The Generational Curse Stops With You

I was sitting in the audience at our XO Conference when someone asked me a question that lodged in my chest: 'How did you break the cycle?'

They weren't asking about productivity systems or leadership strategies. They were asking about pain. About generational patterns. About the things that get passed down—the wounds, the silence, the shame, the way we learned to cope when things got hard.

How did I stop the cycle so that my kids wouldn't inherit the same brokenness I inherited?

I didn't have a clean answer that day. But I've had years to sit with that question. And what I've learned is this: Breaking generational curses isn't mystical. It's just the courageous decision to stop and do something different.

What Generational Curses Actually Are

I'm not talking about supernatural curses. I'm talking about patterns. Behaviors. Ways of relating that get normalized because they've always been that way.

Maybe it's addiction. Maybe it's emotional neglect dressed up as independence. Maybe it's the way your father related to his emotions—by disappearing into work—and you're doing the exact same thing to your kids.

Maybe it's the way conflict was handled in your family: by exploding or by shutting down. And now you're doing one of those things with your spouse and your team.

These aren't curses in the mystical sense. They're just the natural outcome of living out the scripts we were handed.

The Pattern I Inherited

My story isn't unique in its pain, but it is specific in its pattern. I grew up in an environment shaped by addiction. That addiction showed up as absence and instability. The adults around me coped by working harder, achievement-striving, by convincing themselves that if they just succeeded enough, it would make up for the dysfunction.

I inherited that script.

I became a man who chased achievement. Who believed that success would somehow heal the wounds of my past. Who used busyness as a spiritual practice. Who was great at producing results and terrible at maintaining relationships.

And I was about to pass that same script to my kids.

The Decision That Changed Everything

I had to make a choice that sounds simple but felt impossible: I had to stop.

I had to acknowledge that the way I'd been taught to cope wasn't working anymore. I had to admit that my marriage was breaking under the weight of my dysfunction. I had to face the fact that my kids were learning from me how to relate to people—and what I was teaching them wasn't what I wanted them to carry forward.

That admission was humbling. It felt like failure. In many ways, it was.

But it was also the beginning of breaking the cycle.

What Breaking a Cycle Actually Takes

You have to see it clearly. You can't break something you won't acknowledge. I had to get honest about the patterns I'd inherited and the ways I was reproducing them. That meant therapy. It meant conversations with my family. It meant reading, listening, paying attention to moments when I reacted from a wound instead of responding from health.

You have to grieve what was. You can't move past pain you haven't processed. I had to mourn the childhood I didn't get. The father-son relationship I missed. The stability I longed for. Only after grieving that loss could I stop trying to make the present look like the past.

You have to do the work. Breaking a cycle isn't just about deciding to be different. It's about developing new skills, new responses, new ways of thinking about the world and your place in it. I had to learn what healthy communication looks like. I had to practice being vulnerable when every instinct told me to protect myself. I had to show up differently again and again until the new way became natural.

You have to repair the damage. If your cycle has hurt the people you love, you can't just change silently. You have to name it. You have to apologize. You have to ask for forgiveness and then actually change—not as a performance, but as genuine transformation.

With Irene, that meant saying: 'I see now what my absence did to you. I'm sorry. And I'm committed to showing up differently.' And then showing up differently, day after day, until she could trust it.

The Power You Hold

Here's what transforms the narrative from curse to calling: You have more power than you realize.

Every generational pattern stops with someone. That someone is often a leader. Someone willing to feel the discomfort of being different. Someone willing to admit their family's script was broken and write a new one.

That someone could be you.

And when you do that work—when you break the cycle—you don't just change your family. You change the trajectory of generations. Your kids inherit different patterns. They learn what healthy relationships look like. They learn that it's okay to acknowledge pain and get help. They learn that the past doesn't have to be prologue.

That's the power of breaking a generational curse.

Your Invitation

If you're reading this and you recognize a pattern you're carrying, I want to invite you into something: Don't wait for it to break you. Don't wait for a crisis. Don't wait until the cost is too high.

Start today:
1. Acknowledge the pattern. What cycle are you carrying? Name it specifically.
2. Get support. Find a therapist, a mentor, a trusted community. You can't do this alone.
3. Make one different choice. Just one. This week. Show up differently in one interaction.

The cycle stops with you. And when it does, everything changes.