Build #69 - Spoiler: You might be the bottleneck
It’s 4:33am, and you’re awake. Again.
Your mind’s off, running through everything that isn’t quite working in your business.
Why hasn’t that hire stepped up?
Why is the leadership team still looking to you for all the answers?
Why does growth feel so… stuck?
You’re thinking about strategy, structure, performance. The external stuff. The “what’s getting in the way of scaling” stuff.
But here’s the thing we see again and again with founder-led businesses: beneath the delivery issues, team dynamics, and slow decisions you often find something else.
You find you.
Not in a blame-y, “this is all your fault” kind of way, but in a gently uncomfortable, “oh… this might be mine” kind of way.
Because in founder-led businesses, culture starts with you. Behaviours ripple down. The way you lead, communicate, cope, avoid, react… none of it stays in your head. It builds the atmosphere everyone else is breathing.
You are the culture
Being a founder isn’t just about building a business. It’s about building yourself into it. Long before you scale anything, your own patterns are already baked into the foundations.
Your beliefs. Your biases. Your coping strategies. Your hunger for validation. Your avoidance of conflict. Your relationship with control, trust, and success.
These shape how you hire, how you lead, how you make decisions. Not because you’re doing it wrong, but because you’re human.
Pioneer of humanistic psychology, Carl Rogers, said: “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
And that’s the starting point: founders willing to look inwards, not just outwards.
Culture isn’t shaped in a Notion doc or values workshop. It’s built in the day-to-day. How you give feedback, what you celebrate, how you handle pressure, what you avoid, how safe it feels to disagree with you.
When things feel murky or chaotic, it’s often a sign that something in the founder’s world needs attention.
What are you bringing into the business?
You didn’t arrive here as a blank slate. You brought your upbringing, early relationships, and core beliefs about success, safety, trust, and conflict.
Maybe you grew up in chaos, where staying invisible was the safest bet.
Maybe praise was rare, so now you chase achievement like oxygen.
Maybe conflict meant explosions, so now you avoid tough conversations.
Maybe you had to prove your worth from a young age, so letting go feels impossible.
Fast forward to today: delegation feels risky, feedback stings, and trusting others still doesn’t come easily.
That’s not a tactical problem. That’s a psychological echo.
Psychodynamic theory tells us that our earliest relationships shape how we relate to power, autonomy, trust, and responsibility. These internal “templates” don’t disappear when you raise a seed round or hire a COO. They come with you - and if unexamined, they quietly run the show.
So when the business feels stuck, it’s easy to look outward: at the team, the market, the tools. But often, the real unlock comes from looking inward.
Leading from awareness
This isn’t about over-analysing yourself into paralysis. It’s about learning the difference between responding to what’s real, and reacting to something old.
When you’re unaware of your patterns, they take the lead. You think you’re responding to the moment, but you’re actually reacting to something much older, more personal.
We’ve seen founders fire too quickly out of fear. Hold on too long to avoid discomfort. These aren’t bad decisions, they’re survival strategies in disguise. When you name them, you create space to choose something more intentional.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs ends in self-actualisation: that sense of creativity, purpose and meaning. Most founders assume it comes after the business scales.
In truth, it needs to happen alongside it.
You can’t build a resilient company from a reactive mind. You can’t build a people-first culture if you haven’t figured out your own patterns yet.
The most grounded founders aren’t the ones with the smartest plans, they’re the ones who’ve done the inner work. They hold boundaries. They ask better questions. They know how to let go without disappearing.
The practical part: Leading from within
If all of this sounds a bit psychological, it kind of is. But it’s also incredibly practical.
When you understand yourself more deeply, your leadership sharpens. The fog lifts. You stop solving the same problems the same way. You make space for better decisions, better relationships, and better outcomes.
That’s what we mean by self-actualisation. Not some mountain-top enlightenment, just more effective leadership through deeper awareness.
Where to begin? The good news is, you don’t need a therapist on speed dial. You just need to pause the autopilot.
Here are four places to start:
Track your triggers - Notice when you feel disproportionately annoyed, anxious, shut down or over-involved. That’s a signal something deeper is at play.
Name the story - What’s the internal narrative? ‘If I don’t fix this, I’m failing.’ ‘They should know better.’ ‘I’m on my own here.’ These beliefs may be driving your reaction.
Ask better questions – Instead of defaulting to ‘How do I fix this?’, try: ‘What’s this really about?’ or ‘Who does this remind me of’. This is where insight lives.
Pause before reacting – Your brain’s amygdala (threat detector) responds fast. Your prefrontal cortex (decision maker) takes longer. A few seconds of pause lets the wiser part catch up.
And so what?
I believe business growth starts with founder growth.
In my work at Actualise I help founders out of firefighting mode and into strategic leadership. Not just with smarter frameworks, but with deeper insight into who you are.
Our approach blends practical tools with psychological depth - including coaching that challenges assumptions you've outgrown and support to separate what's yours from what belongs to the business.
You didn’t start this business to feel trapped by it.
You started it to build something real and meaningful.
And that starts with the hardest, bravest build of all: yourself.