Founders and Leaders: feeling alone? You aren’t.

Entrepreneur loneliness is one of the least-talked-about and most universal experiences in startup life. Fear, self-doubt, and imposter syndrome show up for nearly every founder, but the nature of the role makes it hard to admit that out loud. If you are feeling uniquely alone in what you are carrying right now, you are not. Not even close.

Moving from founder/CEO to coach has given me the tremendous gift of being able to step inside the stories, experiences, triumphs, and anxieties of dozens of leaders at once. This visibility is a gift in my work, but it has also been a gift to me personally. It has helped me to see that much of what I experienced as a leader during the 7-years I spent leading my own recent startup was common to nearly all leaders.

Why Entrepreneur Loneliness Is So Common

The structure of the founder role creates loneliness almost by design. You sit at the intersection of every tension in your company. You cannot always be fully honest with your team, your investors, or your board at the same time. You are expected to project confidence while quietly managing fear. Most of your peers are doing the same thing, which means the honest conversations rarely happen.

Coaching dozens of CEOs simultaneously has shown me that the emotions most founders treat as shameful personal failures are in fact near-universal. Naming them here is part of how we begin to dissolve them.

The Feelings Founders Most Often Face Alone

Anxiety About Whether You Have What It Takes

Feeling anxious about whether you have what it takes to lead a team of people? You aren’t alone.

Nobody is born knowing how to lead in crises. Leadership in hard moments is tremendously difficult for everyone. It is easy to imagine that other leaders are weathering this experience better than you are. And yes people respond differently and cope differently. But allow me to reassure you that everyone from yours truly to your CEO idols are feeling this time. Anxiety, uncertainty, confusion, fear: these are near-universal emotions for founders in difficult seasons.

These aren’t the days you envision when you set out to build a company. Maybe you had a great idea for a new product. Maybe you wanted to start a company to work with your good friends. Perhaps you thought fame and fortune were around the corner. Whatever the motivation, it’s unlikely you envisioned yourself leading a team of humans through a global pandemic. And that’s ok. The leaders we grew up admiring did not envision the challenges they faced either. You’ll be ok too. You've got this.

The 3 AM Wakeup

Feeling overwhelmed with anxiety at 3 AM? You aren’t alone.

The 3 AM founder wakeup is common enough that it’s becoming a time-honored tradition.

There is a reason for this experience. We aren’t wired to excel in the middle of the night. Our prefrontal cortex, the more evolved, mature and thoughtful part of the brain, isn’t fully ‘online’ at 3 AM.

That’s why the problems that seem navigable by day feel overwhelming during these middle-of-the-night bouts of anxiety. But you aren’t alone. Nearly all leaders I speak with experience these 3 AM freak-outs daily or often.

Conflict With Your Co-Founder or Leadership Team

Finding yourself bickering with cofounders or your leadership team? You aren’t alone.

We are programmed to process our anxiety in community with the people closest to us. When we do it well, that’s a beautiful thing. When we are showing up anxious, sleep-deprived, it’s easy to show up like overwhelmed kids.

I find myself having where I get filled with feelings of anxiety and a deep resentment that this is all happening. When I process that through journaling or in conversation with a friend over video, I can move through it. When it comes up right before an interaction with my wife or son, I often find myself carrying that anxiety into the conversation.

If you are navigating co-founder tension specifically, you might find it useful to read about how to resolve co-founder conflict.

The Fear of Letting Your Team Down

Worried you won’t be able to take care of your team the way you want? You aren’t alone.

Many of us leader-types end up in these roles because they feel familiar. Many of us had elements of our childhood or adolescence where we were invited or compelled to step into caretaker roles in our families of origin. In my case, it was a father who struggled with addiction and a mother and sister who struggled with the resulting instability. I was the stable, caring, connecting one. For leaders who become leaders as a result of these childhood roles, leading in times of turmoil can feel natural but also uniquely challenging. It feels natural because it’s familiar. But it can be deeply challenging because these childhood roles get matched closely with our identity and even equated with survival.

It’s not your job to save your team.

You cannot fix these circumstances, and that’s ok. It’s your job to resource them with clarity and to be a partner in the journey. Clarity around who owns what and how information flows is often the most practical gift you can offer your team.

Afraid you won’t get the performance out of your team the company needs to survive? You aren’t alone.

This remote thing is hard for a lot of people. For leaders who deal regularly with anxiety about whether they are pushing the team to do great work and to excel, going suddenly fully remote can be anxiety-inducing. You aren’t alone.

If you’ve recruited bright, internally-driven, hard working people, now is a good time to lean into trust. You might even voice both your anxiety and your trust to your team. Voicing our fears has the dual benefit of helping us to find freedom from them and helping us find partners in the solutions. If you’re anxious about performance in a time like this, your team probably already knows that. Better to voice it and to also share your interest in being trusting partner during this time.

Confusion About Growth vs. Survival

Confused about how to weigh growth and austerity? You aren’t alone.

Growth is life for startups. Or maybe cash is? During times like this it’s really hard to know. I have written about the shift my last company went through when VC markets shut off unexpectedly and we had to pivot to a profitability plan practically overnight. Very fucking hard.

It feels unfair and painful when the goalposts that determine success suddenly shift. I coach several companies who were planning on raising in Q2 and were well-positioned to do so. They still might, but the shift in climate may necessitate a massive change in plan. For those of us who grew up straight-A students who were really good at memorizing the answers, a sudden change in the right answer like this can feel jarring. It is frustrating as hell. It’s also the reality of running a startup in a dynamic market. You aren’t alone.

How to Stop Feeling Alone as a Founder

I know. This is all really fucking hard. The things that worked last year or last month may not feel like they are working right now.

The leader you have learned to be may not be the leader you need to be for your company through the time that is now at hand.

But that’s ok. You aren’t alone.

Here are a few things that actually help:

• Name it out loud. Saying "I am feeling isolated" to one honest person begins to dissolve it.
• Find a peer. Reach out to a fellow founder you haven't spoken with in a while. Ask how they are really doing. The conversation will help you both.
• Get support. A coach, a therapist, or a trusted friend can carry some of this weight with you. These are times for connection, not silence.
• Journal. Processing anxiety in writing before it lands on a co-founder or partner protects your closest relationships.

You are part of a community of leaders that are going through this challenge together. And we can go through it more together than we have in the past.

If you are curious about what working with a coach actually looks like, you can read more about what a CEO coach does and whether it might be right for you.

And if you are navigating founder burnout alongside loneliness, the two are often connected. You can read more at navigating founder burnout.

Thinking of all of you leaders out there and sending love.

-Matt