Two Emotional Failure Modes: Reactivity and Paralysis

Emotions are powerful - they’re no joke. Anger has destroyed civilizations. Grief ends lives. Anxiety can rob 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 stuck in one of two emotional failure modes: reactivity or paralysis. 

I want you to remember - your emotions are not a problem. But startups are so emotionally intense that an underdeveloped emotional toolkit will be a problem for you, 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 the consequence of when founders haven't yet built the skills to manage the emotions your startup will cause you to feel. 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 following psychological workstream: Emotion —> action. Emotion —> action. Emotion —> action. On loop.

Reactivity is all emotion and no thought. It’s all body - flailing limbs and no brain. It results in mindless, unstrategic, action. There is no wise or thoughtful choice founders can make when their psychologies are in 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 .

We usually process information in the prefrontal cortex, the front part of the brain. This is where our “executive functioning” happens - logic and reason, scheduling, decisionmaking, and 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 and 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 startup, with your prefrontal cortex in the backseat.

Avoid Reactivity by Thinking

Founders whose failure mode is reactivity scale themselves by learning think and feel - before they act. Thinking kills reactivity. When founders think about what they’re doing, their task lists, notifications, and email inbox stop acting as the conductor telling them where to direct their time. You have to decide where your attention goes - not Slack. Learning to think about what you’re doing re-establishes your agency and enables your choice. It allows your actions to become thoughtful and targeted. You might lose some speed initially, but you’ll likely more than make up for it by not having to double back and try to hit the same target again because of sloppy execution that wasn’t considered in the first place. Founder brains are big and beautiful. I’ve almost never worked with a founder who didn’t know what their most critical focus was, but I’ve worked with many who struggled to align their actions with that knowing. Agency and choice drive focused, clear, and decisive action. Reactivity might feel like it’s your default state. It might help you get a lot of work done, but don’t let it trick you into believing it was the right work.

Your task is to give yourself permission to slow down and pause if you need to. This will give you time to consider what you’re doing. Are you in reactive failure mode? Do you feel like a chicken with its head cut off? Stop. Pause. Breathe - deeply and slowly. Drop into your body to notice what you’re feeling, tend to your needs, and then decide what you should be doing. You will always have more work, responsibilities, and decisions to make than any reasonable human could possibly complete. This will almost always be true. Learn to tolerate the volume of your work by developing thoughtfulness about your energy is best focused.

Sometimes this looks like setting a timer every few hours to tell you when it’s time to pause and make sure you’re executing thoughtfully. Sometimes it looks like adding a 5-min cushion between your meetings so you have enough time to take a few deep breaths, get organized, and reset before the next one starts. Sometimes it looks like a single moment of curiosity that happens randomly: “How am I feeling right now? And what do I need? Is what I’m doing correct? Am I focused on the right thing or do I need to shift gears?” that allows you to return back to agency, choice, and proactivity.

Founders scale themselves when they learn to think and feel - before they act.

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 psychological shutdown. A collapse.

When founders don’t know what to do with their feelings, their emotions don’t magically go away. They stay in your body. And if the feelings are intense and durable enough, they’ll 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 warp your cognitive processing. Fear distorts your thinking. It can either 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 aren’t operating in reality, you won’t win.

Too much uncertainty will get internalized in your body as anxiety. Anxiety blocks you from trusting yourself, so you’ll never feel confident enough to take the next step forward. Anxiety slows down and bottlenecks founders’ action by entrapping them in endless thinking.

And when founders lose their connection to the emotions of passion and inspiration, that gets crystallized into burnout. And now your longevity is shot, and maybe your startup’s future.

Founders who are living in paralysis need to take care of their mental health. It is impossible for a founder to scale themselves - to learn new skills that enable them to keep pace with the demands of their startup - when these emotions dominate their psychologies. More often than not, these founders’ startups need to be deprioritized so they can heal and get back to healthy functioning. This is why this failure mode is so dangerous and so worth avoiding.

In paralysis, your psychology has no thought and no action. What it has are intensely negative, unprocessed emotions that are stagnant in your psychology. These emotions are so intense that they end up corrupting the founder’s underlying belief system. In paralysis, founders start to believe what their 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." These beliefs then warp and distort the founder’s thoughts and ability to cleanly analyze their decisions. The lens they’re using to view the world is distorted, so any action the founder takes out of paralysis is unlikely to achieve their goals. Unfortunately, the outcomes of those actions reinforce the founder’s corrupted belief system, validate their irrational emotions, and continue reinforcing their warped thinking. 

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, their startup doesn't have much chance of success. 

If you see yourself in paralysis, don’t lose hope. Almost every amazing founder I know has taken at least a dip into paralysis. It feels super gritty but it doesn’t need to be the end of the world, or your journey as a founder. Catch it early by developing a practice of processing your emotions and you'll have the best chance of getting back to clarity. Think of paralysis as a side quest intended to test the outer bounds of your strength.  

Avoid Paralysis by Processing Your Emotions Quickly and Efficiently

Founders whose failure mode is paralysis scale themselves by learning to process their emotions quickly as they come up. Staying connected to your emotions - recognizing them, acknowledging their presence in your body, investigating whether they have any signal that could be helpful to you, and then choosing whether to act with that new information or not - will keep you from being so consistently overwhelmed by them that you get paralyzed. Imagine that your psychology is like a pot of pasta kept on a rolling boil. You want to stir the pot proactively at a regular cadence so it doesn’t boil over.

Founders, if you find that you are stuck in paralysis to the extent that you’re failing to deliver on your commitments, your health is suffering, you believe that you’re bad and incapable, and you’re not able to consistently perform in your role at work, this is one of the few times I recommend you reach out to a coach or therapist who can help you. The issue with long-term paralysis is that creates a reality distortion field. It will be really hard for you to help yourself because your perception is so distorted that you will reject what friends, family members, advisors, or other supportive people in your world are telling you: Whatever is happening, it isn’t the end of the world. You are okay. You can still do this - you can achieve what you’d like to achieve. You are capable - you have the skills, smarts, and abilities to accomplish great things. What you’re experiencing right now doesn’t define you - unless you let it. There is greatness in you, of you, and out ahead of you.

All of this is true. If you can’t believe it just yet - hold onto it anyway. Get the support you need to cleanse your filters, clean up your thinking, and heal your emotions back to their natural state of fluidity and vibrance. Your beliefs about yourself will be the slowest to change but once they do, there is no more resilient founder than a founder who looked a demon in the face who told them, “No you can’t” by saying, resolutely, “Yes I can.” and having made the choice deep in their soul to believe it.