Resilience

Founders and startup leaders face unexpected challenges, persistent stress and uncertainty, overwhelming setbacks, and endless changes usually for years. Responding effectively and continuing to build the business demands resilience on many levels.

If you choose this road, it is worth some self-reflection to see if you have the raw stuff of natural resilience required to sustain you as you pour your time, energy, and resources into a profoundly uncertain adventure. Plus, it is worthwhile to be heads-up and intentional about cultivating and growing that resilience so that you can go through what is likely a much longer and harder challenge than you imagined at the outset.

Mental Resilience

There is always so much going on when you are building a startup:

• Too many tasks and priorities demanding attention.
• Problem-solving with incomplete information
• Limited resources 
• Endless distractions and requests for attention by others in the ecosystem
• And so on

Maintaining your focus on what will move your ball down the field is essential. Defining and sorting through your options requires creativity and discipline. Filtering the endless but often irrelevant advice, suggestions, and demands on your resources is vital.

Yet, sometimes, I have felt my brain turn into rubber with the sense that new incoming information was bouncing off my mind rather than being absorbed and processed. Or, a migraine would take me or one of my colleagues out. At that point, asking for help, personally stepping away from the tasks at hand, and investing in sleep are the only ways to reset and restore my mental capacity. It is imperative to know and recognize the signs of reaching your limits – and stop before you start making foolish decisions. Sometimes, it helps to share with your colleagues so you can help cover for and support one another.

Emotional Resilience

Count on it. There will be major disappointments, setbacks, rejections, and failures. Stressed people often take out their anxiety, lack of control, and fear on each other. Entrepreneurs often experience imposter syndrome, hindsight regret for mistakes, and self-recrimination for failing to recognize a need for change. Sometimes, relationships blow up or dramatically degrade. All of these come with emotional consequences that can drain energy and focus and even trigger anxiety and depression.

Some of my worst entrepreneurial mistakes were failing to recognize an emerging situation and act decisively. My regret for the costs of my failures lingers. The loss of important relationships hurts. I have had to learn to assess the root cause, learn what I can from mistakes, and move on. Seeking support from those I trust to care about me, being able to forgive myself and others, and finding silver linings and paths out of the current valley have all proven essential for my emotional resilience.

Physical Resilience

Building a business often means working long hours under sustained stress. This can disrupt sleep and make it hard to find time to eat a healthy diet and exercise, resulting in a depleted immune system. Push too hard and your body may just force you to stop.

When mentoring startup CEOs, I routinely hear about the effects of exhaustion on their productivity and all the compromises they make with healthy habits. My personal worst example of pushing my body beyond what it was capable of occurred when trying to close our first major institutional round. For months, I worked every waking moment to raise the money we needed while still keeping the business progressing forward. As the pressure reached a crescendo multiplied by holiday demands on our core team, the Board of Directors, and me, my body gave up and I got sick. As I continued to push through, one of my colleagues noticed that I was not breathing very well and demanded that I get checked medically. Feeling “I don’t have time for this,” I made time. The urgent care doctor diagnosed me with a sinus infection, two ear infections, and walking pneumonia. She said that if I didn’t slow down at least a little, she was going to admit me to the hospital. That is an example of pushing too hard for too long, and, unfortunately, it is not that uncommon among startup leaders.  

Learning to proactively wedge in some care for your physical self is often a critical investment of time and energy to enable you to sustain yourself. The point here is just to highlight how devastating it can be if you push yourself physically beyond the point of collapse. Consider whether resting now is worth it to ensure you can keep going.

If the stories and observations above have managed to discourage you from pursuing the startup dream, be thankful and move on.

If, instead, you are a rebel like me who sees all of this as just another challenge to be overcome, dive in and go for it – and post a few of these tips on your bathroom mirror so you might be reminded of them when you are in the middle of a bit of a rough or overwhelmed patch.

10 Tips For Being Resilient While Building a Startup

• Focus relentlessly on the most crucial critical path milestones and let the little balls drop.
  
  
• Prioritize hiring great people when needed, even though it will stretch you. Then, figure out how to delegate effectively and increase the firm’s capability. You absolutely cannot build a big business all on your own.
  
  
• Cultivate relationship(s) with someone outside the business who believes in and cares about you and can provide a shoulder to cry on and an encouraging word when you need it most. When you need emotional support, it cannot be your team who is looking to you for leadership. For me, this is my best friend and husband, but it doesn’t have to be your spouse. 
  
  
• Find useful hacks to ensure you eat healthy, exercise, and sleep. If your body fails, your business will likely fail as well.
  
  
• Do not be afraid to ask for help.
  
  
• Seek perspective and input from people who have done this before. They may be able to help you see past whatever blinders you have on (and we all have blinders sometimes!).
  
  
• Lean into your spiritual foundation. Sometimes, a shift in perspective can make a world of difference.
  
  
• Learn. Learn. Learn. You cannot know everything you need to, so being open to learning across many dimensions and despite the discomfort of growing is essential to expanding your capacity and honing your judgment.
  
  
• Discover your own warning signs of pushing too hard – and pay attention to when your reserves are running dangerously low.
  
  
• Remember that building a startup is a marathon, not a sprint.