What It Means to Scale Yourself
As a psychotherapist who’s worked with thousands of startup founders, I’ve heard one piece of advice given to founders over and over: Take care of your mental health.
And this is great advice. It reflects how we’ve evolved beyond the previous ethos to “sit down and shut up. Man up and take it. Suffer in silence.” It acknowledges that startups are emotionally intense and can be harrowing to build. It creates permission to struggle. To have limits.
“Take care of your mental health” is a powerful cultural shift - one that brings our inner experience out from the shadows where we can consider it, work with it, and begin to restore it.
But over the years, I’ve learned something surprising: taking care of your mental health isn’t enough for startup founders.
It’s necessary, but not sufficient. It’s the baseline minimum required just to survive. It’s table stakes.
Because the phrase take care of your mental health implies that you’re a fixed system. That you need to restore an internal capacity whose volume and potential is already known - and known to be limited. And when you hit your breaking point, you just need to deploy a patch to be brought back online.
But you are not a fixed system. You’re a founder. And founders are built for growth.
This advice also assumes that all you are is mental. But you’re more than just a brilliant mind - you’re a whole internal ecosystem, and your startup engages all of it: Your beliefs, your emotions, your values, your passion, and your vision for how the world should change.
Diminishing your inner world to something purely “mental” ignores the full stack of what fuels you.
To achieve your ambition, you need a framework that doesn’t just help you recover capacity, but expand beyond it.
You need to learn to scale yourself as your startup grows.
Your startup will help you do this. It will require you to.
The goal of mental health is stability. In my grad school textbooks, it was “everyday functioning.”
The goal of scaling yourself is transformation.
I’ve seen founders “take care of their mental health” by taking a week off to recover from burnout, by going to therapy to reduce anxiety, or by rebalancing their schedule after hitting a wall. These are wise and necessary choices. But they focus on minimizing downside, which is the best-case outcome for a founder who only knows how to take care of their mental health.
I’ve also seen founders scale themselves. I’ve helped them do it, often to own astonishment.
I’ve seen a founder metabolize years of repressed insecurity to finally speak up in a toxic cofounder dynamic - and go on to lead with clarity and strength. I’ve seen a founder rebuild their psychology entirely, so they could lead a 2000-person team with presence, courage, and trust. I’ve seen founders outgrow every idea of who they thought they were supposed to be - and become the leaders they didn’t know they could be, but absolutely were.
Scaling yourself isn’t about healing what’s broken. It’s about becoming who you’re meant to be. A version of yourself that matches the scale and ambition of your vision for your company.
When founders scale themselves, they don’t just return to baseline. They exceed it. They learn to grow new arms, new legs, new muscles. They accept the challenge to evolve in whatever direction their startup asks them to, without any constraint or limitation on who they’ll become because of it.
Founders who scale themselves maximize their psychological upside. Because they believe they can. Their startup shows them that they must. And so they do.
Your startup will challenge you to to scale in three dimensions simultaneously:
Your startup will challenge you to scale your psychology by expanding your emotional and cognitive toolkit. This means developing emotional intelligence, self awareness, and skills to understand and manage the intense emotions you’ll feel as you run a startup. It also means developing new cognitive frameworks, belief systems, and ways of thinking to accommodate the new challenges your startup presents. Your startup will require you to scale your being as much as your doing. Your insides need to change to match the ambition of your outsides.
Your startup will challenge you to scale your relationships by learning to become an effective cofounder, manager and leader. This requires you to learn skills to effectively and authentically communicate with, align, and coordinate other people – like your cofounder, employees, c-suite, and board.
And your startup will challenge you to scale your influence through authentic culture and process. As your company grows, you won’t be able to touch every decision or solve every problem yourself. So you’ll learn to deploy authentic values, create iterative process, and cultivate a culture that reflects the best of you even when you’re not in the room. Scaling your company is an extension of scaling yourself.
Founders scale themselves by learning new skills to scale their psychology, their relationships, and their influence at roughly the same speed that their product and team grow.
Scaling yourself isn’t a luxury. It’s a requirement for every startup founder. The faster your startup grows, the more important it becomes that you are growing alongside it. Because as your company grows, your most scalable asset isn’t your product.
It’s you.
