There are fears we learn through experience.

And there are fears we inherit.

I didn’t grow up in Venezuela, but Venezuela lives in my nervous system.

My parents did. They went hungry. My father was held at gunpoint more than once. Robbery wasn’t shocking, it was expected. Trust wasn’t a virtue; it was a liability. You learned quickly to pay attention, to stay alert, to assume safety could disappear without warning.

When my parents immigrated to Canada, they brought resilience with them. Gratitude. And fear, not the dramatic kind, but the quiet, practical kind that teaches you how to survive. The kind that becomes invisible because it’s so thoroughly woven into the way you move through the world.

That fear didn’t disappear when they crossed borders. If anything, it settled deeper.

Growing up, love and vigilance lived side by side. You listened closely to tone before words. You watched timing the way other kids watched television. You learned instinctively when to speak and when silence was safer. Consequences arrived faster than explanations ever could, so you learned to anticipate them instead.

At the time, I didn’t call this fear. I called it being smart.

I didn’t fully understand just how deeply my body had learned these rules until years later, the only time I ever visited Caracas myself.

On that trip, I experienced both extremes at once.

I remember immense beauty first. Long family gatherings that stretched late into the night, laughter layered over stories, food passed hand to hand with an intimacy that didn’t need explanation. I remember the landscape just as vividly, lush, alive, expansive in a way that made the world feel larger rather than smaller. There was warmth everywhere. A sense of belonging. The kind of richness that comes from being surrounded by people who know your history without you having to explain it.

And then, within hours, I watched someone get shot right in front of me.

Later on that trip, I went to a nightclub and instead of the familiar Canadian coat check I’d grown up with; hand over your jacket, get a ticket, no second thought, I encountered a gun check system. Weapons surrendered at the door, tagged, and returned on the way out. It was jarring and, at the same time, strangely unsurprising.

It was only later, in conversations with other people who grew up like me, in quiet moments of self-reflection, that I could finally name what had been running beneath the surface of every major decision I made.

Why I chose stability even when it felt suffocating. Why I hesitated before taking risks, even ones that made sense on paper. Why, despite building unconventional paths for myself, leaving secure careers, starting a business, choosing visibility, there were still moments when something inside me whispered: don’t go too far, don’t be too seen, don’t risk too much. As if visibility itself was a kind of danger.

Inherited fear doesn’t feel like fear. It feels like common sense. It feels like love.

Over the holidays, my husband and I took a trip we’d been dreaming about for some time. Bora Bora. Overwater bungalows suspended above water so clear and blue it almost didn’t look real. Stillness. Beauty. The kind of place that invites you to finally exhale.

I was giddy as I sent my father the photos and details. I wanted him to see what we’d be experiencing, to share in the excitement.

His response stopped me cold.

Those bungalows aren’t safe. You’re isolated. What if something happens? Who would help you?

He wasn’t trying to ruin the moment. I knew that immediately. He was protecting me the only way he knows how, by scanning for threat, by imagining the worst so I wouldn’t have to. It’s what his nervous system was trained to do decades ago in a place where danger was real and safety was never guaranteed.

Later, when I shared the exchange with my sister-in-law, she smiled knowingly. Her family is from Chile. They lived through Pinochet. The disappearances. The kind of history that doesn’t leave a nervous system, even when you escape it.

“My parents had the exact same reaction,” she said. “They were just as concerned about your beautiful bungalow as your father was. Everything felt too far. Too isolated. Too exposed.”

We laughed, but it wasn’t really funny. 

It was recognition. It was the sound of women who understood that the people who loved us most couldn’t help but see danger in paradise, because paradise had never been promised to them.

Just this week I watched Marcello Hernández’s Netflix special American Boy. There’s a moment where he talks about growing up watching the TV show Full House and realizing just how foreign that version of family life actually was.

On Full House, parents explain themselves calmly. Kids talk back without consequence. Everyone has feelings, discusses them openly, and hugs at the end.

He describes his own childhood: nothing like that. 

In the Latino homes he knew, homes shaped by immigration, instability, by the kind of survival that doesn’t leave room for lengthy emotional processing, there was urgency instead. Hierarchy. Consequence. Respect wasn’t negotiated; it was expected. You didn’t ask why. You did it because you were told to do it.

Marcello makes it funny, but what he’s really naming is something profound: we grew up in a different operating system.

And that operating system trained us for life long before anyone called it leadership.

Here’s what happens when you grow up this way:

If you learned early that mistakes have outsized consequences, then risk will always feel heavier than it probably is. You’ll calculate the downside longer than you calculate the upside.

If you learned that authority isn’t to be questioned, that dissent is dangerous, then speaking up in meetings will cost you something even if logically you know it’s safe.

If you learned that safety depends entirely on your behavior, your vigilance, your ability to read and respond correctly, then authenticity starts to feel like a liability. You edit yourself. You perform. You keep parts of yourself hidden because visibility has always meant vulnerability.

What looks like adaptability can also be self-editing. What looks like composure can also be containment. What looks like responsibility can also be fear-driven over-functioning pouring everything you have into managing situations that aren’t actually yours to manage.

And when fear goes unnamed, when it masquerades as professionalism or good sense, it doesn’t disappear.

It leads. It decides. It whispers.

This matters more now than it ever has.

This year, ICE raids happened in my own neighborhood. Not on the news, on familiar streets, near schools, near the coffee shop I visit. Even if you’re not directly impacted, your nervous system notices. Your body remembers.

You can’t unknow what it means to be watched.

You can’t unknow that safety can be conditional, that it can be revoked based on circumstances beyond your control.

You can’t unknow how quickly history can reassert itself.

We like to believe these things stay outside of work. That we can compartmentalize. That we can walk into the office and leave our bodies, our histories, our inherited fears at the door.

We can’t. We don’t.

Because leadership isn’t just strategic. It isn’t just about systems and processes and metrics.

Leadership is physiological. It’s embodied. It lives in the nervous system.

People don’t walk into the workplace without their history. They bring the houses they grew up in. They bring the people who loved them fiercely while teaching them to be afraid. They bring every lesson about safety and consequence that’s been coded into their cells.

And if we want to understand leadership, real leadership, the kind that actually creates change we have to start looking at the house.

Unlearning doesn’t mean rejecting where we come from.

It means something much more delicate: recognizing that we may no longer be leading from the same house.

The rules have changed. The room is different now. The instincts that once kept us safe, the hypervigilance, the self-editing, the strategic containment, may no longer need to run the show.

For me, unlearning has meant learning to notice. To catch myself in the moment when fear is inherited rather than current. When protection has quietly become limitation. When a reflex I developed at nine years old is still masquerading as wisdom in a boardroom.

It means catching my father’s voice in my head when I’m about to take a risk, and asking: Is this danger real? Or am I protecting a version of myself that no longer exists?

Marcello’s Full House joke lands so hard because it reveals something simple and uncomfortable: most mainstream leadership models assume a specific kind of childhood, a particular kind of system, a particular sense of safety that not everyone had.

They assume you grew up believing authority was fair. That conflict could be resolved through conversation. That safety was a given, not something you had to earn through constant vigilance.

So when leadership development focuses only on skills, without examining the identity and history underneath, it misses the real driver.

It’s like trying to fix a car by replacing the tires when the problem is in the engine.

People aren’t resistant to change. They’re not lazy or inflexible or stubborn.

They’re protecting the version of themselves that once kept them safe.

The house we grew up in shaped us. It made us perceptive. Resourceful. Strong in ways that people who grew up with safety can never quite understand.

But we’re not living in that house anymore.

Leadership maturity, real maturity, is realizing we’re allowed to build a different one now.

One where fear informs, but doesn’t decide.

One where awareness replaces reflex.

One where we can finally exhale.

And maybe, just maybe, we can look at those beautiful bungalows and see beauty instead of threat. Not because we’re reckless, but because we’ve finally given ourselves permission to believe we deserve it.