Your Mother’s Birth Is Already in Your Leadership – Here’s How to Find It
Alexia developed the Head Trash Clearance Method and has spent two decades helping women – many of them senior leaders – trace where their fear, control and authority patterns actually come from.
Somewhere in the way you lead, there is a story about birth that isn’t yours.
It might be your mother’s: the induction that went on for two days, told at family gatherings in the voice people use for things they’ve decided to find funny. It might be your grandmother’s, which you only ever heard in pieces. A difficult labour. A baby who didn’t make it. A silence around the whole subject that told you plenty. Or it might not be a birth story at all, in the obvious sense. It might just be a message you picked up early, so early you can’t say where from: that your body lets you down under pressure, that control has to be fought for and can go without warning, that the people who are supposed to help you don’t always tell you the truth.
You didn’t choose it. You inherited it, the way you inherited your colouring or your habit of over-preparing for meetings. And there’s a good chance it’s quietly at work in decisions you make every week. Not about birth. About work.
The pattern I kept seeing
This isn’t mysticism, and it isn’t an excuse. It’s something I watched happen often enough, over enough years, that I stopped putting it down to chance. How a woman relates to authority – whether she trusts her own body under pressure, whether she believes the people with power over her have her interests at heart – has often been shaped by a birth story that happened a generation before her, and that she took in before she had the words to question it.
A woman who grew up hearing that her mother wasn’t listened to will often have a sore spot about being dismissed at work that goes deeper than whatever set it off this time. A woman whose family told birth as a cautionary tale – this is what your body might do to you – will often carry a quiet watchfulness about her own body, and manage it by keeping a grip on things at work that most of her colleagues wouldn’t bother about. A woman who grew up with silence rather than a story sometimes finds she has no language for her own overwhelm either, so she performs competence until something gives.
None of it is fixed. All of it can be traced. That’s the part nobody tends to mention.
Why this is Head Trash, not therapy homework
I built the method because I was tired of watching capable women spend years on generic anxiety management – breathing exercises, reframing – aimed at symptoms whose root nobody had gone looking for. It rests on a simple idea. A feeling that keeps coming back usually has a specific starting point, and once you find that point clearly enough, the feeling stops running by itself.
In practice, you start pulling on a thread. You think you’re dealing with one thing, say control, and you tug on it and find it’s tied to something else, and that to something else again. It’s a bit like a magician’s hat. You pull out a yellow handkerchief, and behind it there’s a purple one, and behind that another, and for a while it feels endless. Clients often describe it as a knot in your hair: you keep working at it until you arrive back where you started, and then the whole thing comes loose. Getting back to the start is how you know you’ve found it.
One thing I insist on is that we use your words, not the tidy clinical ones. If what runs in your head is “I don’t like rocking the boat,” we keep that. We don’t quietly translate it into “I struggle with assertiveness,” because the charge is in your phrase, not mine. It can be a word only you understand, or one you made up. That’s still the right one. The words are only a marker anyway. They’re a handle for something held lower down, in the body, and the way you reach it is through the exact language your own mind uses to file it.
Put to birth, this is less elaborate than people expect. Often I just ask, outright, about the birth – theirs, and what they were told about it. I ask what they heard from their mother about how they arrived. I circle the subject and watch what surfaces. And a good deal of it is pattern recognition on my side: I’ve read a great deal about birth over the years, so when a woman describes something like not being able to finish, part of me is already wondering whether that’s a forceps pattern, and I can simply put the question to her. Your mode of arrival lays down a kind of emotional blueprint. It’s your first experience outside the womb, the first time you breathe air on your own, and whatever happens then tends to get written in more deeply than almost anything that comes after. Most women have never been asked to connect that to how they operate now, because nobody thought a story about their mother’s labour had anything to do with the way they run a team.
When you trace it properly, the pattern loosens. Not because you’ve had a pleasant chat about your feelings, but because your nervous system had been running on a threat template it built decades ago, and once you find that template you can update it. It’s the same work I do with tokophobia, further upstream.
What it looks like when the link lands
Three women come to mind, and they run three different flavours of the same mechanism.
The first was a director of operations, senior in her organisation and, by any measure, very good at her job. But she kept describing the same frustration. She could take something a long way and then stall on the final stretch. “I take it so far,” she said, “and then I can’t seem to do the last ten per cent.” She’d always been good at getting things done; it was the finishing – the part that makes something excellent, or complete, or properly kept up – that kept slipping away from her, as though it belonged to someone else. I asked her whether she’d been a forceps or ventouse birth. She wanted to know how on earth I could possibly know that. I didn’t, not for certain. But the pattern had a shape I recognised. A baby born by forceps or ventouse does most of the work of coming down the birth canal themselves, and then needs someone to help them over the final part. They get so far under their own power, and then something outside them steps in to finish the job. That was the template running under her career. She could do almost all of it herself, and then, without noticing she was doing it, she’d wait for something or someone else to complete it.
The second had a lifelong, almost principled objection to being on time. Not the ordinary lateness everyone has now and then – a real refusal. The idea of getting to a station early, to be sure of a seat and a coffee before the train, was faintly offensive to her. And she was no novice at this sort of thing: she’d trained deeply in NLP, to master-practitioner level, and NLP has a great deal to say about how people hold and react to time. She’d come at her time problem from every angle she’d been taught, across several modalities, and none of it had shifted it. When I asked about her birth, her mother – still alive – was able to fill in the detail. The doctors had wanted her born before the weekend and had encouraged an induction so she wouldn’t arrive at an awkward moment for them. She was, as she put it once she saw it, moved out early because it suited other people’s schedule. She hadn’t been ready. And she’d spent her whole life since insisting on arriving in her own time, when she was good and ready, which was exactly what she hadn’t been allowed to do the first time. That one surprised me – not because the mechanism was unusual, but because of who she was. She had every tool going for a time problem and not one of them touched it, because not one of them was aimed at where it actually started.
The third is someone I now work alongside – my co-host, and the editor of this publication, JJ. She was born with the cord wrapped around her neck, a blue baby who couldn’t breathe on her own and needed help in the NICU simply to live. For most of her life that fact sat in the background, connected to nothing. What it produced, though, was a very particular pattern. She was never short of ideas – businesses, books, websites, projects she genuinely wanted to make real. She started plenty of them. She finished almost none. Draft after draft, plan after plan, all waiting to take shape and never quite taking it. She hadn’t been able to breathe life into anything, which turned out to be an almost literal description: at her own birth she hadn’t been able to breathe life into herself either, and had needed someone else to do it for her. “Bring it to life” simply wasn’t one of her available settings, because it hadn’t been there the first time she needed it. When she healed the birth trauma at the root of it – and she was in her late sixties by then – the change was almost comical in its speed. A website she’d been circling for ages was finished in three days. She started the business. She’s finishing the book. It had all been sitting there, ready, the whole time.
None of these women came in looking for a birth story. They came in with a work problem – a finishing problem, a time problem, a starting problem – that had outlived every ordinary explanation anyone had offered for it. That’s usually how it goes. A pattern with a source is something you can work with. A pattern with no source just feels like who you are.
It runs forwards, too
Here’s the part I didn’t fully understand until I’d lived it. This inheritance doesn’t only travel backwards, from your mother to you. It travels forwards, from you to whoever comes next. That’s what changed my mind about doing the work early.
I did my own fear work – the tokophobia, the control, the trapped feeling – before I was pregnant. The themes that came up were the ones any child eventually leans on: control, being trapped, not being in charge of how things turn out. When I had my babies I had no family nearby to call at 2am, I’d already lost my own mother, and I read almost nothing. Most of it was me and my own instincts. My babies slept through the night from very early and weren’t especially difficult – not because I did anything clever, but because a lot of it had been dealt with before they arrived. They were born into a nervous system that was already in reasonable shape, rather than one running on low-grade anxiety while it carried them.
That’s not a claim about being a perfect anything. It’s a claim about regulation. Early on, a child borrows your nervous system to steady their own. They use your calm as the anchor until they can manage their own. If yours is steady, they have something to hold. If yours is all over the place, they’re a small boat trying not to be sick on a sea that won’t sit still. Doing this work is part of how you become the steady thing in the room – which is also, as it happens, what it makes you at work. The same nervous system is running both rooms.
What to actually do with this
Start with the story, not the feeling. Ask a parent, if you can and if it’s safe. What actually happened at your birth, and at theirs? Not the summary – the detail. Where were they, who was in the room, what were they told and by whom, and did they believe it.
Then look for the echo. Where at work do you need control more than the situation warrants? Where do you brace for not being believed? Where do you perform a calm you don’t feel, because somewhere you learned that showing real fear gets you managed rather than heard? These are rarely random. They tend to rhyme with the story you just asked about.
A word about where to take this next, and I want to be straight about it. If the birth you need to look at is behind you, the work is the work I’ve just described: find the story, then trace the echo. But if you’re reading this with a birth still ahead of you – approaching pregnancy, or weighing up whether you want to at all – there’s a more structured place to begin. The Birth Readiness Profile is the tool I built for exactly that: mapping what you’re carrying into pregnancy, birth and motherhood before you’re standing in the middle of it. It’s made for women at that point in the journey rather than as a leadership diagnostic – but if that’s where you are, it will give you language for what’s going on inside you a good deal sooner than you’d otherwise find it.
Your mother’s birth is not your fate. But it may well be in the room every time you walk into one. The women I’ve worked with who found that story and looked at it properly didn’t only change how they felt about birth. They changed how they led.
About the author: Alexia Leachman is the founder of Fear Free Childbirth and Fearless Birthing, and the creator of the Head Trash Clearance Method. Over two decades she has worked with directors, founders and senior leaders on the fear, identity and control questions that pregnancy and birth surface – and coined the Reproductive Anxiety Disorder (RAD) framework to name what she was consistently seeing in that work. She is the author of Betrayed By Your Biology and Fearless Birthing. More about Alexia ›
Fear Free Childbirth is a publication and is not a substitute for medical or mental-health care. If you’re struggling to cope or in crisis, please contact your GP, midwife, or a qualified professional.
Read next:
- The Working Woman’s Birth Fear Isn’t What You Think It Is
- Society Has a Plan for You the Moment You Become a Mother
Alexia supports families planning pregnancy and birth. She helps them to overcome their fears and feel calm and confident about birth and pregnancy.
Alexia also trains birth professionals in the Fearless Birthing, a unique approach to birth preparation that is ideal for those who have fears around birth.
- Society Has a Plan for You the Moment You Become a Mother. You Didn’t Agree to It. - 23rd July 2026
- Your Mother’s Birth Is Already in Your Leadership – Here’s How to Find It - 23rd July 2026
- The Working Woman’s Birth Fear Isn’t What You Think It Is - 23rd July 2026