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Ideas come and go. Every successful entrepreneur has seen ideas fail. That’s all part of it. The thing that all (successful) entrepreneurs have in common is their commitment to being entrepreneurs.

It’s an identity thing: To be an entrepreneur is to declare that your mission is to create extraordinary value in the world. It’s extraordinary because to do so you must create vehicles (businesses) for that value creation much larger than yourself.

To aspire to be an entrepreneur is to be on the path of learning how to do all of that.

To give up on entrepreneurship itself, is to give up on that path of maximized value creation. There’s no reason at all to do so, ever.

Hi there. My name is Lizzy Hodcroft and I’m addict.

I’m completely addicted to start up.

When you look up the definition of addiction, you’ll find a lot of meanings that throw in the words “compulsive disorder”. What I found most interesting was this, “The two properties that characterize all addictive stimuli are that they are reinforcing and intrinsically rewarding.”

 

Kinda sounds exactly like entrepreneurship right?

 

And there is nothing wrong with that. One of the best parts of starting your own business is the excitement, possibilities and emotional reward when things go right.

But this can also go wrong – very very wrong. And in so many different ways.

Whether it’s too many coffees, staying up all night, drinking to relax or even eating bad food on the go, we all have made choices during our entrepreneurial journey that means we compromise ourselves to chase the success we all crave for our business.

And when we do this repeatedly, over and over again, it can become a real problem. Chasing highs to combat earlier lows or failure can be just as detrimental to your health as chasing the high of a good batch of cocaine.

Maybe part of the conflict is that for the first time in our lives, we are now focusing on things “we want to do” rather than the usual job structure of what “we need to do”

I’ve never been great at patience, especially if I’m stuck in an uncomfortable part of my life.

It’s something personally, I have always found extremely trying and hard. As soon as I feel uncomfortable, I feel I must change something, fix something, just do something I just can’t handle sitting through the storm and letting it blow over. But being so reactive had also led to quite a few bad outcomes. I make impulse decisions with quite often, bad judgement.

Everything in my business quickly becomes priority number one and this reflects in the way I work with others too. Subconsciously, I’m setting myself short and strict timelines to get things done. Ping me an email while I’m working on something else? I’ll answer straight away. And then I’ll start something new, and then I’ll remember that one thing that I wanted to do awhile go and start that. Perhaps the phone will ring – I’m on it! Look at me! So many tasks! So productive!

Is it wrong to do that? I don’t know. It has certainly helped me to be successful in my professional life. At the same time, it comes at a price, and I have to stop and ask myself at what point is it okay to slow down a little?

Impulse for me, and I believe most of us, seems to lead to a more negative meaning – reckless, hasty, and foolhardy. Making decisions and not thinking things through. But it’s important to remember that impulsiveness can also imply spontaneity and inciting bigger ideas into action.

When you have pushed yourself as an entrepreneur for years and years, it becomes an absolute habit and part of your very makeup. Nothing is more energizing than that – it’s the best adrenaline rush there is.

And I’m addicted to it

And so I am working each day to be careful to control this addiction. Like all addictions, I have been amazed at how hard it can be to control. But they say the first step is to admit there is a problem, which I now do very openly. I am still working on figuring out the second step, but I will definitely let you know when I get there. I just hope that by being open about this struggle in my own life, others out there will gain insights that will help them, so at least some good can come out of me going crazy.

Finding balance through my own self-discovery and awareness is a much my mission as the success of my business- for if I am not thriving, I am not at my best to execute any decision – impulsive or not.

Separating yourself from your work is difficult, especially for founding entrepreneurs, but we must learn to remain humble during the good times, and steadfast during the bad. Only with distance can we find the balance that we crave.

The bottom line is that there are only 24 hours in a day and that is an unchangeable fact. (The sick part is I totally would change that if I could to allow for more time to get even more done. I really do have a problem don’t I?).

I’m Lizzy Hodcroft, and I’m an addict.

I’m Lizzy Hodcrcoft and I’m a Founder, entrepreneur, pet owner, trusting friend and work in progress.

 

There are two pretty common ways of approaching how people view their job and their identity.

There are those that just see their job as a means to an end. It might not light their passion but they are okay with that. What’s important to them is what they can do with the money gained from their work in order to fund a lifestyle.

Than there are those that need to connect with what they do. Regardless of the reward or salary, they do what they do because the love it and couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Entrepreneurs lie in a funny little area of both. We know we must live and breathe what we do and create in order to find success, investment and growth. We also have an eye for the future but even more confusing is the fact our lives do become defined by our business. It’s an all immersive experience, one that you cannot achieve by half-hearted commitment.

Very quickly, the lines become blurred between what we are building and who we are. It’s the same reason I’ve found entrepreneurship the most interesting and beneficial self-discovery journey; the catalyst to the insight I have.

Being on Dragon’s Den gave me the opportunity to dig into this further. In just an hour, the dragons were able to separate myself from my business; something I am still trying to figure out. I pitched a business but they fell in love with me. Although not impressed by the company I came to the den with, all the investors took note of my drive, intellect and talent. That’s the funny thing about personality traits, they follow you no matter what you are doing.

Tomorrow I could wake up and decide to work in some pub pulling pints or even washing dishes but those traits would still help to define who I am. Next month, I might win the lottery (please please please!), buy an island and make it into a sanctuary for dogs. Still Lizzy though. Still the same flaws, insecurities, passion and weird habit of eating crackers in bed with my eyes closed as I fall asleep.

This is pretty easy to internalise. See yourself in your mind and then just change the background. Plop yourself into cities around the world, even outer space. Change has not been internal but rather situational. Another thing to realise is that we are pretty programmed beings. Chances are, unless you are a small child or teenager, you have very specific traits that will not change easily.

Where this gets tricky is when things like shame, pride, success and failure come in. You do a thing and that thing is perceived as either good or bad. For the sake of argument, let’s say everyone though that your thing was good, brilliant even. You are proud of your thing. You feel good.

In contrast, if everyone told you that your thing was terrible, you would feel bad most likely. You might even feel ashamed of the thing you made or that  you failed in making a decent thing. These feelings (especially the negative ones) get internalised pretty goddamn fast. Confidence can quickly erode because of negative feedback towards what you made. We think it wasn’t the “thing” or idea that failed, it was you.

The reason we continue to attach our ego to our work, I believe, stems from what we are taught growing up. Before we have the time to discover who we are and therefore the standards which we measure ourselves by, we are taught to live by standards set by others; our parents, nursery and social norms. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, we need to learn how to become integrated within society. What I am saying is that we aren’t really ever taught how to break free from that as we develop and grow. We either pass or fail. We either win or lose. We either succeed or we fall short. We’re never taught the power of reflection, learning to understand where we went wrong and how to empower that experience into strength.

Type “Entrepreneurs, who you are is not your business” into Google and you don’t really get much back. It’s as though I didn’t type in the “not” for that search. All the articles thrown back at me are about the traits you must have to become an entrepreneur, furthering this idea that you are either born to build or you are just not cut out for it. Ingraining a sense that you are your business and you will become it.

So is it even possible to have focus, commitment and passion while also still honouring that you are a separate, eating, breathing, emotional being with basic needs?

It’s almost as though you are shamed into thinking you cannot be a successful start-up or entrepreneur if you are able to also find some kind of work/life balance or distance that enables you to take on different perspectives. Which would go a long way to explain why this doesn’t seem to  be something that is often discussed within this space.

Even as I write this, the idea of an investor reading this and taking it as some kind of sign that I lack the grit and intent of throwing every aspect of my life into building a business worries me. And if it worries me then it must be part of the reason we aren’t willing to strike some kind of deal between the work we produce and who we see ourselves to be as a person.

I have come to realise that for me, external validation of some kind is important. This probably comes from the fact that I am a bit of people pleaser. Making others happy in turn makes me happy but this can also have some pretty drastic side effects. If even by mistake, I disappoint or anger others, I can feel pretty terrible. It’s almost as though I have a small identity crisis; like all of a sudden I’m not the person I thought I was.

I’m a passionate and intense person by nature. Attaching emotions to things that do not call for emotion is what I do. I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption (PS4 game) lately in a few spare hours over the weekend and probably take more time than the average player to feed and brush my horse. I haven’t changed horses since the beginning because I am now attached to a horse in a game.

I worry about what my dogs thinks of me, trying desperately to find the deeper meaning in why he wont come to bed with me on some idle weekday night.

Especially in tech and early stage start-ups, we quickly begin to understand that the first investment we will receive will most likely not because of our business idea but because an investor sees real potential in you, the ability to work with you and the leader you will become with guidance and time. It makes a lot of sense… if you don’t have any turnover but need cash to build the thing that will give you turnover, getting someone to buy into your idea, into you, is really important.

This can lead to a lot of pressure in how you present yourself. And whether we want to admit it or not, this bleeds into our identity and how we view ourselves. How we view ourselves often quickly  becomes intertwined with how others view us. And since how the consumer, investor or employee views the business is pretty darn important to achieving success, well… it’s a bit of an identity crisis waiting to happen.

So let’s talk about it.

As entrepreneurs, we already surround ourselves with those of similar mind set. We already have functions and networking events and slack channels that we use to support and inspire each other. We talk about it in whispers, only able to feel relief after we discover that someone else feels it too but still too conscious of the eyes that might be watching to own our weakness.

Humility is a trait of strong leaders. The type of leader’s employees want to work for and investors want to fund. Being humble and acknowledging the error of your ways is also a great way to build trust and credibility. Humility needs to be balanced with a sense of confidence. If not balanced, you can undermine the team’s belief in you and in the business. Humility must be genuine as when leaders genuinely acknowledge mistakes or deficits in an area, it inspires others to discover their own confidence to act, take risks and evaluate their own challenges.

This leads to genuine improvement and self-development that will have ripples within the business. Remember, it always starts with you.

 

Someday…

Have you ever watched a documentary about addiction where the addict is telling the camera crew that someday he will quit? Someday he’ll settle down, he’ll get a job and then he will happy. Someday, if he can just get a break he can break his addiction. If he just had some money, he could change his life. And all the while he’s telling us that in the future things will different, his eyes are starting to close and his head starts to nod as he plunges the syringe into his vein.

Obviously, we can all see that drugs are part of the problem and I am certainly not implying that they aren’t contributing to his situation. However, we all do this and that’s the real kicker. We’ve all thought that if we could just get that car we would never be sad again. We tell ourselves that if we can be more like our friend Karen that we will be happy; we expect that if we get to that point, we will be happy.

But happiness is not something we can find. Happiness is the result of overcoming suffering to achieve something that you can be proud of. Happiness is the light that comes out of darkness, the hero that comes from war, the child that comes from the incredibly painful process of childbirth.

Take volcanos. Volcanos are one of the most destructive forces on this planet, taking out entire cities and forests, burning all that it touches and charring the ground beneath it. But once everything cools, something amazing happens. Volcanic soil is extremely rich in nutrients. The area that was once blackened with ash becomes a literal living laboratory for evolution. Lava flows become lush gardens and rich habitats.

As they say, “from the ashes rises the phoenix”. And to rise implies action, not something that just “happens”.

We have become increasingly talented at avoiding reality. We fill our minds with Netflix or perhaps hide from our panic with sleep. We solve the short term, soothing ourselves for the now without ever really considering that our problems will only meet us again in the future. The worst part is that we are totally aware that we do it but trade in our future for one moment of bliss. We know we have problems that we have left unsolved yet we choose to find reasons as to why we cannot solve them.

We seek success like we are trying to find God. Success becomes something that is obtainable in the future like some kind of carrot on a stick. We’re programmed to think that. Society has managed to wire our environment for wish lists and must haves. Success no longer resembles a long process of trials and tribulations, a goal to set and achieve but something that just happens and something we all deserve, no matter if we are willing to put in the action and effort. We are left dreaming of great results without ever thinking to confront what process we need to take to there and the pitfalls we will encounter along the way.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

“Sick and tired of being sick and tired makes me tired and sick from worrying about being sick and tired”

It’s fulfilling prophecy. We feel bad about feeling bad. We feel guilty for feeling bad. We realise we are letting ourselves be the victim and then feel angry about being so self-absorbed.

So allow yourself to feel bad. Don’t pile on more weight by hating yourself for the way you feel. Learn to let that go and focus on what you can change.

Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential. We don’t know where we fit and we feel we have no purpose. Having no purpose makes it hard to know what you really care about and when you don’t understand what you care about, what you really really care about, then you inevitably loose focus and feel lost.

In our desperation, we attach ourselves to anything and anyone that will have us and discover the other million ways that we have not fit the mould or made the measure. All we want is to be happy!

But what is happiness? And why do we think we so justly deserve it when it’s so blatantly obvious that part of life is pain. Finding happiness can quickly become an addiction; one that we chase over and over again and becoming increasingly aware that we don’t have it which ultimately makes our pursuit of happiness into a negative, vicious experience that we feel we have failed at.

The more you want to be recognised.. the more you want to be normal… the more that you want to feel worthy, the more you feel small, abnormal and worthless as this becomes your only focus.

Eating disorders often stem from a girls need or want to  be prettier, thinner, sexier. The more this girl zones into what she imagines herself to lack, the more ugly she comes to see herself.

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never (truly) live if you are looking for the meaning of life”

Failures in life are what make you an interesting person. Failures in business are what lead to a better understanding of what is needed to be successful in the next venture. Allowing yourself to be open and vulnerable paradoxically makes you more confident and liked by others. The misery your depression, anxiety or fear bring you, also provides the greatest insight and growth you will achieve in your life.

Sometimes in life, you just have to hold on and be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Trying to avoid this matter-of-fact is what ultimately destroys us. The more we hide away from life and the world and escape the hardship we face, the more we are delaying the inevitable and suddenly we find ourselves waking up one morning full of dread and anxiety about the day ahead of us. The only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.

“The denial of failure is a failure. “ Feeling ashamed about being ashamed is shameful.

Stepping out of this cycle is to accept the challenges that lay ahead and take action.

Many of us have probably heard someone, a teacher or motivational speaker reference your energy and time as money in the bank. It’s a finite resource which we must learn to spend carefully. If you have £100 in the bank and you spend it on one nice meal only to find you starve the rest of the week.. well, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.

As you can probably conclude, this is not a new concept. However, the way it has been presented and explained in the past means that all too often it falls on deaf ears. Whomever is dishing out the advice does it under the assumption that we know what we value, that we understand our purpose and now we just need to focus. From my own experience, most of us fail at the start because we just don’t know who we are yet. If we don’t know who we are, we don’t know what direction we need to be heading so we drive around a circles and wonder why we haven’t gotten anywhere.

Learning about yourself is incredibly hard. We were never taught this growing up and we certainly weren’t encouraged to do so as we grew older. It’s the kind of lesson that transcends beyond your business, further than your day to day and forces you to come to terms with something many of us never do. Learning to accept yourself. Ideally, mastering the art of loving who you are.

Celebrating the success we do achieve, reflecting on the failures in order to learn from them and having an intrinsic knowledge of your strengths and weaknesses is one of the most powerful tools you can access.

When you are able to fully comprehend what you find important and the values and passion that support it, the struggle you battle through to defend those values suddenly is completely worthwhile.

You cannot always avoid the pain, hurt, depression, panic and loneliness but you can find a purpose, a passion to follow, that makes the shit time more endurable. If we cannot discover meaning in our life then we will attach our ego to the most trivial of things and find our bank of energy and time is out of credit.

Learn to attach your ego to only the things that deserve it.

When we put our hard work, ideas and plans out into the world and regardless of how amazing our product, service or personality is – it’s a really scary process and we will not always receive the kind of response we might be expecting.

But instead of looking at how we can push that fear aside or hide it way – I want to try and empower us to embrace the worries, insecurities and doubt and learn how to use that energy for positive results.

 

 

Many of us in the UK have begun to realise – our crisis is no longer material. Our crisis is existential – meaning more and more of us are seeking guidance and help through the NHS leading to unacceptably long wait times and the thresholds of access being raised. As a result, people’s needs are often left to escalate, leading to deeper crisis and resulting in poor patient outcomes and higher care costs.

The journey to recovery is often lonely and the path to achieving your recovery goals, confusing.

Myself and Emma Reilly (my co-founder) would like to introduce you to myndr, a new community and platform that harnesses the power of peer to peer mental health collaboration, offering support to set and break down tasks and goals in a clear, concise way. Myndr takes an already proven therapy method with anonymised goal setting and empowers the flow of ideas and advice which users can tailor to their own needs and desired outcome.

Presently, our focus is pinpointed towards those in the start up, where there is strong evidence that founders often struggle with mental health. We are building our community through collaboration, removing the stigma around failure and offering tools to mitigate and avoid burn out. We ask for a very small monthly fee in exchange for access to our podcasts, blogs, workshops and events.

Unlike other apps that address mood and mental health, myndr understands that tech only helps to facilitate the solution and is not the solution. Tracking mood without an action plan only provides a data set. Chasing goals you don’t actually value stunts your opportunity for self-discovery and real progression towards change.

Myndr will implement machine learning and AI to track, respond and segment every goal and the suggested steps to achieve it, allowing us to essentially create an amazing data set of “how-to” for mental health.

Our team leverages from our own experience with recovery, mental health and the services currently provided, helping us to provide real insight on how to turn what is often just a theory into reality.

I ask for you all to please visit our website and sign up. We are currently looking for people to guest blog about their own experience with mental health and will soon be launching a press campaign in the North East in order to facilitate the growth of our movement!

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I’ve been head over heels in research and developing content for myndr lately. Both myself and my co-founder are one of the few businesses to get on the pre-seed Ignite program for start ups in tech. It’s an exhilarating ride but it’s also raising a lot of internal questions that need to be asked.

I’ve been exploring ego and why so many of us suffer pain over things we don’t really care about. I’m trying to understand the self-inflicted standards set by others that we willingly accept.

I always tell myself that just being the best person you can be with pure intent is more than good enough. If I can do that, I can’t expect anything more of myself. However, if I really take the time to explore this a bit more, I know that that’s not enough for me. It SHOULD be enough for me but it’s not. So why not?

I’ve arrived to the conclusion that it all comes down to validation. I can do good things all day but I struggle to be confident enough in myself for that be enough. I need others to recognise what I do in order to feel the impact. As I type this, I do feel some shame in this as it’s tough to admit that we need such support from others to find our worth. But I don’t feel as though I am alone.

In fact, I would argue that this is a sickness we all suffer from because it’s what we are taught from such a young age. From the very early ages of entering any type of school system our children are being held to a standard that someone else has made for them. The metrics and measurements are not of their own and what’s worse, we never get taught how to create our own standards. I know that some will argue that we need this base line. After all, progress is something that does need to be measured. I agree with that. I’ll hold my hands up and admit that understanding what we have mastered and what we need to improve on is an important part of growth itself.

What we don’t do is help children to understand that there is a difference between the work that they produce and the person that they are.

We grow up defining ourselves on the grades we get, the clothes we wear and getting our self-worth from our infatuation with where fit on societies scale of measurements.

And I think we are all aware of this to an extent. However, I don’t think I really knew how engrained this was until an exercise was put in front of me to measure my satisfaction with different areas of my life. Ignite provides us with some pretty awesome workshops and this one was delivered by Vix of The Practical Balance.

You may have heard of it or possibly done it before. You essentially make a kind of spider’s web with the scores you give each spoke. Each spoke represents different areas of your life such as finance, family, home life and social life. Your goal is to make a near perfect circle over time, essentially finding balance.

So I started with the easier ones. Home life is good, I’ll give that a high score. Finances are okay, I’ll plot it somewhere in the middle. Social life? Uhh… well here’s the thing, I don’t really have much of one. I have lots of friends and a great network around me but as far as actually going out and seeing people… let’s just say I’m not used to anyone trying to call me after about 7pm.

So I started to mark this quite poorly, aware that I couldn’t even recall the last time I met with someone just for a catch up instead of also discussing business.

Weirdly though, I also realised that I didn’t feel as though this was bad a thing. In fact, having friends constantly trying to hang out and do things together with me sounds pretty exhausting. I don’t think I’d enjoy it.

I had been measuring my contentment with my social life to what I imagined it should be, based on the general idea that life throws at us.

I wasn’t even aware I had been doing it. I had forgot that this wheel was my wheel to be measured by my standards, my values, my metrics.

Suddenly, the score I placed on the social life spoke was pretty damn high. I don’t have much of a social life because I don’t want much of a social life. Friends are very important to me and I am an extremely loyal person but I don’t need to see you every day. We don’t need to get ready for outings together and I won’t be texting you all night either. For me, it’s enough to share the successes and pick each other up when we battle through challenges.

It hit me like a ton of bricks.

A lot of the pain I experience in my life, nearly 100% of the stress I live through and most of the worry I carry around is simply because I am still allowing others to define the metrics and measurements of my worth.

Things in my life that I am content with, that I am happy to plod along with are often ignored of that comfort because someone else is giving me a hard time about it. And I’m not exactly a confrontational person. If it’s going to be easier for me to just nod until you shut up, it’s kind of what I do. —- side note to that *** this only applies if you are someone I care about. If some stranger started imposing his theory’s and advice on me that I didn’t agree with, well, perhaps I would still nod and smile but I certainly wouldn’t worry myself with how I action his advice. ***

When I say, “someone else”, I specifically mean my parents. I’m nearly thirty but the pain of wanting to make them proud has never dulled. I’m extremely fortunate to have parents that support me but one of them is also pretty damn confident about how they approach the world. One of those “my way or the high way” types. This does not come from a place of malice but rather a bad case of “I know best” and “I’m trying to save you pain”. Paradoxically, it usually causes me more harm than help. I suppose I also worry that perhaps they feel a sense of purpose when dishing out to-do lists and the next how-to. I’m also at that age when it hits home that your parents will not always be the heroes we saw them as when we were younger. It’s just extremely sad. Heart breaking even.

The point is though, regardless of my close relationship to my parents, I am allowing them to hold me hostage by letting their values and expectations trump my own.

I let others around me set the standards for how I measure my self-worth, success, finances, loneliness and even happiness.

Of course, I will always care to an extent about what my parents think of me. I love them and we want those we care about to care about us. But you know, I’m a grown adult now and I should be able to make the decisions that directly affect my life based on my values and no one else’s. I have to live it. I have to be present in my choices, they don’t.

If I am going to lead others to discover a better way of living with myndr, then I must start to explore my own hidden and downplayed demons and actively live what I am teaching. I also want you to understand that I get that trying to put theory into practice, imputing it to a real situation, is friggin tough. Once emotions get involved, the waters muddy pretty quickly and suddenly someone is pouring in fuel and setting fire to it. It’s not straight forward. It’s confusing and overwhelming.

 

At myndr, we understand that. We understand the frustration at being given advice that seems so simple yet becomes a bit like pandora’s box when we attempt to action it. We understand it because we’ve been through it, are still going through it and will continue to have to revisit our truths to guide us in what we do.

I’d like to encourage all of you to take a little time to think about something that maybe causing you stress. Ask yourself why that stress is there. Is it because the outcome is valuable to you and therefore the expectation is reflected from yourself? Or is it because you are trying to accomplish a task based on another’s orders, expectations or advice? If you feel like you are lacking in some aspect of your life is it truly because you feel the pain of something missing? Or is it because you are not aligned with the norm or expectation that you feel you need to live up to?

 

I’m starting to learn how to connect better with my values. I’m trying to brush away the shame I often feel when sharing my values to someone that does not hold the same or even similar ones. I will not allow myself to feel I am disappointing someone because I do not share their beliefs.

I’d also love to hear your own thoughts, perhaps a similar struggle. It gets better together.

 

I love start up. I love every aspect of it, especially when we get to throw caution to the wind and narrow our focus down to pure passion. I love the disruption, the nay-sayers and finding new ways of achieving success. Looking back on 2018, I’m not sure that I always was able to live up to my own morals and values. I believe I let myself get lost in industry standards and doubt. Well 2019 can look forward to me continuing the journey of growth into the weird, energetic and sharp woman I am! You may know me from Dragon’s Den with The Sweet Beet but I’m also a public speaker and co-founder of a business called myndr. (www.myndr.co.uk) So let’s get talking. I wanna hear from ya.