5 Reasons Entrepreneur Therapy Enhances Startup Culture and Founder Performance
If you want to unlock the next level of achievement, you need to invest in yourself
Despite its shine in pop culture, there’s nothing glamorous about being an entrepreneur. In fact, of all professions, it may be one of the more difficult paths to success.
Instead of working eight years to climb the org chart in a conventional corporation, entrepreneurs cram those eight years into two or three hoping for a lofty exit that’s far from guaranteed.
The risks of evolving markets add to the immense responsibility founders feel for their company and employees. And if you’re not bootstrapped, there’s additional pressure from investors to demonstrate consistent growth.
This mixture leads to immense stress, difficulty sleeping, and strained relationships.
A 2015 study found 49% of entrepreneurs have experienced mental health conditions and have higher rates of depression, ADHD, anxiety, substance abuse, and bipolar disorder compared with a representative sample of the general population.
Further, 65% of high potential startups fail due to interpersonal issues in the cofounder partnership. This means that many great ideas were unable to sustain their execution, resulting in crushed dreams and missed opportunities.
Here are five reasons entrepreneur therapy can improve startup culture and founder performance:
1. Startup psychologists improve cofounder communication.
As a psychologist working with entrepreneurs and cofounders to enhance their alignment, I’ve seen the dramatic impact having consistent, meaningful conversations can have on the cofounder relationship.
I’ve seen early-stage entrepreneurs go from disorganized and dysfunctional to structured, motivated, and productive. I’ve helped seasoned cofounders with resentment re-align by embracing mutual vulnerability and learning how to have more effective dialogues.
Working with a professional to improve your communication alleviates stress, builds teamwork, and leads to more effective decisions.
2. Entrepreneur therapists enhance founder’s mental wellbeing.
While some coaches can be helpful in boosting short-term productivity, many rely on limited theories of emotional functioning that don’t result in long-term changes.
Similarly, many therapists lack expertise in issues faced by founders and entrepreneurs. And despite having more thorough training, they too may ascribe to contemporary theories that negate the influence of unconscious motivations that are most likely to sabotage founder’s efforts.
But if you’re able to find an expert in founder mental health who has expertise in depth-psychology, they can dramatically improve your mental/emotional wellbeing.
Like all good things, these meaningful gains in EQ take time, but will increase the clarity of your thinking, give you more space between the stimulus and your response, and improve your decision-making.
3. Improving the founder’s mental health influences the startup’s culture.
Organizational culture is far more than the values you write on internal materials. More often, it’s the unintended consequences of how you’re communicating — the behavior you model to employees.
When there’s tension within yourself or between your and your cofounder(s), everyone else can sense it. And this leads to a certain set of behaviors — back-channeling, walking on egg shells, avoidance — that colors the culture of your organization.
When you prioritize your mental health and the wellbeing of your most important business relationship, it changes the emotional tone of your interactions and models the type of behaviors you want others to embody.
4. Increasing mental health of founders boosts sustainability.
Burnout among entrepreneurs is ubiquitous. Combining the amount of work with the stressors, pressures, and existential isolation accompanying the responsibility you feel leads to energetic depletion.
There’s only one way to counter this drain:
Fight the good fight.
I tell ambitious individuals that you must fight to maintain the parts of yourself that bring balance and fulfillment.
You must force yourself to engage in activities that support your overall wellbeing, especially as the pressure pulls you more and more into the blackhole of endless work.
Investing in your mental health gives you a fighting chance.
Consistent meetings with an expert send messages to yourself that your wellbeing is important. Your interest in actionable self-improvement builds momentum that helps you connect with yourself in other ways — exercise, reading, meditation, and more supportive habits. This psychic investment snowballs and counters the effects of burnout.
5. Conversations with a business therapist help you see the bigger picture.
Often, founders are so close to the problems they’re hoping to solve that they cannot see solutions that may appear simple to an outsider.
Just as you can give recommendations to others on their path because you have more distance than they do, you too can benefit from taking a step back.
Founder psychologists and startup counselors have expertise in facilitating conversations that teach you how to engage in more meaningful self-reflection than you can on your own. Over time, you begin to build a new muscle of self-awareness that helps you notice patterns and take a step back to see the bigger picture.
This process directly improves your leadership, people skills, and decision-making process.
Now that you’ve made it through the list and understand some of the benefits, you may have an unanswered question:
What is entrepreneur therapy?
I define entrepreneur therapy as a meaningful process of self-discovery and healing for entrepreneurs.
The word psychotherapy is derived from Ancient Greek psyche (meaning “breath; spirit; soul”) and therapeia (meaning “healing; treatment”).
Therefore, a literal translation of psychotherapy may be “soul healing.”
Within the realm of startups, many individuals choose to ignore their reasons for pursuing entrepreneurship. Often, these motivations include emotional wounds that the individual seeks to heal through achievement.
This may take several forms:
Building a business so no one can tell you what to do, in hopes to never feel controlled and criticized like you did in childhood.
Building a company so you can have “fuck you” money and financial means to escape. The wound may involve humiliation, rejection, or feeling taken advantage of by loved ones.
Building a business to feel a greater sense of control to counter the lack of control you felt in childhood.
Building a company to gain the recognition, appreciation, and admiration that you didn’t receive from your parents.
I believe that to become the healthiest and most productive version of yourself, you must develop a greater sense of authenticity.
Authenticity develops by aligning three key components: who you really are, what you’re not aware of in yourself, and how you present yourself to the world.
Your true self, your unconscious, and your mask must be in alignment to build the type of presence that leads to influence, fulfillment, and maximum achievement.
Entrepreneur therapy, then, involves healing the “soul wounds” that fuel your compensation to become your most authentic self.
Making these connections unlocks your emotional ceiling, alleviates the tension that would otherwise keep these pains in your unconscious, and increases your congruence, leading to greater energy, mental clarity, and focus.
The goal of entrepreneur therapy isn’t to stop playing the game of achievement, it’s to play it consciously with intention and alignment with your greatest truths.
While this philosophy guides my work with founders, the experience as a client is much less intimidating.
Often, my clients describe feeling a sense of relief, accountability, and happiness with the progress they make through our meaningful conversations. They notice that our chats flow differently than other conversations and lead to insight, self-reflection, and greater understanding of unconscious motivations that may otherwise block their achievement.
So if you’re considering entrepreneur therapy, cofounder coaching, or another form of relational self-growth, give it a try!
It could be the key to maximizing your performance and creating a transformative organizational culture.