Heal Yourself, Heal Your Business

The most important asset of a start-up is you as a founder. Look after your well-being and the business will thrive.

Mental health in the business world has been a taboo subject for a long time. Thankfully not any longer.  A number of high-profile cases have drawn attention to this key component of start-up heath – the state of the mind of their founders. 

Tom Blomofield of Monzo shocked everyone when he quit as CEO admitting he was facing mental health issues. It’s not an easy thing to admit and because of his bravery, many start-up founders now feel encouraged to talk about their own issues. 

He is not the only one. Much earlier Antonio Horta Ossario of Lloyds made headlines as he announced he was taking time off over mental health issues. And Calvin Benton of Spill openly admitted struggling with burnout.

“Mental health is key for founders in fast-growth scale-ups — the challenge is that they often lack a support network where they can open up about and ease the strain of scaling businesses” Gerard Grech, CEO -Tech Nation 

The toll that mental health issues take on start-ups can take many forms:

• Self-sabotage – when a business grows beyond what founders can handle, they will subconsciously start to sabotage it back in line with what they can comfortably handle.
• Burnout – the most common issue affecting founders – when a founder burns out so does the business.
• Conflict – between co-founders or inside the management team, deep seemingly unresolvable conflict in a start-up is linked to unconscious patterns carried by the founders and often leads to the implosion of the business.
• Negative repeating patterns – things like hiring the wrong people, bringing in the wrong investors, failing to keep promises and maintain deadlines, taking on more than you can deliver... All these are unconscious patterns held by some founders.

And all the above led to this statistic published by The Telegraph – and this was in pre-covid times!

“60% of start-ups fail within the first 3 years” - The Telegraph 2019 

Add to this the impact of the last two years of restrictions and lockdowns and you will get the true picture of today’s reality.

Another set of statistics - published by Michael A. Freeman, M.D. University of California San Francisco in his article Are Entrepreneurs “Touched with Fire?"  - paint an even grimmer reality. According to his study, entrepreneurs are 50% more likely to have a mental health condition and suffer from a series of conditions, namely: 

• Twice more likely to suffer from depression
• 6 times more likely to suffer from ADHD
• 3 times more likely to engage in substance abuse
• 10 times more likely to suffer from bipolar disease
• Twice more likely to require psychiatric hospitalization
• Twice more likely to experience suicidal thoughts.

What is this all about? Is it the toll of the stress entrepreneurs handle or are certain personality types more attracted to entrepreneurship than others? Both, I would argue.

But more important than the reason why of these statistics is what can be done to improve them.

And here’s the innovative approach that I suggest: energy healing.

Energy healing looks at these issues in a holistic way. Because the energy of the business is linked to that of the founder and when the founder carries unresolved issues these will manifest in the business.

What is energy healing? It’s a complex healing system that considers the person’s health holistically – from a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual point of view. 

Unlike traditional psychotherapy which focuses only on the mind, energy healing recognises that we are made of much more than the mind. The level of energy we can hold in our bodies comes into play as does the type of energy generated by our emotions. Our mindset and our spiritual outlook in life (or lack of) also contribute to our balance or lack of it. But most importantly, energy healing deals with the patterns of unconscious trauma that we hold in our subconsciousness. These patterns are lodged into our energy field and act like beams attracting the right people and situations to recreate a traumatic pattern again and again.

Energy healing takes many forms, from the most widely accepted ones such as Reiki to the most mysterious ones such as shamanic energy medicine. But they all have one aspect in common: they see the root cause of the issue that manifests in the outside world as an energy imbalance that affects the founder. Work on that and the issue in the outside world will improve. As within, so without.

So where do you start? It all depends on how open you are to alternative healing methods. Here are some recommendations:

• Reiki – It’s great for an energy boost when you really feel you need one but it’s less likely to help you remove deep traumatic patterns.
• Mindfulness and meditation practices – Helps keep you on track and can offer you a framework to deal with everyday pressures. It’s less likely to help with deep trauma.
• Chakra clearing and balancing – It can remove blockages and rebalance energy quickly.
• Shamanic energy medicine – Helps you clear deep traumatic patterns and address complex issues.
• Sacred plant medicine – The deepest form of energy healing. It can remove deep traumatic patterns and change one’s life completely. However, it’s not for everyone and great care should be exercised in choosing whom to do this with and under what circumstances.

If you’re interested to find out more about various healing modalities read my blog post A Journey towards yourself here.

Wherever you as a start-up founder are on this journey, know that help is readily available. Don’t bottle up things until they erupt and destroy your business. Do something, do it early and keep on looking after your wellbeing.

After all, you are the most important asset of your business.