Leadership Anxiety

Part 1: Leadership Anxiety

I love visiting our stores, but I haven’t always.

Going into our stores used to give me intense anxiety and was a very unfulfilling experience for me.

The feeling of not wanting to go into your own store, a place where you put a ton of effort into creating amazing experiences for other people is a weird one, but also a feeling many business owners have told me they experience as well.

“So what is it?” I ask them, “What makes you feel so uncomfortable in a space that you’ve created?”

There are many different answers but each person I’ve spoken with intuitively knows something is wrong, and is often too afraid or feels too unprepared to take action on it.

I get it. It can feel like a lot. The gap between the vision in your head and reality is huge. But you need to try. Take it one small step at a time. It might take years. YEARS.

We opened Cat & Cloud in 2016 and just in this last year I’ve been starting to feel like this is my home. I’ve always believed in our potential, even when the stress was eating me alive, now I have that belief and the love that comes from doing the hard work. (Starting a business is the easy part)

So let’s get after it. I know you’re tired and mentally stretched but what good is spending all your time and energy building something you can’t even enjoy?

Part 2: The Best Piece of Advice

I posted the above to Instagram earlier this week and received a great question:

“What’s the best piece of advice you can offer shop owners and managers experiencing this?”

While I’m pretty sure there’s no one best piece of advice for anything, this is what came to mind:

It’s ok to admit when you’re not getting any joy out of the work we’re doing.

This doesn’t mean you’re not cut out to be in leadership. It could mean you lack a clear understanding of what you want, don’t share common goals with the people around you, unknowingly adopted someone's broken system and narrative for how work gets done, and the list goes on.

Owning that something is wrong and knowing that something isn’t some inherent flaw in who you are as a person gives you power. Power to experiment, look at old problems from a new perspective, and get specific on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

This isn’t possible if you continue to hide your pain behind the smile you’ve been forcing yourself to wear.