# Staying Emotionally & Relationally Healthy While Launching Your Startup – Dr. Sherry Walling

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4t1uf1w1s8
Duration: 19 min
Language: English
Words: 3382
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/h4t1uf1w1s8

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[0:00] thank you so I always feel like an imposter when I'm here because I don't understand the humor I don't have an app the metrics that I track in my life for very different than the ones that you all track I'm a clinical psychologist by training so I do track different metrics but I think the real qualification that allows me to address such an esteemed audience as I am the chief co-founder of the waling Family Robinson Rob and I have been married for 13 years and so we've been on this journey together so I wanted to talk a little bit about that journey starting with this really cute

[0:35] family picture I've noticed it this year the speaker's aren't doing as many cute kid pictures what happen anyway so this is our family um from 2007 and this was a pretty amazing year in our life it was the year that we Rob started transitioning away from consulting and away from full-time work started acquiring apps those of you who know some of the history of the work that he's done know that this was a big turning era was the year that he started sketching out the micro preneur academy and really became a full-time entrepreneur during this year I was in the final phases of my PhD and was doing

[1:10] a year-long research fellowship at Yale University School of Medicine and we had this little baby that we'd loved and there were so many things going right in her life we had amazing opportunities and we're doing really cool things that we sort of never thought we would we would be able to do but we spent most of our evenings arguing and we were both kind of depressed and it was really difficult to figure out how things could be so good and so bad at the same time we have stopped talked pretty seriously about ending our marriage and splitting up our family and doing some crazy bicoastal child custody sharing

[1:50] situation it was just going to be really terrible to walk down that road and ultimately we were both really glad that we didn't but it's been really important for us to reflect on that time in our life because thankfully we've had lots more busy seasons and lots more success and lots more times when we're both working really hard and pretty stressed so we need to figure out what went wrong that year and learn from it so in my 12 minutes I'm going to try to talk about three simple lessons that we learned the first is about managing anxiety anybody in here got stressed with your work anybody

[2:24] a couple of you good well you guys listen um the second one was about communication this is really about how to keep our relationship healthy and functioning in the midst of really stressful seasons and this sword its practicing the big picture and I use the word practice intentionally because I think it's actually very effortful to pay attention to keep remembering the big picture of why we're doing these things in our lives so first one anxiety anxiety is unavoidable you all know this this is part of your daily experience or your weekly experience at least anxiety is also thankfully fairly useful it's pretty motivational but this is where my

[3:09] psychology training comes in and I can say this with a lot of certainty and I'm not even exaggerating anxiety can be pretty deadly it can cause serious problems to your health and your well-being if it's not managed effectively so anxiety in the launc let me put my my academic hat on really quick looking at this research literature and there is some literature that looks particularly at entrepreneurs and their experiences so one fairly large scale study found that first-time entrepreneurs and their spouses were more likely to be treated with anxiety medication than people who are working a nine-to-five job so there are anxiety things I the entrepreneurs were carrying

[3:47] around was was qualitatively different than the anxiety of people working in different kinds of jobs finally or secondly entrepreneurs reported higher workload related stress so they felt like they had way more to do than people in a variety of other kinds of jobs in white-collar blue-collar and professional positions so this experience of launching a product of doing a start-up of founding the company is qualitatively different it is anxiety-provoking in a different way than other people who are doing you know other kinds of work so this just affirms what we all know which is what research often does it's sort of like duh we know that we're

[4:29] anxious um but thankfully it's not all bad news there's this old research study and some of you may be familiar with it's from like 1908 it's a really old study it's called the yerkes-dodson law it's been replicated lots of times in lots of different populations and it's looking at the relationship between arousal in this case anxiety and performance and what you'll see is that there's an optimal - I have a pointer yes I do this sort of moderate anxiety level is actually related to optimal performance you need to be a bit anxious it's anxiety that made me practice my talk review my slides make sure there weren't

[5:09] any Liem typos but if your anxiety is too low then you might get a little sloppy you might get a little lazy it may not pay attention to the details that you need to pay attention to in order to perform optimally but here on the other end on the high arousal arousal spectrum anxiety floods you and you can't function effectively and this is where we need to be mindful of the role that anxiety can play or the toll that it can take on your work let's see okay so unmanaged anxiety anxiety at that upper end of the spectrum damages creativity concentration organization problem-solving in communication skills

[5:51] all things that you need if you're going to be successful in your work and your startup unmanaged anxiety also is fairly strongly linked to a number of health problems and finally anxiety gets really out of control is linked to some pretty serious problems like family violence addiction an increased risk for suicide this is this is my work this is the area that I know well and I know that things on this bottom slide may feel like very distant from your personal experience but these are problems that are related to lots of families from lots of different socio-economic levels lots of different backgrounds so these are things that if you're not careful or

[6:35] possible in many of our lives so the message here is anxiety is manage it don't let it manage you and I know there's an emphasis here at micro conf it being pretty actionable so I'm gonna try to do that some simple strategies for managing anxiety the first one is to notice it anxiety goes allah is accompanied by a set of pretty specific physiological symptoms you don't sleep well you have trouble concentrating your breath is shallow and fast your heart races faster your muscles are tense you can feel it in your body once you start paying attention and it's important to be able to do that because that will

[7:18] allow you to catch it early and know oh I'm I'm not doing so well I need to take some intervention before my anxiety increases to a level where it's going to be counterproductive the second one don't roll your eyes at me it's not this is not just yoga but one of the most effective strategies for managing anxiety in the moment for calming yourself down pretty quickly is to breathe to control your breath to slow it down to take a few calm slow breaths before you go into a different difficult conversation before you get on the stage to speak before you do something that's likely to spike your

[7:56] anxiety anxiety is very physiological it happens in your body and this is one way to quickly simply counter that experience in the moment another one keep track of what's going well this is especially in the phase of a startup when there are a lot of moving parts there's a lot of mini failures to go into any successful business I think it's important to really pay attention every day to the simple things in your life that are going well I'm borrowing this from an old Ignatian spiritual practice called the examine and which at the end of each day someone takes a moment to reflect on what was

[8:37] life-giving that day what went well what was their best moment of the day and what was not life-giving what sucked from that day and keeping track of those two allows you to actually maximize what goes well and give you some insight into what you might need to remove from your life if it's possible I think also doing this helps you realize that there are lots of little successes along the way because it's the its ongoing to-do list the to-do list that's never done that you go to bed with each night and you're sort of stressed every minute that you're thinking about all the things that are

[9:10] undone countering that feeling with a few positive things that have gone well is important eliminate unnecessary stressors we have had someone help us clean our house since I was pregnant with Finn so 7 years ago and I was in graduate school and we didn't necessarily have a lot of money but it was really important because we can't live in chaos and we were both really busy and this has probably been one of our marriage savers getting help with household work getting help with childcare getting help with your lawn things like that are actually a wise investment in your business I like to say how do I say it now that I'm

[9:55] quoting myself so hiring a housekeeper is cheaper than therapy and therapy is cheaper than divorce so just sort of keep that keep that to yourself um another really important part of managing anxiety is getting support and whether that's really talking with your spouse about what's going on your partner I sometimes walk through the house when Rob is on his phone calls with his mastermind group and it's like group therapy honestly they cheer each other on they were like really helpful to each other they give practical advice and feedback but that group of people helps him carry the load in a way that I can't in a way

[10:35] that someone who's directly co-founding or working as a partner with him can't but they provide a lot of cheer leading on support and it's so important to have people in your life who can do that for you and really if this is an area where you struggle a lot where your anxiety often might lead you to make questionable decisions or where you're feeling like you're chronically short-tempered with your family where it's really causing some problems in your life I would recommend seeing a therapist we're not all that scary and finally on this slide take care of yourself I've given talks like this to lots of different groups to physicians

[11:15] to police officers to other kinds of first responders to people in the military and everybody's like yeah that's good for other people that whole sleep nutrition nutrition and exercise thing we all think were exempt from these things and none of us are maybe in the short term maybe one week at a time but over the long term in your life you will have serious consequences if you don't take care of yourself take care of your body by doing some of these simple things okay so one thing that I found so interesting about that study that I talked about earlier is that it wasn't just the founders who had elevated

[11:53] levels of anxiety it was their spouses too one thing that those of you in marketing know and I know as a psychologist emotion is highly contagious so if there's anxiety and one person in the partnership it is likely to spread to the other people in the partnership and the reality is that no matter how involves your spouse or your mother or the important people in your life are in the projects that you're working on they are carrying the weight of it too and I think it's really important to be very proactive in communicating about what's going on in your startup but also to talk with your

[12:30] partner to make sure that your family is healthy so a couple of one sort of practice that we have started since our terrible year in New Haven Connecticut is that we have implemented sort of a weekly huddle this usually happens on Sunday evenings it's a mapping out of what's happening that week we both have busy schedules our Google calendars look like a version of Tetris and we're moving things around but we take like 20 minutes and talk about what's going on this week what do you need where are you with trip with microcon planning do you need to work a couple nights a week okay so if you're working on Monday and

[13:06] Wednesday night then we'll definitely have dinner together as a family on Tuesday night and maybe Thursday I'll go with my friends because I'm sort of tired of doing bad time all by myself with the kids all week and so there's a lot of negotiation that goes on to make sure that both people in the partnership are sort of getting what they need we make sure that we can solve our solvable problems and that's again warehouse cleaning and other support and help comes in if it's a crazy week then we plan accordingly we also talk about when it's family time so Patrick I loved your video whoever you are it was really funny but

[13:43] I want to say too don't multitask your family you don't need a lot of time with your family maybe depending on your particular situation but the importance is quality and focused time so having an hour where you eat a meal where there's no phones on the table having time where you're talking with your spouse each day even if it's 15 minutes but you're not also you know doing this whole like look up back and forth thing while you're looking at your smartphone and then trying to make eye contact with your spouse those are things that really do bleed to burnout in a relationship so making sure that you're carving aside

[14:17] time communicating about that time so that I'm not wondering like am I gonna see you this week I know okay on Friday night we're going in on a date we have a babysitter we're gonna have time to sit down and talk about what's going on so this doing this on a weekly basis has been really important for us to just sort of know that we have a schedule that works know that everything is covered and know that we're working together as a team I don't think I also think sorry I also think it's important to check in about the larger issues in your life it's doing a start-up

[14:51] launching a product demands a tremendous amount of resources right time personal finances money energy creativity you want to make sure that your partner is understanding where those resources are going how those are working families do this in lots of different ways if you listen to the 200th episode of texting you'll hear Jason and Justin's wives and and me actually talking about how they do this in their families and some you know some spouses know a great deal about what's happening with the company finances I don't want to know I don't want to know at all I we have an arrangement where you know you make your number each month

[15:32] and that goes into our personal account and beyond that I'm not worried about it so but we had to work that out that was important for us it was important for me to say I don't want to know if you make a lot of money I'm just gonna go shopping so let's like be smarter than that just don't tell me if you don't make any money I'm gonna worry um so figuring that out what works for you and your family and how that balance is navigated it's really important I think it's also important to keep the vision for your family um I think you know we've heard in a lot of

[16:06] the talks today that you work really hard think about a business plan that makes sense Josh did a great job of talking about that thinking about an idea and making sure that that it's marketable or workable I think the same level of thought and planning and dreaming and vision should also go into your family making sure that that you and your spouse and your children if you have them are also pursuing their dreams and are pursuing their goals and have ideas about how what they want for the trajectory of their lives making sure that your mind and your creativity aren't fully poured into your startup I know it's demanding I know it takes a

[16:45] lot but having a vision for other parts of your life to roles and expectations is sort of related to how you navigate the partnership within your family another thing and I spoke about this a little bit when I talk about vision is is there reciprocity do both people in the partnership have dreams that the family is supporting you know is your is your spouse pursuing things that she or he once just wants to pursue as well so making sure that you're not sort of sucking up all the dream energy that it's shared among the members of the family okay so ultimately I think the message is

[17:25] that you have to invest in your relationships it's not negotiable because the truth is is that if you are successful you're gonna want to be surrounded by the people that knew you back before the big payout the people that knew you the people that loved you and are faithful to you and if you're not successful and lots of us won't be you're gonna need people who love you anyway you're gonna need people who can help you put back together what's left of your pride and yourself and help sort of you heal so that you can launch the next idea or move forward and whatever way you're going to you want to remember

[18:05] that there is more to your life than this work and that this work for most of you most of the people in this room that I've talked to you're pursuing these you know these entrepreneurial ideas because you want a certain kind of life you want a life where you make the decisions where you're creative where you're innovative where you make a mark where you decide your vacation policy where you work for yourself and remembering that why you're doing it and remembering that often you're doing it because it allows for a kind of life with your family that you really want and find attractive but you can't sacrifice your

[18:41] family or your house or your sanity too much to get to the end so I'm not at all critical of hard work I understand that these take sacrifices and that there's a lot that you pour into this work and I celebrate that I celebrate all of Rob's success but I also celebrate this the fact that we stuck together that we have made a life and have continued to make a family that we really love and find a lot of pleasure in success or failure

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