Why Founders need therapy - Sophie Scott

0:03At one point, it got so bad and I just felt no one understood that I lost it, and I almost sort of try to throw myself from a moving vehicle at one point just because I felt like no one was taking the one. seriously how stressed out I felt. Are you working 50, 60, 100 hour weeks trying to grow your business but feeling burnt out, lonely, anxious? The quality of your life is based on the quality of your relationships. Today we're learning from Sophie Scott, a founder who's now giving therapy to other founders because she's experienced the pressures that come with this job. You're going learn about the four existential crises that put founders in therapy and what the warning signs are sophie shares a few anonymous examples about how others have handled these crises and how you can deal with them before it's too late generally i believe that people enter therapy when

1:04Sophie, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Okay, so obviously reason I want to have you on is, well, multiple reasons. One, we're friends. It's nice to hang out with a friend and an excuse to talk about more serious things because we usually just mess around and chat. Absolute garbage. Well, you do, obviously, and I listen. But you have been a founder and I've obviously spent time with you during your experience as a founder. I was experiencing mental health challenges. You were experiencing mental health challenges. We obviously connected about this. You already previously to being a founder had a background and experience in psychology.

1:44So that's my context for why I talk to you about this kind of stuff. I'd like you to share who you are in your own words. You know, what's your experience? Why should people listen to you? Okay, sure. So these days I'm a psychotherapist. I have a private practice in London working with clients online and also my clinic. And I'll go into kind of like what therapy is about and my credentials in a moment. But as you said, I was a former founder. So I have a wide range of clients, but a lot are founders, probably because they know that I ran a wellness media startup called Balance for nearly seven years.

2:27And so I had a lot of kind of highs and lows myself. I ultimately grew it to about 25 people. But, you know, it really took its toll on my mental health. And it's kind of ironic because, you know, here I was talking about mental well-being and really struggling myself. So, yeah, I completely burnt out. I ended up in a psychiatrist's office. Despite the fact that I was also, you know, training as a therapist, I wasn't yet a therapist, but I was training. I did a very long training. um and at one point it got so bad and I just felt no one understood that I just lost it and I almost sort of tried to throw myself from a moving vehicle at one point just because I felt like no one was taking it seriously how stressed out I felt I'm not going to go into kind of like some of the reasons as to why that was because um I don't think that that's fully appropriate at this point but legally not advised yeah understood but um yeah I I have so much empathy for founders and you know can totally relate to the as I said the highs and lows of the of the journey relating to some of the things you said you know as a founder in the wellness space there's probably even more of an expectation and more of a surprise from people when you actually struggle with mental health or struggle with health in general people sort of forget you're human and there are these um paragons of virtue and you know these amazing people we look up to in those spaces who on the surface always seem to be absolutely perfect picture perfect in every kind of way but they're actually people like us who still are human and still riddled by human psychology and the flaws of our own biology and minds so absolutely i think it's important to talk to people who work in that space as well.

4:24Because if the people who work in wellness still don't have it all figured out and don't have everything in balance, then what can we expect for your, you know, SaaS founder building a finance product who is really far removed from health information and even maybe self-awareness on the journey of managing their mental health, which is very important to stay the course. Absolutely. And I think that, you know, what I do come into therapy even if they're you know completely burnt out they're riddled with anxiety they normally always still like glitter you know they've got this kind of effervescence about them um and they're just not all of them but you know they're so charming and kind of like lovable and warm that you don't really know that they're struggling people around them close to them wouldn't know um and that's and that's the thing right it's like you're able to put on such a good show for everybody else and you've got to keep that up and we'll talk about this more um getting a bit more specific but um you know you put on such a good show for your team and for your investors and your board and meanwhile kind of really struggling yourself so yeah I think it's important it's always a bit nerve-wracking yeah of course admit that and also like physical disabilities are very, you know, they're out there on show.

5:47Mental disabilities, sometimes, obviously they're hidden, but actually sometimes they're hidden from yourself. And I remember when, you know, there were some mental health problems I've had in the past that have been very clear to me. I had depression for a while. I knew I had depression. It was very clear to me. All my friends were telling me and the way that I was behaving. I had the awareness to realize that was obvious. When I had insomnia, someone told me it was a mental health problem. I was like, no, no, I'm just not sleeping. It'll get better. It was like six months. And it really took someone to just sit me down and be like, you have a proper mental health problem.

6:21You have to go and do something about it. Here are some things to try, et cetera, for me to land the message. And that's someone who wasn't actually ashamed by the stigma of mental health at all. Yeah. And what that experience actually taught me is how insanely unselfaware you can be because of your overarching narratives in your head about what you're experiencing and normalizing but it's okay exactly and that's the other thing is that i think you know excitement and anxiety can feel very similar it's like this adrenaline you need to poo oh sorry you need to poo yeah excitement anxiety i don't need to be right now if that's what you're asking no no i'm okay no i don't usually announce that um but you know they can feel very very similar so actually for so long you know you might be feeling like you're just living this really adrenaline-fueled life and okay that involves ups and downs but you know there's something really like sometimes fun about it and and and certainly addictive right and so i think it takes building that self-awareness and actually really getting in touch with your body and and recognizing kind of like bodily sensations and what what's happening to decipher whether it's kind of that good stress or bad stress right Whether it's something that's motivating you and, you know, you're growing from it and you're being challenged or whether your energy is starting to deplete and you're getting these kind of weird signals from your body that something's not right.

7:53On that topic, I find that, you know, now with Heights, we sell probiotic and that experience you do. Exactly. The experience I've learned from that, from customer feedback and everything else, and also myself being a customer of it. realized that men and women, very different understanding of listening to their body. And the reason I mentioned this with the probiotic particularly is obviously it's about pooing. Your favorite subject. Well, it is today, apparently. And it's really interesting. Women are way more in tune with their bowels and their sensations and the reviews they leave. And all of these things are like, it's like people leave reviews that seem wise, almost, right?

8:34The insight around it is fascinating. and men don't notice this stuff so much at all including their bowel movements it's just like a job to be done it gets done however long it takes kind of thing and I've learned through the experience of customer iteration that women understand how to feel their body and their sensations so much more than men which going further down the the road of why actually obviously because periods and so you literally every month you are in complete like sensation overload of understanding what's going on and men don't have that. And so moving downstream of that, when you say it's in your body and feel it in your body, you know, a lot of our listeners are men, obviously might hear that as a man and be like, sounds like woo woo garbage to me.

9:22But I think it's a really important thing to lay on because I think that, um, again, maybe the most surprising thing that I learned from reading the power of now by Eckhart Tolle, which you know I love. That book is all supposed to be about the mind, the now, et cetera, et cetera. You know, 75 % of his message is it's your body. Listen to your body. And he does a really great job of explaining it. And so I think that's the really interesting thing I'd like you to just explain a little bit more because how is what's going on in your mind something that you can feel in your body? And especially if you're a man and you're not, especially if you're a man, you're just not in tune with your body because most of us are not.

10:00What are we supposed to be looking out for? Well, let's just think about this for a second. So 95 % of the brain's activity is unconscious, right? So that's a huge proportion, right? So those are your thoughts, your feelings, your dreams. And that includes like the things that are going on in your body, the sensations, we're just not aware of any of them. And so if we can start to come out of our mind, right? because we don't know really what's going on there anyway and start to bring mindful attention to the breath. And even now if we do it, there's something called resonance frequency breathing, which I use a lot with clients.

10:46Really simple. It's five breaths in.

10:51Hold for five. Out for five. And I'll talk about client examples in a moment, but what happens is the nervous system goes into hyperarousal a lot of the time. So in other words, you probably know about fight or flight, right? Which is the sympathetic nervous system. And most of the time when we're very stressed out or when we have, let's say, like prolonged stress, even though it may not feel stressful all the time, we don't go back enough into rest and digest. In fact, we can become completely, like rest and digest can become completely alien. And that's when you literally can't rest, you cannot sleep, you cannot digest, so you can't eat, you lose your appetite.

11:44And so what we want to do is we want to try and notice our behavior. If, for example we can't sleep we can't eat we can't concentrate because we can't focus on tasks because our body's not in rest and digest we need to reset the nervous system and we do that through lots of ways and maybe we can even do some throughout the episode but the first one the most important is through the breath and if we do that on an ongoing basis we detach from all the kind of garbage in our mind and we we pick up on what's going on in the body and that is the gateway into the unconscious and unconscious sounds bad but it's good no i mean unconscious can feel scary for people right but it's also where the gold is right so um you know really the kind of the main reason to have therapy is to make the they say make the unconscious conscious and you know if we think that it's 90 % of what you perceive right now is based on your past experiences.

12:51That's like crazy, right? So if you're not conscious of like what your past experiences were, what the scripts you've got in your head are, the things that you're passed on by your family, traumas, et cetera, then you behave unconsciously like a lot of the time and you tie your own shoelaces and you block yourself so that's kind of the focus of therapy is to unlock the unconscious and yet there may be some um some dark stuff there but there's also some gold like we always say you know whatever's in the light there's also a shadow of equal proportion right um but the gold is in the shadow and you know uh if we think about founders so if you think about like their light and shade which we've all got so a founder what's a great quality of a founder like being an overachiever yeah okay so if you're like you're all of those things right you're an overachiever you're innovative you can achieve like amazing things and do create change in the world but the shadow of that is a loss of like personal relationships or a loss of your own well-being and if you can't find a way to look at both sides of the coin that's when like a distortion happens right so like to simplify it in therapy there's three stages so the first is like knowledge so building self-awareness the second is through like behavioral change so we do things like experiments and be like okay can you like just try doing this thing a bit differently for the time being and then the third is integrating those things so you integrate your knowledge and you integrate behavioral change so that assimilation you know you can bring it to your life and let other people around you know and then that leads to kind of what can lead to to lasting change but it's a practice sorry i'm sort of going into what therapy well actually let's go let's go back to that what like what I mean obviously everyone's heard of therapy or whatever but I think because everyone has they don't really attach what it really is just sounds like this thing that might be something that people should do what is therapy why is it important and why specifically should entrepreneurs care about it so I mean in practice it's going to the same person you know usually at the same time every week to talk about whatever was going on in your life um but because of the fact that as i said you know the vast majority of the way we interpret today is based on the past we do look back at the past but always with a view to like what will help you unblock yourself and get out of your own way in the in the present and very much looking at the future as well so i'm certainly a therapist that is future facing not just all about the past right um and then the relationship is really important so I know it sounds really really weird but these all sorts of like mysterious things start to happen within the therapeutic relationship because uh the client and indeed the therapist can project a lot onto each other so um you're as a therapist you're usually cast as the client's kind of primary caregiver so like their parent um and so the relationship that they have with them whether that's good or not so good plays out and so there is a kind of opportunity for healing and reparenting to happen which is super interesting but kind of maybe I've gone a bit too deep there I think why it's it's so valuable is because even if you've got people in your life you know and hopefully you do you do that you can talk to um people close to you are still very invested in the outcome you know people are still judgmental and biased understandably so but if you go to a therapist um it's a totally non-judgmental space um so you get to really explore that shadow part of you the part that might have really dark thoughts or thoughts that wouldn't be welcomed by your husband or wife or or whoever and it's it's such a privilege um as a therapist like working with people and getting to know their innermost world and and secrets and it allows um like a very intimate type of relationship to unfold to challenge that how intimate can it be if you know nothing back of the other person yeah it's a super interesting question so i think my view actually is that therapy is starting to change and should change and I'm kind of trying to push it in that way a bit more so like doing an interview like this and revealing what I did at the start you know Freud or whatever wouldn't have done that yeah um but I think that being completely like faceless and nameless actually isn't that valuable because people feel threatened to open up anything about themselves or like like their defense has come up more obviously wouldn't reveal loads of stuff and i think some things are helpful and some things aren't but you're you're right it's a unique relationship but then if it was the same as like meeting a friend in a pub it wouldn't it's like a private piece of theater um okay so that's what therapy is and how you approach it yeah why do founders need it?

18:40So, you know, founders like generally come when they're in a crisis mode. Um, there's a lot, there's, well, not a lot. There's a good proportion that come because they have just deep curiosity about who they are. They want to get to know themselves better. And I think it's really important to say that as well. Um, and they stay in therapy. So, you know, if you know yourself better you do better right so that's the first thing to say um but there but founders come into therapy um and need therapy because they're shouldering an awful lot it's a hugely stressful lifestyle choice to make i mean lifestyle choice makes it sound like it's a you know you're going to be vegan or but it's hugely stressful it's one in three founders um suffer from depression That's, you know, I know it's a stat.

19:34Well, they say that 5 % of the, like, world population suffers from depression, which seems low. Does seem low. Yeah. I mean, if you ask me, everyone looks depressed. True. That might be because you're in England in the winter. Yeah, on the tube. But seriously, like, there's a huge disparity there. And it's kind of surprising. So it's six times more than the average. Yeah, exactly. So it's 30 % to 5%, yeah. So, and that seems kind of unlikely if you think about it, because we know that purpose, like having a purpose and having, you know, a reason to get up in the morning is usually an antidote to depression.

20:14So what is that? Is it cause or is it effect? I don't think it's a clear-cut answer. I don't know what your experience is. Is it that those with depressive-like characteristics may be more likely to end up as founders? Or is it that, you know, the ups and downs kind of lead someone to feeling depressed or even suicidal? I mean, there's been a lot of really high-profile kind of suicides or at least kind of presumed suicides. I don't know what your thoughts are on that. I think certainly at the upper level of success, two things seem to happen. You know, I've spoken to many guests on this kind of stuff as well.

21:03I mean, if you go to the top, top, top level, I just read the Elon Musk biography. Have you read it? I haven't read it. And I'm just curious to ask you. I mean, he's clearly, clearly riddled with deep mental health problems. I mean, he's also like autistic, self-diagnosed, but you can see that in his interactions, it's quite clearly true. Um, he's quite clearly, uh, basically the whole narrative in the Elon book in general is that, uh, he is someone who, when things are going well, cannot handle it. Like if things are going really well, he has to ruin his life and find a new challenge. And that is exactly why he bought Twitter.

21:40Like after all reading the book and you're so happy for him to have solved all these problems, finally with Tesla and finally with SpaceX. And then the guy buys Twitter and ruins his life it's destructive and everyone around him is like begging him not to including all the people he listens to because they see the pattern he does it anyway and has ruined his life he hates it um he's so resentful for having done it um but that's just his pattern so you know from that level down at the top level you can there's a sort of um psychosis to believing you can change the world yes i think that's like a quite an unhinged thought yeah there's this sort of weird mix between confidence and humility that's sort of like this odd like imbalance in your personality in the first place well I think that that's really interesting because being a founder does kind of support bipolar behavior you know these kind of like huge highs and lows and then you know like society celebrates busyness and productivity but who's there when there is a crash afterwards And I think that that's when people may come to therapy.

22:48But often the person themselves doesn't like that version of themselves. You know, the version that can't get out of bed or is totally exhausted and depleted. Sorry to have interrupted you, but I think it's, yeah, I'm agreeing with you. Yeah. Well, going back to the point, though, on who goes to therapy. So the only time I did therapy, and this is going to sound surprising to you, maybe. um but as you know i deeply research and am fascinated by mental health things in general so i've read tons of books plenty of self-help and i have no shame on self-help i mean that's basically the summaration of a summary of many self-help books up there um i find them very valuable i take lots of lessons loads of notes this tablet is like full of those notes um i've only been to therapy once for like a period during covid like a lot of people i'm sure As in one session?

23:43No, but one period of time. How many sessions? Like six or something, which comes back to actually sort of my point. It's probably not enough. It's enough to know that you don't really vibe with your therapist. I think it's a very hard thing to get right. I just was unimpressed. Same thing happened. I've done relationship therapy with my wife and we just weren't that impressed with our relationship therapist. We kind of stopped. I've never really found a person that I felt was right for me. and one of the challenges I think when you're a founder is investing in yourself properly around health and all of the things that you should do even though you know you should do it it's difficult to spend the money on yourself doing those things and then it's very hard to be like is it that therapy isn't right for me or have I not found the right person and how much money do I need to throw into this burning pile of cash fire pit to find the right person or is the right person out there.

24:38Do you know, there's this kind of, well, I guess I'll give you some of the obstacles you'll face in a customer, a potential customer wondering about therapy, right? Because that is totally my thing. I think I've got luckier with coaches, but I've got unlucky with therapy. And so I've never maintained it. And it doesn't mean I don't think I need therapy. In fact, relatively of the belief that I'm sure everyone needs ongoing therapy. However, not found my person. Sorry, how many therapists have you met with? Well, only two. Right. Okay. tiny but i'm giving you literally i suppose this is a perfect example of a typical busy founder's journey into therapy right yeah i tried i stuck with it i was like that's rubbish tried someone else did a couple of sessions was like i'm not getting anything from that is the problem me is it them is it your industry and how does how do we make that work therapy and founders how are we going to find the right it's a good question yeah and commit to the investment yeah it's it's one that i'm kind of like toying with aside from this um on a more kind of business level but it's also not a straightforward answer because i don't know enough about your even though i know you pretty well i don't know enough about like your really deep material to know okay so it could be that there's a dissatisfaction that's there that's i don't i'm gonna start it could be that there's a dissatisfaction that's there that can go on to anyone kind of like this perfectionism and unless someone is perfect then it's best to just kind of like not go there um and that could be the work so that could be really interesting to work with somebody who is like good enough what does good enough look like for you in fact I've got an interesting um anecdote about that later so it could be that it could be that simply you didn't get the right um like referral or the right recommendation absolutely it happens um and it is a little bit like dating you've got to shop around and look for someone you trust but also there's chemistry with and that you feel that you can learn stuff from and how many dates do you sleep with your therapist yeah well i think six actually is a is a is a good is a good number and then the other thing is and this is something else that i have have seen and experienced is that you can get into a relationship that is actually like pretty pretty dynamic and could be really healing but that feels really scary for somebody and so they can find an excuse or a reason to leave got it as in it's sort of like um they're suddenly about to have a breakthrough and it becomes too terrifying to really approach.

27:25Yeah. Or that the intimacy and being kind of seen is too painful. Okay. Interesting. But you're right. There is an issue, I think, with, you know, like finding the right person. So yeah, maybe in the future we can talk about that. I want to know who are the type of people that do come to you? Like what is a typical type of founder? What is a typical type of challenge? Yeah. Well, obviously everybody is different, but there are definitely certain characteristics so we mentioned before kind of high functioning anxious types I've also noticed that a lot of founders are self-made people and by that I mean that when we kind of dig into the past a bit they've often taken like assumed responsibility in their family from quite a young age be that that they've looked after a parent or siblings They've kind of had to grow up quite fast.

28:20And then you can see that kind of playing out throughout the rest of their life. Right, because the role as an entrepreneur is like nurturing team and stuff like that. It's being the leader. It's assuming responsibility. And it's interesting because we see that in kind of like world leaders as well. I think it's 12 US presidents lost a father when they were really young. And same with UK prime ministers. it's like really high proportion 70 or something percent high proportion have lost a parent before they were 16 so you know i don't think it's a surprise that they've had kind of like a little bit of trauma it kind of can build grit um but of course it can also go the other way just to say um but a lot of founders i think do have that grit and that self-reliance that you that you need right to start something um generally i i believe that people enter therapy when they're struggling with a kind of existential concern um what's that they obviously don't realize that they are so there's the most wonderful um u.s psychotherapist and he was a stanford uh psychiatry professor for many years an author called ervin yalom i don't know if you've read any of his books well if you love therapy at well you love psychology and you love kind of they read like more like novels his best one is love's executioner um they're stories basically and he wrote a very important book in the mid-20th century that set out these kind of four main existential concerns and they are in short death anxiety so that's the fact that like from the moment you're born you know you're gonna die but you don't know when and you don't know how like like that's anxiety provoking um and that's when you should take a lot of psychedelics right right yeah then there's isolation uh which is the fact that you're born alone and you die alone the third one is freedom so you know most of us living in the western world we're very fortunate we have freedom freedom of choice but with that there's a burden of like responsibility to make the right choice or the wrong choice and then the last one is meaninglessness um that there's this threat always hanging over us that life is inherently meaningless and purposeless and i think that the founder's journey kind of compounds or let's say like accentuates these existential concerns so you know no one comes to therapy and goes oh my god i've got death anxiety but usually underneath whatever they're presenting with i've found at least one of these existential concerns to be there how when you're doing your therapy sessions just to play devil's advocate on this because this is a really interesting sounding framing right those four existential threats how much of when you're listening to someone talk about their stuff are you trying to put them into one of those buckets that you might actually not notice they're not in any of them or are they like foolproof great question um nothing is foolproof so quick background on me I'm an integrative therapist so I'm not a pure existential therapist so maybe if you saw none of this means anything to me what do those things mean so um I work with clients holistically.

32:00So I've studied from Freud, which is clinical analysis, to stuff like body and breath work, like Eckhart Tolle, existential, which is what we're talking about now, Jung's, which is dreams. So there's lots of lenses to look through. So I would never, or I would try to never, I'm sure I fuck up, I'm sure I mess up, but I would try to never impose something on somebody. but very often i'd say in more cases than not this applies especially with founders okay can you share some examples yeah yeah yeah okay so it is really interesting yeah like it's interesting conceptually but i feel i have way more questions than i have answers at this point yeah of course well i will share some like client examples yeah obviously their name and their postcode exactly exactly their passport details no they're completely anonymized and and and often um sort of conflated bringing different people together to form an example so let's take a guy um let's take we'll call him freddie right and he comes into therapy because to be honest i'm a bit surprised he does come into therapy um he is burnt out he's on the brink of burnout he is barely sleeping barely eating uh he's got headaches he's he's his energy is kind of all over the place he's running a series a backed company um on the face of it he's winning lots of accolades he's getting lots of press but behind closed doors you know he hasn't got product market fit and he's not going to be able to race again he's going to really struggle he's running out of money and he obviously can't let his team know.

33:48So he feels like a total fraud, right? This is like a very common one that I see.

33:57And so, you know, the first thing to do with somebody like this is to reset or help to reset the nervous system because it's a bit like what we talked about at the beginning. He's so in hyper arousal. he can't really think straight for himself or for his company so the beginning part of the therapy would be you know practicing the resonance frequency breathing encouraging him in fact with Freddie he took um he agreed he would take off like three or four days off work would put an out of office on his email would go and spend time in nature and he had to do that to kind of be able to reset and and gain some perspective because the goal was right how can you step out of being the founder for a minute and step into being like if you were the ned for your company like what would you actually advise and you can't do that if you're in a state of hyper arousal and then there's other things that um sorry and that is simply because you're saying that they're not able to make clear decisions you're able to think clearly in that state correct because in real life you have to go between fight or flight and rest and digest and but if you can't and you're stuck in fight or flight you're not making good decisions so breathing you know establishing things like safe space or safe place visualization there's like various tapping I don't know if you know EFT and like I know some of these things but regardless can you just yeah little explanations of each of these things yeah of course so um safe space we can do it quickly I don't know how I don't know how much time we have so we can do a short version which is um you know if you're closing your eyes connecting with the breath making sure the The exhalation is just that bit longer now than the inhalation.

36:00And I'm going to ask you to bring to mind a safe place. It might be somewhere in nature. It might be somewhere that's familiar to you, somewhere in your house. somewhere where you feel you can just be you, drop any masks noticing your surroundings, what you can see, touch maybe smell notice if anyone's with you and to be able to take yourself to that place And now slowly we're bringing some sensation into it, stroking the palms, just rubbing your palms very slowly together.

36:59Really feeling the hands, fingers.

37:07Staying in that safe place. You're starting to bring your hands up to your forehead, just gently stroking out. It's like you're smoothing out the lines on your forehead. You might go up to your hairline. Okay. Normally we would carry this on and start to stroke down the body like you might stroke your cats down the length of the arm and you put yourself in a safe place and you start to notice if you practice things like this you can open your eyes because we won't go into it properly but if you start to practice things like this you know frequently you do start to lower your limbic system yeah you start to be able to reset things and that's really important before you do any work or make any big decisions okay question on that yeah when I do a practice like that I mean that's a perfect example of something that you could do at home yeah but founders like myself bad at discipline of self-care of things like that and ironically the only place where they all go and do it is spending the money being with a therapist having the space and the structure and being told what to do in that space.

38:33Is that a very common thing? Very common. That's why we all set New Year's resolutions and by March or something we've given up on them. Yeah. It's fine. We've got to forgive ourselves, right? Yes. So that's the first piece of work. Yeah. And then with Freddie, what was happening is that, like, when Freddie came, he seemed great to me. Like, he was super charming. I couldn't really sense that anything was off it took a couple of sessions before he really started to talk about how he felt like his house was burning down around him um before I could really get a sense of the person kind of like behind the mask and and and well we'll come on to that but that that was part of the problem right is that his like world-facing persona and his authentic self were like worlds apart right so he had death anxiety and he had it really bad right he could absolutely feel like his business was burning down around him his dream was burning down like a part of who he was was dying and that filled him with tremendous anxiety understandably like what was going to become of him of his legacy this thing that he'd built and I suppose with these things as well it's quite slow painful death that you sort of refuse to accept because you try and do anything raising money and all of the things to get out of it right he wasn't and this is the thing he wasn't actually acknowledging that he had death anxiety that he was petrified of his company going and when he started to and he calmed his nervous system down he was able to start to make better decisions actually and ultimately he um he ended up being able to do a kind of a flat round and he had to make some difficult decisions but he pivoted the business because ai had made a lot of like what he was doing kind of redundant and but it was only when he faced the death and stopped pretending to be this like all singing all dancing guy and even at board meetings like trying to keep up appearances that actually his own anxiety started to diminish and he was able to take some like proactive useful steps and it was interesting because it tied into his own experience so early on he'd lost his parent he'd lost his mum and he had assumed responsibility really early on in his family so he'd like looked after I think he had four siblings and he'd looked after them all and he went back to school really quickly and there was this sense that he never faced his mom's death so now when he was faced with another death he also wasn't looking at it and so through starting to and this is the thing with these existential concerns when you actually face them and process them it makes things much less scary and you can behave in a much more conscious way so his previous experience was being re-triggered in the present but this time we did something different and he was able to not have to keep up appearances so it also ties into isolation which was another of the concerns so he always felt very alone because what he presented to the world and kind of what was really going on was so far apart and so through the therapy we helped him kind of bridge that gap and that involved him being okay he couldn't really be more more open and honest with his team members but actually with his investors with his board he could be and actually he needed to say help not literally help but like this isn't this isn't working I need to get real here like the business is is not looking good and this is my um this is what I'm going to do about it rather than painting a pretty picture all the time and it's something that I've actually witnessed with you Dan like the way that you're building like heights in public I mean maybe it brings a whole new level of anxiety because you're doing it publicly but I also think it must reduce a lot of your anxiety because you're not hiding yeah yeah yeah so that becomes part of part of the work that he doesn't have to feel so alone um i've been thinking a lot about uh about victimhood and about narratives and in society and all of this kind of stuff um it seems to me like the only class left of human beings that people are unable to logically feel sorry for are the wealthy um a lot of those people in entrepreneurship anyway self-made from rags right rags to riches and as soon as they have privilege and wealth no matter what they do in society whatever if they're feeling bad if they're having mental health problems and stuff people are very unkind and cruel to them because now they have money so it's like weirdly the last remaining stigma that it's totally okay like everything else is now off bounds and you know like cancel culture if you don't care enough about that person but not if you're rich or wealthy so an exited founder which is very commonly my guest on secret leaders and stuff you know they share things i have real genuine empathy for them because they're human beings i also happen to know that a lot of people don't and think well fuck you you've got money so it can't be that bad discuss so yeah um i actually think that exited quote-unquote successful founders material is often not that dissimilar from founders whose company has failed that they're often both left with this sense of well what now like where should I go from here what what do I want my life to look like what actually do I value so I think so the key questions that come up are still similar correct Yeah, absolutely.

44:47So, you know, to take an example of an exited founder, so we'll call her Georgina. And she came to therapy around three months or so after she'd exited. and she described looking at her bank balance and seeing this enormous lump sum in there um and it being like a really weird feeling she she i think she went shopping the day after and like forced herself to buy some overpriced luxury goods she gave a bunch of money to her parents and then she kind of was like now what um she she had offers like opportunities for things but she was turning everything down I think she didn't want to make the wrong decision commit herself to something new she'd run this startup for like what nine years so she she was overcome by a kind of paralysis right so the the existential concern that she was really struggling with there were there were a few but was kind of like meaninglessness so she'd achieved this thing that she'd set out to do but actually it it kind of didn't really make her feel any different there was this hole still there that that needed to be filled right um and and she also felt like untethered and the lack of identity because for so long and this is so common right like we subjugate who we really are often for our company and you see artists do this as well like i've i've heard amazing interviews with jim carrey he talks about this as well for his roles and it's it's like the route to suffering yeah um and that's when depression comes about as well because it's like we have like depression is depressed feelings so you're pushing down your feelings and you're basically like acting apart um so here she was and she'd achieved the thing that she'd really wanted but why did she ever really want this so we examined not like not to have regrets but it's also it's also okay to acknowledge your regrets or to examine them right um and so we you know she was very honest about the fact that probably a lot of it was for like the big PR story at the end and like what other people would think about her so in terms of like it was a broad extrinsic motivation right in fact demonstrate value to the world exactly and there was such an interesting interview that I that I once um saw with Matt Damon who talked about the moment he he won the Oscar for Good Will Hunting and he was young I don't know how old he was but he was like early 20s when he won it and he said that he went away and he got home and he looked at his oscar and he thought oh my goodness what happens if i hadn't actually got this oscar until i was 95 at the end of my life what a waste of energy and time i would have put into getting this oscar all those years and i think that that's like very very powerful right because we should do this because we enjoy the journey of it I mean I know it's like a very cliche thing to say but when you do something for the outcome especially when it's an extrinsic motivation it will never lead to to fulfillment and I just thought it was such a powerful realization that Matt Damon had right like imagine if he pursued that path for 95 years and then he got there I was like what now but actually Georgina wasn't you know she was I think 40 or something at the time so she had the rest of her life as well to kind of like figure out what it was she wanted to do and so we did um kind of like a life review uh where we looked at the the moments in her life that really had brought her great joy and deciphered from that what her core values were um i also like to work with archetypes so um she had been the jungian archetypes but you see yeah what are they explain what a jungian archetype is i'm going to in the simplest terms in like every fairy tale you see there's the hero there's the wicked witch There's the jester, the wizard.

49:26And you see them in every fairy tale, in every novel, in every movie. It's these kind of like roles that exist within the collective. They sort of guide through the narrative. Correct. But the idea is that we all have them around us all the time and kind of also within us. But usually we identify with one or two the most. And so for a long time, she was like the heroine or the hero. Yeah. She was always like on a mission and fighting and achieving. And is that a typical predominant founder trait? Yeah, it is. So they've got this bias to action. Right. And everything is about heroic action. And actually, for this period in her life, she needed to be much more like the explorer.

50:14And that meant not having an objective. So kind of like being okay in the discomfort of not being the hero, of not having a goal in mind. And one way that we did this is we did some exercises around like, it's de-reflection, which is when you don't think about yourself, but you think about what you can do for others or like how you can help somebody else. And it's a really nice exercise actually when you're feeling like very stuck in your own head. And what she realized through like lots of exploration is that she was actually really passionate about travel and kind of like overseas philanthropic stuff.

50:58And she ended up starting a nonprofit organization in the end, but some time afterwards. um but she had to really toy with what like life's inherent meaning was for her and where she would derive um where she derived her values from what was her existential threat meaninglessness and freedom because she suddenly now had all of this freedom right you know you've got all the money and you've got like no job to go to but if you're not careful that can feel very very threatening because it's like well what do I do with my day too much choice is very overwhelming yeah and so another thing actually that sounds really weird but is setting a schedule when you let's say if you're in that position where you've suddenly got this kind of open wide but you don't want to commit to new things simply committing to you know a phone call with this person at 10 o 'clock or you know a walk at 11 or is was really important so structure alongside this exploration was important so yeah those were the the two kind of existential um themes that she was that she was struggling with okay i can see how freedom is probably the one that people have the least pity for though yeah is that an over generalization like do you agree or you're No, I think you're, I hadn't thought about it.

52:24Right. But I think you're absolutely right. Because freedom is privilege. Yeah. Yeah. And so we should also touch on another thing that I am very aware of and have worked with some clients is like the lack of diversity in the ecosystem. Right. And that that can bring about a whole other. In the ecosystem, sorry. Being in entrepreneurship. Exactly. And that that can bring about a whole other set of mental health struggles and feeling like literal imposter syndrome, because I feel like I am an imposter. Let's say I come to you or a patient comes to you and says, I feel trapped. Or you've diagnosed them.

53:06I suppose quite often you don't notice that you feel trapped. You've diagnosed the situation. Then what? What would you actually do? Well, I think that we often feel trapped when we feel like people aren't aware of what it is we're struggling with, right? Like then it feels it's a very lonely. Right, you're shouldering stuff privately. Exactly. So in a way, it kind of links more to isolation, right? So this one particular client, he felt isolated at work running the scale up. He wasn't, as I said before, kind of like really enjoying it. he was terrified and he was reaching middle age he was terrified that he was going to be irrelevant and replaced and at home he his wife was clearly not happy with him he'd missed his his two-year-old daughter's birthday party his wife said you know whenever you are at home you're just constantly like on your phone you're not even present even if you're there present in body you're not present in mind and I worked with him and and it the question that I usually ask first and foremost is is this a familiar feeling to you or when when else have you felt this way in your life and what he realized is that this very much linked into the relationship that he had with his father so his father was kind of there one minute and then kind of gone he was he ended up being kind of quite ostracized from the family um actually because of his own like working life and this this guy simon he he was he was having this kind of like repetition compulsion so he was repeating what had happened to him and without being aware of it was going to end up in the same potentially in the same boat god it's like a history repeating itself exactly like history repeating it right unconscious or conscious totally unconscious until until we joined these dots right so one of the things that we we did together is we did a negative we did this a few times we did a negative visualization which sounds very kind of counter intuitive um but essentially it involves visualizing what it would look like if his wife did leave him for example and he really was ostracized from his kids and really going into that and imagining it and then we did the same thing with the company and what happens if the company was really successful and you had this huge you know exit at the end or indeed if the company you know you were replaced and through kind of like facing his worst fears he was able to start to redress some of his behaviors in the present day and so because of that he decided to improve his communication with his wife and with his family and that was a way that he was able to like overcome the isolation so silly things like being very disciplined with his phone you know and we made contracts together in the therapy so that he would put his phone away by a certain point in fact he um he never brought it into the bedroom he replaced it with like a proper alarm clock and then he would wake up two hours early and would go into the other room and would have like quiet time with a cup of coffee and would go through his emails and then would enjoy a family breakfast it's like very simple stuff that suddenly made his relationship much better because here's the thing like the quality of your life which is something esther perel says is based on the quality of your relationships and i would argue that it's even more so based on the quality of your relationship with yourself because your external relationships are often a reflection of your relationship with yourself and you know there's no judgment here but I'm always like surprised with how few founders really do invest in their relationships like I was um at Founders Forest which is you know the community that you set up Dan I was helping to run a group on like how to raise happy and successful kids, which by the way, you know, not the same thing.

57:28Right. And I was sharing the idea of being the good enough mother. So like being able to take some pressure off oneself so that, you know, actually your child needs to experience some setbacks and failures and disappointments in order to like grow. Right. And, and, and experience, you know some pain it's important for them and all the founders are absolutely it's so important yeah and I said just out of interest how many of you think it's okay for you to be the good enough CEO nobody yeah so I know it's a difficult kind of like pill to swallow but actually if you are you know if you're a slave to your company you haven't built a company right you've built yourself a job so you built a cage yeah you built a cage and so through um through exercises like that negative visualizations through working out his values improving his communication with his wife because he realized how much he prized that really and he did not want history to repeat itself for his kids um he was able to change things and and make some also practical decisions within the business, which usually involved delegation.

58:50So it's part of the ambition almost for being a successful founder to be able to be comfortable accepting being a good enough CEO. Is that like an aspirational position in your view? I don't think it's an aspirational position to hold all the time, but I think it's necessary at points. Why not? I guess I'm interested in to challenge you further on that. As soon as you said it, like I wasn't in that session. As soon as you said it, I was like, oh, that's quite uncomfortable, isn't it? And then at the same time, like, I've been doing lots of research on success, specifically the science of success, the papers and everything else.