This is a guest post by Veronica Yepez Reyna, an expert in the family dynamics of family enterprises. Veronica is the founder of Perpetum Family Office, an MFO located in California that serves global family enterprises based in Latin America in most matters related to their wealth, other than investments.
It’s early in the morning and I am watching my little boys play in our living room as I try to calmly ease into the day and sip my coffee. It’s impossible; they are six and three and “calmly” rarely seems to define a moment next to them. Instead, their energy flows around the house loud, intense, and strong.
The boys are running around the house chasing each other, laughing and making very loud dinosaur roars. They fall, they cry, and carry on endlessly. One of them is holding a little toy sword and the other one has a dinosaur mask. They come to me and make carnivore noises too close to my face while forcefully hanging to my neck as they pretend to be attacking a brachiosaurus. It all feels so “orange”, a certain way for me to describe the strong and masculine energy that I experience next to them. In the Values Edge system, orange is the color for values like power, growth, achievement, and winning.
In the midst of their running, screaming, and jumping I catch myself longing for a daughter, thinking how life in my household would be with another girl who could bring more of the feminine energy. To be honest, my first thought is about tutus, dresses, ponytails, dolls, and all things pink. But after a minute, my longing for the feminine is clearer; what I am referring to is softness, receptiveness, compassion, vulnerability, intuition, and openness. To feel more “teal”, (code in the Values Edge for stability, loyalty, and conformity) a certain way for me to describe the caring and feminine that I experience next to my nieces.
Fighting Stereotypes
At that point, my youngest son runs towards me and carefully climbs on my lap. He takes my arm and places it around his chest, he wants to be calmed and cuddled. He is a loving and sensitive soul who often looks into my eyes softly and gifts me with moments full of tenderness. Our hearts connect, even when his language is limited, he makes me feel seen and loved in such a compassionate way.
My oldest son asks me “Mummy, is there something bothering you?” when he feels that I am upset, even if I haven’t said a word or made a sound. He’s intuitive, receptive, caring, and he showers me with kisses and massages my back to make me feel better. He often tells me how he’s feeling in complete openness and listens to my advice on how to handle some of his feelings.
I catch myself placing my sons in the same little boxes I have fought all my life to avoid, stereotypes of what men and women are supposed to be or do. I was unconsciously attaching the idea of the “orange traits” to the boys and the “teal traits” to the girls. In reality, at their young age, my boys don’t express themselves solely in “orange”, they also reveal traits that are often identified with the female energy; they are “allowed” to be soft, caring, compassionate, vulnerable, and open.
I don’t want this to change and I fear at some point they may trade the expression of those qualities to fit a professional world that still praises and promotes role models that behave as “alpha males”.
I don’t want my boys to be forced to reduce the spectrum of feelings and ways of being that they have been gifted to fit in a small selection of those that are acceptable and admired in organizations that are broken and incomplete. Our society and our organizations need the richness my boys and so many others hold in their hearts—whether orange, teal or any other color: connected, unlabeled and unboxed.
Rewriting What It Means to Be Successful
I have been working for more than two decades with Founders of very large and complex family enterprises (most of them male) who have reached extraordinary financial success. The majority of them have thrived through the traditional definition of success, guided by achieving in the “outside world” where others can see the outcome of their work, a way of being that supports winning in competitive situations and taking control over what is happening.
They often lead their families and their enterprises through an individualistic pursuit that conveys power, respect, ambition, performance, dominance, and winning (a very orange way of being). Like many around them, I admire their lifetime work; they become giants and their enterprises result in entire platforms that support the lives of thousands of families.
During the intimate setting of individual sessions with these Founders and their families, I can also see the pain behind their alpha male, or “orange” focused lives. There is a tremendous cost for most of them, their families, and their employees because at some point their being became a robotic “doing”: incomplete and unfulfilling.
I witness how often they have lost connection with themselves; they want to reconnect with their being, their natural unwounded masculinity, and their other non-orange traits that may not have gotten them to their financial success, but that are crucial for their survival, fulfillment, and search for purpose. Their family enterprises most often mirror the Founder and we find them incomplete, myopic, and a little bit broken too.
What Gives Me Hope
Some of the Founders we work with are at the late stages of their lives and working on the generational transition of their enterprises. At that point in their lives, some of them are more open and reflective; if we are very lucky, we get to work with a rare Founder that wants to evolve and leave a richer legacy. Those are the projects we thrive for: when the Founder can see himself as an interconnected living system that wants to flourish and open the door for different ways of being and doing.
These Founders truly want to bring their daughters to the table where decisions and the future of their enterprises are shaped. They want to see the “wholeness” of their sons and not only an egocentric reflection of themselves. Founders that want to allow the whole intelligence that their families possess (either masculine, feminine, orange, teal, or any other color) to be seen, heard, and to work together in order to leave something better in this world and live their last stages of life in connection and growth.
Those are the Founders who make me believe that our organizations can have a noble purpose, that as an ecosystem we can achieve richer enterprises that focus not only on performance but also on interconnection and growth, that my boys and yours will find a place where they can not only be successful as “orange” but also share their intuition, receptiveness, connection, emotional intelligence, inner growth, and many other gifts.
These Founders keep my faith that there can be a world where our girls no longer have to fight twice as hard to be seen and heard only because they are not considered aggressive, strong, or orange enough. These Founders make us work hard to help them on the process, but the work is worth every single hour.
About the Author
Veronica Yepez Reyna is an expert in the family dynamics of enterprising families with more than twenty years working around the world, helping some of the most affluent and influential international families align with their full potential.
Her experience spans a breadth of family wealth disciplines from cross-border and inter-generational transfer of wealth strategies, fiduciary practices, next generation empowerment, family office architecture, and succession planning and governance for families and their businesses.
Veronica is the founder of Perpetum Family Office, an MFO located in California that serves global family enterprises based in Latin America in most matters related to their wealth, other than investments. Perpetum’s work focuses on connecting the operation of ownership structures with the human component, helping enterprising families elevate their conversations and decision making.
Veronica has earned the reputation of “NextGen Whisperer”. As the founder of the Center for the Next Generation at Perpetum, she has spent hundreds of hours listening and supporting the inheritors of family businesses and enterprises to find their voice, create efficient strategies to fulfill their purpose, and build strong family relationships.
She designed a unique program for Board Preparation of Family Members certified by the Mexican Stock Exchange (BIVA) and she co-founded the WorldWide Women’s Council (W^3C) where leading female inheritors find a space to raise. She sits on the board of The US – MX Business Association (AEM).
Veronica’s dad was the founder of a very successful business that was lost due to negative family dynamics. At 11 years she saw her dad lose his family business and more importantly, the relationship with some of his siblings for the rest of his life. It has been her mission to bring the right tools and help families avoid a destructive loss of their legacy.