Entrepreneurial Mental Health - Mindstorm Podcast Video Episode

Hi, welcome to Mindstorm. My name is Adeo Ressi. I'm CEO of the Founder Institute, and we're here to talk about mindful and awakened entrepreneurship.

And I'm Josh Whitton, most recently of MakeSoil.org and other planetary interventions.

I still love the term planetary interventions. We haven't recorded an episode in a little while, And what I'd like to do today is talk a bit about maintaining your vibration and your positive contributions in the world when you can be surrounded by others that might have a tendency to drag you down a little bit, and how to stay true to yourself and encourage others to heal and come at things from a good place, even at times that are quite difficult for them, and they're maybe trying to push their difficulty on you. And, you know, I see this all the time because we operate in 200+ cities around the world, and sometimes people are doing great and other times people are doing badly.

They're usually doing great during the interview, hiring them, right?

Well, I mean, I think both of us have struggled with people that we've trusted who have changed, uh, and then they drag you into their trauma or their reality somehow. And, and the question is, how do you maintain yourself, whether it be an employee, a contractor, a friend, and you're trying to do good in the world, and then all of a sudden you can get wrapped into something that has nothing to do with that?

Great. Well, it sounds like you have a lot of experiences there to share. And I'll tell you, I haven't updated policy on this, which is if you're already in a venture that's trying to change the world and go against the grain and do something super positive, and whether save the environment or elevate consciousness or whatever, I'm of the mindset you've already got your work cut out for you. Like, work with the most stable A-players you possibly can, because if you simultaneously are like taking people on who are in a super wounded, triggered place and hoping to heal them along the way, or have them heal along the way while you save the world, I find it's a little too unreliable. So I think it's good for people to get clear on whether, whether you're working together just to sort out yourselves and the ego and heal, or whether you've got an outside mission like clean up the oceans or whatever. Because how many, how many ventures do you see fail just because the founders freak out or they go at each other or whatever?

Yeah, well, the, the— we know for a fact, you know, based on tons of data that we've collected, and we, we do psychometric testing of everyone we work with, that if you have someone who's who's unstable on a team, the outcome is 100% failure. So there's not even—

I suspected as much, but you have the data.

Yeah, we have the data. So it's 100% failure rate. So I like to say first and foremost that belief is the new currency of success. And what I mean by that is not just that you believe it, but everyone around you believes it. And that means your team, your partners, your investors, even your customers. And when you start to have variance on belief, that's a problem. And that can infiltrate. And you know, you see now with things like the SoftBank implosion, you know, they were believing in a certain like scale really fast and don't care about anything else. And then—

The thesis has been tested, hasn't it?

Yeah, well, it didn't work very well because if you don't care about anything else, then problems start coming up very quickly. But so it is also your investors, but your team, and then back to the team, to your point, like you can try to heal the world, you can try to do something better, but, and I'm not saying that everyone needs to be perfect, but if you have a broken cog in the machine, it can really grind things to a halt quickly.

Yeah, and looking for a, I hate to say it, I used to be of this kind of naive mindset that I would just ignore a person's past up to that point and just give people a fresh start. And now I'm of the mindset that the past is worth considering as you're building a team. What has a person done up to this point? We're at a point where anybody can be happy and shiny for 30 minutes during an interview, but like, what has a person been doing with themselves up to this point? How have their previous relationships been working out? Are they, and ironically, you'll quite often find the best, a team person to bring on board is somebody who's actually happy and doing well in their current thing, right? Not the person who hasn't found their fit their whole life. They complain about all their jobs. I used to be so naive that I was just like, wow, let's give this person a chance.

Now is the opportunity for them to shine. But it's not just team members, it's investors too. Again, SoftBank being a great example, ripped from the headlines today. You know, when you look at how they've treated people under duress, under their own duress and under the duress of the company, pretty poor. And I don't know a talented entrepreneur that wants that money because even though it's an enormous amount of money and there's a huge like pot of gold at the end of the rainbow with something like that around, if you have to deal with the hassles that come with it, it's pretty daunting. And so I agree, it's more than just looking at who they are or the amount of money they offer or whatever. It's like, What have you done in the past? Where are you in your life cycle right now? And how can you contribute to this belief and vision that I'm trying to do? And it's very possible their contribution could be negative if you're not careful.

Low consciousness money is probably another failure mode that happens quite often, right?

So, so I guess, you know, for me, a big question is like, what do you do? Because it's not, it's not so black and white, and it's inevitable. That even if you come out of this and say, yeah, we got to make sure everyone's a believer, a lot of people feign. They're like, oh, I totally believe, and you're like getting false signaling left and right.

Or they believe so long as you're there. But I've had this happen before, um, when I tried to experiment with outsourcing startups, like my ideas, but I'll just like get other people to start them. There's a decay function of the belief, right? So, uh, By day 1, you know, by day 2 they were like at 50% belief, and by day 3 they couldn't remember what, what they were doing there or why they worked there at all. And then by day 4 it was off the rails, you know.

Well, leadership, yeah, that's why a lot of times— I mean, I told you this, that you have to be involved as the founder.

I do remember you trying to warn me about my, my experiment.

Well, so, so in many ways founders are the curators of that belief, and they've got keep that belief, using it, reinvigorating it continually, right? And so that, that, that's definitely, I think, the new role of the modern founder is to keep that belief alive.

They see a future, it's more real to them than anybody else, and just understand that's, that's the role, right?

And you're going to have people that just end up not fitting, and then that's, uh, for one reason or another— maybe they fit now, maybe there's the decay thing you're talking about So, you know, what do you do? And I don't think— look, I'm not going to come and tell anyone listening today that there's an answer. It's like, if you do this, it will definitely work. I mean, the first thing that I would say, though, is you should be conscious of the problem, right? And if you feel that there's a cog that's not moving with the rest of the machine, you need to be like, what is happening and how serious is it? And, you know, I encourage everyone Awareness is the first step and action is the second step. So I think, I don't know if you would disagree that awareness is the first step, so maybe it's worth talking about what the actions are.

I mean, awareness is almost the whole enchilada, but it's in short supply. And even if a person seems fairly aware, you know, got their malavids on, got blind spots. Right? Where are yours? What happened to yours?

Where's Spiritual Adeo? I got off an airplane. That's what happened with Spiritual Adeo. He went through security.

They stripped you of your spirituality?

Well, you know, I don't like being strip-searched when I go through security that much. So the likelihood of it happening with beads and things is high. So they come off.

I'll tell you one thing that I want to talk about is, um, I've been thinking this kind of whole topic you're bringing up. I'm thinking about the ego because I had an experience the other day, perhaps because, uh, more meditation I've been doing lately. But one day I got triggered, and because I'm not a perfect person, as anybody who knows me can probably attest, but I got triggered one day, super triggered, and I meditated, thankfully, and I could see the ego freaking out. It's like I stood back and I saw this tangled— it was really just like this supercomputer that had a lot of code it was running, and I was able to talk it down. I was able to see some of the almost structural defects in the ego. But anyways, I came out of this experience and just was like, wow, the ego. And what I mean by this is it's the dominant force in society today. It's building all these skyscrapers and silly companies that aren't good for the planet and unconscious consumerism and marketing. Like, that's just the ego doing this. And it's the primary determiner of our felt sense of well-being. So that if everything is going perfect in your day, you have a perfect day, right? Well, then the ego comes along and says, oh, but now they brought the food to my table and it's not as warm as I like it. Like, the ego will just form another preference that needs to be met until somebody doesn't meet something, an expectation, and now it's upset again. Like, people, you can make your ego just makes yourself unhappy as it tries to like attain, attain, attain endless, an endless string of preferences that depend on people outside of you to fulfill. It's a terrible recipe.

Well, so, and I have a great example of this. It's very relevant to what we're talking about. So Our site got attacked the other day, um, and, uh, I— this— my co-founder discovered it and he called me up. He said, Adel, I don't want you to freak out, which is an interesting opening line.

And that helps me freak out from that moment, pre-freak out.

No. And then he's like, our site got hacked. Now, what was very interesting and very ties into this topic perfectly and the ego and everything else, I probably in history would have freaked out and been like, "Oh my God, we've been hacked. What do we do?" But I was, because I was conscious and maybe even because I'm like, "Why would I freak out?" when he opened with that. The first thing that you can control, the first action that you can take is your reaction. Right? And if you freak out, you set the tone of the organization because you're the leader, then everyone else freaks out.

They follow the freakout leader.

Right. And so in many ways, I was actually very calm. And I said, okay. Now, that didn't mean that I didn't do anything. I wasn't like, oh, now let me go for a long walk and think about it. No long walk when you're getting hacked. So we— thankfully, by the way, they didn't steal anything too. We didn't know what they stole when I first hopped, but they didn't actually get anything very valuable. But when it went— so, so instead of like freaking out, so to speak, the first thing you can control is your own reaction. And the first thing that I did is sort of centering myself, like your meditation example, and just let it kind of wash over me. And all those first reactions, probably coming from the ego, were very like, oh my God, ah, anger, frustration, survival mode. And what I did instead is by taking that moment to center and calm myself and just really reflect, you know, at the end of the day, what came out of it was an opportunity for growth. And it was an opportunity for my personal growth and it ended up being a great opportunity for our organizational growth. And what ended up happening is it was pretty chaotic because we didn't know and we kind of methodically went through and it did derail the organization, unfortunately, which can happen with these scenarios with broken cogs in the machine. But a few days—

For a day, it derailed it for a few days.

Yeah, a few days. A few days later, about 3 days later, one of our team members, one of our executives, a woman, walked in my office and she said, "Dan, you know, it's been really stressful the last few days, and I've been keeping a tempo on morale, and morale's actually pretty good. And I want to say something that might be a little surprising to you, but I'm really motivated. I'm proud of our response." And it's brought the best out of our organization. It's been really interesting to watch how we're reacting to things. And what was beautiful there is it made me realize that you can't control the world around you. Bad things are going to happen. It's almost inevitable. I hope not, but you can almost count on it. It's just unfortunate. That that's the case. The only thing you can 100% control is your reaction and your emotions.

Yeah.

And, and so maybe the first piece of advice that I could give is when a cog in the machine breaks, instead of having that initial freak-out ego reaction— fight or flight, fear, anger, frustration— center yourself and think like what's the best thing that you as a person and you as an organization can do to respond to it with making the world more beautiful and bringing love versus anger, fear, frustration, and the like. And what ended up happening in our case is we figured out who it was. We understood that they were having a mental breakdown. Because of the nature of what they were doing. And we started looking at ways to reach out to that individual to help them rather than, you know, sue them. Right, exactly. You're right, because you could sue them or like refer them to the police or whatever else. But we're like, wait a minute, like, what can we do to help this person not hunt or hurt them or anything else. And I think a lot of people, when they're threatened, they're like, you're threatening me, like you're coming in on my territory. Like the ego's like, that's the ego. Yeah.

So I would say this response by you and your team is, is like, is like it's evidential that you've done some work on the ego. And I know you personally, and I've I've seen whether you call it ego work or not, I've seen you do so much to try to better yourself and take a more expansive view and feel your oneness with everyone else and empathize. So looks like, looks like it's working because we saw your response here.

Well, and, and you know what, um, it, it, it quickly trickled through the organization because nobody was like, yeah, how do we sue them or take them down? Or no one else had an ego-driven response either. Yeah. And now I think that the leadership of an organization does trickle down, but it not only in individual circumstances, it trickles through organizations long before those tests come up. And to some extent, the enlightenment and the awakeness and awareness and beautiful push that you make in the world does reach the other levels of the organization. And so if these things happen, the organization learns how to respond long before the cog breaks, right? And so I think that's maybe another takeaway. And then, you know, the other thing— so, so, so first, how you respond, how you center yourself informs the organization how they will respond. So that would be my first piece of advice. And then my second thought on this, or piece of advice, however you want to phrase it, is can you turn this into something good? And not just good for you, not just good for the organization, but good for the person.

A growth experience for everyone.

Yeah, yeah, why not? I mean, at least try. Uh, you know, I'm not saying you're going to be— I'm not, I'm not saying that every situation is going to wind up where, like, win-win-win, right? But why not? Like, why not?

At least hold the hope and give the opportunity for it.

Exactly. I love that. Like, create the opportunity for a win-win-win to, to occur.

And if somebody puts it under their heel and steps on it, then you can say, well We have really, really tried here to open, to give this, this opportunity, right?

It's super hard to do because, I mean, I've had this now happen to me in the last few weeks quite a few times with friends as well, where, you know, something happens to them, they're queuing up a battle, and you can see that people around them get scared, get nervous. They're like, what's going on? And, and then Even as an outsider, in some cases, if you can step in and say, "Hey, hey, hey, timeout. How do we turn this into win-win-win-win-win for everyone?" Because you can reframe in a matter of minutes.

The whole tone will change.

Well, exactly. And that reframing is a really beautiful— I love that term too. I think it's a beautiful opportunity because you might have, in some cases, someone that works with you or for you. And they're queuing up for a fight. And because maybe you weren't involved, and, and, and maybe your wisdom or experience hasn't trickled through the entire organization, and maybe that person that is feeling very hurt, their ego's hurt, or they're afraid. And if you can help step in and reframe it for the win, the big win where everyone wins, I think that's beautiful. And You may not have the answer right away, and that might be the third piece of advice or words that I would share, which is like, maybe you don't need an answer right away, but you set the intention, which we've talked about manifesting. You sort of take a step towards that direction and sort of say, hey, look, as long as my intention and my manifesting is going in that win-win-win direction, I don't need to have every answer right now.

Yeah, the intention, the sincere intention, will help create those opportunities, help the universe and everyone around you to conspire for those opportunities because that intention was set there, right?

Right. So I'll tell you, just to continue the story of this incident, right?

But I have 3 things that I want to add to your thing real quick. Can we do that? Sure. And then, uh, yeah, so bookmark that. So, uh, I pulled a book off your shelf that somebody gave you, I think as a joke, but it was by this, you know, like yogi or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I like, I like the book a lot.

And then he says the joke book is—

he was just trying to make fun of you and give you this book, but it's actually a really good book.

Technically, probably was one of my friends making fun of me. Yes.

And He says in there that responsibility is your ability to respond, which is nicer than just respond, like this weight, this burden on your shoulder. No, it's your ability to respond. So responsibility is freedom in that sense. Freedom is the ability to respond. And our ability to act is limited, but our ability to respond is unlimited because that response can just— might be internal, it might be not acting, it might be whatever, right?

No response sometimes is a response, right?

You know, so, so that's the first thing. Second, second thing that that book reminded me of is pranayama. You know, this is like the Hindu concept and practice of different breathing techniques. So what's cool about those is they have like hundreds of them and they're for specific circumstances. So there's breathing exercises that are specifically geared to to get the ego to chill out, to get both of your brain hemispheres working, to get you out of a triggered state, to get you— like this alternate nostril breathing, that's a good one. But you know, they've got hundreds of these, right?

I just tried it. It's harder than it sounds.

You gotta use your hands. So it's, you know, don't do the wrong one because the wrong one will just like amp up the energy in your body. And if you're just already triggered, that's not the right one to do. But there's There are— check out pranayama. And that's something you'd share in your culture, in your office, right? Like sitting down and doing alternate nostril breathing. It's like a time-tested technology for bringing the whole brain back online to deal with an issue. So that's—

breath is a great tool.

Breath is a great tool and it's right there. Unlike going to the therapist or going off for a medicine ceremony, those take a long time to set up. Like our ability to breathe and chill out is immediate. So that's the other one. And I did that the day, I remember now, when my ego was freaking out. And then later on when I had the super meta-awareness, I could actually look at the ego and see it as a supercomputer and reprogram it. I think that doing that pranayama was part of what gave me that metacognition ability. And then thirdly, what you reminded me of with your response to this situation, which I'm still learning in my life, is somewhere between being permissive and getting walked all over and going to war. Somewhere between those two polarities is the open heart with good boundaries, right? And that's severely missing in our society today. And I've been in that place a couple times where I could look at somebody who was trying to get me into something that wasn't right for me or really overstepping or whatever, and I've been able to look at them with a wide open heart, like radiating love, and just be like, "No, that's not working for me." And they feel the heart more than the no, and they're like, "I can see that. Alright." You know, and it was just like, wow, the open-hearted no. How incredible is that? Or the open-hearted boundary. So like, you guys are like, listen, buddy, like, you can't keep hacking our site It's not good for anybody. And here's other alternatives for what you can do with yourself.

Well, speaking of waiting, so you gave a great— so every time we interacted with the individual, he would attack. So I ended up going to where he lived. He lives in another country, and I had meetings set up, and he had actually hacked those meetings, and it seemed to us that he was going to plan something not pleasant at those meetings. And so first there was the decision to go, which we said, okay, because there was some risk in going. We said, okay, we'll go. Then we found out he was planning something and we said, okay, we probably have to cancel them. But it ended up being kind of back to like not having this strict plan but letting the universe open doors with intentions. I ended up meeting with other leaders in the city and discussing what was going on, and one of them volunteered in that meeting to help.

Wow.

And it ended up being perfect because that person was able to bring the— calm the situation down to the point where there was a healthy dialogue, and then introduce the person that was experiencing trauma and trouble from a calmer state of mind to start dialogue from a much healthier place than where it was before. And if I had been overreactive, God knows what would have happened. If I had had too much of a plan, I might have never even gone or just canceled everything.

Or just given into fear or whatever.

So instead I said, okay, I'm gonna sort of let things flow and be guided by circumstances. And sure enough, met with everyone, discussed it, and literally one of these people volunteered. And also turns out the person who volunteered, both of his parents are trained psychologists, therapists professionally. And so he has some background and was really able to bring it all to— now it's not concluded just yet. This is— it's still underway. But, you know, right, and I can't even— I can't tell you how it's going to be concluded, but what I can tell you is that right now I feel like we're, we're moving in the right direction to a healthy and happy resolution for everyone, which was and is the intention. And I can't give you that roadmap, but I'm— but the— because we had the intention, I let sort of things guide me in a conversation rather than a hard path. And, you know, other things have come out of it that are really beautiful too. And I would add maybe as a fourth and possibly final piece of advice, just due to— or words due to time— I was then, because I was open, I started getting— and, and I was willing to talk about it like I am now— I got some really interesting people giving me really beautiful ideas One of which we're probably going to do. And it came out of— I went, I went to lunch with a friend of mine in, in, in the region, and she was telling me she went through something similar, but not in a business context, in a personal context. And she gave me all this advice. But what, what, what she also brought up is how broken the broader mental health system is. And so you don't even have the opportunity to catch incidents like this before they happen. Or like, there's no prevention and there's no cure, right?

Because chances are this person has had experiences before now that weren't quite acceptable. But yeah, there's no assist— nothing really was there to—

well, he had actually been committed to a mental institution, as we found out. But, but leave that aside. What we did then, and which is also like past the point of cure, that's like too late, right? But what, what, what sort of, she had gone so far as to be like, I wonder what services are available. She went in purporting to have a problem and the mental health system in a couple different countries were like, I don't know what to do. Wow.

Even if you're just like, I need help, I've got issues.

Right. Oh wow. So what we realized, the coming through this process, we also saw an opportunity which was to create some sort of, um, mental health network that would be there far earlier than emergency, right? That you could turn to. And maybe it's like you get some sort of decent rate, you go, hey, dear therapist, you, you have some business experience, would you be willing for like $50 or $100 an hour just to, if someone is in trouble, you know, do a half-hour emergency talk with them. And then if you feel they can help, you know, charge them for an hour, but like not make it very approachable for people who need a little bit of help. And what we realized, that just wasn't there, like, and, and it certainly wasn't accessible. And so it inspired us to really start thinking about, can we build a global mental health network, if you will, that can be responsive to needs before they escalate to problems. And then, because what we saw is like, when you have the need, there's not much there, and when you have the problem, there's not much there. So let's try and fix it.

Well, and that's a good time to issue that challenge to your network of entrepreneurs and, and founders out there, uh, that if you're wondering what domain to go into, uh, the mental health situation worldwide is not—

it's in crisis.

It's in crisis, you know. And there's mental health to get involved in at every part of the bell curve, because even normal people, people who aren't, you know, labeled as mentally unhealthy, still generally not too happy, a bit depressed, having to—

mental health is like working out, right? You know, it's like if you don't work out at all, your health will not be good. And, and mental health is the same. It's not saying you just wait for an emergency, you know. You, you should be concerned about your mental health in the same way you're concerned about your diet, in the the same way you're concerned about, um, working out and keeping your body fit and in relatively good shape. And if you don't do things for your mental health, it will suffer like all the other facets of your being. And I, I would say though, in general, we have a mental health crisis, which can be a subject for a broader conversation in the future. But, but, but just going back to the topic here of running something, so, you know, awareness And then those are some tools that I would recommend. And I agree with you about ego. But at the end of the day, I think if, if someone is really in crisis and someone's really, you know, not helping you but hurting you, trying to find that win-win-win situation. And then if you can salvage it and bring them back into the fold, great. If you can't, then the win-win-win may be an exit. But like, if you can make it an exit where truly everyone wins, I think that's a beautiful outcome.

That is certainly a beautiful intention to hold.

Any final thoughts?

No, I think that's a wrap. If you want, we could just summarize real quick a ton of the stuff that we just covered. Like, the leader sets the tone in the organization. To just remember that within a matter of minutes you could decide whether your whole organization goes into war mode or goes into peacemaking, you know, world healing mode, right? Having a beautiful intention even in a crisis situation, not being super reactive and coming up with a black and white decision immediately. Check out pranayama if you need something to physiologically give you that space and that breathing room. And, uh, yeah, and we need more mental health startups in the world and people taking on that challenge.

So thanks everybody, this was beautiful.