📆 Upcoming event

On the morning of the 12th February I’ll be co-hosting an in-person workshop at the Creandum VC offices in Central London.

The workshop is intended for Founders and Leaders who are looking to improve their coaching skills in order to get the best out of their teams.

The workshop is free but spaces are limited so reserve your spot now! The signup page is not quite live yet so for now feel free to respond to this newsletter if you’re interested.

Sarah and I will be offering this and further leadership development workshops as a training option to clients, so if you think leaders in your team could benefit from learning how to be a great coach; or you have other leadership development challenges you’re exploring then we’d love to discuss how we might support.

Unf***ing your nervous system

Almost every Founder who comes to me is in a state of fight, flight or freeze. Their nervous system constantly heightened. Often, they’ve tried to brute force their way through the struggle, but eventually brute force simply isn’t enough. Many have spent years justifying this state of being as the inevitable consequence of being a Founder, but it truly doesn’t have to be that way.

I’m not going to pretend that the life of a Founder can be lived like a Zen Buddhist (nor would most Founders I know want it to be). Being a Founder is stressful, intense and consuming in a way that few other jobs are. But it also doesn’t have to be lived in a state of constant stress and misery either. I’ve seen enough Founders sacrifice themselves on the altar of their own startups and enough who’ve achieved success at least partly as a result of taking good care of themselves, to know that acknowledging your needs as a Founder is likely the single smartest business decision you can make.

So why does the problem persist?

Well I have some thoughts, some of which are specific to founders and some apply to modern society in general:

• For most Founders it’s not a deliberate decision - it either sneaks up on them over time; or they get caught in the liminal space between funding rounds, fuelled by the promise that things will get easier after the next round. Sometimes they do; mostly they don’t.

• The separation of wellbeing from performance - we’ve framed wellbeing as soft and squishy and about the needs of the individual; whilst performance is scientific, data-driven and the imperative of any organisation. We’ve hacked away at the connective tissue linking the two, ignoring wellbeing as a necessary foundation for high performance. In this separation, we’ve made rest a reward rather than a right.

• We’ve forgotten how to relax - just look at how quickly we unconsciously reach for our phones to avoid the withdrawal symptoms from lack of stimulation. I’d recommend Ted Gioia’s State of the Culture essay for a provocative read on dopamine culture. You may not agree with his assessment of the incentives at play in Silicon Valley, but as someone who spent several years of my career building products to tackle substance use, I find it hard to argue that our collective behaviour doesn’t have many of the hallmarks of addiction.

• We (in western culture) are a very ‘head-dominant’ society - what I mean by that is that we place a lot of weight on what’s going on in our minds and very little on what’s going on in our bodies. By living numb from the neck down we’re often blind to the constant stream of data our body’s sending us regarding how we’re doing.

• We’ve glamourised the hero’s journey - as humans we’re natural storytellers, and what hero’s journey is complete without the struggle - the dragon to kill, the maiden to rescue, the foe to overcome, or the startup to build. Our view of what drives success is shaped by a rose-tinted, retrospective analysis of a small minority, whose tales are the most enthralling; ignoring the truth that most unprepared wannabe heroes get smoked by the dragon and don’t live to tell the tale.

So in some combination, I believe these things combine to uphold a view that there’s no problem to solve, or simply no other way of being. But frankly, I disagree on both fronts.

What’s the problem?

The first thing to note is that our nervous system is the lens through which we experience the world; so simply put, the state of our nervous system will shape our reality. It’s like moment to moment we’re putting on different pairs of glasses, each with different lenses that change our view of the world.

According to Polyvagal theory, there are three primary ‘lenses’ or states:

• Ventral Vagal State: associated with a sense of safety, connection, and calm.

• Sympathetic State: Fight-or-flight response, characterized by stress and anxiety.

• Dorsal Vagal State: causing shutdown, disconnection, or freeze.

The second important thing to note is that our lives today look incredibly different to the evolutionary context in which our nervous system evolved. For most of us, we no longer face the threat of being hunted by predators like our caveperson ancestors; and yet our nervous system is still wired for that context - survival.

In the Ventral Vagal State, we’re in a low stress mode in which our prefrontal cortex can be prioritised, priming us to connect with others, to think more clearly and expansively, to be open to new ideas, to plan, problem solve and reason, and to show better emotional control. It’s the state we’d ideally be spending most of our time in.

Once we move into the sympathetic or dorsal vagal states, survival mechanisms are prioritised ahead of this, lowering our propensity for these other vital functions.

Being in a momentary heightened state is not necessarily a bad thing - but the implications of living like that long-term are not good. Not only is business decision-making worsened; relationships get strained; physical health degrades; challenging behavioural patterns can emerge e.g. use of substances, or other means of escapism; and of course mental health suffers. In fact the data around Founder mental health makes pretty bleak reading.

So I really don’t think we can pretend that there’s not a problem to solve here.

What’s the alternative?

I believe that an important development task for each of us (Founder or not) is to find ways to increase our time in the ventral vagal state - or to put it less scientifically, to unf*** our nervous systems. The end goal need not be to live an entirely chill life, to abandon your ambitions and never push yourself. Quite the contrary, greater nervous system mastery means you spend more of your time in the most conducive state to doing your best work and are equipped with greater levels of resilience in pursuit of hard things. So for Founders, however difficult it might seem, it’s absolutely worth the effort of doing the unf***ing.

But easier said than done of course.

There are changes to be made to address the symptom (the heightened state of the nervous system); and many to address the causes (which might span a vast array of different topics for each Founder). For the sake of this particular edition though, I’m going to focus on a symptom-first approach. It’s not that the causes aren’t equally important to address, but in my experience, clients find it hard to think expansively and creatively about how to address causes, if they haven’t first developed a certain level of nervous system fluidity i.e. some ability to shift their state and an appreciation of what it feels like.

So if fluidity is the first step towards mastery, how to develop it?

Here are five simple steps.

Just kidding. There are never five simple steps. Not to anything worth having. And no amount of Linkedin carousels will convince me otherwise!

There are though, lots of grounding practices you might experiment with - energy practices like qigong, the synchronisation of breath and movement in yoga, various forms of meditation, even basic forms of exercise like going for a run; but, as someone whose experimented extensively, in terms of bang-for-your-buck for a time-poor founder, I believe breathwork is the quickest and most accessible way to help regulate your nervous system, both for short-term, in-the-moment shifts e.g. calming yourself before a board meeting; and with consistency over time, improving what’s called vagal tone i.e. a measure of how well the vagus nerve, in its role as regulator of the parasympathetic nervous system, is functioning.

So perhaps unsurprisingly, this edition’s experiment is focused on breathwork. I’ve recorded a brief overview of four different breathing techniques for downshifting your nervous system below.

The good thing about breathwork; in contrast to some people’s experience of meditation, is that almost everyone feels the impact immediately, however short-lived. So give it a go. 10-15 minutes a day for a week and see what happens. You might just start to unf*** your nervous system.

From the archive