Paying with the Body

Part One

Most founders who reach the stage of paying for the business with their nervous system did not arrive there through a single decision. They arrived through a sequence of small ones, each of which made sense at the time. The early stretch where you slept four hours and it was fine, because the work needed to happen and the energy was there. The middle stretch where the four hours became routine, because the work was still expanding and there was no obvious moment to stop. The later stretch, where the four hours stopped being a choice and started being a fact, because the body had recalibrated around it and no longer reliably did the longer version even when the day allowed it.

The same pattern shows up across most of the systems. The diet that was good enough in year one is unrecognisable in year four. The exercise that was a non-negotiable became a sometimes. The relationships that were close became coordinated. The mind that used to wander, take in things that were not directly about the business, came in, started running pattern-recognition on the business even during dinner. None of these were decisions. They were drifts, each of which the body absorbed without complaint at the time.

The body did not stay silent. The body sent the signals it has available to send. The poor sleep. The clenched jaw. The stomach that no longer processes. The skin. The cycle. The recurring small injuries. The viral things that hang on longer than they used to. These are the body's language. From inside the business, they are easy to read as costs of doing the work. From outside the business, by anyone honest enough to say it, they read as the business consuming the person.

What makes this hard to see is that the business is also delivering. Real things. Real revenue. Real growth. Real impact. The founder is not, in any obvious way, suffering for nothing. The trade looks, on the spreadsheet, like a reasonable one. The bookkeeping is being done in different currencies, and the body's currency does not have a column on the spreadsheet, so the trade looks more favourable than it is.

Part Two

The work that addresses this is not optimisation. The optimisation toolkit, the sleep, the cold, the breathwork, the adaptogens, is useful and is not the answer. The answer is structural. It is the redesign of what the business is asking the body to carry.

What this looks like, in practice, is different for every founder. For some, it is genuine delegation, not just titular delegation, of decisions that have been held at the centre for longer than they should have been. For some, it is the slower work of becoming the kind of founder the business needs in its next stage, which usually means being less central rather than more, and that change is harder than it sounds because the founder has been central for a reason. For some, it is the harder conversation about whether the business as currently structured is the business the founder wants to keep running, or whether the next move is something else entirely.

None of these are quick conversations. None of them respond well to urgency. The founder who arrives at this stage tends to want the answer fast, because the answer is overdue and the body is tired. The work cannot be done fast without damaging the work itself. It has to be done at a pace the founder is usually not, in the early stages, willing to accept.

In my own years before the diabetes diagnosis, I was running a version of this on my own body, in a different setting. The work I was doing was not a business I owned. It was the role I was performing for the firm I was inside. But the structural arrangement was the same. The body was metabolising the stress the role produced, the optimisation toolkit was treated as the answer, and the actual question, which was whether the role was still the right one for who I had become, was the one I was not, at that stage, prepared to ask. The body asked it for me, eventually, in the form of the diagnosis. The redesign that followed was the work the optimisation could not do.

In the practice I run now, this is one of the more common patterns the Diagnostic surfaces. Not always with founders. Often with founders. The conversation, when the patterns are named, almost never goes where the founder thought it would when she booked the call. That is usually the sign that the conversation is doing what it should.

If the body has started having a louder voice than the spreadsheet, I run a free 30-minute Diagnostic on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. A conversation to look at what is actually going on, and what the real work ahead might be.

Continue reading: The Operating System →

Or if you'd rather start a conversation: Book the free 30-min Diagnostic →