Two Emotional Failure Modes: Reactivity and Paralysis

Emotions are powerful - they’re no joke. Anger has destroyed civilizations. Grief ends lives. Anxiety robs us of the beauty of the present moment by keeping us focused on the future. When founders don’t know how to work with their emotions, it’s a major failure mode. They suffer, and their startups usually die. 

Founders commonly believe their emotions are a problem because they get habitually stuck in one of two emotional failure modes: reactivity or paralysis

I want you to remember - your emotions are not a problem. But an underdeveloped emotional toolkit will be a problem, either now or later. The two failure modes I’m about to describe are completely optional. Leave them for your competitors! They’re not necessary for you to build an amazing company. These failure modes are simply the consequence of when founders haven't yet skilled up their emotional toolkit. So if you see yourself in the following examples - don’t worry - it just means you’ve got some scaling to do. 

Emotional Failure Mode #1: Reactivity

One emotional failure mode is reactivity.

When founders don’t know how to name and process the feelings in their bodies, they run the risk of being overwhelmed by their intensity.

Too much intense emotion creates the opposite psychological workstream than a founder's typical cognitive-based one: Emotion, action. Emotion, action. Emotion, action. Reactivity is all body and no brain - just mindless, unstrategic action.

Reactivity is all emotion and no thought. Recklessness and blind faith are reactivity’s cousins. 

There is no clear, strategic action founders can take when their psychologies are overwhelmed with emotion and they're in the failure mode of reactivity. That’s because physiologically, too much emotion makes your brain shut off. I mean that literally. You physically can’t think if you’re overwhelmed with emotion.

We usually process information in the prefrontal cortex, the front part of the brain. This is where we do our “executive functioning” - logic and reason, scheduling, decisionmaking, problemsolving. All the things a founder really wants to be using their brain for.

But - when we’re too stressed, when we’re engulfed in emotion, our brain processing shifts. We start to use the amygdala to process our experiences instead. The amygdala is not capable of executive function. Its job is to process fear - and to make sure we’re really aware of everything going on that’s scary. You do not want your amygdala running your fundraising process, with your prefrontal cortex in the back seat. 

To avoid the reactive failure mode, founders need to learn to stay connected to their emotions - to keep a handle on them, processing them and working through them quickly as they come up. Again, founders scale when they relate to their emotions as data and find smart, efficient ways to incorporate them into their work.

Emotional Failure Mode #2: Paralysis

The second emotional failure mode is paralysis. Paralysis is all intense emotion - with no action and no thought. It’s a total system shutdown. A collapse.

When founders don’t know what to do with their feelings - those emotions don’t magically go away. They stay in your body. And if those feelings are intense enough, they crystallize into secondary emotions that are even more dense and difficult to change.

Unprocessed frustration - maybe at an unequal equity split - crystallizes into resentment. Resentment destroys relationships.

Unprocessed fear can really warp your cognitive processing. Fear distorts your thinking - it can make you numb to existential threats, or it can make you see everything as an existential threat. Neither of those outcomes is great because neither perspective is real - and if you don’t operate in reality, you won’t win.

Too much uncertainty in your world will get internalized as anxiety. Anxiety blocks you from trusting yourself, so you’ll never feel confident to take the next step forward. 

And if you lose a connection to your passion or your inspiration - that crystallizes as burnout if it lasts too long. And now your longevity is shot - and maybe your startup’s future.

Founders who are living this failure mode need to take care of their mental health. It is impossible for a founder to scale themselves - to uplevel from baseline - when these emotions are dominant. And more often than not, your startup needs to be deprioritized so you heal. Which is why this failure mode is so dangerous and so worth avoiding. In paralysis, your psychology has no thought and no action. All it has are these intensely negative, unprocessed emotions that are corrupting your underlying thinking and your belief system. This warped system will create a new psychological workstream that reinforces itself. Paralysis - a psychology with distorted thought, stuck emotion, and corrupted beliefs - is when founders start to believe what these negative emotions are telling them: "You are incapable. You are powerless. You’ve can’t do this. You’re failing. You’re a horrible, disappointing person." This self-generated nightmare is the failure mode to end all failure modes - and it’s also really sad. When a founder’s psychology is weaponized against itself, the startup doesn't have much chance of success because its leader is no longer operating in reality.

But - of course there is always hope! Almost every amazing founder I know has taken at least a dip into paralysis. It’s super gritty, but it doesn’t need to be the end of the world - or your journey as a founder. Catch it early and you'll have the best chance of getting back to clarity. It's possible for paralysis to be a little side quest that’ll test the outer bounds of your strength. 

This is why processing your emotions is a competitive advantage.

When founders don’t know how to process their emotions, they suffer. Their brains don’t work. And their startups often die. 

It is a failure mode not to listen to your emotions. And it’s a failure mode to always rely on your ability to think through problems - that will always only get you so far, because your startup will keep making you feel feelings. It’s still really normal for founders to think that emotions need to be ‘managed away’ so we can get to the clean, rational logic and make a decision. Let those founders fail. 

One example of this for me was when Covid shut the world down for the first time, way back in March 2020. Every startup I worked with was hugely affected. Every founder in every vertical had to make a series of super tough decisions - to cut headcount, shift roadmaps, or shut down. Every founder was forced to give up the original vision that they’d had - that they’d devoted themselves to for years, that they got out of bed for, that they hired tens or hundreds of people to help them build. Every founder was afraid, and every founder was grieving what they were leaving behind in order to build a startup that was better suited to the moment.

The founders who could process their fear and loss - who could feel it, name it, and let it run through their bodies - were able to make tough calls and execute much more quickly than the founders who were too afraid or too attached to what they were losing. The fastest client I had rebuilt his company in two days. He was in tears for most of it but he still did it. My slowest client took over two months to walk through essentially the same decisions that this other founder had considered and already made. And his grief continued to slow down his execution for months after he restructured his company and product roadmap.

Imagine if these founders were in the same market. Imagine if they were competitors - how this could have impacted one startup’s eventual success over the other. And imagine what their teams must have felt like - in one case, there’s a leader who’s genuinely affected by what’s going on, and who’s able to move quickly and execute anyway. Maybe you’d feel inspired to do the same. In another situation, you have a founder who goes dark. Their silence leaves you with a lot of uncertainty and a total lack of trust.

Founders scale when they work in partnership with their emotions.

Founders whose failure mode is reactivity need to learn how to think about what they’re feeling before they act. You might need more time to slow your mind down enough to drop into your body and process the emotions you’re feeling.. If you paused everything to give yourself 5 minutes - or 10 before ‘doing,’ - I’m so curious about what your emotional experience would be. What data you’re missing. And what action might surface as the most important when your thoughts are balanced with emotions.

And founders who tend toward paralysis need to learn how to feel about they’re thinking. My advice to you is - to take what you feel. And think about it. And make a choice about whether you can give yourself what you need. Given what your goals are right now. If not - give yourself a little piece of what you need and defer the bigger break to when you reasonably take it.

The opportunity for all of you, regardless of your failure mode, is for all of your parts to work in harmony. None of them more important than, or less helpful than the others. All recruited in service of your goal.

Your emotions are data. Getting good at reading this data makes you more powerful than your competitors, who are stuck in reactivity, paralysis, or are numbed out to the rich data emotion provides.

Processing your emotions is a competitive advantage.