Hi {{First Name|friend}}

Sometimes we're in the valley of lows for so long with our company that we hate talking about it.

It usually happens after a season of defeats where we’ve been beaten up much more than usual. So much so that our confidence & enthusiasm take a real blow. Yet we put on a brave face and rally as best as we can.

And then it happens.

One big marquee customer we were counting on didn’t re-sign.

Or a top leader we’ve been patiently grooming and investing in for so long put in their two weeks notice.

It’s that final gut-punch on top of all those previous bruises that breaks us.

At that moment, we’ve hit a whole new low.

One in which we don’t want to talk to anyone else.

We’re now raging & discombobulating.

And we despise anyone asking about us or the business.

We just want to close the blinds, crawl into the fetal position and numb ourselves till the pain stops hurting so much.

We would cry but we have no time. Plus there’s a team meeting coming up & everyone’s counting on our energy & confidence in solving this.

We don’t feel like telling our partner or our investor another new disappointing development in a long series of depressing updates.

The thought of sharing with our children, family or friends seems inconceivable.

In fact, just knowing that a concerned loved one will soon ask us how its going makes us want to curl up & die. We don’t want to hear any of their Be positive bullsh*t.

Or worse, see the look of alarm on their faces and then have to console them, telling them don’t worry, it’ll get better. We’ll figure it out.

We just want everyone to leave us the f*ck alone.

Most founders swallow this sh*t pie of self-loathing & depression, and keep moving. We don’t dwell on it because it seems too overwhelming to face.

Something that could break us upon further inquiry.

But the truth is, carrying this heaviness, on top of everything else in the business —that’s what’s slowly killing us.

There’s only 1 thing we can do when we feel so demoralized & defeated.

Sit with it.

Put it on a piece of paper and vomit the feelings of anguish & dread. If writing is not our forte, find a coach, therapist or friend who will really listen. Someone who won’t panic or try to fix it, but will help us unpack with no judgement.

Here’s the secret: Meet our sadness in its full form and say our worst fears out loud, and keep ranting until we hit the tripwire.

And we’ll know when we hit our tripwire.

It will be an emotional climax that will leave us speechless. Something we can’t believe we said out loud or wrote out so explicitly.

- I am a f*cking failure. This just confirms it. Once everyone actually gets to know me truly, they’ll see that I’m absolute toxic and they don’t want to be near me.

- I am never going to get enough revenue to see us through. We will never recover from this. I have killed this company.

- I’m such an absolute idiot, why did I ever think I could do this? Why did I risk my family’s savings & my reputation on this? I have ruined myself and my family.

This is incredibly hard to see written down or spoken into existence.

It almost feels shameful to say something so immature, so childlike.

But here’s the thing: deep within, we’re all still that kid - the one who was laughed at lunch time, the one who disappointed our parent & the one who was left out of our friend group. That kid is still there within us, no matter how influential and wealthy we’ve become.

And once we let that child within us speak, the floodgates will open.

An avalanche of sadness and anger will come out. Don’t stop it, let it all out. Sit with this ugliness as it rears its full head & put it all out there. Let it exhaust itself.

In that moment, all our egotism & cowardice will be on full display, and there’ll be nothing left to hide.

We will be at the lowest of our lows, possibly even cursing ourselves for doing this exercise to begin with.

But then something happens.

Maybe not at first, but give it a few minutes.

As we see the words written on the paper in front of us or held in the air between us and our confidant, the thoughts seem a little separate from us. It’s almost as if putting it all out there put some distance between us and those feelings.

For the first time in a long time, this emotional terrorist seems a little less scary and loosens its grip on us.

That’s when the tightness in our chest starts relaxing & we feel a little lighter.

A sense of relief starts trickling down as we don’t have to hold onto this burden so fiercely anymore and that feels like a promising sign.

We may have a few more expletives inside of us, so keep sharing. Get it all out there.

And as we keep reflecting deeper & expunging our sins, something else remarkable happens.

We start getting clarity.

A small drip of it at first but if we keep pulling on that familiar thread, it speeds up. Soon a stream of insights starts falling into our lap and we can’t believe it.

This is not magic, it’s science. Since our amygdala is no longer fighting itself, our brain is clearer now and so it starts seeing patterns again.

Our beautiful instinct, the one that we trusted this whole time, the one that got us this far —all of a sudden, it starts lighting up again and starts giving us deep, piercing clarity —on what went wrong and why it went wrong.

- Now that I think about it, Ben was always showing signs of misfit, esp when his previous big-company strategies kept failing here and he never adapted them. He never tried to be curious and start from scratch. That was a real tell that I should have paid more attention to.

- That big advertising client was a huge hit but in reality, they were just dabbling with us because it made them look good to bring in flashy new tech. This is not really a painful problem for them, it’s a nice add-on and the moment we lost the CMO who championed us, we were on the cutting block.

Intolerable emotions are actually a gift for deep clarity.

Because they are storms that sweep up every crappy feeling & sob story of ours in their path. And if we can catch, name & release these beasts into the wild, it creates a calm void inside of us.

One in which our core mental gifts have real room to start growing again.

When we empty ourselves of our ego & self-pity, our brilliance has space to step in.

We start trusting ourselves again and once we see a little bit of our old razor sharp instinct back in play again, we get a little excited. We feel a bit like our old selves, and are ready to start hustling & swinging for the fences again.