Leadership is shaped not only by experience and knowledge but also by the patterns people develop over time. These patterns often influence how leaders respond to pressure, manage conflict, and build relationships at work. Dr. Sylvia Lafair, CEO and Co-founder of Creative Energy Options, has spent more than 35 years helping individuals and organizations understand these behaviors. Through her work in Pattern Awareness and the GLIMMERS Effect™, she encourages leaders to recognize familiar reactions, pause during difficult moments and make more conscious choices.
Let’s explore how her approach connects self-understanding with stronger leadership and lasting change.
Understanding the Patterns Behind Leadership
For most of her professional life, Dr. Sylvia has been fascinated by a deceptively simple question: “Why do intelligent, talented people continue repeating behaviors that undermine their success?”
Her journey began with studying human behavior and family relationships. She noticed that patterns people learned in their families often followed them into their professional lives. The child who became the family peacemaker might grow into an executive who avoids conflict. The overly responsible child might become a leader who cannot delegate. The rebel might spend an entire career challenging authority, even when cooperation would serve everyone better.
That discovery changed the direction of her work. For more than 35 years, she has helped executives and organizations recognize these patterns and transform them into healthier, more productive behaviors. She believes the workplace can be an extraordinary environment for personal growth, with changes in leadership behavior extending beyond the office to families, communities, and future generations.
Building a Different Approach to Leadership Development
Creative Energy Options began with a conviction that traditional leadership development was missing something essential. Organizations were teaching communication, strategy, and management skills, yet the same conflicts and dysfunctional behaviors kept resurfacing.
Dr. Sylvia realized that people were being taught what to do without adequately exploring why they continued doing what did not work. Her approach brought together behavioral awareness, systems thinking, and practical leadership development to help people create lasting change rather than temporary improvements.
Today, she believes this mission is more relevant than ever. “Artificial intelligence is transforming how organizations operate, but technology cannot replace empathy, courage, ethical judgment, and meaningful relationships,” she notes. Her focus has evolved toward helping leaders strengthen these human capabilities while recognizing the patterns that can undermine them. She believes business success and human development should strengthen each other.
Pattern Awareness and the Power of Self-Understanding
Dr. Sylvia believes leaders need more than IQ and emotional intelligence. They also need Pattern Awareness, the ability to recognize recurring behaviors that shape decisions, relationships, and reactions, particularly under pressure, and consciously choose a different response.
Consider an executive who constantly overworks and micromanages. Everyone sees a dedicated Super-Achiever, yet beneath that behavior may be an old belief that personal worth depends on being indispensable. Without awareness, the pattern continues until exhaustion, resentment, or employee turnover becomes unavoidable. With Pattern Awareness, the leader can recognize what drives the behavior and begin making healthier choices.
Uncertainty often activates familiar responses. Even experienced leaders may become controlling, defensive, withdrawn, or overly accommodating when stressed. As she explains, “Stress doesn’t necessarily create our patterns. It often reveals the ones that have been operating quietly for years.”
She believes successful leaders will need to understand themselves well enough to recognize when an outdated pattern is influencing their decisions.
The GLIMMERS Effect™: Turning Stress into Choice
After decades of working with leaders, Dr. Sylvia noticed that stressful situations often triggered predictable reactions. Criticism might produce defensiveness, uncertainty might activate control, and disagreement might lead to withdrawal. Some people, however, learned to interrupt these responses by pausing, tolerating discomfort, and making different choices.
This became the foundation of the GLIMMERS Effect™ framework, which follows five stages: Trigger, Pattern, Pause, Ugly Middle, and Choice.
Something triggers us, and a familiar pattern emerges. She encourages people to pause and recognize what is happening. Then comes the Ugly Middle, the uncomfortable space where the old behavior feels familiar but the healthier response still feels awkward. Finally, she encourages them to choose a different response.
That conscious choice activates the glimmer, a moment of clarity when we recognize that we do not have to keep repeating the past. The framework integrates head, heart, and gut, combining intellectual understanding, emotional awareness, and the ability to notice internal signals without automatically acting on them.
A glimmer is not about pretending everything is wonderful. It is about recognizing that even in difficult circumstances, we have more choices than we initially believed.
Turning Workplace Conflict into Collaboration
One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is assuming conflict is always about the issue being discussed. Often, the disagreement is merely the visible expression of something deeper.
Dr. Sylvia describes two executives: one pushes for quick decisions, while the other asks endless questions and delays commitments. Management may call it a personality conflict. But one executive may associate speed with competence, while the other associates caution with safety. Both are operating from learned patterns.
Instead of asking, “Who’s the problem?” she encourages leaders to ask, “What pattern are we repeating together?”
This question helps people become curious rather than defensive. They begin examining how their reactions affect others and what they might do differently. She reminds leaders that “conflict is information before it becomes a problem.” When organizations use that information constructively, they can build trust, strengthen collaboration, and create conditions where innovation can flourish.
Leading Through Change and Understanding People
Dr. Sylvia believes an important leadership capability is remaining grounded when everything around you is changing. This requires self-awareness, emotional regulation, curiosity, courage, and humility. Leaders do not need every answer. Pretending they do can destroy trust faster than admitting uncertainty. People want leaders who are honest, consistent, and willing to listen.
She also highlights how early family experiences influence professional relationships. Long before entering a boardroom, people learn how to handle authority, competition, disappointment, recognition, and conflict. Some become the responsible child, while others become the Pleaser, Rebel, Rescuer, or Peacemaker.
These behaviors may have helped them navigate childhood, but problems arise when they carry them into adulthood without questioning whether they still serve them. She encourages leaders to examine what triggers them, which role they automatically assume when tension rises, and where they first learned that response. The goal is to understand personal history without allowing it to dictate the future.
Helping Women Lead with Confidence and Authenticity
Dr. Sylvia has observed the pressure women leaders face to be competent, accommodating, confident, and likable at the same time. Women are often expected to demonstrate authority without appearing too forceful and ambition without seeming self-centered.
These expectations can activate patterns such as the Pleaser, Super-Achiever, and Rescuer. She has worked with talented women who were so busy proving their value that they barely enjoyed their accomplishments.
Her advice is direct: “Stop confusing approval with respect.” Women do not need everyone to like every decision. They need clarity about their values, the courage to communicate honestly, and the willingness to stand behind their choices.
Her book, GUTSY: How Women Leaders Make Change, explores how family and culture influence how women are viewed in the workplace and what they can do to ensure they are heard and respected. She hopes the next generation of women leaders spends less energy proving they deserve a seat at the table and more energy shaping what happens around it.
From Awareness to Lasting Change
Dr. Sylvia’s book Don’t Bring It to Work explored how behaviors learned in the family frequently follow people into their professional organizations. Her forthcoming book, GLIMMERS at Work: The Self-Aware Leader’s Advantage, takes that understanding further by asking how people can change their patterns once they recognize them.
Knowledge alone does not create transformation. People can understand their behavior intellectually and still repeat it when challenged. GLIMMERS offers a practical pathway for turning awareness into action, particularly during emotionally charged moments.
As AI becomes increasingly capable of performing analytical tasks, she believes empathy, ethical judgment, and genuine connection become even more valuable. Her central message is that self-awareness is no longer a leadership luxury. It is a competitive advantage.
A Vision for the Future of Leadership
Dr. Sylvia’s vision is to help establish a new standard for leadership, one that recognizes organizational transformation begins with human transformation. She envisions Creative Energy Options expanding its work through coaching, leadership programs, books, a membership site, and practical tools that make behavioral transformation accessible to more people.
She is particularly excited about emerging leaders, who have an opportunity to recognize and change patterns before those behaviors become deeply embedded in their professional identities.
Writing GLIMMERS at Work has also deepened her own understanding of personal growth. Even after decades of helping others recognize their patterns, she has discovered new opportunities to examine her own. This has reinforced her belief that self-awareness is not a destination. It is an ongoing practice.
Ultimately, she wants her work to contribute to something larger than career success. When leaders change destructive patterns, they influence employees, colleagues, families, and future generations. As she explains, “We can learn from the past without continuing to live by its rules.”
For Dr. Sylvia Lafair, meaningful change begins with the choices people make in difficult moments. A leader who pauses instead of attacking, a parent who listens instead of controlling, or a colleague who chooses understanding over blame can help create lasting change. Through her work, she continues to show how self-awareness can lead to healthier relationships and stronger organizations.
