation to learn how we’ll work together on this.

• Group Coaching: Click here to stay in the know on when our next Within Group Coaching cohort launches.

• Let’s be friends: If you want to see more of the BTS of building Within and receive more tips and ideas on building with integrity, connect with me on LinkedIn and Instagram.

• Finally, tell me how you liked this newsletter. I read every piece of feedback.

Grateful for you being here!

With love,
Roslyn 💚