Earth to startup founders: How to “show up” for you and your team.
I have thirteen tabs open and four apps pinging as I sit down to write a piece about managing distractions. Can I stay focused and finish this task in one sitting? Yeah, ten bucks says no.
“There’s no such thing as being on time; there’s only being early or late”, my Zen teacher would say as we’d sheepishly entered the room long after the bell. But most of us struggle to show up, in any meaningful way, at all.
We’re distracted beyond belief.
Visual artist, David Shrigley, points this out brilliantly is his recent work.1
See more of David Shrigley’s work here.
Torn between the mayhem of our own minds, the calls of calendars and co-workers, and the countless notifications and alerts that punctuate our days, we arrive at work or in meetings as faint facsimiles of our best selves.
Yes, we’re there in body, but rarely and only briefly with our full attention in tow. Keen listening, flow states and ‘Deep Work’ are as rare as double rainbows. That’s what distractions do; they milk us of our potential.
In my school years, teachers would mark the roll by calling out names in alphabetical order with a question mark pinned on the end.
Teacher: “Craig?”
Me: “Present!”
For all the many hundreds of times the word was exercised during my education, I wish someone had explained what it actually meant. If only school, or university, or my first workplaces had taught me what it is to be present.
While we all got marks for attendance at school, simply turning up sets a low bar for our professional lives and is a recipe for chronic underperformance. In the world of high-performing startups, “turning up” and “showing up” are very different states of affairs. And it turns out that learning to be present is a prerequisite for showing up.
Susan David, who is a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and the author of Emotional Agility says “‘showing up’ means facing into your thoughts, emotions, and behaviours willingly, with curiosity and kindness.”2 It requires a high level of self-awareness, which emotional intelligence doyen, Daniel Goleman, defines as “knowing your internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions.”3 Showing up, then, is not just appearing on the call, on the screen, or in the room; it’s about genuinely being there. In other words, it’s about being present. It is a skill that’s a bit harder to master than it might sound.
Now, more than ever.
Peak distraction
You know that the scale of our collective distractedness must be off the charts when entrepreneurs are flush with enough investor cash to throw truckloads at television advertising to promote their app-based cures. Dealing with distraction has become big business.
“Distraction is a serious problem of modern life,” says SetApp’s multimedia campaign from the UK.
You can blame it all on lockdowns if you like, but what if the most telling difference between working in the office or working in the privacy of your own pyjamas is that there are simply more (and a more obvious trail) of your digital distractions logged in your browser history?
Of course, it doesn’t help that “Covid” and its cousins Covid-19, Coronavirus, Corona and Sars-CoV-2 crowd out the Top 10 most cited words4 of the year; or that working from home (or is that living at work?) involves cats, kids and half-naked flatmates waltzing through your workday. , But that’s not the full story. Neuroscience suggests that rather than our distractedness being caused by a surfeit of Covid-related stimuli and consequences, we’re actually prone to it by design.
Descendents of the nervous monkeys
Once, when sabre-tooth tigers roamed the earth, there was a better than lottery-winning chance that we’d get picked off and eaten by something nasty. It made our forebears nervous and hyper-vigilant. Those of our ancestors who were more inclined to chillin’ got weeded and eaten out of the gene pool. So here we all are suitably anxious, nervous, fearful and prone to getting hijacked by our own thoughts and feelings without a moment’s notice.
According to Dr Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist and Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley, our nervous systems have been a work in progress for about 6,000,000 human lifespans.5 Our grey matter has evolved from reptilian to mammalian to the brain of a primate or, if you prefer, from lizard to mouse to monkey. But for all that progress, what neuroscientists call the “default mode network” of our brain is still busy with self-referential thinking and stressing over big cats .
All fired up. A model of the Default Mode Network from the brain of Patient E shows activation in multiple brain regions. Image courtesy of Australian neurotechnology startup, Omniscient.
It’s fair to say that our brains are highly active by default, with evidence suggesting we typically have 50-70,000 thoughts a day, most of them negative, and many of them mental tropes. You can see the problem here. Unaided, our minds can send us down rabbit holes or into familiar orbits that can be hard to get out of.
Who notices if you “show up” or not?
Remember when you went to that networking event, and the person you were talking to was looking over your shoulder for someone more interesting/important/influential than you? Who wants to hang out with someone like that, or work with them?
We instantly recognise when someone’s not showing up for us, and we don’t like it. In personal relationships we tend to call it out early, but it’s not so easy at work.
If you're a founder working with your team while you’re distracted, it won’t go well. First, because your team will notice from the get-go and translate it into feeling disrespected. And, secondly, because your behaviour sends a signal to everyone else in your company to say it’s okay to roll that way.
And there’s an even bigger problem here. Operating in a highly distracted state, and normalising it under the guise of busy-ness and multitasking means that your company starts running on autopilot. Your people start ruminating on the past, or agonising about the future, rather than focusing on what’s in front of them - the present - where they have maximum impact.
Probably the biggest risk of autopilot is that your team starts to accept assumptions, habits and established patterns of behaviour as the status quo, instead of looking at data objectively and bringing their wonder, curiosity and beautiful questions to the party.
Startups don't fail because startups are risky. Startups fail because their founders often lack a sense of self-awareness - Forbes
I’ve seen many a bright spark dulled and dumbed down by founders too busy to show up for them and, so, they leave for greener pastures. It happens between co-founders too. Forbes points to research suggesting that “65% of startups fail as a result of co-founder conflict,” and that “startups don't fail because startups are risky. Startups fail because their founders often lack a sense of self-awareness.”6
The self-awareness required for showing up is something for every founder to be working on for their own wellbeing and for the greater good of their teams, family and friends. And learning how to be present is one helluva start. For you, it’s enlivening. For the people around you, it’s a gift, and when you learn to be present reliably, repeatedly and on demand, it becomes true presence.
The wisdom of contemplative practices has a way of setting us straight: “If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything” - Thich Nhat Hanh.
Get yourself a practice
There is a raft of schools, disciplines, doctrines, techniques, mantras and tools out there to help you be more open, available, and in the now. You can draw on any number of them, whatever works for you.
When I co-founded Sendle, I was determined to improve my own ability to “show up”. Having been less than present for far too much of my school, university and professional life, I travelled to and from San Francisco four times that year to study, practice and become a Certified Teacher of ‘Search Inside Yourself’, a leadership program designed and tested at Google to help Googlers elevate their performance, leadership and wellbeing.7
One of the first principles of this program is the power of breathing. Not because it guarantees you’ll achieve a certain mental state, but because it helps you access the state you’re in with a lot more clarity and precision.
We breathe about 20,000 times a day but hardly ever notice. It’s a pretty big miss when you think about it. Focusing on our breathing engages our parasympathetic nervous system, which down-regulates your heart rate and puts your body in a rest-and-digest mode. Conscious breathing lowers stress and improves focus, concentration, oxygen uptake and delivery, immune response and sleep quality. Those are pretty good credentials.
But the best one for me is this: your breath is always in the present moment. You can’t breathe in the past or in the future. It’s a bridge between mind and body and an anchor to the here and now. What a great place to start showing up.
Now is the perfect time to start
Meditative traditions have appreciated the qualities of breath and the numerous benefits of focusing on your breathing for millennia. And many you will have heard of them before and had good intentions about putting them into practice. But just like New Year’s resolutions, good intentions seldom turn into healthy habits and sustained change.
Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity - James Clear, Atomic Habits
Why? Because we either start too big, find the new behavior painful and quit, or we procrastinate and don’t start at all. But as James Clear explains in his book Atomic Habits, “Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity”8.
According to Clear, what you need is a simple, predetermined plan: “I will [BEHAVIOUR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].” Meditation for example - “I will meditate for one minute at 7:00am in my kitchen.”
Here’s a simple Three Breath Micro-practice to help you on your way:
With your first breath, bring your attention to your breathing.
With your second breath, just relax a little.
On your third breath ask yourself, “What’s important right now?”
So, now all you need to do to get going is complete your plan: “I will use this Three Breath Micro-practice at [TIME] in [LOCATION].”
If you want to show up for yourself and your team, there really is no time like the present.
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David Shrigley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Shrigley
Susan David https://www.susandavid.com/
Daniel Goleman https://www.danielgoleman.info/
Most cited words of 2020 https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/what-s-the-top-word-of-2020-oh-you-guessed-that-one-easily-1.4298315
Rick Hanson https://www.rickhanson.net/hug-the-monkey/
Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/brettonputter/2019/02/25/cofoundd-startup-due-diligence-begins-with-your-cofounder/?sh=2b44c4b0284b
Search Inside Yourself https://siyli.org/
James Clear https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits