The Mind and Family Office Firms

By Joe Caruso

This article explores how the mind – through personal narratives, meanings, and self-definition – shapes behavior and conflict in family office firms. Author Joe Caruso argues that many challenges in such businesses stem from clashing individual narratives rather than structural issues. Using case studies, he illustrates how shifting contextual understanding can change perceptions, leading to new behaviors and outcomes. The piece emphasizes that resolving family business conflicts requires addressing underlying “mind issues” by examining and recalibrating personal stories and meanings.

The mind is at the core of many problems for individuals, businesses, and especially family-owned businesses.  In this paper I will share how understanding how the mind creates story and meaning can be the most effective way to overcome these challenges.

Let’s start by considering the following true cases:​​

Case 1)  Recently, during a high-level strategy meeting for a family business, Bob completed his presentation on the direction he thought the team should consider making technology an integral aspect of the business.  Upon closing he felt the need to add this, “I know in my heart this is the way our founder would like us to go.”  It wasn’t lost on me or anyone else in the meeting that the founder had passed away thirty years ago during a decade when the very first text message was sent.  Yet, Bob felt he needed to close his presentation with that impossible claim.

Case 2)   A third generation, highly-successful family business had hired a CEO, put policies and procedures in place to guard family interests, establish trusts, foundations, etc.  Yet the relationship between the family stockholders (which included siblings, spouses and some offspring) was always one of underlying tension, fundamental disagreements and what some might call passive-aggressive in-fighting that never seemed to improve and in fact was getting worse over time.

Case 3)  A well-established family business that had become a household name was long-regarded as a very philanthropic company that greatly contributed to the community in many ways.  Recently, the company had come under fire and was being vilified as an arrogant corporation that had used the community, had used its power to control its market, and had become driven by profits and greed.  While this had happened sporadically before, it was now starting to get a significant amount of press.  The family shareholders—all with different advisors and lawyers—began fighting like never before (even in the media).  

I was able to help in each of these cases by first listening to everyone involved and focusing on their minds, meanings and narratives.  This allowed me to formulate the best way to help them.   Let me start by offering some very simple and basic definitions of these three concepts.  Then I’ll get into why and how they’re essential to creating better outcomes.

 ​Let’s think of the mind as the processer where thought and feeling are created. It determines what anything and everything means to us. Let’s also consider that this processer is also the determinant of how we see ourselves. (Who we are– as well as who we aren’t.)

“Narrative is the Rosetta Stone of the Mind.”

We are the stories we tell ourselves.  My ‘story of me’ and your ‘story of you’ are our own self-created narratives.  Our minds (and the narratives that drive them) are all we have when it comes to determining what we believe to be true, or not, and what/who we like, or don’t, and what everything and anything means to us personally.  

Consider the common deer.  We all know what a deer is.  However, how we personally define the animal is based on the context of our own self-narrative. For example, if you are a nature lover, deer can be beautiful creatures.  If you are a gardener, deer can be expensive pests.  If you are a chef, a hunter or one who eats wild game, deer is venison.  And if you live in the rural Midwest, deer can be the deadliest animal to humans, due to collisions with cars.  In each of these conceptions of a deer, the deer is still a deer, yet what it means to each of these types of individuals can be different based on their own personal narrative. 

​Now let’s consider some ways a family business can be described in one word, and how that can feed and form a narrative.  Here are some of the words past clients have used to describe their family businesses: Hierarchy.  Inheritance. Family heirloom. Asset. Privilege. Burden. Blessing/curse.

​These single-word definitions are not unlike describing the genre of a movie or play.  Drama. Comedy. Love story. Tragedy. The description of the narrative of someone’s family business not only reflects how they may feel about the business but also reflects how they see their role in it.  Remember: the mind understands itself and the world through the context of self-narrative.  

In family-owned businesses, parents, grandparents, siblings, offspring, spouses, nephews, nieces and others are more likely to consider the family business and what it stands for as a part of their self-definition.   In other words, while they can honestly say that they have a life of their own, at least a part of their self-definition is usually family-business driven if they are involved at all.

When Narratives Collide

When the self-definition of a family member collides with self-definitions of other family members, conflict arises.  Similarly, conflict can occur when one family member’s definition of what the family business is–or should be–isn’t the same as the other members of the family.   

In order to best understand anything (including ourselves),we need to contrast what it “is” with what it “isn’t.”  This is how children learn shapes such as a triangle.  They learn that the triangle is the bit inside of the three lines.   Often in life, like geometry, it’s the boundaries and borders of things that help us to better understand the thing itself.  In life, when boundaries and borders are in dispute, people can form disagreements about realities.  Any good war historian or parent can tell you that boundaries and borders are fertile grounds for conflicts and battles. This is often behind the various challenges confronting individuals in family-owned businesses.

The heart of this conflict, discomfort, tension, or whatever else it can be called, isn’t usually completely solved by new organizational charts, family charters, role changes or other business mechanisms for structure because the root cause of the problem isn’t a business issue.  It is a mind issue.  In other words, it is a people issue.  And because it’s an issue that is caused by conflicting meanings and narratives, it’s most-effectively solved by working with the individual minds and their respective meanings and narratives. This is the core of my work.  

I began studying the mind by studying my own.  I was 18 years old and had just been diagnosed with an incurable cancer. According to the doctors, I didn’t have a future to plan, so I spent a lot of time thinking about one question…Why live if you’re going to die?    After radical experimental chemotherapy and several surgeries, I was able to survive the cancer.  (Today, many years later, it is considered one of the curable cancers.)   But the question remained in my mind. I promised myself that for the rest of my life, I would study life:  What is it?  How do we experience it?  How do we become who we are, and how do we change?   These questions all led me to examining the source of my self-understanding—my mind. 

I never expected this pursuit to turn into a successful career, yet it has.  And the reason has proven to be simpler than I could have ever predicted.   The mind is ubiquitous in our lives and our work. Because business is owned, run and determined by people, the mind is not only relevant, but critical to the success, failure, challenges, dynamics and shortcomings of a business.  

The Conscious Mind and The “Under Mind”

• Most people know that the mind can affect how we feel, and that how we feel can affect how we think(and vice versa).  

• Even less people know that it is often difficult for us to discern feeling from thought.  (We can think we feel something, and feel we think something.)

• Even fewer people are aware that the mind creates a lot of decisions and feelings– that we experience—without us knowing it is doing so.  (This is the realm of our sub-conscious mind or what I call “The Under Mind”).

Our minds don’t always present us with a clear, objective, healthy, and positive understanding of our lives.  The fact is, the mind can repress, depress, conflate, inflate, distort and determine outcomes and realities– all without our awareness. And sometimes the mind does this against our own best interests.

In fact, one of the most powerful things I’ve learned in my life and my work is that the mind is stubborn in its proclivity for patterns that are familiar and predictable—driving stories of self and others whether these ideas in our best interest or not.  This in no way means that if we find ourselves in a negative rut that we’re stuck there.  Quite the contrary. The key is to actually embrace the stubbornness of the mind’s working process.

We can’t change the way the mind works, but we can change what and how it considers and defines things.   We can do so, by utilizing how it works.   Consider the wheel of a car spinning in the mud or snow.  Sometimes it helps to put something under the tire, like a piece of wood, that it can grab onto to get unstuck.  In this way, it is often necessary to have another person to talk with to get our own minds to stop spinning and get unstuck. I would completely understand if a past client described my work as the helper who provided a new way of thinking that became the traction they needed to get beyond the problem.  

The mind’s process for change begins with a shift in context which leads to a new understanding.  Once fully accepted, behavior will naturally adjust and change to the new understanding.  I have a reputation for helping change individual and group behaviors and outcomes.  I always count on the natural process of the mind to do just that.  

​ Here is the process simply stated:

1) A shift in context stimulates a shift in potential meaning and understanding. (Think about the deer example.)

2) New understanding stimulates new thoughts and behaviors.

3) New thoughts and behaviors create new outcomes.

​Nearly everyone is familiar with the reality of the familiar saying, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”  This is what the mind prefers.  Thankfully, the path to better outcomes doesn’t lie in getting someone to change their story.  I wouldn’t dream of trying to.     

How we define a problem determines all the solutions we’ve decided that our mind will and won’t consider.   This has been true for every client I’ve had for over 30 years, even though every client has been unique unto themselves.  

At age 18, when my journey into the world of the mind really began, my prognosis was death.  My mind didn’t save my life, and it didn’t cure my cancer.  It simply changed what mylife meant to me.  And that shift in context, changed my focus –from death to life.   In retrospect it was a true life-changing decision.

In any business, and especially in family-owned business, the sequence to creating a different outcome is new understanding, new behavior and–only then—will a new outcome emerge.    

After all…in the end, it’s all about the journey and the outcome.   And both begin, with the mind.