My mum worked herself to the bone. Not because she was careless with herself, but because she loved us so much she didn’t think she had a choice.
It was 7 days a week, minimum 14 hr days. She kept an immaculate house. She made sure we had everything we needed. From the outside, she was doing it all. Noble, caring, sacrificing for her family.
But I remember something else too. The tiredness that lived behind her eyes. The way she’d sit down at the end of the day and there’d be this quiet exhale, like she’d been holding her breath for hours. The times she snapped at us, then felt guilty, then pushed even harder (herself and us) to make up for it. The way she put herself last in every single equation, so consistently that I think she stopped noticing she was doing it.
She never said out loud that this was what a good mother looked like. She didn’t need to. I was watching. I was learning. I was downloading the whole programme without realising it.
And then, about fifteen years into my own career, I caught myself sitting at my desk at 9pm at home, exhausted, guilty about working and not spending time with my husband, guilty about not being mentally there during dinner, snapping at my kids, pushing through, putting myself last in every single equation.
I had inherited something. And I hadn’t even been asked if I wanted it.
The Inheritance Nobody Puts in a Will
We talk about inheritance in terms of money, property, eye colour, maybe a family nose you’d rather not have. But the most powerful things we inherit are invisible. They are the unspoken rules of how life works. The beliefs we absorbed before we were old enough to question them. The emotional patterns we watched so many times they became our own default settings.
Things like:
Rest has to be earned. You prove your worth through output. Putting yourself first is selfish. Success requires sacrifice. If you slow down, everything will fall apart.
Nobody sat us down and taught us these things as lessons. They didn’t have to. We watched the adults around us live them out, day after day, year after year. And our young minds, which are wired to learn from observation, concluded: this is just how it is. This is what being a responsible adult looks like. This is what love looks like. This is what being good enough looks like.
The trouble is, most of us are still running those programmes right now. In the way we can’t switch off at the end of the day. In the guilt we feel when we take an hour for ourselves. In the belief that our value is directly tied to how much we produce. In the exhaustion we’ve normalised so completely that we’ve stopped recognising it as a problem.
We didn’t choose this. But we are living it. And here’s what keeps me awake at night when I think about my own clients and, honestly, about myself before I did the work.
Our children are watching us right now.
What Your Children Are Actually Learning From You
I want to be careful here because this is not about blame. Your parents did the best they could with what they had and what they knew. And so are you. But awareness is everything, because you cannot change what you cannot see.
Your children are not just listening to what you tell them. They are studying you. They are watching what you do when you’re tired. They are watching whether you eat properly or skip meals because you’re too busy. They are watching how you speak about yourself, whether it’s with kindness or contempt. They are watching whether you ever stop, or whether stopping feels dangerous to you.
They are watching whether you ever prioritise yourself without immediately apologising for it.
They are learning, in real time, what adulthood looks like. What success costs. What love requires of a person. Whether it is safe to have needs.
And I know that is an uncomfortable thing to read, especially when you are already trying so hard. But I think you need to hear it not as an accusation, but as an invitation. Because the cycle doesn’t have to continue. The inheritance doesn’t have to be passed on. That is entirely in your hands.
The Moment I Realised Something Had to Change
I was in the car with my kids. I’d been on calls most of the day, I was mentally still at my desk, and they were trying to tell me something about their day at school. Something that clearly mattered to them.
And I was nodding, but I wasn’t there. I was somewhere between the email I hadn’t replied to and the meeting I was already dreading tomorrow. I was doing what I had trained myself to do: be present enough to look present, while somewhere else entirely.
My oldest stopped talking mid-sentence. Looked at me. And said, quietly: “Mummy, you’re not listening, are you.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact. Calm, matter-of-fact, the way children say things when they’ve already accepted the truth of something.
That moment hit me somewhere deep. Not because I was a bad parent. But because I suddenly saw, with absolute clarity, what I was teaching them. That the people we love most have to compete for our attention. That presence is conditional. That being needed by work is more urgent than being there for the people who need us most.
I thought about my mum. About her tired eyes. About how I sometimes felt, as a child, that I had to queue up behind her responsibilities to get to her.
I had become the inheritance.
Breaking the Cycle Is Not About Doing Less
Here is what I want to be clear about, because the wellness industry has done a lot of damage with oversimplified messaging: breaking this cycle is not about abandoning your ambition. It is not about working less or wanting less or somehow shrinking the parts of yourself that are driven and capable and hungry for more.
Your ambition is not the problem. The belief that your ambition has to cost you everything is the problem.
The inherited pattern that says you must be exhausted to prove you’re working hard enough. That as long as everyone around you is okay, then that equals you’re okay. That you must be available to everyone else before you are allowed to be available to yourself. That you must put yourself last to prove you love your family enough.
That pattern is a lie. A well-intentioned, generationally transmitted lie. But a lie nonetheless.
Breaking the cycle means deciding, consciously and deliberately, to rewrite what gets handed down. It means doing the internal work to understand which beliefs are actually yours and which ones you simply absorbed without being asked. It means choosing, day by day, to model something different for the children who are watching you right now.
It means letting them see you rest without guilt. Letting them see you say no without falling apart. Letting them see you pursue something that lights you up. Letting them see you treat yourself with the same care and respect you show everyone else.
Because that, not the overwork and the exhaustion and the martyrdom, is what you actually want to leave them.
What It Looks Like When the Cycle Breaks
I want to tell you about a client I worked with. She came to me completely wrung out. Brilliant at her job, devoted to her family, and silently furious with herself for not being able to hold it all together more gracefully. She described herself as a hamster on a wheel, always moving, never arriving anywhere.
A few sessions in, she made a connection that changed everything for her. She realised that her relationship with overworking was not a time management problem. It was an identity problem. She had grown up watching her dad who worked relentlessly, and she had concluded, at some deep wordless level, that being a good person meant never stopping. That stopping was a form of failure.
Once she saw it, she couldn’t unsee it. Not just in herself, but in what she was passing on.
The shift didn’t happen overnight. But it did happen. She started building in moments of genuine rest, not as a reward but as a right. She started saying no to things that had been draining her for years. She had a conversation with her partner that was months overdue. And she started doing something small but enormous: she started letting her children see her switch off. Properly switch off. Laugh without distraction. Be there without the glaze of work behind her eyes. Letting them see her unfiltered.
Several months later, she told me her daughter had said to her, unprompted, “You seem happier, Mum.”
That is the inheritance worth leaving.
Where Do You Start?
The first step is simply noticing. Not judging, just noticing.
What beliefs about work, rest, worth and success are running quietly in the background of your life? Where did they come from? Do you actually agree with them, or have you just never stopped long enough to question them?
When your child watches you navigate a hard day, what are they learning? Not what you tell them, but what they observe. About how you handle pressure. About what you believe you deserve. About whether the people who love you get your presence or just your performance.
This is not comfortable work. But it is the most important work you will ever do. Not for your career. Not even for yourself. For the child who is quietly, carefully, lovingly watching you figure out how to be human.
You have the chance, right now, to change what gets passed down. To make the inheritance something worth having.
That starts with you.
If any of this landed somewhere real for you, I’d love to have a conversation, book a call with me here. The Freedom Assessment is also a good place to start: it takes about three minutes and will show you exactly where you’re stuck and what’s keeping you there. You can find it at happybunny.coach.