A startup debt to talk about more: emotional debt

Three to four years into my startup journey our then CTO Sunil introduced me to a term called “technical debt”. He explained  that we would have to account some time to make changes to the product that won’t be seen by customers but that would support us in the long run. I was furious. How could we not be building new features that’d be valuable to our customers? He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that our codebase was like a house. One where certain rooms were functional, but a bit janky. And some hadn’t been built with the idea in mind that we might wanted to add an additional room at the end of it. I was slowly catching on to the idea.

Although I could never fully grasp it, I accepted more and more of what he explained to me. It took me many more years, after I had already left the startup I co-founded in fact, to come to terms with another kind of debt, similar in dynamic, much trickier to deal with though: emotional debt.

The nature of an emotional debt

Years later and having coached hundreds of founders around this concept, implicitly and explicitly, I find the term emotional debt deeply valuable.

We incur emotional debt whenever there’s an experience we’ve had, but not fully digested in all aspects of it. In my trauma therapy training I learned that this is in fact a natural and important human survival skill. Imagine you’re living in a pre-historic village and it gets raided by a neighboring tribe. Although no one gets killed, a number of houses have been burned down and food has been stolen. The next morning the most important tasks for everyone are to protect the village again, rebuild the houses and hunt for food to survive. Many of the villagers will have been deeply traumatized from the fears and terror they experienced in their bodies. Since food and shelter takes first priority to humans, not processing these emotions for now is a debt that’s necessary and important to incur. We can put it aside and leave it stuck in our bodies, ready to reengage and digest it later. It’s a great survival feature if you will. 

A couple of weeks later when everything has been rebuilt, there might be a chance for the local shaman to offer a ritual around the fireplace where everyone can gather and re-experience the emotions that were too difficult to deal with at the actual event of the raid: the rage and anger towards the attackers, the fear and the terror over their lives and eventually the grief for the loss of their goods and most importantly their safety. Once that has been felt and integrated, everyone is able to move on and the night of the village raid can safely go into the history books, fairy tales and heroes journey accounts that luckily everyone survived, yet learned from.

A version of this scenario is likely to occur at a startup throughout its journey. Here are a number of examples that I have experienced myself and coached CEOs and founders around and view as a potential trigger for incurring emotional debt: (I’m focusing mainly on a founder’s experience here)

• Having a term sheet fall through last minute from an investor
• Hearing a “no” repeatedly from investors
• Failing to find product/market fit and needing to pivot
• Needing to fire someone / doing layoffs
• Needing to shift reporting structure for team members
• Losing a big customer or a group of smaller ones all of a sudden
• Getting hacked or suffering a ddos attack
• A deeply negative response from customers to a feature release or change
• A pr shitstorm of any kind
• Needing to shut down the company
• Getting to sell the company, making lots of money from it, yet still feeling like you’ve let everyone down

Over the years, there’s often an accumulation of many moments that slowly, if left unattended will eat away at a CEO’s or founders wellbeing and sense of aliveness. 

The importance of incurring emotional debt at a startup

I don’t think incurring emotional debt is a bad thing as I described in the example above. It’s natural and it’s human. The first order of business for a startup is to survive and most of us are willing to incur all kinds of debt, including financial, technical and emotional ones to help it survive and eventually thrive. 

I believe that if we’re not willing to incur that kind of debt, it’s hard to succeed, because the pace you can go at, if you digest everything along the way, will be too slow to bring the company off the ground. While that’s not always true, another reason is that most people simply don’t have the tools to deal with the emotional debt that they are incurring. So it’s not a question of whether to digest and rebalance but one of lack of ability. 

My own story certainly mirrors that. After leaving my startup, I spent almost two years in a Buddhist monastery to deal with the many inner unprocessed parts. I also did years of therapy and other self-connecting and healing modalities and eventually trained as a trauma therapist myself before becoming a coach. Before those experiences, I simply didn’t know what to do with myself and the emotions surfacing from the rapid fire rollercoaster of the startup.

There comes however a time, and often, that is a point when potential clients email me, where the energy needed to carry around all the emotional debt that’s accumulated over the years is too painful to not look at and finally start to process. This has brought me in contact to work with hundreds of often very, sometimes wildly successful founders, CEOs and VCs as they are reaching this point. There’s often a deep confusion since in many cases, the business is doing great, they have more money than ever, a better team than ever, finally a better relationship with their husband or wife and yet, something is starting to feel deeply off. 

Ways to settle your emotional startup debt

I’ve written before about the 3 ways that neuro-science suggest that we can deal with any kind of incurred stressors in our lives. And the honest truth, just like any engineer would tell you about technical debt is no different with emotional debt. It’s a process, that in my experience is deeply fulfilling, relieving and ultimately fun, yet also painful at times, can take longer stretches of time and there’s not much to show for, except for a deeper sense of calm and happiness. 

The most important aspect of dealing with emotional startup debt in my experience is to decide to deal with it. Sounds simple enough, but a basic intention to leave the status quo of just keeping going versus taking a moment to pause, looking yourself in the mirror and acknowledging that there’s a change you’d like to make in how you’re relating to yourself, that is by far the hardest. 

From there, a lot of avenues can open up and there’s rarely a one-size fits all solution. Strategies to reintegrate and digest old experiences that were accumulated over time are plentiful, which one is most effective for you, I can’t say, until you’ve tried some and figured out which one works for you. A somewhat generic list I’d give is the following

• Therapy (with a body focus) like Somatic Experiencing, The Grinberg method, IFS (I tend to recommend against traditional talk therapy, I find it a poor way to deal with ourselves) 
• Coaching (with a body focus): If one doesn’t want to solely deal with the past, but also re-focus their outlook of the future and realign their dreams, I find that most powerful. 
• Regular peer-coaching sessions with other CEOs/founders (most helpful if both or one of the people has some knowledge of how emotional integration works, through NVC, therapy experience, etc.) 
• More downtime, time in nature, vacations, time off (often not helpful if not also paired with some of the above 3 ways, since our brains are cunning at leaving the debt untouched)

The process itself, although deeply scary often, is in itself simple. Feel and touch into your body and mind, what hasn’t been felt, but needed to be felt at the time. And let it move and flow, in the way it wants to. The fear, the anger, the despair, the grief, the lack of compassion and understanding. Sometimes the joy from the wins along the way that wasn’t fully acknowledged needs to be re-integrated too. It’s not always just “difficult” emotions. 

As these experiences become integrated again over time, new insights, and a profound lightness can occur. Whenever a founder or CEO who is 5-10 years into their startup journey tells me “I wish it was as easy and creative as it was at the start of the company” I usually know that a number of experiences have accumulated that is now blocking this person from feeling light and creative again. Once we work through some of them, often their sense of joy and excitement for what they are doing returns on their own, like a precious gem that shines again and was just covered under lots of layers of dust.