By Rachel P.

Four months ago, I went for my dream: building my company.

Rollercoaster, ups and downs... these expressions really don’t do it justice.

The highs have been ecstatic, the lows brought me to places where I didn’t recognize myself: At one point my co-founder and I were really struggling. “This is what a looming divorce must feel like” I thought. When I tried to pick myself up, I just felt stress, tiredness and sadness...

Some thoughts & tools I came across that helped me a lot:

Recognizing there’s a time to be sad/down/angry
I believe that we all have a ton of grit, energy and motivation, but I also believe that at times the best thing we can do for ourselves is just to recognize and accept that things are tough. Because that’s the only way we’ll start doing the right things to address it. 

Remembering & visualizing the why
During the down phases, I would question why I'm doing all of this (=build my company) and whether I should be doing it at all. After all, following my dream should feel great, no?

Then I started to visualize the “why” behind wanting to build a company—and things changed. I imagined myself working with my future teams & customers, interacting with the world in new ways through the company’s product, being able to create new patterns through my company's culture and having female leaders in tech—Visualizing the future I wanted to create gave me the required adrenaline and energy that were stronger than the stress and negativity of my current situation.

Getting help
I started by openly telling friends during meetups that things are really tough. It didn’t help. The “I’m sorry to hear that” and “here’s one sentence of advice” was not what I needed. It was real attention, real problem-solving and taking people’s time to talk about myself - maybe for hours. Asking for it didn’t come naturally to me.

A friend ended up proactively offering/insisting to meet for coffee—specifically to talk things through. Plus, I invested 3 hours in talking to a life coach over 4 weeks. It worked as it helped me form new thoughts about & reframe my situation in a way I wasn't able to myself. For example, I realized that my path forward was not binary (be left with nothing or make everything work, but I had many options in between that I felt good about (surprise :D).

Trying some life coaching techniques

• Identify stressful thoughts such as I'm running behind, I should have already found a co-founder, already have decided on an idea. Say them out loud, right them down. Stopping to “ignore” them helps already. My life coach also got me to challenge whether they are true - in what way could I be wrong about them? Is it really so bad, if my worst fear comes true? Most of my stressful thoughts were not “true”, but I had made myself believe in them.
• Think about the big picture: What else is stressing you? Everything is connected: Work, love, health,... all affect how we feel. In my case, I realized that I had been putting some personal admin things and a date off and these were also stressful other things I wasted energy on ignoring.
• Ask yourself an annoying question: In what way could my situation be perfect? My life coach “forced” me to come up with an entire list of things, which helped me see my situation in a weirdly positive light. For example, my current situation could be seen as a learning opportunity where I learn things that will be powerful in the future, even though maybe I cannot yet grasp that now.

Some of these things may seem obvious, but in my darkest hours, they helped me get to a better mental state, where I was more recentered and grounded to face challenges.

On company building: By now I have accepted that especially the first phase - when uncertainty is highest and we have to figure EVERYTHING out, this is just the deal. As entrepreneurs, we bet on the “ups”. The price we pay is the possibility of the “downs” and it helps to have some tools to deal with them.