The concept of leadership red flags is important to understand.
They signify the early warning signs of mental distress.
As a young leader, this was something I took on board but never paid due diligence to.
Until two years ago.
In the depths of the COVID pandemic I realised why this lesson was so important.
As small business owners, entrepreneurs and leaders we all tend to have one thing in common.
Personal drive.
You don’t start a business because you lack motivation.
Quite the contrary.
You do these things because you are hyper motivated.
At a level that strays far from sanity.
You don’t get to the starting line by being rational.
Statistically speaking, with no experience you are quite likely to end up worse off.
Or at best, to achieve mediocrity.
A stalemate.
Stuck between the path you’re on and the glorious end goal you crave.
It’s actually irrational to expect more.
The probability of creating something extraordinary is as high as creating something disastrous.
The bell curve has two sides to it.
Which brings me to optimism.
You have to be an optimist to start a business.
The pessimists don’t even open the door, let alone walk through it.
With great optimism, hopes and dreams we can do amazing things.
But this critical choice is born out of intuition far more than rationality.
It’s more akin to rolling a dice.
A dance with the devil.
The accelerator (and the brake)
That high drive and motivation is fantastic.
It’s something we must have to survive start-up.
We need to be able to push the accelerator.
Move through the gears.
The onus is on the founder to set the foundations.
To see the first clients.
Build the first caseload.
Hire the support staff.
Train them.
Hire the clinical staff.
Train them too.
Rinse and… repeat.
All the while holding together one’s own caseload.
And one’s own health and wellbeing.
And everyone else’s as well.
It’s a lot of effort and energy expenditure.
And when you hit those early hiccups it’s on you, the founder, to negotiate them.
To find the reserves to go again.
And again, and again.
This is the skill of a startup founder.
Find the accelerator pedal and press it to the floor.
Wet tarmac
The difference with business post COVID is not so much in the car you’re driving as much as the road itself.
You can still push the accelerator.
The revolutions go up and it get’s nice and noisy.
But the road isn’t exactly the same.
You may prefer driving in 4th gear, or even 5th.
But now you find yourself back in 2nd.
And it’s disheartening to say the least.
You normally would have pushed it harder.
Overcome your next challenge and gone into third at least.
But the road is slippery.
The wheels slip and skid.
You can’t accelerate your way out of a hailstorm.
On a side note: have you ever noticed that some people actually seem to drive faster in the rain?
They take more risks in the wet than you’d expect in the dry?
It does my head in – and this is coming from someone who lost 9 demerit points before he turned 21.
Back to my story, the thing is the goal right now isn’t to get home as fast as possible.
It’s to stay on the road.
Stay safe and stay sane.
Red flags in leadership
In formula one racing they present a red flag after there has been an incident.
Usually a crash, and they stop the race.
All the cars line up in pitlane and they wait for a restart.
In business, the race never stops.
We have to find a way of anticipating these crashes.
We need to identify the red flags before they occur.
Before our car ends up on the wrong side of the tarmac.
The red flags I refer to are those putting you at risk of adverse health.
Mental health, brain health, your emotional wellbeing.
My red flag is feeling unmotivated; underwhelmed.
I’m never unmotivated.
I’m always hungry for opportunity and to feel a sense of completion.
If I ever feel this sense of malaise something is usually quite wrong for me.
There are a couple of pillars which I try to ensure remain stable to stay on the straight and narrow.
The main one is sleep.
These days I need at least 8 hours of quality sleep to function.
I protect this very seriously.
I also recommend it ad nauseum.
It’s amazing, before kids I wasn’t even bothered by lost sleep.
The second one is exercise.
I find when my exercise drops away, my brain health tends to slide with it too.
Often after being sick or having an injury this can be very challenging.
The thirds one is my relationship with my partner.
If ever we have a fight, my world is shaken and I struggle to focus.
My greatest lesson
In September 2021 I went through a personal crisis.
It was lockdown number 6 in Melbourne.
We were encroaching upon 200 days of home confines.
Within my 5km radius.
The year had started out quite optimistically with the birth of my first child.
The months that followed had been quite testing as new parents.
The cracks had started to appear from around July.
This period coincided with a sustained period of sleep deprivation
Both myself and my partner struggled along.
But the wheels had started to come off.
The terrible trifecta:
- Living through COVID lockdowns
- Running a business
- Becoming a new parent
And then…
I still remember the day it happened.
I was pushing my son’s pram and talking to my business partner.
We had a bit of a scuffle the day prior which was quite unusual.
The phone call started with a similar tone but ended with my anger breaking into tears.
And the words – “I can’t do this anymore” finally came sliding out.
After months of inner turmoil, slamming my foot on the accelerator over and over.
I was more surprised to hear it than he was.
At the time I had taken on the task of repairing the groups flagship clinic.
As well as preparing a new startup.
It was actually quite fun but the curveball had been the lockdown and the ramping up of risk on all fronts.
Single COVID cases popping up and clinics being shut for two weeks.
Added to this was my own sense of immortality.
I had steered my team through COVID.
And concurrently past the $1M rev mark.
At the time, I’m sure I had felt that this game was easy.
However, I neglected to realise that I’d been running on adrenaline for a sustained period of time.
Barely sleeping over the previous 18 months.
My exercise habits were non-existent owing to gyms being shut again.
And my partner was wholly consumed with managing our 8 month old baby.
Another terrible trifecta.
The final nail
Before I could look up again my admin manager resigned with a weeks’ notice…and I was cooked.
I had already started the journey to pit lane.
Luckily, our clinic had transitioned it’s front-end leadership.
I knew I needed space around my son’s birth and I’d delegated several tasks to a senior therapist.
This had gone quite well, and I had slowly been increasing his responsibilities.
Then promoting him into management as I took on tasks elsewhere.
What this meant was I had access to another driver.
And part and parcel of the reason I was able to drive so far, so fast and for so long.
I had found my limit and finally had to pull over.
Dopamine diet
At the end of the day, most of my problems were in my own head.
We never did get a COVID close contact and our therapists continued to rebuild.
A month on the sidelines was enough to regain clarity.
But I have never really been the same since.
That feeling of being so overworked, so exhausted.
Yet still fighting…
It took a good 12 months to properly shake off.
I came off the adrenaline hard in 2022 and really went deep into the valley.
It felt like a war had been running and suddenly we all just came home.
We had our second child later that year and I made the decision to sell.
The red pill
Business is an addiction.
I was craving the dopamine hit.
That feeling of success dropping into my bucket each week *ping*.
Like a pokies machine, you just play and play and play.
I still crave that high.
And I’m still here in the entrepreneurial sphere because of one thing.
This ever present drug.
The desire to push my limits.
I’ve taken the red pill and there is no going back into the matrix.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
