Apologies if you haven't heard back from me in the past couple of weeks. Mental health struggles are real, folks.
In my case, I have a family member who is struggling with their own mental health and I have yet to figure out how to separate my emotions from theirs. So in the past few weeks, I've shown up for my family, my clients and the CEO dinner guests, and basically ignored everyone else. If that included you, I'm sorry.
Years ago, when I threw my first CEO dinner, I invited all my local clients to my house the week before Christmas.
After dinner, I introduced everyone to an ice breaker called, "If You Really Knew Me..." in which you go around the table and say, "if you really knew me, you would know <insert thing here>." It normally takes a few laps around the table, but eventually, people get pretty real.
I've never had much patience, so I kicked things off with, "if you really knew me, you would know that the reason I invited everyone tonight is because I had a pretty challenging childhood in a few ways, and it was always the worst around holidays, so I get pretty depressed between Thanksgiving and New Years and I really just didn't want to be alone."
By the time we made it all the way around the table, we learned that the spouse of one of the CEOs was dying of a terminal illness and another CEO, who had bootstrapped their company to several million in revenue, spent 90+ minutes each day curled up on the floor of their closet because of crippling anxiety.
Pretty much every CEO that night was dealing with something massive in their personal life and they still decided to start a company. Founders really do play life on hard mode.
As I counsel my my own kids, perfection is impossible. We're all wonderful and flawed human beings. The best we can do is be transparent about our struggles and ask for forgiveness when we screw up, then trust our community to give us a little bit of grace.
So, again, if I haven't gotten back to you in recent weeks, this is why. And I'm starting to feel better, so you'll probably hear back from me this week 😁
#startups #founders #mentalhealth