Managing Mental Health as a CEO with Janis Machala

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, the co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Janice Michala. Janice is an executive coach and a business coach based in Seattle with a prior life as a tech operating executive, both East Coast and West Coast. So I think you average out to somewhere in Kansas. Janice, thanks for being here.

Janice Michala: My pleasure. I love bolstering what you guys are doing, so I'm always willing to support you guys.

Matt Blumberg: Well, thank you, I appreciate that. So the last six months has been, by all accounts, very challenging for founders from a mental health perspective. I would argue that founders have always had challenges with mental health, and it's a very stressful job, and that's very well documented. But this has really gotten much more sort of popular as a theme really since Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. That was a moment where a lot of founders felt like they were staring into the abyss for a day or two and kind of brought a lot of this to the fore. So my question for you is, have you seen this in your coaching practice and what thoughts can you share about where it comes from and what founders can do about it?

Janice Michala: So we all have these voices in our head and in my world I call them saboteurs. And that came about through some work that I do from Shirzad Chamine Positive Intelligence, and that those voices in our head can be loud and they can be deeply embedded. And they differ for different people. But we all have the judge. And the judge is that thing that we judge ourselves very harshly, or we judge others, or we judge circumstances. So that's the thing. And those voices can be very harsh for some entrepreneurs. And also it's a lonely job. Being a founder, there's certain things you can't talk to the board about. There's certain things you can't talk to your team about. There's certain things you can't talk to your spouse about. And so in a lot of ways it's an isolating role and therefore what you see is a lot of depression, but also anxiety, fear, stress. And if you don't know how to process those emotions, it turns inward and it just takes you down what I call the negative spiral in your brain. And if you don't know how to know how to self- manage out of that, or you don't have a practice, what I call a mental fitness practice to address that, whether it's a great exercise practice, a great meditation practice, something to do for your physicality and your mental state, it's going to cause some real problems for you. And therefore, what I hear is that entrepreneurs get sucked into the need for control, the belief that everything has to be perfect, that you can make everyone happy. That conflict is bad, and you can avoid it. So all of these tropes happen and you get caught and stuck in that negative place. And that's why mental health really spirals because if you don't have resilience or you don't have a method for how to process those things, that's where it gets worse. And if you don't have a tank that you can fill up, the tank is depleted. And I think the pandemic basically bankrupt everybody's tank. So now you add, I'm not going to get funded, or I don't know if I can make payroll. And many of these entrepreneurs have never been through that. And so it just created a perfect storm of not being able to deal with the emotions and dealing with fear. Here's my acronym for fear. False evidence appears real.

Matt Blumberg: Oh, I love that.

Janice Michala: And so that's what's happening is you're either living in the past or living in the future. You got to learn to live in the now.

Matt Blumberg: Sorry, go ahead.

Janice Michala: No, that's okay. All right. And it's hard. It's really hard as a founder to live in the now, but once you do that, you are going to be such a better leader and so much calmer and so much less stress because one, you're not in control and you just have to understand that and you have to learn to let go of it, and that's where you can actually help your mental health significantly.

Matt Blumberg: I love that. That is such good and very timely advice. And I love the phrase mental fitness. And anything like physical fitness, it is about going to the gym. It's about having those practices, working with a trainer and just going to the gym.

Janice Michala: And it's a daily reprieve that we have from our brain and our head.

Matt Blumberg: Janice Michala, thank you so much for being here.

Janice Michala: You're welcome. Thank you.