You know the situation.

It seems like things just keep coming. One after another after another. It’s hard to deal with. How could anyone deal with this?

And then, just as suddenly as it started, it stops. At least for a bit.

Silence.

Relief, even.

But then…

Discomfort.

You instinctively check your phone, your texts, your email, your social media.

You’ve been saying for weeks that you couldn’t wait for a break. But now that you have one, it almost feels like withdrawal. You can’t even enjoy the break you said you craved!

What’s going on?

What Happens Under Stress

When humans are in a stressful situation, a special cocktail of chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline are released into the bloodstream.

These chemicals create urgency and focus.

In optimal amounts they feel good. There is a “get shit done” modality that kicks in here. As much as we feel like we are in emergency mode (which in a sense we are), we also feel very, very alive.

When the situation goes away, our bodies want to keep that aliveness going.

In a very real sense, that sense of looking for something else, for some other aspect of the emergency, is like another phenomenon.

Withdrawal.

Just like other addictions you might be familiar with.

Stress Brings Some Very Good Things

Our capacity and focus under stress can be very good things.

IF we have very defined things to do, stress can help us accomplish more of these things in less time.

Like a well-timed cup of coffee, stress can give us the jolt we need.

This is one reason why procrastination can have such a powerful effect.

As a former law colleague of mine told me, “Give me some coffee and an unreasonable deadline and I can do anything.”

That’s what stress can do for us.

The Downsides Of Stress

Unfortunately, stress can also bring some very bad things.

The human body is not designed to be under stress, to be in fight-or-flight mode, for very long. Thousands of years ago, hunters would track game for a day or two, then face significant stress in the moments leading up to the kill.

They would drag the kill back to camp, and, for days or weeks, rest and eat.

Full stress mode was at most 5 to 10 percent of the time.

Thousands of years later, we have changed, but our bodies have not. Our stresses are now not only self-inflicted, but almost constant. Our environment, our mental outlook on the world and our place in it, has evolved. We have not

Almost every chronic condition that humans face is at least related to and often primarily caused by stress.

High blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, type 2 diabetes, gastric reflux, IBS, just to name a few.

But the downsides are not just physical.

Remember that stress produces a narrowing of focus. Any resources that are not required are taken off line.

This includes physical processes like digestion, but also things that require the right hemisphere of the brain.

Emotional regulation, empathic communication, holistic thinking.

Your ability to manage your people and see your long-term strategy? Essentially nonexistent.

Empathy? Compassion? Gone.

Your Business Needs You At Your Best

“Best,” however, depends on the needs of the situation.

When you are in task mode, “best” may mean stressed, caffeinated, alive.

But when you are connecting with your employees, your customers, your investors, “best” requires a wholly different skill set.

Calm, clear, present.

Empathy, intuition, holistic thinking.

All of these things are more accessible if you feel less stress.

If you are able to slow down.

If you are able to tune into the quieter voices in you that, I assure you, are there and available and essential.

The Withdrawal Of Slowing Down

The hardest step is to step away.

To get into the habit of regularly slowing down. To get away from the urge to be constantly doing.

For some people, slowing down can be a regular meditation practice. Or it can be a walk in nature or listening to relaxing music.

For some people, slowing down can look like speeding up. A hard run or workout.

The key is to slow down your mind.

To allow the chemicals, and your frantic thinking, to dissipate.

It can feel incredibly uncomfortable.

But I assure you, over time, it is transformational. And essential to the long term sustainability of your business, and yourself.

Want To Go Deeper?

Does any of this resonate with you?

If so, reach out to me and I’ll send you a special video that goes even deeper.

More and more founders like you are coming out of the spiritual closet and seeing their work as a vital personal journey to both abundance and meaning.

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, no matter where they are in their transformation.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

By the time a founder or CEO comes to me, they know two things—

First, they know they are getting in their own way.

Second, they know there are very few people who can help them with that.

When More of the Same Is No Longer Enough

You have a success strategy.

There is something that you have done, over and over again, to succeed.

Maybe it’s pleasing people.

Maybe it’s working hard.

Maybe it’s being the smartest person in the room.

It has gotten you to this point. And now, it’s getting in the way.

Coach Marshall Goldsmith wrote a famous book on this phenomenon, “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.” His point is that the very strategy that made you successful will at some point turn on you and become a negative.

Trying to please people can mean that you are afraid of the very conflict that will actually build trust and deeper relationships.

Being the smartest person in the room means that you might risk repelling the very people who are most able to help you.

Continuing to work harder and harder is unsustainable. It leads to overwhelm and even health issues.

You need a different strategy. And if you are like most people in your shoes, you only know what you have done, and anything else looks incredibly risky.

You know you are getting in your own way, but you have no idea HOW you are getting in your own way.

You need a different perspective. And that raises the next problem.

No One Dares Tell You The Truth

For many people in your world, you are the most successful person they know.

Some of those people might want to be like you, to emulate you.

But most just want to be near you. They want to be successful by helping you be successful.

You have unintentionally created a group of yes people. Your employees’ sole agenda is often to remain your employee. And they are not willing to say anything that will risk that.

But they are not the only people who have an agenda.

Your spouse has an agenda, perhaps involving getting more time from you for your family.

Your investors have an agenda—getting the most value from you before they replace you with a “professional” CEO.

Your customers have an agenda—that you deliver a top-notch product or service at minimal profit.

No one is thinking about you, not even those close to you.

Your personal fulfillment and happiness is at the top of, at most, one person’s agenda.

Yours.

No One Can Relate To Your Challenges

“I run a successful company and sometimes I struggle,” is not a problem many people can relate to.

“I sold my company and now I feel empty inside,” is even less relatable.

I’ve worked with scores of leaders who feel guilty about their success even as they hesitate to share the problems their success has created.

So they bottle it up. They freeze.

They convince themselves they are ok, that they are happy, but they’re not.

They have had more success than they ever thought they would.

But they’re bored or even depressed.

They thought a big check would finally make them feel enough. And now they realize they’ve been looking in the wrong direction.

Does This Resonate?

Does any of this resonate with you?

If so, reach out to me and I’ll send you a special video that goes even deeper.

More and more founders like you are coming out of the spiritual closet and seeing their work as a vital personal journey to both abundance and meaning.

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, no matter where they are in their transformation.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

Ken Goulet has been a mentor of mine the last several years, as I have been growing my coaching business and he has been advising several prominent health care startups through successful funding rounds and other transactions.

I asked him to talk about a topic near and dear to my heart—founder leadership.

While I work with founders a lot, my experience with them has been mostly AFTER the business has become profitable. Especially as the founder gets to the point where they are scaling the business—turning a small profitable business into a larger and more profitable one.

Investors are often tempted to replace the founder before the company gets to this point, but founders and their companies can win big of the founder is willing to grow beyond the idea person and into a leader.

I asked Ken what he has found makes the difference. What distinguishes the founder who CAN grow with the founder who is replaced?

I’d encourage you to look for the video clips of that conversation elsewhere on LinkedIn, but I’ll summarize briefly Ken’s comments in this week’s newsletter, along with my own perspective.

Team

Building the right team is critical at every stage, but is especially important as the organization begins to scale. Hire smart people, smarter than you in their particular area, and give them full reign in their responsibilities.

As Ken says, the temptation is to overestimate how good you are at a particular task. I’d add that many founders have a NEED to feel that they are good at everything—it’s one of the reasons they became founders in the first place.

But if you think that you can bring someone on who can do something eighty percent as well as you can, you should do that and let them run. First, it will be good enough that you end up saving time in the long run. Second, you are probably wrong. They may very well be better than you and you should encourage that.

What I have found is that, more important than the actual composition of the team itself, is the trust that is formed among the members of the team.

When that trust is present, it is possible for a team to row together toward a common goal. To both support and criticize each other. We see that in sports teams—it is often not the most talented team that wins, but the team that is most able to work together.

Build the right team and trust it, and things will grow beyond your expectations.

Focus

Founders start their journey by doing everything, by solving every problem.

But that can’t last for long. As a company grows, there quickly become too many problems for the founder to solve all of them, or even be involved in all of them.

Focusing on the right thing and the right time is critically important. Especially when the founder has an effective team, they can’t get pulled into every crisis. Instead, they have to keep an eye on the big picture, on the key members of the team, and on key relationships with customers and investors.

If the founder is spending their days running from crisis to crisis, it may manageable in the short term, but it is likely evidence of a longer term problem.

Emotion

As Ken and many others have said, the startup journey is a roller coaster ride. There will be highs and those highs should be celebrated. There will be lows and those lows should be dealt with. But the founder cannot get too high or too low.

Managing your emotions is a critical capacity.

Most founders today act from a position of constant stress. This has impacts far beyond emotional management.

Your health. Stress results cortisol and other chemicals coursing through your system. We are designed to respond to this every now and then. But the constant surge of these chemicals can result in chronic disease and can even shut you down for a period of time if it gets too bad.

Your judgment. Stress triggers the fight or flight response. This makes everything look like an emergency, whether it is or not. Slow down and it becomes clear what you need to do next. Automatically. Your judgment improves, and your intuition comes on line.

Your “followship.” Leaders need followers. No one likes to be around a stressed out leader. And they are unlikely to stay for long.

Delegate

Always ask yourself, “How can I give this person more?” Always give someone a little bit more than you both are confident that you can deliver. It will grow both of you and everyone wins.

As you grow in your ability to delegate, you will grow in what you are willing to delegate. Eventually you will be willing to delegate entire parts of an organization. Your team will run the show. This is what Dan Sullivan, author of “10x is Easier Than 2x,” calls a self-managing company. When you hit that point, your leadership, and your organization, will truly begin to shine.

Your Board

Ken makes a distinction here between “managing” your board and working with it.

He is spot on.

Too many founders see the board as an obstacle to be overcome, rather than a partner to enroll. When you begin to see the board as a source of valuable perspective and relationships, you are on the way to maximizing this incredible source of insight and perspective.

When you can value the differing perspectives and experiences that an engaged board can bring, you are well on the way to maximizing the value that a board can bring you.

As something to work with, rather than manage or control.

In Summary

Leadership, especially as a founder, tends to bring out the best and worst of us. By growing our own capacity to be self-aware, to distinguish among our emotional triggers, our historical stories, and our actual challenges, we can increase our ability to grow into the demands of the role as our organization grows and succeeds.

To the extent a founder can do this, everyone wins. The founder, employees, customers, and investors.

Going deep on this journey is a key differentiator between the startups that succeed and the ones that ultimately struggle or fail.

Going Deeper

Does any of that resonate with you?

If so, reach out to me and I’ll send you a special video that goes even deeper.

More and more founders like you are coming out of the spiritual closet and seeing their work as a vital personal journey to both abundance and meaning.

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, no matter where they are in their transformation.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.

Einstein said that the eighth wonder of the world is compound interest.

Maybe.

But each of us has something innate that is even more incredible and even more powerful.

This power operates outside of time and space. It can create and destroy in an instant.

This power is the power of an idea. Your idea.

Most of us dismiss our ideas way too quickly. I am here to change that.

Ideas Come From Nowhere

No one knows where ideas come from.

God? The muse?

I know most of my thoughts are like tired reruns. I’ve seen them before. A lot of them are negative.

But then that new idea comes, seemingly like a bolt of lightning.

When? Why? How do I get more of these?

Practices To Generate More Ideas

As much as my ideas are unpredictable, there do seem to be ways to generate more of them. But the question for me is how to still my mind enough that I can get past the constant chatter to the good stuff that is waiting underneath.

These practices will help your mental chatter slow.

The quieter thoughts that you then have access to will feel more like a knowing. More like something that was waiting for you all along.

Meditate. Certainly the reigning champion in this area. Hard to do but so worth it. Especially since the benefits build over time.

Exercise.There is something about a walk, a run, a ride that clears the head.

Sleep. It is for good reason that the phrase “sleep on it” came into the lexicon.

Shower. Who knows why this works but it seems to for many people. Though I confess this has never been a big one for me.

Converse.This might be my favorite one. Because when you are talking with another person, there are things that come up for you, and the other person, that are created new and fresh and, most importantly, that you never would have come up with on your own.

How To Get Out Of The Way Of Your Best Ideas

Most great ideas never make it into the world. Because the don’t seem “practical” or they seem “risky” or my favorite, “It’s just not the right time.”

But your ideas are bigger than you. Bigger than me. And I am determined to help as many people bring their ideas into the world as possible.

The world needs your ideas. So stop getting it their way.

Stop How-To-Ing

The first thing that I typically do when I have an idea is start making a plan. Thinking about what would need to happen to bring my version of this idea into the world.

That’s incredibly limiting.

Because even if I have a great idea I might not be the best person to bring it into the world or even know the best way of doing that. If you have a better idea of how to bring my idea into the world than I do, everybody wins.

Instead? Start Sharing

If an idea is big enough it will need a team to bring it to life. Different talents, different skills, different connections.

Our instinct is not to share. To think that we have to do it all ourselves. To not want the credit, the spoils, the money to go to someone else.

But there is a reason the idea came to you instead of someone else.

Will it die with you?

If I have a good idea, I feel like the universe has entrusted it to me and that I have a duty to bring it into the world.

But instead of hoarding it, I do this by sharing it with as many people as possible. To allow others to interact with it and influence it. To give it the best chance at success.

To give the universe its chance to work its magic as well. Through connection, coincidence, and all the other tools it has at its disposal.

Your ideas deserve nothing less.

Because they aren’t really yours, right?

Going Deeper

Does any of that resonate with you?

If so, reach out to me and I’ll send you a special video that goes even deeper.

More and more founders like you are coming out of the spiritual closet and seeing their work as a vital personal journey to both abundance and meaning.

This is what I write about. For founders, for original thinkers, no matter where they are in their transformation.

The world needs YOU, in all your brilliance and imperfection.

If you are a founder wanting to scale and sell your company, there are three shifts in identity that can help you do so with twice the impact and half the stress. Take a look at this video.

If you want to build a coaching business where you get to be yourself, help amazing people, and replace your corporate income in the process, here’s a video where I share the top three mistakes I see coaches make when trying to build a sustainable business—

http://bit.ly/creatingextraordinarycoaches

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here.

You can follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss a post by hitting the bell on my profile.

If you want to subscribe to this Creating Extraordinary Futures newsletter, you can do so here.