My Favourite Failure: Burnt out twice and unable to make the most basic decisions - Oliva Co-Founder Sançar Sahin

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1:05And it was really a tight form where I burnt out for the first time. It was never the fault of the company. I couldn't articulate my personal values. I couldn't articulate what gave me energy and what took away energy. And because of those things, I couldn't set healthy boundaries and maintain healthy boundaries because I had nothing to set those healthy boundaries against. That's Sansha Shaheen, the co-founder of Oliva, a mental health startup that's just raised £4.3 million at the time of putting this together. It's a B2B which helps companies give mental health support to their employees like on-demand therapy and coaching.

1:46Like me, with my company Heights, there's a very clear line of sight from Sansha's personal health crisis for starting his company. At his low points, he found himself stripped of confidence, unable to make the simplest decisions.

2:06sancha arrived in barcelona at the beginning of the tech wave in the city he became a marketer and after a few moves joined a rocket ship you may have heard of called typeform i would go in very early i would leave pretty late but as soon as i would come home i would open up the laptop you know i'd sit on the sofa and open up the laptop again and i would work for another a good few hours into the evening. And that's okay on a project basis. If you've got good control of your time and your priorities, it's okay to work more. I'm a co-founder now and it's not that I work a few hours. But when you're doing that every day as part of your automatic way of doing things and you're deprioritizing talking to your partner or going out with friends or whatever it might be, just because you think this is the way it should be, that's when it starts to have a negative impact on other bits of your life.

3:04And other examples, I had birthday plans, one birthday, and we'd just cancel it because we had a bit of a PR crisis at the time and had to jump on that. But it was nonstop. There's always a reason to cancel something because of work, but it wasn't because of those things being high priority necessarily. It was because of a lack of prioritization and understanding how to set healthy boundaries. As with a lot of mental health struggles, it all spilled out over something trivial. It was a specific Friday evening. I came home from work and I ordered a takeaway curry for myself and my girlfriend. It was something we would do on a Friday.

3:48And I ordered what I thought was two chicken tikka masalas, right? And I don't know if you know anything about curries, but you know, chicken tikka masala, beautiful curry, like tomato based sauce, et cetera, right? What I actually ordered was two chicken tikka. So no sauce, just the chicken. And the order arrived and I realized my mistake. And I was really pissed off with myself. Like it ruined my evening. I you know in my mind I was just like I just can't do anything right I can't even order a curry properly I've ruined the evening for us you know I've wasted money you know I was like really down on myself about this this trivial thing that I had done and then my girlfriend kind of looked at me and said dude come on it's a curry it doesn't matter and it was at that point where I realised that something wasn't quite as healthy as it should be in my mind.

4:48And it was at that point that I started, well, not on that same Friday, but more or less the next week, I started looking for a therapist for the first time. It was hard finding the right therapist. It normally is the first time, says Sanchar, but it was a different change he made that he thought would be transformative. Around that same time, I made the decision I need to move on from type form. and in my mind it was because the company you know wasn't at the right stage for me anymore or I wasn't the right person for the stage which I think is partly true but I had a narrative in my mind that if I change the company then I change this feeling you know that that was the narrative in my mind so it seems pretty simple leave you know say goodbye to that that stage of my life and then move on to something else and then that's when I got a job at Hotjar.

5:38Sometime into Hotjar was when lockdown started. And, you know, for all of us, that was a crazy time. And I remember it was a beautiful summer. I was locked down with my girlfriend in the mother-in-law's house. I mean, we're not married, but, you know, more or less the mother-in-law. And we were just doing garden projects all, you know, whenever we could, during the weekend and in the evenings. Beautiful summer. And I was just struggling. Like, I was just struggling to make decisions. Like we were just doing the most simple things like digging holes to put up a fence or whatever. And I just, I was like, I don't know where to put this hole.

6:14I, you know, I had no confidence in me whatsoever. And, you know, this was definitely affecting my work life and my ability to execute and to motivate myself and my teams and all of this kind of stuff. And just made me feel like I was pretty useless to be frank. and I was still doing therapy but with a different therapist at this point online and a better therapist for me and I was gradually learning more and more about myself and basically to cut a long story short what I eventually realized was none of this was to do with the companies I was working in this was all to do with me not having a good understanding of myself and what makes me tick and what puts me below the line.

7:05If you're familiar with the conscious leadership framework, you know, about being below the line, which is where you're you're defensive, you lack creativity, you know, you don't really have any time for anybody because you're pushed below the line by something, lack of time, lack of personal time management, whatever it might be, whatever stresses you out. But when you're above the line, you can be creative, you have time for people you're more open to ideas you're you take feedback as as a gift and not as something to get defensive about etc and i was just constantly below the line i didn't know about this framework at the time but i was constantly below the line and um through therapy i learned how to get myself above the line or at least identify when i'm below the line and that was really, really important.

7:54I've liked the concept of below the line for a long time. It's very intuitive. The thing is though, as Sanchar says, you can't stop bad things happening. That's life. But when you're below the line, it can take you much longer to recharge. And if you're in a demanding environment, then it can mean you're nearly always in a state of low battery. The Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield described it in our interview as his emotional reserves running dry. So how do we give ourselves the best chance of being above the line? It's definitely different for different people. And that's why we all need to be quite cautious of these templated wellness theories.

8:38You know, like you get these people to say, I wake up at 5 a.m. every morning and drink a super juice and go for a 24-mile run and then meditate for 16 hours or whatever. like, yeah, fine. If that works for you, then fantastic. But most people have busy lives, you know, people have kids, people have pets, you don't always have that motivation to do it. And if you don't do those things, it can actually be more damaging because you start to get, you know, more annoyed with yourself because you can't do these things. So you have to find what works for you. And often the answer is quite simple. you know for me for example I know I now know that simply just going for a walk for just a few minutes around the block just unravels my mind so if I'm ever in a situation where I just can't control my thoughts or like I feel like I've got a million competing priorities that I just can't unravel and make sense of literally just walking starts to calm my mind and things become clearer in my mind.

9:41And by the time I come back, I can put pens of paper, I can put a to-do list together and kind of get back on track. So it could be as simple as that. But it starts before that. It starts by unpacking yourself. So those things I mentioned at the beginning, what are your personal values? What gives you energy? What takes away energy? And what are the kind of triggers that might make you or push you below the line. For me, for example, I know if I have back-to-back calls at work, like if I have one of those days where it's just back-to-back calls with very little time to breathe in between, I know that will push me below the line.

10:26I can accept it sometimes. Sometimes I just need to do it. But if somebody phones me up and wants to brainstorm creatively about something at the end of that day, they're going to get nothing from me. I'll be defensive. I'll be passive aggressive. I'll be like, why are you calling me? You're putting me on the spot, et cetera. But if that same phone call came spontaneously at a different day where I didn't have those back-to-back calls, I would be like, great, let's have this call. You know, let's talk about this. Let's be creative.

11:06Sancha Shahin with some hard-fought wisdom and some very difficult moments. He also says if you've got any stigma left about getting therapy, perhaps try to think of it like getting a massage for your brain. Now, who doesn't like a massage? Thanks for listening to this episode. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Surter. If you like this episode, please hit follow or subscribe. See you next time.

11:34You