Processing Your Emotions is a Competitive Advantage

As a breed, founders are brilliant thinkers. You have fast, powerful minds wired for problem-solving. After working with thousands of you, I can confidently say: there’s no cognitive horsepower like a founder’s. You’re quick to generate ideas, simplify complexity, and find openings where most people see brick walls. And there’s no bias to action like a founder’s bias to action, as long as you know what action to take.

So it makes sense that your psychology - your internal work stream - is powered by thought:

Thoughts that turn into actions.

Thoughts that turn into actions.

Thoughts that turn into actions.

Your psychology skews heavily toward cognition. It’s part of what makes you exceptional. But when it comes to scaling your startup - and yourself - thinking alone isn’t enough.

A psychology that relies entirely on thinking is still a single-threaded system, no matter how brilliant that thinking is. And single-threaded systems aren’t resilient. Relying solely on cognition to carry you through every challenge your startup throws at you is actually a failure mode. Your thoughts can only take you so far.

Why? Because founders have a lot of feelings. Emotion is another component - a critical dataset within your psychology - that’s often missing or neglected in founders’ processing.

It’s a universal truth that most founders don’t realize until they’re deep in it: Startups generate a lot of intense emotion. Constantly. Pressure, uncertainty, fear, hope, disappointment, rage, awe, joy - all in the span of a day, an hour, or even a single meeting. That’s not a bug. It’s a feature of the job.

Here’s a partial list of the emotions founders regularly feel:

These are just some of the normal emotions that founders feel.

It’s normal to feel any of these emotions.

It’s normal feel ALL of these emotions.

It’s normal to cycle through every one of these feelings - at a really high intensity - in the span of a day, an hour, or even minute to minute.

These emotions are normal. Normal. They’re okay. And you’re okay for feeling them.

Founders at every stage and scale feel feelings. If you think you’ll stop having feelings after you raise your next round or ship that next feature, then let me be the first person to tell you: You’re wrong. Your startup will only get more complex. And the complexity of your problems will grow in size and scope to match. Your feelings will follow the same trajectory.

Feeling feelings about your startup isn’t a problem now - and it won’t be later. Emotions aren’t bad. They’re not wrong. They’re morally neutral information. They don't mean you’re weak, incapable, or any less of a founder. Feeling emotions means that you’re human, having a normal response to high-stakes work.

The question isn’t whether you’ll feel emotions. You will. The better question is: will you know what to do with them?

Emotional Processing is A Strategic Advantage

Founders scale themselves when they learn to use emotion as data - data that drives action right alongside thought.

When you don’t work with your emotions, they don’t disappear. They cloud your thinking. They slow your execution. When neglected, they build into reactivity or paralysisLINK. The founders who learn to process emotions - not just suppress, ignore, or bypass them - are the ones who operate with their full psychological capacity. They move faster, make clearer decisions, execute consistently, and stay connected to their team and purpose while others flail.

Processing your emotions isn’t weakness, indulgence, or self-care. It’s how you stay resourced, resilient, and sharp. It’s how you avoid burnout and build trust. It’s how you lead a team through chaos without becoming chaotic yourself. It’s leverage.

Emotion is data. It’s information you experience as physical sensation in your body, while thought is data you experience in your mind. Many people believe emotion is illogical, and that’s simply not true. Like any dataset, emotion has structure, logic, and signal - just a different kind than cognition. Emotion has a different purpose than thought - one that’s equally valid and equally important.

Where cognition maps plans, ideas, and possibilities, emotion tells us about the strength and safety we feel in relationship to everything and everyone around us. Emotion gives you information about what you need. And it carries signal about what’s deeply right for you - or wrong for you.

When you ignore emotional data, you miss half the picture. When you learn to incorporate it, you become dangerous - in the best way.

What Emotional Data Looks Like

Let’s say you feel disappointed in your lack of progress over the last few quarters. Your disappointment points to a high standard of execution you didn’t meet - the relationship you have to your highest vision of yourself. That’s valuable data. Even if it’s uncomfortable, disappointment becomes useful when it reveals a clear map for who you’d like to become.

Maybe you’re angry at your cofounder for moving too slowly or dropping the ball. Anger speaks to an unmet expectation or unspoken need. It gives you the chance to clarify what you need and how you want to work together. That seems additive.

Or maybe you feel a deep sadness after a long string of investor rejections, and you’re worried because your family is depending on you. This emotion speaks to your love and responsibility. It’s a reflection of your deepest commitments - not something to override or hide.

Emotions don’t exist to derail you - they’re data that speaks to your humanity. They’re here to guide you. And when you learn how to integrate that guidance - when you can feel something, learn from it, and respond intentionally - you’ve unlocked one of the highest-leverage skills a founder can possess. Emotions add color to and richness to your experience, and often really, really clear information about what to do next.

You operate in a world where there’s never enough information to guarantee you’re making the “right” decision. Incorporating emotion in your psychological workstream - alongside thought - is how you access the full dataset available to you. It’s how you make the best possible decisions you can for yourself and your startup.

Outperform With Emotional Fluency

In a startup, there is never enough information to make a perfect decision - and no visibility into how other founders are operating. You’re wading through uncertainty, ambiguity, and risk - and expected to perform at the highest level within it. That’s just the nature of your job. Which means the founders who succeed don’t possess perfect clarity. They’re the ones who know how to make the right calls with incomplete data.

Emotion is another source of data in an information-scarce environment. And most founders overlook it.

They rely on thought alone - their brilliant, fast-moving cognition - and treat emotion like an annoyance to be managed away. But when you learn to include emotion in your execution, you’re suddenly working with more data than your competitors. You’re incorporating signals they’re missing. In a world of imperfect information, more signal means better performance.

This is why learning to process your emotions is a competitive advantage.

Back in 2020 when Covid hit, every founder I worked with had to make hard decisions at lightning speed. Industries and business models collapsed overnight. Cuts to headcount, revised product roadmaps, pivots, shutdowns - everything was on the table. Every decision put more distance between the founder and the original vision they’d been devoted to for years - the one they got out of bed for, that they hired tens or hundreds of people to help them build.

Everyone was afraid. And everyone was grieving what they had to leave behind in order to build a startup that was better suited to the moment.

The difference wasn’t who avoided the grief. It was who could move through it.

One founder cried through back-to-back calls but rebuilt his company in two days. He let the emotion move through him and aligned his company around a new strategy by the end of the week.

Another founder, facing nearly identical conditions - same stage, same headcount - took two months to arrive at the same decisions. He was stuck in a swirl of avoidance, guilt, and attachment to what had been. And months later, he was still struggling to reconcile what he’d lost.

The founders who could wade through what they were feeling, who opened themselves to the grief of what they were choosing to shutter or change - were able to make tough calls and execute far faster than the founders who were too afraid or too attached to what they were losing.

Now imagine these two founders were competitors, selling to the same customer in the same market. One startup had a clear, focused new roadmap within days. The other spent months in limbo, watching their product die while leadership stayed silent. Who do you think eventually succeeded? Who moved faster? Acquired more users? Preserved growth? And which founder preserved the trust and morale of a team that was watching the macros and waiting for leadership with the maturity to act with confidence and clarity in the face of uncertainty?

This is the difference that working with your emotion makes. It’s not about eliminating emotion. It’s about processing it - so you can act while others shut down, spin out, or flail.

I’ve seen founders move through burnout in days once they name the grief underneath it.

I’ve seen cofounder partnerships transform after one founder processes the shame that kept them silent.

I’ve seen companies change direction overnight when a founder finally acknowledges the fear that’s been warping every conversation - and rightfully uses it to create a new roadmap.

This is what it means to scale yourself. Not by avoiding what you feel - but by building the muscle to metabolize it. This is how you create a more resilient operating system - one that doesn’t collapse under pressure, but grows stronger because of it.

Emotional processing isn’t extraneous. It’s not unnecessary, indulgent, or a waste of time. It’s foundational. It’s how you stay resourced and clear while others flail. It’s how you make better decisions, faster, with more of yourself available. And once you master it - once you learn to connect into the rich and vibrant signal it contains - you’ll never want to build without it again.

This is your competitive advantage.