What are you running away from?
To understand what's not working and what we are meant to be doing, we need to uncover what we're trying to avoid.
In the last essay, I reflected on the reasons why some founder CEOs choose to leave their jobs, and shared bits of my story. But my story wouldn’t be complete without also sharing what I was running away from. Accepting that I’m running away and stopping to turn back and face my fears was one of the important steps of my own journey.
We sometimes end up doing what we aren’t meant to do because we are running away from something that we are unwilling to acknowledge. We may believe that we are deficient in some way, which evokes some uncomfortable feelings. Then our minds, usually unconsciously, come up with a strategy to make sure we don’t ever feel these feelings, and this strategy may well include building a startup. Enacting this strategy takes us away from what we are meant to be doing in the first place.
In such situations, a founder may find themselves feeling permanently stuck, feeling like they aren’t in the right place, but that they can’t quit either for reasons they can’t easily explain. I know, I was there.
A weak girl?
One of my earliest memories is from the time when I must have been around three years old. I was playing by myself in my grandparents’ courtyard. They lived in a large block of flats. Local kids had a playground they could enjoy, while being watched from dozens of balconies and windows over them. I saw some kids I didn’t know and tried to approach them. Suddenly, they started teasing me, calling me a “weak girl”.
As small children we don’t yet have the emotional maturity to experience our feelings without being overwhelmed or to put what’s happening into perspective, and so when we experience pain interacting with others, we tend to conclude that there’s something wrong with us. After all, the only perspective we have as small children is the first-person perspective. If these kids didn’t want to play with me, there must have been something wrong with me, and if they ran away from me, there must have been something repulsive about me.
In hindsight I realise that that social rejection was one of my formative experiences, which was later reinforced at school, where I constantly felt like I wasn’t fitting in and yet desperately wanted to fit in and be accepted by my classmates, while at the same time knowing that I’m different from them in some important ways and they’re not my tribe. I only connected the dots as an adult, after many hours of therapy and self-reflection, seeing clearly to what extent my desire to be accepted, respected and loved by others I respect has been driving my life choices.
If I only build a successful business…
That subconscious desire to find my tribe, people I like and respect, and be liked and accepted by them eventually drove me to the startup community. A computer science student, a geek at heart, I felt for the first time in my life that the founder community is where I belong, or at least, should belong. Feeling, but not acknowledging, that sense of deficiency I first felt as a three year old kid, I decided that I needed to build a startup.
What I didn’t know is that I was running away from feeling rejected and deficient as a small child, quietly hoping, in the depths of my unconscious mind, that if I only build a successful business I won’t ever have to feel that way again. I will be able to finally relax and feel like I’m ok. That I’m loved, accepted and respected for who I am.
This is a very common strategy that our mind uses to compensate for an imagined deficiency. Not being able to experience feeling enough, but desperately wanting to feel enough, a part of our psyche comes up with a strategy to compensate for it. It makes a subconscious assumption like, “Deep down I know I’m not enough, but if I have X (money, fame, education, partner, kids, respect etc), then it’ll compensate for it and I’ll finally feel enough”.
The trouble is, it doesn’t work. Whenever we achieve “X” and enjoy it for a while, we invariably find out that the feeling of not being enough is still here, and our minds come up with a different strategy: “Oh, I was wrong that I needed X, I actually need Y”, and off we go in a new direction. The only way out of this is to realise, to viscerally feel deep down, that you are fundamentally enough as you are. That we all are unconditionally human, enough as we are, no proof needed. It took me quite a few years to learn this.
Back when I was running my startup, not being aware of this dynamic created the double bind I found myself in. Me being a founder was the mechanism I was relying on to feel that I belong to a tribe of people I respect, not feeling rejected and teased. At the same time, a part of me knew that being a CEO was not what I was meant to be doing. That’s why it’s a double bind: whatever I did, I felt I would either sacrifice my integrity or face the feelings I wasn’t yet ready to face.
Yet that understanding of what I was running away from eventually helped me start asking different questions. What if I can be respected and accepted just as I am, without having a business card that says “Founder and CEO”? What if I can face those scary feelings from childhood and discover that they don’t actually harm me? What if I don’t have to feel out of integrity only to protect my feelings?
Our feelings can’t harm us, but avoiding them can
The curious thing about feelings is that they don’t harm us when we feel them, but we’re still afraid of them. They only harm us when we aren’t willing to feel them and enact neurotic strategies to avoid feeling them, which can actually harm us and others.
Understanding what we are running away from and facing it can help us inquire into whether we need to be running away from that in the first place. If our startup is an elaborate running away strategy, we might do ourselves a favour by asking if all of that is really necessary to feel fundamentally ok.
There are countless ways to get started on this journey. Therapy, yoga, coaching, journalling, circling, meditation, bodywork, equine therapy, 12 step programmes and countless other modalities can all help us get to know ourselves better in the safety of a trusted relationship. However, what’s important is that we start and then keep moving forward without any rush when we inevitably encounter things inside that we don’t want to be there.
Being aware of how you’re feeling in the moment and being able to stay with it without any attempt to change how you feel is a skill. Like any other skill, it can be learned. Without it, we are at the mercy of our automatic reactions and habits that run our lives when we are not paying attention.
For a founder CEO, understanding what they are running away from can help them understand whether running their startup is something they genuinely want to do or an elaborate strategy to avoid something they don’t want to feel. Most likely, it’s a mix of both. Making sense of all of it will be a step towards either becoming a better leader, or discovering what you’re meant to be doing instead.
Startup CEOs in transition peer group
Nearly every startup CEO thinks about stepping down at some point. Yet, almost everyone faces these two questions in solitude, because admitting that you're considering leaving your business is still taboo:
How can I decide to step down?
How do I prepare the transition?
I'm building a peer group of startup CEOs where we'll explore these questions together.
This is for you if you are:
A startup CEO trying to decide whether to step down
A startup CEO preparing the transition to a new CEO
Here's how it works:
Meeting bi-weekly for 90 minutes
No advice giving, only sharing experience to see how others are navigating questions that torment us
Strict confidentiality expectations
No more than 5 founders and me as a coach and facilitator
Monthly fee invoiced discreetly (so that your finance team doesn't know you might be considering stepping down)
If you are interested in joining, drop me a line on evgeny@evgeny.coach. And if you know someone who might need this, forward them this essay, they'll say thank you