extending your emotional runway

When founders ask me what I coach on, often I respond:

I help extend emotional runway.

Everyone knows about financial runway. It’s the number in your bank account that keeps ticking down each month, like a numerical hourglass.

But what’s often more dangerous is the emotional runway ticking down towards burn out. Running out of emotional runway is even more insidious because it’s hard to quantify, and you often don’t know you’re burning out until you’ve burnt out.

Emotional runway is your ability to keep picking yourself back up, dusting yourself back off, and getting yourself back in the game the next day.

This is where coaching comes in: while you have banks and VCs to extend your financial runway, coaches are there to extend you emotional runway.

Let me give you a personal example. As a first-time founder at 23, I was like the energizer bunny when it came to getting things done. I would gladly pull all-nighters, do multiple cross country trips every month, and take every meeting that came across my desk. I loved doing this because I was running on the high of disbelief. I couldn’t believe that I could ask people for money and they would give it. I couldn’t believe a room full of people across the country would want to hear me speak. I couldn’t believe that I could get paid to just build my own dream.

But as the years went by, that energy well became a little bit harder to draw from. Thinking about the company became less and less something I could obsess over and more and more something that caused me stress. This change was gradual, so the toll it had taken on me really didn’t hit until my inner voice whispered, “I’m done.” Not, “something needs to change.” It was definitive. It had already decided I was done. There was no amount of self-convincing that could bring me back from this point.

I stepped down as CEO, leaving room for someone with more energy to take the reins.

A lot of the founders I coach are also navigating this fine line I walked — balancing personal needs and company needs, two forces that are often at odds with each other. When you’re obsessed with what you’re building, this incredible thing happens where you have more energy than what seems humanly possible. It makes it hard to pull away from the work because everything feels so exciting. However, that energy is not free and you’re pulling from a finite well, especially if you’re not careful to refill the well when you can.

The founders I work with are full speed ahead — they’re working 12–15 hour days to realize their dream and I have the deepest admiration for them. At some points this is necessary. But often, running full speed is just a hard habit to break. Eventually, work without balance is not sustainable. When you’re running on little sleep, you make worse choices, you get pulled towards emotion rather than reason, you feel guilty to your friends and family, and your body aches from lack of movement. In short, you’re tired. Extending your emotional runway means restoring your energy for the times when you need it most, and getting more in tune with when all your engines are needed.

These are hard new habits to build when it feels like there’s a new emergency everyday. When there’s an emergency, our natural extinct is to fall back to behaviors we know best.

Many of my coaching sessions start with addressing an immediate fire: an unhappy customer, a bad fit employee, or a contract on shaky grounds. We find the best path forward on the problem — and then we focus on the larger pattern emerging. No fire is an isolated incident. They are hints to behaviors that are showing up in multiple places. Sometimes that’s conflict avoidance, other times it’s a struggle to delegate, many times it’s difficulty prioritizing. A coach helps piece together the patterns, hold it up to the mirror, and ask whether the pattern is serving you or something you want to change.

All of my clients end up confronting their own habits. They are open to change, even when it is hard. One of my clients came into a session overwhelmed by an angry customer who had derailed her whole day. The founder’s reaction is not wrong. Depending on the customer’s importance and power, this may very well be the best action to take. So we started by talking about whether this is the action she wish she took.

It wasn’t. She was more frustrated at her own reaction than the customer’s. She noticed that whenever a customer was upset, she kept getting pulled away from other more important work to appease the customer as quickly as possible. So we spent a small amount of time drafting the immediate communications, but most of the time on addressing the larger pattern.

Whether it’s making tough decisions, having hard conversations, or managing your own emotions, everyone has trouble with navigating messy human situations. Stumbling in these moments is not an indictment against the leader. It is human. The stakes are just higher when you are a leader, so they cannot be ignored. Coaching is about having regular conversations about where your habits aren’t serving you, putting the mistakes in context (is this a ring-the-alarms moment or is this just a do-better-next-time moment?), resolving the issue at hand, and solidifying your commitment to how you want to act differently in the future. In these moments, being able to point to the values you intentionally want to hold and the behavioral norms you want to employ is the most effective way to handle them.

I’ve been meeting with my own coach for over 3 years now. As you can imagine, 3 years of observing how I act and react means she knows my patterns, often even better than I do since she doesn’t have to look through the filter of self bias. She can call me out on when I’m making a decision that violates one of my values. She holds me accountable to the truths I’ve expressed to her when I forget:

• She knows that I value my agency and creativity, so in moments when I’m wavering on whether to continue with a project, she asks: “Is there anything you’d rather be doing?”
• She knows I value being very hands-on with the things I build, so when I was deciding whether to take on a part-time advisor role, she questioned: “Have you found similar engagements meaningful in the past?
• She knows I’m a peacemaker who is trying to be more of my unapologetic self, so when I’m feeling the pressure to say what I think people want to hear rather than what I actually mean, she pushes: “Is that what feels the most true to you?”

Now, I serve the same role for my clients, holding them accountable to their values when tough decisions come their way:

• Knowing one client values continuing to learn new things and expand his knowledge, when I notice he’s being consumed by busy work, I remind him: “What are you curious about here?”
• Knowing one client values clarity, when I notice the kindness cushions coming out in her language, I ask: “What is the core message you are trying to communicate?”
• Knowing one client values creative expression, when she was feeling pressure to do things the old way at her company, I nudge: “Where is there room to add your unique flavor?”

By developing strong clear values in the good times, and by having a coach hold you to them, you can lean on those values in the face of tough decisions.

My work as a coach is driven by wanting to help people do the work they were meant to do. When everyone does what they were put on this earth to do, we have a better world. The reason people don’t pursue their calling is fear — fear of failure, fear of disappointment, fear of judgment. A coach helps you make decisions from a place of truth rather than a place of fear.

I’ll be the first to say that it is incredibly hard to pursue a passion. There’s so many letdowns along the way, and they hurt especially bad because you care so deeply. Enough disappointments, and it can feel like the world is telling you to quit. Your emotional runway is at an all-time low. The only thing that can give you the strength to withstand those moments of doubt is to get really grounded in your personal values so you don’t let the daily buffets knock you down.

In the end, my clients have seen a lot of outward success. Doubling revenue, hitting their first million, tripling their team and board. But even they value the inner progress more than the outer progress. One client shared:

“I have expanded my awareness of my own flaws and superpowers, and have broken counterproductive mental models that have long been rooted in my brain….Every major win I’ve achieved as a founder could not have been possible without the fundamental, inner progress I’ve made.”

What are you waiting for? Let’s extend your runway.