Sudden and unpredictable changes of mood and mind

Starting a business can feel like having a clinical mood disorder.

It’s this precarious balance between grandiosity and insignificance.

One day you’re manically convinced that you’re a genius whose new product is legitimately going to change people’s lives forever.

My amazing new dinglehopper will be embraced by consumers and organizations worldwide and revolutionize the way the humans communicate. Go me!

The next day you surrender to the fact that nobody is going to even care about your stupid new piece of shit, killing the additional bit of hope you didn’t even know you still had.

My dinglehopper idea is a complete hallucination that will be ignored at best and humiliated at worst, publicly confirming my worthlessness for all to see. Kill me.

Wow, are entrepreneurs sick or what?

But all diagnoses of mental illness aside, here’s the reality of these sudden and unpredictable changes of mood and mind.

They’re part of the journey. This rollercoaster of business is one hell of a ride, and the sooner we accept that there will be highs and lows, the more equipped we will be take on both the good and the bad.

In my career experience, I’ve learned there are two types of people you want in your life to help you with this task.

Those who believe in you more than you believe in yourself, and those who can give you a different perspective when you can’t see past your own assumptions.

Both critical.

My name for these people is called your secure base, which is the human support system that has love as its scaffolding to help you process all your creative changes. These trusted voices will be there to witness the ups and downs of your journey.

Now, some of these people will compensate for your low confidence in moments of doubt. You can borrow their hope when you don’t have any of your own.

Some of these people will keep you accountable to reality in your moments of grandiosity. You can let them get things off their chest and call you onto the carpet from a place of love.

Some of these people won’t do anything other than give you a hug and say they love you and they’re with you no matter what. You can breathe that in like sweet air.

I’m deeply grateful to have had a secure base for the vast majority of my career. And admittedly, there were certain times in my life where my workaholism was too toxic to even notice they were there. Several of those relationships dissolved, which I regret to this day, and hope not to repeat tomorrow.

But one of the ways I reconcile my younger self’s mistakes is by going out of my way to be part of other people’s secure base. To be for them what other people have been to me.

It’s not penance for my sins, rather, a chance to keep the love in circulation.

To give what I need, regardless of how people receive it, because I know that the purpose of loving is being the carrier of love.

And so, if you’ve taken the brave plunge into entrepreneurship and are starting to notice the precarious balance between grandiosity and insignificance, know that you’re not alone, you’re not the first, and you’re not mentally ill.

Actually that last part is up for debate. We don’t know each other that well. Besides, considering how many millions of people worldwide have received unwarranted mental disorder diagnoses, who the hell even knows anymore?

Just goes to show you the absurdity of the human condition. Maybe it’s a bug, maybe it’s a feature, maybe it’s both.

But this life is all we’ve got, and so, we may as well learn to accept reality on reality’s terms, and surround ourselves with a secure base.

People who believe in us more than we believe in ourselves, and people who can give us a different perspective when we can’t see past our own assumptions.

When you have sudden and unpredictable changes of mood and mind, what story do you tell yourself?