When Parenting Turns Inward

23 Oct

A client sent me a podcast to listen to recently with the subject line:

“This felt like a slap in the face.”

It was an episode about parenting and what happens when parents aren’t emotionally present.

I don’t have kids, but as I listened to it, it hit me too. It wasn’t really about parenting; it was about presence. About what happens when parts of us never quite feel met or nurtured. So instead of reflecting on how we raise children, I started thinking about how we raise ourselves.

The Inner Parent We All Need

None of my clients come to me for parenting advice. But they do come with the same quiet tension running beneath their personal or professional lives:

👉 The part of them that’s still seeking safety, validation, or permission and

👉 The part that’s trying to lead, decide, and move forward.

Those two parts, the inner child and the evolving adult don’t cancel each other out. They coexist. The real work is learning how to move from an internal battle to an inner partnership.

That’s what self-leadership really is. The ability to notice your inner landscape, regulate your responses, and meet yourself with both compassion and accountability. It’s rebuilding the inner architecture so you’re not led by old wounds or fleeting validations. Because even as adults who look competent on the outside, many of us are still waiting to feel safe on the inside.

The Mother and Father Within

In that podcast, the hosts drew a distinction between mothering and fathering. Not as opposites but as complements.

The mother soothes, regulates, and provides continuity. The father challenges, sets boundaries, and opens the world a little wider.

When either is missing, something in us grows lopsided.

But here’s the hopeful truth: as adults, we get a second chance.

We can relearn what it means to mother ourselves with gentleness and to father ourselves with structure in life, in leadership, and even in the workplace. Because the workplace is not separate from our inner world. How we handle feedback, navigate conflict, or support others all reflect the quality of our inner parenting.

Why This Matters at Work

As Individuals, leaders and professionals regardless of role, experience and age, we can all sometimes over focus on performance systems and strategy but underneath all that, people are still human. They don’t just need direction; they need presence.

In particular in work environments I am thinking of everyone but in particular new starters, people struggling with performance, colleagues returning from maternity or sick leave. Like infants forming attachment, we’re all scanning for cues not just what to do, but how safe it feels to belong.

If we deal out tasks but not presence, insecurity lingers long after onboarding ends.

When leaders of the self, in other words all of us embody both the nurturing and the challenging we can then hold space without overprotecting or controlling, our cultures then shift. People stop working to prove their worth, and start contributing from it.

This is where emotional resilience, relational clarity, and values-led leadership intersect. It’s what builds truly human-centred performance.

The Challenge (and the Invitation)

Let’s be honest, this isn’t easy work. We all overcorrect sometimes. We all sometimes lean too soft, too hard, too self-critical, too detached. Growth rarely feels graceful. But awareness is the doorway. When something lands with a sting, be it a podcast, a comment from someone we work with, a conflict with someone we love, what is needed is the pause and the reminder to ask of ourselves:

“What part of me is being called to grow up a little more? And what part still needs to be held with care?”

That’s the essence of self-leadership.

Not perfection but presence.
Not certainty but curiosity.
Not proving but belonging to yourself again.

Maybe that’s the real adulthood no one warned us about: we don’t grow up once.

We keep re-parenting the parts that need us most at work, at home, in every moment we choose to show up with presence and purpose. I help professionals and organisations build the inner architecture for self-leadership, emotional resilience, values-led performance and balanced integration of your past, present and future self. Because when we reconnect to ourselves, our inner father, mother, our values, our voice, our clarity, our desires with understanding and right relationship to self everything we need to lead fully begins to align. If you feel called to this work, let's connect and until then....