Exited founder turned CEO-coach | Helping founders discover who they are as leaders and build high-performance, low-drama companies

Over 15 years I founded and served as CEO to three VC backed companies (one big exit and two learning experiences), all while presenting only the most polished, hyper-competent version of myself and my company, at all times. And then, in 2020 I left it all behind.When I signed the papers, officially removing myself as CEO of the company I’d started a decade prior, it felt like I’d been punched in the gut.Without my persona as the “CEO of VNN,” I realized that I had no idea who I was anymore, or what to do with my life.It was the opportunity of a lifetime.I spent the next 2 years searching, meditating, hanging out with monks, diving into psychedelics, and trying on new identities that never felt right.I was stuck.And then, I finally opened up.I started being honest about my struggles, despite the voice in my head telling me to play a role. I let go of my compulsion to be “Ryan the CEO,” or “Ryan the entrepreneur,” or even “Ryan the guy who’s raised a ton of money and scaled a media company.”I was just, Ryan.And the most surprising things happened.1. The more I opened up, the more everyone else did around me. My network grew and developed into one of deep relationships spanning life and business.2. The more I let go, the more the universe seemed to place exactly what I needed on my doorstep. Things began to happen organically, in ways much better than I could have planned.3. The quieter my mind got, the more I was able to access an innate wellspring of creativity and inspiration that, frankly, made work feel easy and joyful.Me, the guy who’d worked so hard his whole life to be perfect, when I learned to let go and be me, great, meaningful work flowed out of me.And from that foundation, I started Inside-Out Leadership, a boutique executive coaching firm that helps founders transform their companies into their masterpieces and step fully into their lives.Today, in my work as a coach I see the tendency to present that veneer of polished competence in nearly every founder I meet. And while I recognize the need for presentation in some cases (fundraising, recruiting), I also see how that need to look good actually gets in the way of our learning and growth.If you're tired of doing your own impression of the "perfect leader," you're not alone.Shoot me a DM. There's another way. And it's fucking incredible.

Ryan H. Vaughn

Early in my career, I was hesitant to be direct with people. I didn’t want to come across as aggressive. I didn’t want to hurt feelings. I didn’t want to be “that guy.”

So I softened feedback.
I talked around the point.
I hoped people would infer what I meant without me having to actually say it.

It sounded thoughtful.
It felt kind.
And it created more confusion than clarity.

For a long time, I told myself this was generosity. What I eventually saw was that it was mostly fear.

Indirect communication often gets framed as “niceness.” But more often, it’s a way of trying to preserve connection without risking discomfort.

And that’s the paradox.

The key to influence isn’t niceness. It also isn't directness. It’s connection.

Directness only works when it happens inside connection.

Leaders tend to go indirect in the moments that matter most:

Difficult feedback
Missed expectations
Tension that’s been quietly building

In those moments, indirectness becomes a crutch - a way to avoid the risk of saying something true and potentially disrupting the relationship.

But people feel it anyway.

They notice the mismatch between words and tone.
Between praise and body language.
Between what’s said publicly and what’s felt privately.

Standards get fuzzy.
Expectations get unclear.
And psychological safety starts to erode.

Because no one actually knows where they stand.

Or, equally problematic, leaders are overpowering in their directness. Crossing the line into asshole territory, and leaving no room for the other person in the interaction.

This is equally problematic, as it equally erodes connection.

Real influence happens when you can stay in connection and speak truth into that connection.

That requires self-trust.

Learning to communicate directly isn’t just a communication skill.
It’s a developmental shift.

It means trusting yourself enough to stay present when things feel uncomfortable.

To say what’s true without withdrawing or armoring up.
To risk momentary tension in service of long-term trust.

As that fear loosens, you learn to stay in connection with another human within more and more intense conversations. Then, something interesting happens.

Directness stops feeling harsh. It becomes clean. Simple. Human.

If experimenting with directness feels uncomfortable, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.

It takes practice. The key is in monitoring how connected you are with the other person, while you speak your truth.

That’s where influence lives.

---

Proud to coach with Inside-Out Leadership, CEO coaching by exited founders who've been there.

If this resonated and you want to dive deeper, shoot me a DM.

Exited founder turned CEO-coach | Helped early/mid stage startup founders raise over $500m, and create equity value over $12bn (and counting...)

No alternative text description for this image

25 years building companies taught me that creating something meaningful is different than creating something successful.

Most people think meaning comes from getting somewhere.

A clearer vision. A bigger goal. A better version of themselves.

That belief creates tension.

Like a rubber band stretched tight between who you are today and who you think you’re supposed to become.

We praise that tension. We call it ambition.

And to be fair, it works.

It gets people out of bed. It builds companies. It produces results.

It also quietly guarantees dissatisfaction.

Because the moment you reach one version of the dream, it stops mattering.

It’s immediately replaced by the next one.

Not because you failed. But because the dream was never designed to end.

So the bargain most achievers make, usually without realizing it, looks like this:

Progress, momentum, recognition in exchange for contentment.

And we normalize this trade so completely that questioning it feels irresponsible.
Lazy, even.

Here’s what I've learned, working with dozens of founders in transition:

There are 2 fundamentally different ways to act.

1. Functional action

Doing things to get somewhere.
Action in service of an outcome.
Most work lives here.

2. Expressive action

Action taken not to become someone, but to faithfully respond to what’s true right now.

Not “What will this lead to?”
But “What feels honest in this moment?”

Expressive action doesn’t optimize for success.

It doesn’t guarantee status or promise outcomes.

It’s closer to art than strategy.

That scared me.

I worried that if I stopped chasing, I’d fall behind.

That everyone else would keep running while I stood still.

What I found instead was this:

When action comes from expression rather than ambition, there’s more energy, not less.

More precision. More aliveness.

You still work hard. But the work stops feeling like a toll paid on the way to a future life.

It is the life.

This is how you create something meaningful.

Not by aiming at meaning.

But by taking the action that feels most honest in this moment, without negotiating with outcomes.

Meaning is a byproduct of expressive action, never the goal.

This doesn’t mean ambition is wrong. Or that goals are bad.

It means if the only reason you’re moving is to escape the present moment, no amount of achievement will ever feel like arrival.

Meaning doesn’t come from becoming someone else.

It comes from doing what you’re doing as if it were art for its own sake, without needing it to justify your worth.

If this lands uncomfortably, nothing has gone wrong.

You may just be noticing that the ladder you’re climbing was never actually yours.

---

Proud to coach with Inside-Out Leadership, CEO coaching by exited founders who've been there.

If this resonated and you want to dive deeper, shoot me a DM.

Once upon a time, I won $500k from a five-minute business pitch, but I still think the business pitch, as currently constructed, is leading investors to fund the wrong entrepreneurs...

I have a friend. Immigrated from a war zone in Haiti with his family. Served in the military with distinction. After becoming a civilian, he founded multiple businesses, including a few aimed at helping vets. I have some high-capacity friends, but this particular friend is a force of nature.

I got to witness him pitch to a couple of angels & seed investors a while back. 

He told his story, explained what he was raising money for, but even as he was pitching, I found myself getting confused. The pitch didn’t follow the format I’m used to, and as a result, it wasn't as clear as it could have been. I noticed this, so I wasn’t surprised when the investors told him he was too early. 

These investors, who will tell you until they’re blue in the face that at the seed stage they bet on the jockey and not the horse, unceremoniously turned down a force of nature because his pitch didn’t match the pattern they’re looking for. 

And it got me wondering: is the investor pitch really the best way to make an investment decision at the seed stage? 

If it really is about the jockey, and not the horse, shouldn’t our attention be on learning about the jockey?

Now I get it. A good presentation at the seed stage is indicative of someone who will be able to give a good presentation at later stages. This is important.

But this is also a learned skill. 

There is a “right way” to present your business, which I or any other experienced fundraiser could teach a young entrepreneur in an afternoon. It’s glorified paint-by-numbers.

At the seed stage, having a great pitch is compelling. But however compelling it sounds, the business is wrong. 

It’ll change a ton of times between then and any sort of exit, so having a good pitch really only proves that you know the combination lock to get investors excited. 

Instead, we should be looking for someone who can create their own path when there is no clear way forward. 

What if, instead of focusing our diligence on the fundamentals of a business that will change umpteen times, we asked entrepreneurs to tell their stories? 
What if we tailored the process to finding the best jockeys, knowing that we can train them to pitch to later-stage investors as we go?

The best entrepreneurs, invariably, have incredible stories from their lives, school, the military, previous companies, etc. Stories of amazing resilience in which they've overcome incredible odds. Learning about how a person has navigated these environments in their past will tell us more about their ability to do those same things than asking them to make up pretty-sounding shit.

If what we’re really looking for at the seed stage is good people, shouldn’t we design our vetting process around figuring out who it is, really, that is pitching us?

I'd love to hear your thoughts below.

Somewhere along the way, many of us lose the ability to pretend.

We stop softening our words.
We stop managing the room.
We stop spending energy trying to be palatable.

What once felt automatic starts to feel exhausting. And then, quietly, it stops working.

This is not bitterness. And it is not a personality flaw.

There is actually some interesting science behind it.

I recently read an article by Ellen Scherr that explored how, as we age, the brain reorganizes itself. Neural pathways tied to constant social monitoring and emotional labor get pruned. Energy becomes more precious. And the brain becomes less invested in managing how we are perceived. 

In simple terms, we become less compelled to please.

The article talks about women in particular, but I see this shift in the men I work with all the time. Founders in their 40s and 50s become more direct. They people-please less. They stop contorting themselves to fit rooms they have already outgrown.

And almost without exception, life feels more intense: More alive, Less numb.

Usually, they often become more effective too, because they are no longer self-limiting just to fit in.

A lot of my clients come to me wanting to trust themselves more and show up as more thoroughly themselves, with fewer filters in their lives.

That transition matters.

When people let go of those filters, everything sharpens. And in our work, we help people get to know themselves deeply enough to trust what wants to come through.

But there's another way this happens: Age

I see it in most clients as they grow older. They care less about what they used to care about, especially socially. They become more direct. They give less fucks.

There are ways to accelerate that. Inner work is one of them. But age is a very reliable indicator. Think of your nana, farting loudly in the middle of dinner and completely ignoring it. It's that sort of thing.

Now, you may not want to go around farting everywhere.

But letting go of all the subtle ways you limit yourself to fit in is, in my experience, unquestionably a happiness and effectiveness amplifier. 

When you stop checking whether you're acceptable and adjusting yourself in real time, you stop outsourcing your authority to the room.

This is not about becoming careless or abrasive. There's a difference between authenticity and unintegrated impulse. It's about reclaiming parts of yourself that were kept hidden primarily to keep the peace.

Age will eventually take you there. Inner work can take you there sooner.

Either way, the destination is the same.

 A life that feels less managed. Less split. More honest.

If this feels familiar, nothing has gone wrong. You may just be growing into yourself.

And that is not something to fix.

-

Proud to coach with Inside-Out Leadership, CEO coaching by exited founders who've been there.

For most of my life, I had a very clear idea of who I was supposed to be. Then I discovered how to really live...

First, it was a professional basketball player.

I practiced constantly. Organized my life around it. Got the tattoos. I lived inside that identity.

And then that dream ended.

When it did, I didn’t stop to ask who I was without it.
I just found something else to become.

That next phase got darker. Drugs. Alcohol.
A few years of trying very hard not to feel the question underneath all of it.

Eventually, that identity collapsed too.
I ended up in jail after my second DUI.

So I did what a lot of people do at that point.

I decided to become someone better.

This was the late 2000s. Facebook and Twitter were just getting started. Startup founders were the new heroes. That seemed like a good thing to be.

So I became one.

I founded companies. Failed a couple times. Learned. Tried again. Built and scaled a venture-backed company over a decade. Raised money. Built a big team. Chased and eventually secured an exit.

And honestly, for a long time, it worked.

Until it didn’t.

A few years before I left that company, I started noticing how much energy it took to hold everything together.

Who I thought I needed to be for investors.
Who I thought I needed to be for employees.
Who I thought I needed to be for customers.

I was constantly managing the room. Constantly performing the role.

At some point, that just became unsustainable.

When I finally stepped away, a question landed that felt bigger than any business problem I’d ever faced:

If I’m not the CEO of this company anymore... who am I?

My reflex was the same one I’d always had.

Start something new.
Build the next thing.
Reconstruct the identity.

But this time, I didn’t.

Instead, I sat in the discomfort of not knowing.
No title. No pitch. No clean story about what was coming next.

People kept asking, “So what’s next?”

And for a long time, I genuinely didn’t know.

That was uncomfortable.
And humbling.

But something interesting happened in that space.

When I stopped trying to become anything, things started emerging on their own.

I started writing again. Not strategically. Just honestly.

That writing led to conversations.
Those conversations led to coaching.
And eventually, to the work I do now.

None of it came from a master plan.
It came from listening.

Entrepreneurship taught me how to build companies.

Letting go taught me how to build a life.

I see this pattern constantly in founders.

They think the next level requires a sharper identity.
A clearer vision.
A stronger version of themselves.

Sometimes the work is the opposite.

Not becoming someone new, but undoing the person you think you have to be.

If the old story isn’t working anymore, nothing has gone wrong.

You might just be standing at the edge of something more honest.

And that’s not a problem to solve.

It’s an invitation.

Most “shitty co-founder relationships” don’t start that way. Here's how they actually go off the rails: They decay slowly.

Every time something matters to you, but you don't say it, "eh, no biggie. I'll let it go."

You’re taking on relational debt. Cruft.

Imagine communication like a pipe.
Early on, it’s clean, you can say anything.

But over years of working together:

Missed expectations
Unspoken frustration
Feedback you meant to give, but didn’t

A little gunk builds up each time you don’t speak.

Eventually, the pipe clogs.

Now you’re arguing about trivial things, when the real issue is years of unsaid truth.

Here’s what I’ve learned from being a co-founder multiple times, and from coaching hundreds of founders:

Hyper-effective companies are built on hyper-effective relationships.

And hyper-effective relationships require clearing.

Clearing the pipe takes a simple (and very hard) 3-step process:

1) Observe what’s true, inarguably

Facts + your feelings.
No stories. No interpretations. No blame.

2) Take 100% responsibility

Not because it’s all your fault but because ownership is the only place you can create change.

3) Commit to doing your part differently

Your commitments are the antidote to the environment you helped create.

Notice what’s missing?

No demand for an apology.
No score-keeping.
No forcing the other person to change.

When you fully own your side, one of two things happens:

• The relationship becomes clean and effective again
• Or it becomes obvious it can’t continue, without drama

Either way, the pipe is clear.

And clear communication is the foundation for whatever you build next.

If you're struggling with your cofounder relationship, comment "gimme gimme" to get the full, comprehensive strategy we share with clients.

---

Proud to coach with Inside-Out Leadership, CEO coaching by exited founders who've been there.

If this resonated and you want to dive deeper, shoot me a DM.

Jim Carrey stood on the Golden Globes stage, a two-time winner, looking out at a room full of the most successful people on earth. What he said next is a valuable lesson to us all: 

“I am two-time Golden Globe winner Jim Carrey...
And when I dream, I don’t just dream any old dreams. No sir. I dream about being three-time Golden Globe winner Jim Carrey. 
Because then I would be enough. 
It would finally be true. 
And I could stop this, this terrible search. 
For what I know, ultimately won’t fulfil me.”

He was joking, but at the same time, he definitely wasn't.

This is the sacred, self-inflicted wound that drives every high-achiever.

It starts with a dream. And with the first whisps of the dream, the machine locks in, and the outcome is set.

You create details, bringing the dream to life. And the minute it's real, a tension is born: a taut rubber band stretching between the dream and you. 

The dream is always pulling. 

You feel this tension as the disappointing, unself-actualized side of yourself, which compels you to chase, to change today to conform to your vision for tomorrow. This tension propels you out of bed every day.

We deify this tension as ambition. We call it "making something of yourself." But in addition to propelling us, it permeates life with a generalized dissatisfaction that no amount of achievement can solve. The moment you attain a piece of your dream, it becomes irrelevant, overwhelmed by the necessity of attaining the next piece. If you attain the whole thing, your dream will have receded, sitting as far out of reach from your hard-won perch as it was at the start.

The bargain is this: to succeed in getting closer to my dream, I offer in trade my contentment, in full, and vow to never be satisfied. 

This is the trade many high-achievers make. They get the allure of the chase at the cost of the moment.

Chasing a dream translates roughly to "wishing things were different from what they are." Since they cannot possibly be, our perpetually unfulfilled wishes leave us wanting. The game of chasing an ever-receding mirage is a game you can't win. 

I see this most often with founders right after an exit, to whom I say:

If you can still convince yourself that building a bigger company will finally make you feel complete - considering the last exit didn't - then do it. It is by far the easier path. 

It’s just like Jim Carrey's "dream" of a third Golden Globe. 

But eventually, you realize that no exit is big enough to make you feel whole in a lasting way. 

That is the moment the real work begins. The work that leads you away from chasing achievements to feel complete, and into the actual work of your life.

That transition - from performer to person - is the most exciting part of what I do.

It’s when you finally stop searching. And start living.

---

Proud to coach with Inside-Out Leadership, CEO coaching by exited founders who've been there.

Most companies that implode, do so for the same reason.

I still remember the chair I was sitting in.

Brown leather. Boardroom.
Nine months after our Series A.

We were scaling fast, from 15 to 75 people.
Hitting numbers. Lining up a Series B.

An investor looked at the pitch deck I’d spent weeks on and said:

“This is garbage. No one will buy this. Change it.”

In that moment, my job as CEO was to push back. I knew that.

Instead, something else happened. Fear took over.

And it almost killed the company.

A wave hit my body first, heat in my chest, pressure, shame.
And suddenly I wasn’t a CEO in a boardroom anymore.

I was a kid, scared that if I didn’t comply, someone would leave.

So I did what fear told me to do. I changed the pitch.

The raise failed.
We closed a bridge round instead.
It took years to recover.

At the time, I told myself a clean story: bad advice, bad board dynamics, bad timing.

What I couldn’t see yet was the real cause.

Fear made the decision for me.

This is far more common in startups than we like to admit.

We rarely talk about fear directly. So it hides behind more respectable labels:

Perfectionism
Founder conflict
Execution issues
Being “off your game”
Tone problems

Different symptoms. Same root.

Fear is a reflex. And when it’s unexamined, it runs companies from the background.

I see this constantly now in founders I work with:

• Flinching in negotiations
• Avoiding hard conversations
• Over-polishing instead of shipping
• Defensiveness
• Burnout

All fear-based. Mostly unconscious.

So what actually helps?

1. See fear as a bodily experience, not a thought.
Fear shows up as sensation before it becomes story.

2. Name it directly.
Not “I’m off my game.” But “I’m scared right now.”

3. Wait to make important decisions until fear has subsided.

The ability to sit with discomfort until you can respond instead of react is a leadership skill.

And finally: talk about fear as fear. Unexamined fear becomes fate.

For founders, this isn’t optional inner work.

It’s a business risk.

Ignoring fear and hoping it goes away isn’t an acceptable strategy for technical debt or competition.

It shouldn’t be for leadership either.

---

Proud to coach with Inside-Out Leadership, CEO coaching by exited founders who've been there.

If this resonated and you want to dive deeper, shoot me a DM.

Anxiety is the price of the life you were meant to live. James Hollis said that years ago, and I’ve found it to be painfully accurate.

If you’re building something new, stretching beyond who you’ve been, anxiety is inevitable. 

Not as a flaw. As a signal.

Most people treat anxiety like an enemy. Something to suppress, outrun, or eliminate. And when that doesn’t work, they assume something is wrong with them.

Usually, nothing is wrong.

Anxiety is your nervous system doing its job. It’s an alarm designed to pull your attention toward something that matters.

The problem isn’t anxiety. It’s our relationship to it.

When you resist anxiety, it tightens.
When you try to override it with logic, it gets louder.
When you numb it, you mute everything else too.

What actually helps is learning to interpret it.

Some anxiety is functional. It’s telling you to act. Make the call. Fix the problem. Adjust the plan. Once you do, it quiets down. Feature, not bug.

Other anxiety is patterned. Old. Installed early. Designed to protect you from hurts that are no longer present. That kind of anxiety doesn’t resolve through action. It resolves through feeling it fully. Listening to it all the way, until it has nothing more to say.

That’s the part most people avoid.

Because feeling anxiety fully takes courage. It requires slowing down instead of muscling through. Listening instead of fixing. Trusting that the emotion isn’t here to destroy you, but to show you something.

When you learn to work with anxiety this way, it stops running your life from the background. It becomes guidance instead of interference.

The irony is that the leaders who feel the most alive, most grounded, most effective aren’t the ones without anxiety.

They’re the ones who stopped fighting it.

---

Proud to coach with Inside-Out Leadership , CEO coaching by exited founders who've been there.

If this resonated and you want to dive deeper, shoot me a DM.

In 2014, Microsoft was stagnant after years of success. Then, Satya Nadella took over and did the opposite of what most CEOs do: he didn’t start with strategy, he started with psychology...

For years the stock essentially wouldn’t move.
Key markets, like mobile and early cloud were slipping away.
Internally, teams were siloed.
Competition inside the business was rewarded more than collaboration.

The company wasn’t dying, it was stagnating.

Most leadership plays at moments like this start with strategy:

New products. New org charts. New KPIs.

Nadella’s first move was quieter and much harder.

He called out the real problem:

Microsoft had become a “know-it-all” culture and needed to become a “learn-it-all” one.

That feels soft, but it isn’t.

A know-it-all culture is driven by fear:

• Fear of being wrong
• Fear of losing status
• Fear of admitting uncertainty

That fear doesn’t show up as panic. It shows up as silos.

Avoiding hard conversations.
People optimizing for brilliance over learning.

That wasn’t a strategy problem. It was a psychology problem.

So he started inside.

He modeled curiosity instead of certainty.
He rewarded leaders who learned and collaborated.
He made it safe to say “I don’t know” and ask better questions.

He didn’t just change culture, he changed how leadership worked.

The result?

Microsoft regained relevance.
Cloud became a core growth engine.
And the company went from a decade of stagnation to becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world.

But that’s not the real lesson.

Leadership breakdowns rarely start as strategy problems. They start as fear-driven behavior patterns.

Fear doesn’t announce itself as fear.
It shows up as:

“We need more certainty.”
“That’s not how we’ve always done it.”
“We’re right and they’re wrong.”

Those aren’t causes.
They’re symptoms.

Nadella began with the psychology under the surface:

• how people relate to uncertainty,
• how they protect identity,
• how they choose learning over armor.

Most leaders try to fix outcomes.

The best fix themselves first.

That’s where real transformation begins.

---

Proud to coach with Inside-Out Leadership, CEO coaching by exited founders who've been there.

If this resonated and you want to dive deeper, shoot me a DM.

Step 7, The Postcard: The primary risk to any intentional change is inertia. Specifically, that your best intentions get lost within the never-ending sea of life/work/family tasks, and before you know it, another year has passed... 

Don’t let that happen.

Create accountability for yourself, to yourself, by writing a letter to your future self, which you’ll schedule to have automatically delivered at a future date.

This way, whatever happens in the year ahead, you know that at some point in the future you will be reminded of your commitments, and have occasion to reflect on how well you kept to them (remembering that the key is keeping to actions taken, not outcomes produced).

In this letter, share your reflections from these exercises, your learnings, and any commitments you are making to yourself.

Schedule the email to send to yourself on June 30, 2026, using your mail client’s “Schedule Message” feature. 

And with that, brings the close to my annual reflection template.

------------

This is it.
This year.
This minute. 
This moment.

Even if it seems like this couldn’t possibly be it. 

That feeling is it, too.

Thank you for everything you brought to the world in 2025, for everything you are, and for everything you are becoming. 

Thank you for taking the time to reflect on your one weird, precious life, and by doing so giving yourself the opportunity to create it more consciously. 

Thank you for being unabashedly you, and not anyone else.

There will be a lot of moments in 2026. Co-create them with the ones you love.

I wish you the best of luck in diving deep, leading authentically, and bringing your unique story to the world this coming year.

And, if you'd like access to the full Annual Reflection Template, comment "Gimme gimme" below.

---

Proud to coach with Inside-Out Leadership, CEO coaching by exited founders who've been there.

If this resonated and you want to dive deeper, shoot me a DM.

There’s a moment in leadership that doesn’t get talked about much - when the role that once fit you perfectly starts to feel heavy.

Not wrong.
Not broken.
Just no longer yours.

Most people interpret that feeling as something to fix. 

Recommit. Push harder. Find the motivation again. 

After all, this role worked once. It made you who you are.

But sometimes what’s happening is simpler, and harder to accept.

You’ve changed.

Most leaders don’t leave roles because they fail at them. They leave because, quietly, the role no longer matches the person they’re becoming.

Howard Schultz is a useful example of this.

He built Starbucks. For a long time, he was Starbucks. The company’s culture and story were deeply personal to him. When he first stepped away as CEO, it wasn’t because the company was broken. It was because the role no longer fit.

Years later, he returned. The company needed him, and at that moment, he was the right person again.

And then, later still, he stepped away once more.

That second departure is the interesting one.

It wasn’t driven by crisis or failure. It came from something quieter. A recognition that staying would mean clinging to a version of himself that no longer felt true.

Most founders struggle here.

They stay in roles long after they’ve outgrown them, not because they’re incapable, but because their identity hasn’t caught up. The company becomes a proxy for self-worth. Letting go feels like disappearing.

But outgrowing a role isn’t failure.

It’s information.

It’s a signal that the work is changing, and so are you.

I see this often in my work. Leaders who are still performing competence long after it stopped being authentic. They’re not failing. They’re misaligned. And the longer they ignore that signal, the more brittle everything becomes.

Stepping away, when done honestly, isn’t quitting. It’s a form of stewardship. Of yourself, and often of the organization too.

The hardest part is trusting that who you are is bigger than the role that once defined you.

But that trust is exactly what makes the next chapter possible.

---

Proud to coach with Inside-Out Leadership, CEO coaching by exited founders who've been there.

I had to die three times before I finally got the hang of it.

The first was at 17.

I was convinced I’d be a professional basketball player. I practiced constantly. Built my life around it. That identity gave everything meaning.

And then it ended.

I didn’t know who I was without it, and I wasn’t willing to stay with that question.
So I numbed it.

Drugs. Alcohol. A few years of running hard in the wrong direction, until I found myself sitting on a stiff cot in a jail cell after my second DUI.

That version of me collapsed completely.

The second time, I responded the way our culture teaches us to.

I decided I could still be great, just as someone else.

This was the late 2000s. Startup founders were the new heroes. That felt like a worthy thing to become.

So I became one.

I founded companies. Failed a couple. Learned. Tried again. Built and scaled a venture-backed company over a decade. Raised capital. Built a large team. Eventually exited.

For a long time, that identity worked.

Until it didn’t.

When I finally stepped away from the CEO role, that identity died too.

But this third time was different.

Every other time an identity fell apart, I rushed to replace it.
New role. New story. New certainty to keep myself moving forward.

This time, I didn’t do that.

Instead, I stayed in what followed.

No title.
No plan.
No clean answer when people asked what was next.

It felt like standing on a plateau, between where I’d come from and wherever I might go next. The old story was gone. The new one hadn’t arrived.

A liminal space.

In the past, I treated moments like this as problems to solve.
Something to fix as quickly as possible.

This time, I let it be unfinished.

That space was uncomfortable. Disorienting. Quiet.
And unexpectedly, it was also the most alive I’d felt in years.

Without an identity to perform or defend, I started noticing what actually had energy. Writing. Honest conversations. Work that emerged instead of being forced.

Not from a master plan.
From listening.

Every major transition creates this in-between moment, when who you were no longer works, and who you’ll become isn’t clear yet.

Most of us rush to close that gap.

But there’s another way through it.

Not by recreating yourself.
Not by rushing to certainty.
But by staying with the space long enough for something truer to surface.

That’s what the third death taught me.

Not how to become someone new.

But how to stop interrupting the moment where life is trying to show you who you already are.

---

Proud to coach with Inside-Out Leadership, CEO coaching by exited founders who've been there.

If this resonated and you want to dive deeper, shoot me a DM.

Michael Phelps won 28 Olympic medals across four Games. Yet, after London 2012, despite winning six medals, he was in deep crisis and contemplated ending his life...

He's not alone. Will Smith has talked about "Cliff Top" being just as lonely and hard as "Rock Bottom." Jim Carrey has said similar. The list goes on.

So what's going on?

This is a central paradox of high performers in any field. The fierce drive that propels you to the top of your game/market is the same corrosive force that leaves you hollowed out at the summit. For founders, we chase the exit unquestioningly, so focused on attaining the goal that we never stop to consider what might come after.

What nobody tells you about an exit is that the leaving is its own special kind of challenge. Special, and yet surprisingly consistent from person to person.

Here's the typical process:
1. Exit.
2. Existential vacuum.
3. ???
4. Realigned to purpose.

Some founders, confronted with this vacuum of purpose, jump immediately into the next thing. If you exit your consumer app and can find purpose in an even bigger consumer app, bless your heart, please run with everything you've got. Come read this post back after your next exit. 

If you find yourself struggling, however, know that you're not alone. Many founders struggle with step 3. I did. I experimented, jumping into each project with the same gusto, but I kept finding that I couldn’t recapture that sense of unquestioning purpose. Try as I might, it just felt different.

The salient issue, I've learned after coaching dozens of founders through their post-exit transition, is that as we mature, the way we construct meaning changes. 

At first, we FIND purpose. But eventually, we must CREATE it.

Finding Purpose:

• Purpose is found in the world and brought into yourself.
• Meaning is derived from what, and how much, you get.
• Success is a function of the outcome achieved.

Creating Purpose:

• Purpose is found inside yourself and brought to the world. 
• Meaning is built from what, and how much, you give.
• Success is a function of the work done and the motivations behind it.

Phelps found his breakthrough by checking into intensive treatment in 2014.

He returned in 2016 to win five more golds in Rio, but he swam from a radically different internal foundation. He swam from love for the sport, not the desperate need for meaning. The achievement was the same, but his entire relationship to it had transformed.

Today, he has moved beyond the pool to create purpose as a vocal advocate for mental health. By sharing his struggle, he is building a meaningful life that a gold medal alone never could.

Only you can tell if it's time to start your own work. If so, here's a question for you to get started on your path to rediscovery:
 
How can your career be most useful to others?

In 2017, Uber lost its CEO, its reputation, and nearly its future - because the culture became toxic and turned against itself. I’ve been there, too, without the global brand, but with all the danger...

Uber's early success was fueled by aggression, speed, and internal competitiveness. These traits fueled their rise, but without emotional regulation or boundaries, they became catastrophic liabilities.

I've been in that pressure cooker.

Years ago, I scaled my company from 15 employees to 75 employees in nine months. Our corporate culture was completely unprepared for the stresses of such rapid scale-up.

I talk to founders every day who face the same dilemma. They do what successful people do: they try to fix it. They spend a fortune on consultants, off-sites, and "culture work."

Uber is the masterclass in this.

They hired a former U.S. Attorney General to write a 12-page report with recommendations, fired 20 people in one shot to signal 'change', and ditched their original values for a new list of corporate-approved principles.

But you can't fire or spend your way into a new culture. By pushing new cultural frames without acknowledging the current ones, you breed resentment and cynicism from those who see the culture for what it actually is.

To truly change your culture, first, you must stop trying to build the culture you want and start by looking at the culture you actually have. Only then, working from a foundation of what is, can you begin to make change.

Here's how:

1. Look Inside Your Company

Anonymous surveys are a great tool to understand how your employees view your culture. Anonymity is key.

A survey like this communicates to your employees that you understand the importance of culture and that you will presumably listen to what they say. However, if you take this route and do nothing to address the feedback, it can break trust. 

2. Look Inside Yourself

At some point in every entrepreneur’s journey, they realize that their company is a manifestation of themselves. This offers a shortcut: you can understand your corporate culture by understanding yourself.

Are you late to meetings? That’s your culture. Others are late, too. 
Do you hold yourself to the grindstone, sacrificing holidays to make more progress? That’s your culture. Others do that, too. 

While most entrepreneurs resist this, looking internally is the most reliable route to determine your culture. For those brave few, it’s best done with either a 360-degree survey, or a dedicated coach to help you see your blind spots.

Great. I’ve reconciled with my current culture, and I still don't like it. Now what?

Once you've identified how you're creating the culture you say you don't want, changing it is simple:

Step 1: Change yourself to live by the values you want the company to live by.
Step 2: Write the values you live by on the wall.

And if you’re wondering, yes, that’s what we actually did to transform our culture at speed.

Simple, yes.

But not easy.

I used to be a virtuoso of the "Founder's Glance." In 30 minutes, I could diagnose a hemorrhaging sales pipeline or a toxic board member with surgical precision. It took me 15 years to sharpen these instincts into a blade...

And then GPT-4 learned it all in an afternoon. 

For the modern founder, watching AI automate your "unique" expertise is far more than merely a professional crisis. It’s an existential punch to the gut. 

The standard advice is to pivot - to move from "knowledge" to "wisdom." We’re told that our value now lies in judgment, in knowing which fires to douse and which to let burn. There is some truth there, certainly. 

But here is the deeper rot that no one wants to name. 

Tying your worth to "wisdom" is just as brittle as tying it to knowledge. Because wisdom is still something you possess. It is an accumulation, a trophy case of experiences. And anything you possess can - eventually, inevitably - be taken from you. 

I grokked this the hard way in 2020. 

The day I signed the papers and officially ceased to be "Ryan the CEO," the armor evaporated. Without the title, the expertise, and the authority, I realized with a terrifying clarity that I had no idea who was left standing in the room. I had spent a decade building a masterpiece of a company, but I was a stranger to the person underneath it. 

The only foundation that cannot be automated is your Integrity. 

Not integrity as a corporate buzzword, but integrity as wholeness - the radical alignment between your deepest values and your daily actions. This requires two things that are infinitely harder than raising a Series A: 

1. Ruthless Self-Inquiry: 

Stripping away the inherited scripts of "unicorn status" and "disruptive growth" to find what you actually give a damn about when the world isn't watching. 

2. The Courage to Lose: 

The terrifying bravery to say "no" to the high-status investor or the lucrative exit because it doesn't match the shape of your soul. 

When I finally put down the Successful CEO costume, the world didn't end. 

It began. 

And I became a more integrated human being. 

Inside-Out Leadership was born from that wreck. We help founders find the floor that doesn't drop out when the technology changes. 

If you’re tired of being at war with an algorithm for your sense of worth, let’s talk. 

Shoot me a DM. There's another way.

Performance psychologist & Coach working with the world's best performers | Applying the principles and practices of elite sport to everyday health and high performance.

If you want athletic dominance, higher performance, and consistent financial success…

You need to learn the blueprint to unlocking the unfair advantage every top performer shares:

For over 10 years I’ve studied the DNA of elite performance.

I discovered a secret the best athletes & Founders share that allows them to reliably perform at their peak (without burning out or taking drugs)…

This ONE similarity gives them an unfair advantage.

It’s NOT:

- Their network
- Their physique or diet
- Their skills or knowledge

All of these ARE important… but they won’t save you.

I’ve seen pro athletes with poor diets, or successful executives without a large network…

There’s only ONE trait every single successful performer has:

They are “high-agency”.

High-agency individuals:

- Act more than they analyze
- Take responsibility for everything
- Focus on growth instead of achievement
- Control and direct their internal narrative
- Never doubt themselves, only their performance

I’ve never seen someone get to the top without this trait…

You don’t have to be the smartest, most gifted, or hardest worker.

But you do have to flip a switch.

When you flip this switch, nobody can dent your confidence or slow you down.

How do I know this?

I’m a certified mental performance consultant & board-certified sports coach. Over the past 10+ years, I’ve worked with the NBA, NFL, Olympians, Army Special Forces, Fortune 5 Companies & Venture-Backed Startups.

Here’s what people say about me:

"Alex is one of the best in the game. His ability to dive deep and explain this is next level. By going through his training, not only did I make massive improvements in my professional life (income and performance), but also benefits in my personal life." — Kevin KD Dorsey, #1 LinkedIn Sales Influencer

"Alex has worked directly with some of the world's most elite athletes. Combined with his deep expertise in human psychology, he's seen first-hand what it takes for someone to perform at the elite level while maintaining their health and sanity." — Andy Johns, Venture Advisor; Former VP of Growth - Twitter, Facebook.

Want to learn more about high performance?

Reach out and connect.

(𝘋𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘦𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘮𝘺 𝘍𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘴𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯)…

Alex Auerbach

I see executives constantly make a mistake you’ll NEVER catch an NFL pro making:

Skipping breaks for the sake of “productivity.”

Founders and execs think they're optimizing their day by stacking meetings back-to-back-to-back, but they're actually destroying their performance.

Athletes understand something executives resist: recovery is part of the performance system, not a reward you earn after burning out.

Microsoft's Human Factors Lab proved this back in 2021 with brain wave monitoring during back-to-back virtual meetings:

Without breaks, stress (beta wave activity) accumulates across meetings. Your brain literally gets worse at focusing and engaging with each consecutive meeting.

With just 10-minute breaks, stress resets between meetings. Participants stayed mentally fresh across four consecutive calls.

The transition periods hit hardest. Moving from one meeting to the next without recovery causes sharp stress spikes that compound over time.

That’s why, for every executive client, we implement 10-minute breaks between meetings. Not negotiable.

Get up, walk around, do some squats. Anything that pulls you away from the screen.

A lot of them push back: "I don't have time for breaks." But you can't afford not to take them.

The irony is that breaks don't just prevent burnout; they improve your ability to perform in the meetings themselves.

Recovery isn't what happens after performance. It's what makes performance possible.

Alex Auerbach Ph.D.

Sharing insights from psychology to help you live better and unlock your Performance DNA. Based on my work with NBA, NFL, Elite Military Units, and VC

Sam Darnold was a bust as a #3 overall pick.

Then Brock Purdy gave him a piece of life-changing advice:

"Think like a point guard. Get the ball in their hands and let them make plays.”

That mental shift took Darnold to back-to-back 14-win seasons and an NFC Championship game.

Most quarterbacks think their job is to be superhuman on the field, but that’s wrong: their real responsibility is putting their teammates in a position to succeed. 

When Darnold adopted this mindset, his performance improved, all because he stopped trying to do too much.

Much like quarterbacks, founders often think it’s their responsibility to be everywhere, solve everything, make every decision.

But research on self-determination and autonomy shows the opposite:

When leaders focus on facilitating others, setting up their teams to succeed, everyone performs better. (The leader included!)

Here's what this looks like in practice:

→ Instead of: "I need to figure this out myself"
→ Think: "Who on my team is best positioned to solve this?"

→ Instead of: "I have to be in every meeting"
→ Think: "How do I enable my team to make decisions without me?"

→ Instead of: "I need to carry this company"
→ Think: "My job is to put the right people in position to carry it"

Darnold didn't get better by trying harder. He got better by changing how he thought about his role.

When people feel ownership and support, they hold themselves to higher standards than you could ever impose.

They problem-solve, persist and, take responsibility.

Don't try to be the hero. Instead, build a system where heroes emerge.

That's the point guard mentality, and it works just as well in the boardroom as it does on the field.

Miami Dolphins fullback Alec Ingold made his goal sheet for 2025 public.

One detail stood out to me immediately:

At the very top, he titled it: "Don't flinch."

Then he signed it.

Ingold borrowed this approach directly from Kobe Bryant, who would sign his goal sheets as a commitment device.

The signature creates what psychologists call a "psychological contract" with yourself. When things get hard, you don't go back on the commitment you made to yourself.

He also splits his goals into two categories: subjective and objective.

Subjective goals are the vision. "Be an authentic leader, “be in great physical condition." These paint the picture of who he wants to become.

Objective goals are the proof: Body fat percentage, off-field traditions with running backs, all the measurable behaviors that demonstrate he's becoming that person.

But here's where it gets interesting for founders and executives:

Ingold also includes what he calls "team goals,” or things that are partially out of his control. 

He acknowledges he might only hit half of these goals, but he also doesn't attach failure to his identity.

This is the psychological flexibility that separates consistent high performers from everyone else. They set ambitious targets, but they judge progress by the daily process, not just the outcome.

Across industries, the best performers don't just set goals at the beginning of the year and hope for the best. 

They build systems for maintaining commitment and staying honest with themselves when things get hard.

They understand that the goal sheet creates a psychological anchor that keeps you pointed in the right direction when everything around you is chaotic.

Some founders treat Q1 planning like a one-time event. They set aggressive targets, feel motivated for two weeks, then drift back to reactive mode.

The executives I work with treat it differently. 

They understand that sustained excellence isn't about willpower. It's about designing systems that make the right behaviors more likely.

Have you ever signed your goal sheets to make a psychological contract with yourself?

P.S. If you’re ready to build the same systems that elite athletes use to hit all your 2026 goals, DM me “SYSTEMS.”

Next time you give yourself grief over taking time off, remember this:

Usain Bolt, the fastest man in the world, is obsessed with video games.

The 8-time Olympic gold medalist admitted to BBC that he used to skip training to go spend the day playing games – specifically Mario Kart.

Now, he didn’t do it for zero reason: He credits those hours at the video game store with developing his competitive spirit. 

Most coaches would call that a terrible decision, but I'd call it brilliant. 

Here’s why:

The best in the world inherently know that rest isn't passive. It's not about collapsing on the couch after a hard week.

Real recovery comes from activities that fully engage you.

Play is one of the most powerful tools we have for decreasing burnout. When you're immersed in something you genuinely enjoy, you enter a state of full presence. 

The world’s best athletes know this, and plenty of execs do, too. The best founders I know have activities that light them up beyond work.

So this weekend, find your Mario Kart.

Not literally (unless that’s actually your thing), but take time to find the thing that makes you feel fully alive.

Remember that having fun is, in its own way, an investment in your excellence!

Stanford research shows your mindset on failure is what determines recovery.

Here are 8 ways elite athletes handle failure that founders should steal:

1. Michael Jordan

"I've missed more than 9,000 shots. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed."

Elite performers zoom out after failure to reduce ego threat. They ask "What can I learn?" instead of "What went wrong?"

2. Serena Williams

"A champion is defined not by their wins but by how they recover when they fall."

Recovery speed matters more than perfection rate. Williams also says she's grown most from setbacks, not victories.

3. Roger Federer

"When you lose nearly every second point on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot."

Federer won 80% of his matches but only 54% of points played. He developed what he calls "a short memory for setbacks."

4. Giannis Antetokounmpo

"There's no failure in sports. It's steps to success."

When asked if missing the playoffs was a "failure," Giannis challenged the entire framework: "Michael Jordan played 15 years, won six championships. The other nine years was a failure?"

5. Tom Brady

"If we got one drive, we're going to try to take advantage of it."

Facing a 28-3 deficit in the Super Bowl, Brady broke the impossible into manageable moments. He didn't process the scale of the problem.

6. Eliud Kipchoge 

"Failure isn't the opposite of success. It's the soil where wisdom grows."

After falling 25 seconds short of breaking the 2-hour marathon, Kipchoge didn't make excuses. He analyzed, trained harder, succeeded two years later.

7. Aaron Judge

After every strikeout, Judge has a physical routine. He swipes dirt from the ground, squeezes it, throws it away. This redirects attention from mistakes and provides a physical cue to let go.

8. Billie Jean King

"Champions keep playing until they get it right."

The emphasis is on "until." Not "in case" or "if," but relentless continuation until the outcome improves.

The pattern across all eight:

Elite performers have systematic approaches to failure. They don't wing it. They train recovery like they train performance.

Research backs this: 

NBA players miss 60% of their shots. Top baseball hitters succeed 3 out of 10 times.

Resilience is a skill you build through progressive challenges. Like training a muscle – stress, rest, adapt, repeat.

Which technique would transform how you handle setbacks?

P.S. I’m sending a breakdown tomorrow of a simple system I teach founders to deal with failures and build skills from them.

The same system elite athletes use to develop everything from shooting form to decision-making under pressure.

Link in comments to sign up so you get that straight to your inbox tomorrow 👇
(You'll also receive my High Performance Playbook for free)

8 Ways Elite Athletes Handle Failure

The Baltimore Ravens' season ended on a missed 44-yard field goal.

But the real lesson for high performers was in what Derrick Henry had to say:

Tyler Loop, the rookie kicker in question, had been perfect from that range all season. Then he missed the one that mattered most.

In these high-pressure moments, rookies look to their leaders for guidance. What those leaders choose to say can make or break not only the player’s confidence, but their entire outlook on failure moving forward.

It’s the moment where true in-play wisdom gets passed down.

Here’s what Henry told him: 

"Keep your spirits up, deal with it tonight and then tomorrow the sun rises again. The story after this is gonna be great for him because God put him in this position to use him as an example.”

What I thought was very telling was that Henry's immediate response showed he has a system. He's dealt with his own fumbles and mistakes enough times that he knows exactly what to say to help someone move forward.

But most rookies don't have a system yet. When you're just getting started and you've never dealt with failure at this level, how do you possibly know what to do?

I see the same pattern with founders. Especially during fundraising when you’re experiencing a ton of rejection.

You're getting no after no after no. Every rejection feels like a judgment on you, your idea, your competency. You start questioning whether you're cut out for this.

But the only way forward is to start treating mistakes as skill-building opportunities rather than character judgments.

I’m working with one Series B health-tech founder right now who’s been struggling with rejection while fundraising.

There were 3 questions I told him to ask himself after every pitch:

→ What did I do that I want to keep doing?

This captures what's working. Maybe your opening story landed well, or your financial projections were clear, or you handled objections confidently.

→ What did I do that I want to do differently?

Not "what I did wrong." What you'd adjust. Maybe you rushed through the market size, or got defensive about a gap in your team, or didn't ask enough questions about what the investor cares about.

→ What did I learn?

This is where growth happens. What became clearer about your pitch? About this investor's priorities? About what questions you need to be ready for next time?

The framework works because it does what Derrick Henry's response did for Tyler Loop: it gives you a way to process what happened and extract value from it, rather than just sitting in the emotional weight of failure.

Rejection can feel brutal, but that doesn’t make it “failure.” You're developing a skill. And like any skill, you get better at it by treating each attempt as data rather than verdict.

If you’re looking to build systems to handle tough failures and rejections, send me a DM and let's have a chat.

Bob Bowman coached Michael Phelps to 28 Olympic medals.

His rule for other coaches: 

"You cannot be other people's motivation."

Here's what separated Phelps from everyone else, and what Bowman built into their training:

Phase 1: Set YOUR goal

Phelps set extreme, internally owned goals. Bowman's job wasn't to tell him what to dream about. His job was to say, "Okay, you want to win eight gold medals in Beijing? Let's build a plan."

This is the foundation of self-regulated learning: the performer establishes the goal. Not the coach.

When the goal comes from you, you're willing to endure what it takes to get there.

Phase 2: Monitor and adjust in practice

Bowman designed practices where Phelps could get constant feedback. Specific, technical observations about what Phelps couldn't see while he was performing.

One example: In one Olympic race, Phelps won gold by one-hundredth of a second because his palm was outstretched when he touched the wall while his opponent's hand was flexed.

That detail came from 12 years of Bowman yelling at him about his finish.

Phase 3: Reflect and iterate

When Phelps' goggles filled with water in Beijing, he didn't panic. He counted his strokes because he'd practiced that scenario in training. Bowman had him practice blind.

The reflection loop was: Did today's practice get me closer to my goal? What needs to adjust?

Bowman told other coaches: "When I first started coaching, I only had a hammer so everything looked like a nail. Now I have hammer, but I also have logic, I have a pat on the back, and I have empathy."

He learned to give different athletes different feedback based on what THEY needed to reach THEIR goals.

This is self-regulated learning: you set the goal, your coach provides the feedback and environment that helps you see if you're on track.

Most founders and executives have never been taught this systematic approach to skill development.

You know you want better executive presence, or to build a higher-performing team, but you're acting without a plan, clear feedback, or adjustments based on what's working.

Elite athletes have a system for becoming experts at their craft:

→ Set a clear, internally motivated goal
→ Build a plan with specific behaviors to develop
→ Monitor whether those behaviors move you toward the goal
→ Get external feedback on what you can't see while performing
→ Reflect and adjust the plan based on results

That's the gap between practicing and actually getting better, and that’s what you need to become the highest performer you can be.

What's one skill you're trying to develop right now, and how are you systematically working on it?

Jon Ryan punted for 12 years, and won a Super Bowl with the Seahawks.

Here’s his rule for managing pressure (that most never learn): 

Know which type of nerves you're feeling.

Early in his career at Lambeau Field, Ryan hit a line drive punt in front of 70,000 people on his first NFL snap. He spent the rest of the game dwelling on it, convinced that mistake could end his career.

By the end of that career, he'd developed what he called an "internal cockiness" after bad punts: "I never hit two bad ones in a row, so the next one is going to be awesome."

The pressure didn't change. Ryan still has nightmares about shanking punts 2-3 times per week, three years after retirement.

What changed was his understanding of what those nerves actually meant.

Ryan made a critical distinction that most performers, athletes or otherwise, miss:

"I learned there were two kinds of nerves. Being nervous because you cared so much and wanted to succeed. And being nervous because you weren't ready.”

In psychology, we call this productive and unproductive worry.

→ Productive worry means your brain and body are getting ready to perform. It's energy you can channel into execution.

→ Unproductive worry means there are gaps in your preparation – your system telling you something's missing.

Most leaders conflate these two types of nerves constantly.

You feel anxious before a board presentation and assume something's wrong. Your heart races before an investor pitch and you spiral into self-doubt.

But if you've done the preparation, those nerves aren't a problem.

Here's how to channel that energy productively:

First, redirect your attention externally. When you notice your heart racing, don't assess what it means. Shift your focus to the task at hand: the first question you'll answer, the opening slide, the investor across the table.

Research shows that maintaining external focus during performance leads to better execution than monitoring your internal state. Your body knows how to perform once you've prepared. Let it.

Second, practice a simple reframe. Before walking into the room, acknowledge what you're feeling: "I feel my heart racing." Then reframe it: "This energy means I'm ready."

The physiological signature of anxiety and excitement is identical. The only difference is the label you give it.

One of my NBA clients uses this exact technique at the free-throw line. Instead of calling it nervousness, he frames it as determination. Same racing heart, completely different performance outcome.

The diagnostic question Ryan's insight will give you is this:

"Am I nervous because I'm unprepared, or because this matters?"

This distinction gives you a tool to manage both the anticipation and the recovery. 

The pressure doesn't vanish at higher levels of performance; Ryan felt it punting in front of 8,000 people in the CFL the same way he felt it at Lambeau in front of 70,000.

But what you can change is your relationship with those nerves and how to use them.

I've spent 10+ years coaching elite athletes as well as founders at all stages.

Here’s a hard truth I’ve observed over the years:

Some founders rocket to success on pure execution and grit. But most? They inevitably burn out or plateau.

Because aggressive execution was their only strategy and the body and mind can only sustain so much. 

Athletes understand this reality as physical plateaus are unignorable. When you hit the wall in sport, there’s no continuing – your body just stops. But founders, who are basically mental athletes, can often keep pushing themselves way beyond their limits and ignore all the symptoms of burn out.

So I built this framework for founders who are looking to scale sustainably. Those focusing on building performance excellence in the right order.

Here’s the framework:

1. Wellbeing & Capacity

Without this, you won't find sustainable performance. You can't perform if you aren’t well, full stop. 

The foundation is adaptive capacity: pairing stress with recovery so you can progressively take on higher challenges. 

Define your recovery practices, remove the guilt around rest, and align your stress with your capacity to handle it.

2. Building Self-Regulation

This is what separates the best from everyone else. It's the ability to control and direct your thoughts, emotions, and physiology toward your goals. 

Elite performers know what mental skill to use in what context, and can deploy it on command. 

Document your mental toolkit, turn reactions into rehearsed responses, and define what state you need for different types of work.

3. Mental Architecture

This is where clever reframing comes in to build unshakeable confidence. Build the right beliefs about stress and challenge. 

Champions don't "push through," they reframe and adapt. They build mental models that serve performance, seeing nerves as readiness and setbacks as data.

4. Performance Preparation

Diana Taurasi could walk you through exactly how she wanted to feel 30 minutes before tipoff, 10 minutes before, and at game time. 

She learned to get into that state through preparation and self-regulation. The greats all do this. 

Review what works, double down on your pre-performance routine, and build preparation into your rhythm.

5. Peak Performance

Excellence happens through mastering the previous four layers. 

This is about staying immersed and present in the moment, adapting to evolving demands in real-time, and bouncing back from setbacks without losing momentum.

In every elite athlete and executive I've coached, I've seen these foundational layers work.

Focus on building them in order, and go from there.

Which stage are you at with your performance?

I've spent 15+ years working with NFL teams on talent selection.

Here are 5 draft strategies from championship teams that’ll transform how you hire:

1. Bill Belichick: "The right 53, not the best 53.”

Belichick kept a draft board of 75 players vs 300+ for other teams. He only evaluated players who fit his specific system.

For founders: Stop hiring "impressive resumes." Start defining what success looks like in your environment, then hire for that.

The best candidate on paper often fails because of role mismatch.

2. Les Snead: Remove authority bias from evaluation

Snead discovered his presence in draft meetings suppressed dissent. Scouts unconsciously aligned with players he favored.

His solution: Scouts build consensus rankings without the GM present. Then he reviews their synthesis, asks questions, but doesn't drive the conversation.

Result: Diverse perspectives surface naturally without hierarchy killing honesty.

For founders: Structure interviews differently, with cross-functional teams that assess candidates without senior leadership present. 

3. Sean Payton: Character assessment is non-delegable.

In Denver, Payton emphasizes that most NFL teams fail because they are “dysfunctional at the top,” so he pushed for tight alignment with ownership and his GM before reshaping the roster. 

For founders: Make culture fit assessment as rigorous as technical evaluation.

Someone brilliant but defensive will struggle in your flat organization. Someone who thrives on autonomy will feel micromanaged in your structured environment.

4. Kyle Shanahan: Balance best available with specific needs

Pure "best available" leaves you with three cornerbacks when you need linebackers. Pure "need-based" makes you draft someone 78 picks too early.

Championship teams fill critical holes in free agency first, then draft the best available within remaining gaps.

For founders: Hire senior talent with proven track records for leadership roles (foundation in free agency). Then hire promising mid-career people for development (draft for potential).

5. Bill Walsh: Design explicit Year 1 roles, expand in Year 2

Walsh never gave rookies the entire playbook. He defined a specific role for Year 1, then expanded in Year 2 once fundamentals were mastered.

For founders: Instead of onboarding with vague expectation, set clear guidelines for the first 90 days, and readjust with explicit instructions on their timeline for the next two years.

The pattern across all five: 

Championship organizations treat hiring as systematic talent construction, not talent gambling.

46% of corporate new hires fail within 18 months.

NFL teams with the best processes predict roster fit with 83% accuracy.

The difference is systematic rigor.

Which strategy would transform your hiring most?

 5 Championship Draft Strategies

Most high achievers think that grinding harder is the way to reach elite performance.

Adam Grant's “Hidden Potential” has a different take:

His research finds that taking breaks has at least three benefits for sustaining elite performance.

First, time away from practice helps sustain what psychologists call "harmonious passion." 

Research reveals that when we work nights and weekends without breaks, our interest and enjoyment in our tasks drop.

Second, the greats deliberately limit their practice. 

Yo-Yo Ma practices 3-6 hours daily and avoids early-morning and late-night sessions. Chopin urged his students not to practice more than 2 hours a day in the summer.

Third, breaks are part of the performance system itself. 

NBA players come to the bench after 8-10 minutes on the court. They put a towel over their head, control their breathing, and reset their mental state. They understand that without recovery, the next shift suffers.

Athletes understand that recovery isn't what you do AFTER you burn out. It's built into the system to ensure that burnout never comes.

But the reality is that most founders are already burned out and trying to grind through all the symptoms.

So with nearly all executives I work with, one of the first rules I implement is 10-minute breaks between meetings. 

Get up, walk around, do some squats. Anything. Just break up the back-to-back-to-back.

If you're thinking about recovering after you've burned out or started underperforming, it's too late.

The good news is it doesn't take much. 

"I don't have an hour to exercise." But what if you walked for 15 minutes? 

It’s essential to get rid of an all-or-nothing mentality.

Athletes understand that recovery is part of performance. Most founders think recovery is what you do after you burn out.

But it's too late then.

NFL teams figured out how to avoid the biggest hiring mistake decades ago:

Executive hiring has a 40% success rate because you're asking one person to do three impossible jobs.

A COO at a major consumer brand is hiring VPs across DTC, performance marketing, and digital. Million-dollar bets on people who will shape the company's trajectory.

When we walked through how his team currently hires, he immediately saw the problem:

The same hiring manager acts as scout (identifying candidates), interviewer (evaluating them), and general manager (making the final call).

When one person plays all three roles, bias compounds at every stage:

→The "empty desk" bias, lowering standards because you're desperate to fill the role. 

→ The "similar-to-me" trap, hiring people who remind you of yourself. 

→ And confirmation bias, deciding you like someone in three minutes, then spending the interview validating that snap judgment.

NFL teams solved this through role separation.

Area scouts gather intelligence on specific regions, medical staff assess physical readiness, position coaches evaluate scheme fit, then the war room brings all these perspectives together, with the GM synthesizing everything to make the final call.

No one person carries all the weight, so no one bias goes unchecked.

Research shows NFL teams hit on draft picks 70-80% of the time. Corporate hiring, on the other hand? About 40%. The difference obviously isn’t talent quality, but evaluation structure.

Here's what systematic evaluation actually looks like:

→ Psychological profiling: Validated assessments that predict performance in specific roles. The NFL identified "need to compete" as the single best predictor of success. What's your equivalent for a VP of Marketing?

→ Structured interviews mapped to competencies: Each interviewer focuses on different competencies. Nobody wastes time covering the same ground.

→ Behavioral observation: Don't just ask what they did, but WATCH them do something relevant to this role.

→ The war room: Independent evaluations get synthesized together. You eliminate groupthink by having people assess candidates separately before discussing as a group.

The COO had two VP searches active. We talked about piloting this system for his executive hiring, adding 3-5 comprehensive evaluations per role instead of the typical "meet a few times and see if there's chemistry" approach.

Basically, you need to treat hiring like the draft: systematic evaluation, role separation, committee-based decisions. When you use validated assessments instead of gut feel, you predict performance.

Most companies won't do this because it feels like overkill. The ones who adopt systematic evaluation will quietly build better teams and make fewer expensive mistakes.

If you're hiring executives and want to discuss bringing this level of rigor to your process, let's talk.

Everyone knows Michael Jordan got cut from his high school team.

But almost no one knows what his mom said when he came home crying.

Most parents would have done one of three things:

1. Blamed the coach ("That guy doesn't know talent when he sees it")
2. Comforted him ("Basketball isn't everything, honey")
3. Or fought to get him another shot ("Let me call the school")

Deloris Jordan did none of those things.

She cried with him, and then she said: "If you really want it, you work hard over the summer."

That's it. No drama. No victim story. No shortcuts.

Just earnestly pointing him to the factors that are actually in his control.

And as we all now know, working hard is exactly what he did.

But maybe he would’ve given up, then and there, without his mother’s guidance.

When you hit a setback this week/moth/year (and you will), you get to choose your response.

You can blame circumstances. You can look for shortcuts. You can build a victim story.

Or you can ask yourself: What can I actually control here? 

Then go work on that.

Deloris Jordan knew that the right kind of support isn't always comfort.

Sometimes it's pointing someone back to their agency.

Cristiano Ronaldo practices his penalty routine every single practice.

He uses one key technique so he can execute even after a devastating miss:

At the Euros against Slovenia in 2024, Ronaldo missed a penalty kick – one that would’ve put Portugal ahead in extra time. 

But minutes later, he stepped up to take another one, in the same spot, with the same routine.

As fans will already know, he absolutely crushed it. And Portugal went on to win the penalty shoot-out.

I've watched this moment a dozen times because it's one of the clearest examples of pressure performance I've ever seen in sports.

But, what most people missed was what happened before each kick. 

He takes a deep breath. Not just any breath – a physiological sigh. Short inhale, long exhale. This technique sends a direct signal to your nervous system to calm down.

I use the same technique before every keynote. For years, I'd walk onto stages feeling my heart rate spike and my imposter syndrome kick in. The physiological sigh became my reset button.

But here's what separates Ronaldo from everyone else:

He doesn't just use it during penalty kicks at the Euros. He practices it constantly...

In the gym, during training sessions, at home, in minor-stakes games that don't matter.

And that's exactly why he can execute when 60,000 fans are watching.

So when the entire tournament is on the line and the pressure is crushing, his body already knows what to do. The calm-down mechanism is automatic.

Most founders and executives wait until they're in the pressure moment to try to manage their nerves.

→ The board meeting where you need to defend your strategy.
→ The investor pitch that could make or break your round.
→ The conversation where you have to let someone go.

But by then, it's too late to build the habit.

Your nervous system needs repetition in low-stakes moments so it can access the skill when everything is on the line.

What's your version of the physiological sigh? And more importantly: are you practicing it when nothing matters so you can use it when everything does?

At the 2004 Olympics, basketball fans across the world were shocked:

“How does such an insanely stacked team only place 3rd?”

Well, the answer lies in what’s called the “too-much-talent effect,” and it comes from 10 years of NBA performance data:

Research showed that after about 50-60% top talent on a team, marginal returns don't just diminish. They go negative. 

You ever hear the phrase “too much of a good thing?” That’s what happens here, and it’s all because of status competition.

When you pack a team with dominant individuals, they don't coexist peacefully. They create disputes over within-group authority and status. People start jostling for attention and influence rather than focusing on team performance.

In extreme cases, team members actively undermine each other to advance their own standing.

The fascinating part? Researchers found this effect in basketball but not in baseball. The difference lies in interdependence.

Basketball requires constant fluid coordination. Players must read each other, adjust on the fly, make split-second decisions together. Baseball players mostly perform individually, then hand off to the next person.

When your work requires people to constantly coordinate and adapt together, too much dominant talent becomes toxic.

This is exactly how we approached building the championship Raptors team. We didn't just trade for any superstar. We selected for Kawhi Leonard specifically because his personality profile fit with the existing group.

→ The question most businesses ask: "Is this person good?"
→ The question championship teams ask: "Is this person good for us?"

Before you hire your next executive, ask yourself:

→ How much fluid coordination does this role actually require?
→ Does this person's dominance profile fit our existing team composition?
→ Are we accidentally creating status competition where we need collaboration?

You don't need the five best players. You need five players who make the best team.

That's how championships are won.

Sleep is the number one performance enhancer. 

And yet it’s the first to go when we make “budget cuts” with our time…

But for anyone trying to make good decisions under pressure, including any high performer, this is the worst decision you can make.

The prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain that handles working memory and cognitive flexibility) is extremely sensitive to sleep loss. You start defaulting to familiar solutions instead of thinking creatively about complex problems.

→ Your emotional regulation tanks. 

Poor sleep makes you more hostile and less sincere to the people around you. Your team feels it. It erodes psychological safety and trust.

→ Your risk assessment breaks down. 

Sleep-restricted people systematically underestimate risks and overestimate rewards. Terrible when you're making high-stakes calls or allocating capital.

→ You don't adapt to it. 

Chronic short sleep (under 7 hours) impairs cognitive performance, and your brain doesn't "get used to it." You might feel functional, but you're objectively impaired.

The irony is that cutting sleep to get more done actually reduces the quality and effectiveness of your work. You're trading short-term hours for long-term capacity.

Recovery isn't time away from performance. It's an investment in your future performance.

If you want to be great at what you do over the long haul, sleep is non-negotiable.

So how do you get enough sleep consistently?

Systems. 

But more on that in my upcoming posts.

For now, make sure you get on top of your sleep debt this weekend. And check out The High Performance Playbook to start laying the groundwork for optimal performance.

Link in the comments 👇

Does delegating a task make the results no longer "your problem?"

Here’s a high-agency POV from 20-time Grand Slam winner Rodger Federer:

In Christopher Clarey's biography "The Master," Federer explained how important it is to stay interested in the things that other people are handling for you.

"Whatever it is, don't have other people make all those decisions for you. At the end of the day, if there is a problem, it's you who is at fault."

Federer understood that you can delegate tasks without delegating ownership. 

He had people managing his schedule, his finances, his equipment, and his travel. But he stayed interested enough to know when something was off, and he took responsibility when it was.

This level of ownership and agency is something that ALL founders and executives could benefit from adopting.

You might have heard (or even said) something like this before:

→ "Marketing didn't hit the numbers."
→ "The product team missed the deadline."
→ "My co-founder dropped the ball."

But what they're really doing is surrendering their power to change the outcome.

Research on locus of control shows that people with high internal locus of control (the belief that they have agency over their outcomes) significantly outperform those who attribute results to external factors.

One mindset creates options. The other creates excuses.

Of course, ownership doesn't mean controlling every detail. Federer didn't personally book his flights or file his taxes or string his racquet.

Delegation is essential to scale.

But it does mean staying interested enough to notice when something's wrong and taking responsibility for fixing it.

The best founders I work with fail just as often as everyone else: Bad hires, missed targets, failed products, you name it.

The difference is they never lose the belief that they're shaping what happens next.

They ask: "What could I have done differently? What did I miss? What should I have been tracking?"

Not: "Who dropped the ball?"

That difference is what separates championship performers from everyone else.

“It’s lonely at the top.”

One study of 350+ entrepreneurs found a statistic that’s shocking:

Loneliness increases the likelihood of quitting your business by almost 70%.

High loneliness doesn't just make you miserable. It directly reduces your entrepreneurial passion, and significantly increases your intention to exit your business.

When you're lonely, you lose your ability to regulate emotions, make clear decisions, and persist through challenges. 

You burn cognitive energy managing isolation instead of building your company.

I saw this exact occurrence in a founder I worked with:

He was keeping himself up at night, avoiding a conversation with a team member. Then another. Then another.

His world got smaller. Each avoided conversation made the next one harder. Team accountability slipped and he started doing work himself that his team should've handled.

Within weeks, he was stressed, isolated, and carrying the weight of work that wasn't his to carry.

This is the loneliness spiral the research describes. It compounds fast.

Self-Determination Theory shows that humans need three things to perform at their peak:

1. Autonomy: control over your path
2. Competence: making measurable progress
3. Relatedness: feeling supported by others

When you're building alone, you're operating without one-third of the equation.

And research backs this up:

People with strong social support networks report lower levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. Those who feel socially disconnected experience higher rates of cardiovascular disease and worse performance outcomes.

For founders, this is about your personal well-being, but also the well-being of your business. 

Though you might not realize it, you NEED:

→ A structured relationship with someone who challenges your thinking (coach, advisor, peer)

→ Regular rhythm of feedback, not just when things break

→ People who know your business well enough to spot patterns you're missing

→ Accountability for the things you're avoiding

Professional athletes don't train alone. Elite military units don't operate alone.

But somehow, founders think they should build alone.

My client eventually made a list of the conversations he was avoiding. We put them in order from easiest to hardest.

He tackled the first one, and the person thanked him saying they'd been frustrated because they never knew what he really wanted. The direct feedback was a relief.

His stress dropped immediately. The problem didn’t disappear, but he stopped carrying it alone.

The loneliness tax compounds daily. The longer you wait, the more it costs.

If you're 6-12 months post-funding and feeling the weight of building alone, that's a signal.

DM me. Let's talk about what systematic support actually looks like.

Gian Piero Gasperini rejects everything traditional coaching says about control.

This is exactly why you should pay attention to his systems:

Atalanta is a mid-table Serie A club with a fraction of the spending power of Juventus, Inter Milan, or AC Milan. 

Yet they've qualified for the Champions League three consecutive years, reached the Europa League final in 2024, and consistently rank 3rd in Serie A for goals scored.

Here’s what Gasperini credits these wins to: "We don't overthink things. We play with a sense of freedom, like children.”

He adapts his tactical approach to the talents available, which is an excellent example of autonomy-supportive leadership in action.

His system provides clear structure, but allows autonomy in execution. The principles are taught and explained, but their plays aren’t scripted.

The parallel to your organization is this: 

Instead of telling employees to follow a process to an absolute T, demonstrate what success looks like, and ask them how they would best approach that result.

Some of the executives I work with resist this at first. They think giving autonomy means losing control. That if you're not telling people exactly how to execute, chaos follows.

But research shows the opposite. When people feel autonomy, competence, and relatedness, they hold themselves to higher standards than you could ever impose.

Atalanta proves this with results. They outperform clubs with three times their budget because Gasperini understands what most leaders miss: control kills performance.

Your team can handle more freedom. But can you handle giving it to them?

taplio

The Battle

Ryan H. Vaughn

Alex Auerbach

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreRyan H. Vaughn's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAlex Auerbach's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Ryan H. Vaughn

Alex Auerbach

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Ryan H. Vaughn's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAlex Auerbach's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreRyan H. Vaughn's LinkedIn Performance