# How to Stay Motivated as a Founder: A Psychologist's Framework

Channel: MicroConf
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw8ZrlqmKXQ
Duration: 35 min
Language: English
Words: 5360
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/lw8ZrlqmKXQ

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[0:00] Hey, microcom. Thank you for coming to the after lunch session. If you need to stand up and go to the back and do some jumping jacks to stay awake, I [snorts] respect that and appreciate it. So, this is actually um I have a few disclosures. One, this is not actually a talk. I mean, I'm going to talk for a little bit, but then I'm going to invite you to talk. So when the time comes for you to talk, I'm going to ask you to pod up into groups of

[0:28] fourish. Fourish, you know, three to five to six. And what we'll do is I'll give you some things to talk about and invite you to do a bit of a deep dive into this conversation around what helps you to stay motivated over the life of running your business. So maybe right now we can do the awkward like look around and eyeball your pod. Just decide. Use body

[0:55] language and eye contact. Maybe say hey. Exchange names. Make a decision to pod together. We are a pod now. We have an identity. Okay, that's enough. you'll have time. The other disclosure that I feel inclined to make is that this is actually a talk about mental health. I'm a clinical psychologist. It's the thing that I do. It's really the thing that I know. It is a mental health talk wrapped in a motivation talk. But I want you to know I am not particularly

[1:38] motivational. But what I do know a lot about is how to help founders prevent burnout, come back from the throws of burnout. And I am the person that you call when things are blowing up and not going well. And mental health is a significant problem. So I come to this topic from the depths, not from the surface. So if you were hoping for like a rah rah rah, we're going to have a magic morning routine. ready go kind of talk. This is not that talk. Uh we'll talk about

[2:13] morning routines because they're great. But I want you to sort of uh buckle up to go a bit internal to your own experience and maybe do a little self-reflection and maybe have the courage to talk a bit about that internal self-reflection with the people in your pod. So, in case you don't know yet,

[2:37] bootstrapping is hard. It's a difficult path to go on. It is pretty much um a guarantee to be somewhat obsessive, compulsive, to not sleep very well, to really potentially fray some of your relationships. It's an all-in kind of task, and it often means a lot of loneliness. It often means a lot of nobody in your world

[3:03] understanding you or getting you. And I'm not not recommending it obviously. Um this is how I spend my life is talking to bootstrappers. It's something that I care about. I'm all in on it. I'm cheering for you. But I do think that it's important to have these moments where we sort of tell the truth

[3:20] about the hard. So why do it? And here are some of the wise that micro attendees have responded when I've asked why are you doing it this way? I love being my own boss. Freedom to do what I want the way that I want. Building something that is truly mine. These are wonderful motivations. This is sort of like existential freedom at its best. And other motivations like leaving a legacy, building something that matters, building a great place to

[3:50] work for me and for my team. wonderful motivations to do this work. We've kind of collapsed these motivations into two core themes. Freedom. How many of you really value the freedom to work whatever 20 hours in a day you want? Just kidding. And impact. You're doing something that matters to you. You're generating wealth for yourself. You're generating employment for your team. you're gen

[4:23] generating freedom for your family. There's lots of things that go into these motivators, freedom and impact. And they seem to be pretty universal across the entrepreneurial community, especially across the bootstrapper community. They sound very heavenly. They're lofty. Highlevel existential goals. Freedom and impact. That's what we want. Give it to us now. Again, I'm all for it. But sometimes these motivators seem to not quite be enough to move us

[5:05] forward in our stuck moments. I've been worried about this for a while. What happens when entrepreneurs get stuck? What happens when they feel caged or trapped? What happens when they don't have the ump to keep going in a thoughtful, sustainable, mindful way? Rob and I wrote a little book about this, Entrepreneurs Guide to Keeping Your Together. Yes, our child came up with the title. I do not recommend putting a swear word in your book title

[5:35] because Amazon does not like those ads. I would have done it differently. The bottom line here is that we do need fuel to get us through the really difficult times that we will inevitably face in our businesses, in our lives. Sometimes the things that really weigh us down are not a problem with our business. Our business can be going great, but we have an ill parent or a child who's struggling or rocks in our relationship

[6:08] with our significant other. So when we are running on empty, we begin to say things like this. I'm running on empty. I'm struggling with motivation. I just don't feel energized by this anymore. I can't figure out how to motivate my team. I can't seem to ship. I spend all day working but don't get anything done. These are the things that bring people

[6:33] into conversation with people like me. It might be that the business is going great. It's a great idea. Everything seems like it should be fine, but it just doesn't feel fine. And you wake up tired. You wake up without that sense of drive or oomph to get going on your day. Maybe it's burnout. Maybe it's

[6:54] depression. Whatever it is, however we diagnose it, it's low motivation. And without motivation, we get lost. We don't know where we're going. We don't know how to find our way. So when motivation is low and you have a lot to do and your business matters to you and your family matters to you and it all feels really

[7:17] important. We start getting squirmy like right when our compass is off we don't have a map. I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember um what it was like to drive without like Google Maps or any of those devices and you're like I I got to get to a gas station. I don't really know where one is. So, you just sort of drive around until hopefully you see something from the freeway. Sometimes

[7:44] that works out, sometimes it doesn't. It's a little bit of that feeling when our motivation is low. We start to think these things. Maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe I don't belong here. Maybe it's time to quit. Maybe it's time to sell. Perhaps it's time to buy a second business. Perhaps I need a new feature. Fire a

[8:11] team member. Launch another product. Change the pricing. Do something that feels like motion. Stuckness is the enemy of entrepreneurs. But motion without direction, without motivation is another really significant enemy of entrepreneurship. Because if you do any of these things or think these thoughts in a an unintentional way, you risk creating quite a problem

[8:39] for yourself and for your team. Motivation I think is one of the most misunderstood concepts in entrepreneurship. So that's why we're talking about it. One way of thinking about motivation, one of the definitions of it is it is motion. It's to move. its meaning to move. So movement, physical movement is one way of thinking about it. But I think the other thing that we want to be clear about is that often motivation is

[9:10] mistaken for emotion. How do I feel today? Do I feel like doing this? I spend a lot of time talking about feelings. I've got feeling charts. I've got lots of words for feelings. I'm a high respector of feelings. You're not going to argue with me about the central importance of feelings as data to guide

[9:32] both of our businesses and our lives. That's a different talk. So just please believe me when I say emotion matters. But emotion gets really confused with motivation because motivation is actually deeper than that. is the drive or incentive that prompts a person to act in a certain way over and over to put your reps in regardless of how you feel. That's a different kind of motivation. That's the deeper motivation that get keeps us going in our

[10:03] businesses. So this is the force behind everything that you do. So let's understand it better because it's not just how you feel when you wake up in the morning. It's not just how it feels to look in your inbox. What's the real driver? Couple things worth noting. There are a couple different kinds of motivation. This morning routine motivation that I like to talk about is micro motivation. That's like the momentary motivation. That is a bit more about emotion. That's the oomph to get you moving. butt in the chair, initiating movement, starting the day, starting the process, getting ready to do something. Macro motivation is the deeper, more existential power to keep

[10:52] going, doing your reps day after day, moving forward over time. So, we want to make that distinction just so we're clear on our terms. Micro motivation. So, uh, I live with Rob Walling, in case you didn't know that. And our offices share a wall. Um, we both work at home. And every once in a while, I know something's going on because I hear through the wall Eye of the Tiger blasting in a way that's

[11:23] extraordinarily irritating to my work. [laughter] But I'm like, uh, homeboy is having a moment. He's like trying to get himself going for something. a good example of micro motivation. All right. So, what I want to do with this time before I divide you up into your pods is talk a bit about our motivation archetypes. What kinds of motivated humans are we? Then I want to talk about timing of motivation, how that works with our businesses and then

[11:55] some strategies to stay motivated. But when we talk about motivation, we are talking about a pretty deep story. Our personal history is a very significant driver of our motivation. How many of us, you can raise your hand if you wish, had a parent that we found to be somewhat disapproving, that we're sort of like never quite good enough

[12:19] for? Okay, it's a big motivator. When we grow up in a context where we have a lot of adversity, something that we're fighting against, someone that we're trying to prove something to, that can become our grit. that can become the thing that we're gets sort of encoded into our personality into who we are that drives our motivation. You have a motivation to fight, a motivation to

[12:45] press against some kind of adversity. We're shaped by the things that happen to us. You've probably heard me make this joke before if you've heard me speak, but when I became a psychologist, I thought I'm going to be like a really practical, actionable psychologist. I'm not going to be the psychologist that's like telling me about your mother. But it turns out the longer I've been a psychologist and the more training I've done and the more people I've spent time with, it's really important what happened with your mother. And as much as we'd like to be like 40 and 50year-old adults and it doesn't matter anymore and we live in the present, the

[13:16] past still shapes us. The trick is knowing how it shapes us and having the eyes to see how it unfolds and how it's wielding its effect or its influence. The other thing that shapes what motivates us is our personality. We all show up on this planet for this iteration of our lives in one form or another. And some of us love new

[13:43] experiences. I'm like this. Some of us just I'm like I want to have one of all of the donuts. I mean, I don't want all of the donuts, but I want to I just can't. There's so many. I want all of them. some of us. So, we're driven by this desire for like novelty. What's interesting? I haven't done that yet. I want to do that. And then others of us have a personality that's like, why would I mess with all of that? I want to stay right here doing things the way that I know they should be done, the way that's comfortable for me. So, if you are familiar with your

[14:20] personality research, I'm talking about the personality characteristic of openness to new experience. Optimism that's another optimism pessimism it's part of our personality and so our motivation is shaped by do I generally believe things are going to be fine how risk tolerant am I or am I always spotting the problems entrepreneurs can be coming from both camps right spotting is a fantastic ability in entrepreneurship so is optimism [laughter] so our personalities are shaping what is important to us and how we come to our work and what keeps us doing it over and

[15:00] over. And then another part that shapes motivation is just our neurology. How sensitive are we to dopamine? How much do we need a little drip drip drip of dopamine versus how long are we able to uh take a feedback loop that involves delayed gratification. So this shapes our motivation. Like if you are a sort of high need dopamine

[15:27] person, you need a tight feedback loop. You need a win every day or every couple days. If you're able to sustain delayed gratification, your motivation profile looks very different. Kind of make sense? So basically what I want to make the point is that our motivations, our drive is a complicated deep part of us. It comes from both our strengths and

[15:50] our weaknesses. And it's something that um is helpful to understand our profile around. I've been playing with this idea of archetypes like your way of motivating is different than my way of motivating. So when people come to me and they're getting stuck, they're feeling like they're struggling with motivation. I ask some of these questions. I ask about their history. I try to understand how their brain's working. Ask about their personality. But I've done this enough now that I' I've been able to sort of group people a bit into [snorts] some

[16:25] general archetypes. So I'm going to tell you about those quickly and then give you some time to talk about which ones might resonate with you. The scientist in me also wants to say that this is not um sort of a personality or it's not an archetypal study that has gone through lots of research. These are just things that I've observed over time. So we'll treat

[16:48] it gently. This is a theory, not a fact. Okay. Couple subtypes of motivational archetypes. The first one that we have is the time traveler. This is someone who is able to see the world for what it could be. And that vision of the future is what fuels them. This is your big idea person. They really want to chase this alternative reality that they see in their mind. And this is often a bit more of a unicorn oriented founder, right? This is like again this really big idea that's going to change the way

[17:31] we drive cars or share information. But they are future oriented in that visionary and that's what motivates them. It's a vision. what's possible. Another archetype is the list checker. This is the meticulous execution kind of person. They build one detail at a time, high level of control, maybe more oriented towards being leftbrain, an indie hacker, but this is that satisfaction of like making the long list and then just meticulously

[18:07] checking it off. And it feels so good. tight dopamine feedback loop. I wrote that copy. Check. Next. Go on to the next thing. We have people who are deeply motivated by human relationships. This is your people person. This is someone who wants to craft a company because they want to create an extraordinary experience for their customers or they want to create an extraordinary experience for their employees, for their team. They care about the craft of the human group, the human experience, not so much the visionary future. They're maybe not really attending to the checklist, but

[18:47] they love the experience for people. It's a people first company, like a Darsh Sha kind of founder. The next one is the crafts person. This is the one who is really motivated by the making of the thing. This is probably early days Ben Chestnut, right? Design background. Someone who loved to create something that they were proud of. This is the maker, the builder. This

[19:14] is maybe maybe a little Derek Rhyr. Where are you, Derek? Just builds beautiful products. Just makes things. Again, maybe not so worried about the humans or the checklists or the other things, but just loves the making. Another motivator, good old money. This is the money maker. I want to generate wealth. I don't care what the business idea is. I don't care how we do it, but my main motivation is that generation of

[19:43] wealth. I want to make some money. And another motivator, this is the hard driver. This is the fighter. Like, I don't care what we're doing. I don't care what the business is. I just want to win. I want the sensation of defeating the competition. I want the sense of you said I couldn't do it.

[20:03] Watch me. I'm going to. We all maybe have a little element of this. This is a little bit in our entrepreneurial DNA. We're all a bit misfits and rebels in our own domains. But some people have this in spades. And it's an important thing to know because if you don't know that you're built like this or that this is a driver for you, you can easily be someone who makes enemies just so you have someone to

[20:32] defeat, right? Makes problems just so you have something to work out. All right, the last one I want to talk about is the power broker. This is someone who is really motivated by who, you know, they want to be in the room. If you're a Hamilton fan, they want to be in the room where it happened. They want to be at the power table. They want to be a decider. They want to know the people that know the people. It's about

[21:03] connection and authority. So these are the six that I have been thinking about and or seven I guess seven that I've been thinking about and I'll ask you to spend a little time in your tables in just one minute sort of identifying which ones resonate with you or don't and it's okay you don't have to pick just one. We are complicated creatures we humans and it's rare that

[21:31] we are purely motivated for anything. So, it's usually a combination of things. But one of the things that I want to get you thinking about is how our motivations change over time according to the growth of our company. Because here's one of the challenges that entrepreneurs experience is we come with our humanness with a loading around what we are motivated by and to do and then we participate in the making of this entity which is our business. And sometimes the business needs different motivators than our motivators and that's where we have to watch out because that's where we can get into trouble. I generally think that our

[22:21] companies need different kinds of motivations over time. So for example, what it might look like over the over the growth of a company is that the crafts person at the beginning. You make something that you love. You have a product that's extraordinary and maybe you're type A enough to make a lot of lists and get a lot of things done and execute on building this amazing product and you have enough fight in you. You've had enough adversity to be pretty gritty and you're a hard driver and you're going to hustle and get it forward. Move it into the eyes of people who can do

[22:57] something about it. and then you're able to bring on some people and you're able to make some money and maybe you're getting ready to grow or sell or get funding or you know do something and you need some power. You need to be in the room with people and then maybe you have the opportunity if it's a big enough idea to really recreate a segment of the world of your industry of the thing that matters to

[23:22] you. But I want you to notice how these motivators shift over time. It would have been very difficult for Ben Chestnut to stay as a crafts person all the way to a 12 billion exit. There's some other motivators, some other skills, some other drives that have to become part of that story. Okay, it's enough for me for now. Let's find our pods. And here's a couple

[23:54] questions for your consideration. What is your primary motivation archetype? I want you to go deeper than freedom and impact. We're agreeing on freedom and impact. So, at least play along with my game and see if one of these seven resonate with you, one or two. And second, I want you to think about how your motivations have changed over the course of running your business or maybe where you're noticing how the needs of your business might be slightly asynchronous or out of touch with your personal motivation. So play with this

[24:30] idea of motivations change over time. So in your pods of fourish, you'll have two to three minutes each. So unfortunately, it's not a long jam, it's a short jam. you can continue the jam later over dinner, but we'll go ahead and have 10 or 12 minutes for that conversation and then we'll come back. I'll give you some more motivational tips and we'll go our merry way. Sound

[24:53] good? Go pod. So, we've hopefully talked a bit about or I've dived in a little bit into the complexity of the number of variables that may come together to comprise our personal motivation profile. And hopefully you've begun to think a little bit about how that fits or doesn't fit the current needs of your

[25:20] business. That's a pretty big question. That's kind of like take homework where you got to do that deep dive on yourself. So, I've already talked a bit about like how problematic it can be when your motivation runs low or when you're misaligned in the needs of your company, the demands of your day, and the things that really excite and motivate and drive you. That mismatch, that misalignment is often the sort of space where burnout begins to take seed. when we have to do a lot of things that we don't actually care about, that's not a

[26:00] good recipe for happiness for humans. That probably won't surprise you. So, when you are feeling out of alignment or disconnected from your motivation, what do you do about it? I'm going to offer some tactics. We're going to do it quickly. Some of them will land. Some of them will be helpful. Some of them won't be relevant. Do your best to sort it through. So if you are feeling this misalignment I discussed, it's really I do think it's very helpful to do the deep dive and hone in on the core drives of your motiv motivation archetype. Where's the mismatch? What's the problem? Where is your day's tasks

[26:41] out of sync with what you really love? What drives you? Another great strategy if you're at a place in your business where you can do it is to hire team members with different motivation archetypes. If you're a crafts person, you need to hire a people person. If you're a people person, maybe hire a list maker. Like you you can offset what the company needs, what fuels the company moving forward by bringing in team members with different motivational strategies, different motivational profiles, so you don't have to do all

[27:11] the things. Another uh idea is to get your personal motivation needs met in other parts of your life. So again, if you are a crafts person and you are in a place in your business where you need to be shaking hands and being in rooms of power and influence and moving your business forward in the sort of network strategy, then you need to spend some time doing something crafty in your private life so that the the maker in you, the artist in you gets a little airtime. And that can look like lots of different things. that can look like a hobby. If any of you know anything about my work,

[27:52] I spend a lot of time talking about the lifesaving importance of a hobby, of a place to play. So, this is part of that. If there's a thing that you love doing in the world, find a place for it. It just might not be in your business right now. The other thing that I think is extraordinarily important for all of us as humans, but especially for entrepreneurs who are leading other people, is to do some of the work to heal your own underlying traumas or historical hurts, the things that are likely to be messing with your motivation that you might not have deep awareness of. I'm a big believer in

[28:29] doing this deep work to help us become the healthiest versions of ourselves so that we aren't self-sabotaging so that we aren't creating drama or creating problems that don't need to be there just to feel like we have something to fight against or something to overcome. That's a lot of work that might not be necessary if you do some of this inner work which is going to serve you in all

[28:51] areas of your life. You can take time for a founder retreat to reconnect with your c core motivators. Clarify goals, create systems for celebration. One of the challenge with that dopamine cycle that I talked about is if we're not breaking down our work, our the growth of our business into these smaller goals, we never take the time for celebration. So, we never reset. We never say, "Oh, look, I finished that phase. I finished that copy. I finished phase one of this launch. And when we don't do that, we're just draining our fuel all the time and nothing ever feels complete. So this is an important strategy. These small

[29:31] celebrations, make the goals accessible and celebrate them regularly. The other thing is to focus on some micro motivators to keep moving in the short term. Have a great playlist that you put on when you need to get moving. Do a little dance party before your talk if you happen to see that. Get your eye of the tiger ready. This is where your micro m motivations can help sustain you when your macro motivations are a little wonky or out of sync. Just do the things. Do the reps, butts, and seats every day. Do the things that help

[30:04] support that. Um, the last thing is to double down on impact activities. This these are again the things that feel good and important that might be outside of your business. volunteering, spending time in your community, spending time fighting for causes that feel important to you. Motivation killers, the things that you want to be super super aware of because they are terrible for you. Oops, did I skip a slide? There we go. Um, poor pacing, like not allowing yourself these times for celebration. Burnout, of

[30:39] course, is the antithesis of motivation. That's where you are running on empty. Uh, I love talking about burnout, love writing about burnout. There's a lot of content available about that if you are wondering if you fall in that category. Not sleeping well is one of the things that is going to kill all levels of

[30:58] motivation. Really, the most important thing that you can do for yourself as an entrepreneur is to protect your sleep. And it's often one of the things that goes, especially if you have a family and a day job and you're doing something nights and weekends. But this will cause you significant trouble in your motivation life if you don't sleep well. All of these things that can are happening around you can derail your ability to really hone in on what is lifegiving to you and help that overflow

[31:34] into your business. So quickly in your table conversations, your pods, what are the motivation killers that are most likely to threaten you? Where are you vulnerable? Are you someone who routinely sacrifices sleep? Are you someone who uh is at a rocky place in your relationship? Are you someone who's having trouble hiring? Like what are the things that get in the

[31:58] way of your motivation? and maybe what are your strategies that have worked in the past that help you get back on track. So, we just have a few minutes for this one, but I think it's worth a little bit of that work from the theory to the application. So, go ahead and jump in your conversations.

[32:16] We have about five minutes. Let's go ahead and come back. Let's let freedom and impact be foundational motivators for us as bootstrappers. It's a great foundation, but don't forget what goes into building the whole system of you and how that fuels how you show up in this business that you're making and in this life that you're crafting. These are the why photos for many of the

[32:54] people in this room. None of it really matters if you're not well. If you're not well in your mind, if you're not well in your heart, if you're not well in your body. And if nothing else, please let this talk just be the gentle reminder to really take care of you because you are the greatest asset for your business. You are the greatest asset for these wise, for your significant others, your kids,

[33:30] your fur babies. And don't forget that interwoven into all of these elements of your life is an invitation for you to really enjoy your life. Your business should be part of that, not the only thing. In the spirit of joy, I will now share a random trapeze video with you. Some of you in Micro Minneapolis came to do trappies with me. That made me very

[34:07] happy. 100% survival rate to date. Thank you for letting me be on the stage. For more motivational insight and circus shenanigans, you can follow me on the internet. I've also written a couple of books. Um, Touching Two Worlds is a book about staying alive in the worst of times. It's about grief and loss and finding your way through that. And The Entrepreneurs Guide to Keeping Your Together is fairly self-explanatory. I also have a podcast and a YouTube

[34:38] channel and things of that nature. Thanks so much for letting me be with you. Have a great makeup. [applause]

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