Category: Selfcare

Q: Can you talk about resilience, perseverance, mental health and looking after yourself?

8/29/2018

Siobhan Bulfin
CEO & Founder
Melon Health

A: I harp on this a lot, because people often ask what you need to start a company and stick with it. And there are two things to me that are the most important things. You need to be persistent. There are very few overnight successes. Jeremy Moon, Icebreaker, it was 10 years before they made a profit, and that’s retail. So you need to be ready to do it for a long time. You need to love it… because you’re going to be doing it for a long time.

When I meet CEO’s of larger companies I usually ask ‘if there’s one bit of advice to up and coming CEO’s, what would it be? And it’s always two things. One is, get rid of people as soon as you know you need to get rid of them. In other words, don’t continue carrying someone just because you don’t have the guts to let them go. You need a good performing team. But the other thing is to just keep showing up. And I remind myself of that sometimes, because that’s actually not that hard. Everything else is hard, but I can just keep showing up. I can do that.

So that’s persistence, and resilience is something else. We can train ourselves to be more resilient. You have to be resilient because it’s just extremely hard a lot of the time. And you just get kicked back and kicked back. Pandora the music station pitched to 333 investors before they got a dime. So you just have to get kicked off the horse and get back on it time and time again. So resilience is really important.

So persistence and resilience would be the key things, and looking after yourself. It’s hard to do that obviously if you’re working crazy hours most days of the week. But for me I run and I do yoga and I meditate everyday. And I swear by it. That’s what works for me.

Q: How do you make sure you get the nourishment you need in terms of intellectual conversations, and keeping a view on what’s coming ahead?

5/24/2017

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Rod Drury
Founder & CEO
Xero

A: We have people right through all levels of the business that really get it. You naturally build those relationships and so get a lot of that internally. If you do find people from other companies you look forward to those interactions. CEO’s share a lot of stuff. I just had a text from Mike Cannon-Brookes yesterday, wanting to benchmark some policies they were doing. So you just ping it straight back on a text. There is lots of support in the network. We’re all time poor so we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so we ask for help quite often. When you find people that are stimulating, push back, and have a good perspective, it’s really interesting.

Some tips on this. I’ll see one of my staff and they’ll say ‘hey Rod, how are you?’ And I often think doesn’t really matter, does it? Ask me a question or something relevant. When you’ve got fifty people asking you how you are it gets a bit tiring. But if someone says ‘hey Rod, I’ve got a problem or what do you think?’ That’s really interesting. Asking questions is a great way to connect and just get to it, because you don’t have time for pleasantries when you’ve got lots of people. At a certain size there is this asymmetry where everyone wants to talk to you, but you’ve heard every conversation - unless someone blows you away and it’s really interesting. So consider that perspective if you want to network with important people. Ask them a question that makes them think. Chit chat isn’t really that interesting, we’re all too busy.

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Q: Can you talk about resilience, perseverance, mental health and looking after yourself?

Q: How do you make sure you get the nourishment you need in terms of intellectual conversations, and keeping a view on what’s coming ahead?

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