Beliz’s Substack

Fire Your Invisible Board of Directors

You think you make your own decisions. There is a table in your head, and people from your past are voting on every one of them. This episode names them and does the math on what they cost…

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15 days ago · Beliz Bediz Sinan

Imagine burning $100,000 of your company’s runway this year to impress a first-grade teacher you haven’t seen in two decades. That sounds insane, right? I can hear you say, “I would never do that”.

I’m sorry, but I have to say that you’re probably doing a version of it right now 😅

When I look at founders from the outside, not caring what people think looks like part of the founder job description. Then I watch them decide something; I can see the “someone else” behind their decisions.

Once I asked a founder why he was pursuing a low-price strategy. His first response was about the market. I asked again, and it turned into a discussion about their customers’ purchasing power. I asked a third time, and he finally saw that his decisions have names behind them. And they’re close to you. Your parent, sibling, or your boss who taught you what good work looks like.

Actually, the reason behind his decisions - that name - had been sitting there through years of pricing decisions, and he had never once said it out loud.

This example I described above is my struggle as well :/

So I know this from a personal experience:

Decisions you make based on other people’s opinions come at a high cost to you.

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Where the wiring comes from

Arthur Brooks1 2 calls this success addiction, and he traces it back to childhood. He describes when a child does something exceptional, the adults in the room react with praise.

As the child grows up and this becomes a recurring pattern, by the age of eight the child’s brain concludes:

Love is something that must be earned, and you earn it by performing well.

With this loop, you’ll find yourself caught up in cycles where you get good grades, get into good schools, land good jobs, and maybe even become a founder, your own boss.

The adult version is someone who needs one success after another to feel accepted, and this cycle has no end. Brooks is talking about ambitious people and includes himself in this group. I’m sure most founders will recognize themselves in this description.

So, the advice to stop caring what people think is useless because you’re struggling with a reward system that was installed before you were old enough to evaluate it.

The part that costs money

A founder running on borrowed approval makes worse decisions, and actually those decisions look like good qualities.

• The low price looks like humility.

• Staying with a dead idea appears to be foresight or conviction.

• Turning down a good offer looks like vision.

• A team that never disagrees with you looks like a healthy culture, and so on…

You don’t question those things.

I wanna put a number on one. Let’s say your price sits 30% below the price of all similar products. And let’s say you have 40 customers for two years. If we do the math, we can realize that’s the salary of your first engineer you keep saying you can’t afford yet :/

And this goes on for years, even after the people you’re trying to prove yourself to have stopped watching you.

The permission is yours to give

I’m not saying to stop caring. That’s hard enough as it is. We can’t just flip that switch overnight, I know. Our goal should be to understand what we’re actually waiting for.

A few years ago, instead of enrolling my son in the school everyone recommended, I registered him in a democratic school with alternative education. I remember the days I spent explaining this decision to people who hadn’t even asked.

My husband’s question woke me up: “Who are you trying to convince, Beliz”

I already made the choice. What I was doing was fulfilling my need to hear from others just how wonderful my decision was.

That is the pattern to catch. Pay attention to whether you’re seeking permission, approval, or something else from others … At some point, you may have unconsciously given them this power, but as you become aware of it, you can change that.

Your freedom lies in the fact that they no longer have to be right.

What should we do?

1. Get the names out
   Instead of asking “What’ll people think?” you’d better ask Who?. For a price decision, for example, who would think I was being greedy?

2. Go one layer down

   Think of the name as a door. The answer is actually hidden behind that door. Ask what you’re protecting by keeping that person comfortable. What I mean is: under “I don’t want to look greedy” there is almost always something older.

Maybe you learned early that asking for money is greedy. Maybe being above
money is part of who you think you are. (That’s my case).

Finding the name has brought you to the door. Now, we’ll look at how to walk
through that door.

3. Now decide without them

   If that person’s opinion didn’t exist, what would you do? What number would you say if no one was going to judge it?

Distinction to keep

To be clear: I’m not advocating for building alone or viewing all feedback as an obstacle. Insight from someone who has taken on a similar risk is among the most valuable data you’ll get.

The line to hold is between counsel and permission.

Counsel changes what you know. Permission determines whether you’re allowed to act. Founders who confuse these two end up obeying orders no one ever gives them.

While I was writing this, I came across a founder’s post on LinkedIn. He wrote that he stopped needing to prove anything to anyone in his forties.

My goal for this article is to help you realize that you don’t have to wait for your forties to get there.

I hope I’ve been able to make a difference in your life, even if only a small one…

With 🧡,

Beliz

In this Deep Dive, two AI voices unpack Beliz’s essay on the borrowed approval quietly steering a founder’s biggest calls.

What they cover:

• The three-why interrogation that exposes the real name behind a founder’s low-price strategy, a name he never said out loud in six years of pricing decisions

• Why “stop caring what people think” is useless advice, traced back to Arthur Brooks’s success addiction and the eight-year-old still at the controls

• The phantom tax made concrete: a thirty percent discount to keep you comfortable equals the salary of the first engineer you keep saying you cannot afford

• The line between counsel and permission, and how confusing the two makes you obey orders no one ever gave you

• The three-step override: name the ghost, find the identity you are protecting, then decide as if that person’s opinion did not exist

This episode is for you if a price, a pivot, or a hire has been sitting on your desk for weeks and you keep calling it undecided when it is only unapproved.

👉 Read the full essay here.

Now it is July. Some of those targets were hit. Some were missed.

Most founders already know the next move: you run a retro. You look at the missed $100K MRR target and you do the classic post-mortem: CAC got too high, the new outbound channel didn’t scale, or churn spiked in May.

You find the mechanical failure, update the Q3 roadmap, and get back to work.

But if you stop there, you are leaving the biggest single point of failure (SPOF) completely unaudited 😱

When engineers build systems, they strictly calculate server capacity, API rate limits, and memory usage. But when founders build yearly roadmaps, they treat their own bandwidth as an infinite resource.

You’re doing well with analyzing the market assumptions. You rarely audit the capacity assumptions

🎧 Prefer listening?
I also turned this into a short audio episode: two AI voices working through the topic. Put your headphones on, take the twenty minutes, and run your own retro while you listen. Listen here.

The Two-Track Retro

To fix this, you need to add one more column to your existing retro. I call it the Capacity Audit.

Instead of just looking at why the business missed the mark, you look at what you miscalculated about the hardware running the business: you and your team.

I wanna give you some examples;

The $30K I Blamed on CAC

Goal: Hit $100K MRR by Q2. Result: stalled at $70K.

The classic retro writes itself. The outbound motion failed, and CAC tripled our LTV. True, but it stops one layer too early.

The bug: I assumed I could personally lead B2B sales calls four hours a day while still running product as the solo PM. I hit my cognitive limit in May. Calls dropped, the pipeline dried up, and no CAC spreadsheet was ever going to catch that.

The Two Months I Blamed on Stripe

We planned to ship v2 by March. It went out in late May.

On paper, the story is scope creep on the dashboard and a few ugly Stripe bugs. That is the surface.

The bug: I built the timeline assuming 40 hours a week meant 40 hours of deep coding. I budgeted nothing for context switching, PR reviews, or the daily fires in the v1 infrastructure. I modeled the team like single-threaded servers with zero friction. Hardware does not run that way.

The Hire I Blamed on Culture Fit

Hired a Head of Growth in February. Parted ways in April.

Easy to file this under wrong profile, bad culture fit, weak execution. Easy, and incomplete.

The bug: I assumed that hiring someone meant I could immediately delete “Growth” from my brain. I never budgeted the 15 hours a week it takes to onboard and align a new leader. I set them up to fail, then blamed the hire.

Treat Human Capacity as a Hard Constraint

You may have drawn up a roadmap based on the assumption that you’ll get 100% of your time and 100% productivity from your team. Accept this and move forward.

Going into H2, stop modeling your team like a cluster of servers with 99.9% uptime. People are messy. They get sick. They lose focus putting out daily fires. And yes, they are social creatures who will absolutely blow 40 minutes by the coffee machine just chatting, no matter how much it secretly drives you crazy.

If your team’s realistic, sustainable operating capacity is 70%, and you only have a highly focused 40 hours a week in you, shrink the roadmap to fit the reality, not the ideal spec.

Do Not Just Read This. Run the Audit. Template 👇

Reading an article about a retro will not save your Q3. You actually have to sit down, pull the data, and run the system check.

To make this frictionless, I built a Two-Track Founder Retro Template. It is a one-page framework that forces you to define your H1 goals, run the classic post-mortem, and extract the hidden capacity bugs that are slowing down your company.

Download the H1 Capacity Audit Template Here

Give it 15 minutes.

Find the bad variable. Deploy the fix. Start H2.

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Every missed H1 goal gets the same lazy autopsy: bad channel, bad timeline, bad hire. This Deep Dive argues the real bug is almost always upstream of that: a founder who planned the year assuming infinite personal bandwidth.

In this Deep Dive, two AI voices unpack Beliz’s essay on why the mid-year retro most founders run is missing the one variable that actually broke their plan.

What they cover:

• Why “customer acquisition cost went up” is the comfortable excuse, and burnout is the real cause, in the $70K MRR stall case

• The fiction of the 40-hour work week: why teams only ever have about 70 percent real capacity, and what happens when you plan for 100

• Why delegation is not a light switch. Onboarding a hire costs 15 real hours a week, and skipping that is why the “culture fit” story is usually a lie

• The two-track retro: keep the mechanical postmortem, but add a capacity audit that asks what you got wrong about your own hardware

• Why the same optimism that gets a company off the ground in January is exactly what sinks it by July if nobody stops to recalibrate

This episode is for you if you are heading into a mid-year planning session and know your Q3 roadmap assumes the same unlimited version of you that January did.

👉 Read the full essay here.

I have spent years running accelerator programs and mentoring founders across industries. The pattern that derails most of them has nothing to do with product, market, or timing.

There are four of them.

🎧 Prefer listening?
I also turned these thoughts into a short audio episode. It’s a conversation between two AI voices, and it makes for a great listen. Put your headphones on, go for a walk, and let's untangle these bottlenecks while you get some fresh air. Listen here.

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The Bottleneck

The company grew. The team is in place. But nothing moves without the founder.

Every decision, big or small, comes back to the founder’s desk. The team learns to wait. They stop deciding and start asking. Eventually, they even stop asking good questions because waiting is simply easier.

The Bottleneck founder built their early success on being the one who decided. "I am involved because I care. Because I know best. Because I have been burned before."

What they do not see: they have trained the people around them to defer. The organization mirrors the belief.

Strip away the rationale, and the root cause is identity. If you are no longer the one making all the calls, who are you?

1 Liz Wiseman, who researched hundreds of leaders for Multipliers, found a type she called the "Accidental Diminisher." A leader who genuinely cares, works harder than anyone, and still shrinks the people around them without realizing it. The Bottleneck is a textbook case.

• The Antidote: Push one meaningful decision back to the team this week. When they ask what to do, reply: "What do you think our best option is?" Accept their answer, even if it is only 80% as good as yours. Let them build the muscle.

The Firefighter

The day starts with a plan. By 10 am, it is gone. The plan never stood a chance.

The Firefighter founder is always solving crises and always available. They are genuinely good at it: fast decisions and a high tolerance for chaos. But urgent work will always expand to fill the available time.

Call it what it is: strategic avoidance, dressed up as productivity.

Sitting with a long-term question like what this company should look like in three years is slower and harder than putting out today’s fire. Urgency is comforting because it is measurable. Strategy is not. Until the fires consume everything.

• The Antidote: Block 30 minutes every morning for “future-proofing.” Do not open Slack, email, or your phone until those 30 minutes are up. Let the small fires burn while you look at the horizon.

The Solo-Player

“I tried delegating. It did not work.”

What they actually mean is: the person they delegated to did not do it exactly like them.

The Solo-Player founder is usually excellent at their craft. That excellence built the company, but now it acts as the ceiling.

The core belief: no one can do this the way I can. And often, they are right. No one does it exactly as they do. The question is whether “exactly as they do” is what the company needs, or what the founder needs.

2 Brené Brown's research in The Gifts of Imperfection is relevant here. Perfectionism is a protection mechanism. It keeps you in control. It justifies your involvement. It explains why nothing can leave your hands without your mark on it.

The visible cost: 16-hour days, a micromanaged team, a founder approaching the edge of their own capacity.

The less visible cost: a team that stopped growing because the founder never made space for it.

The Antidote: Hand off the what, and completely let go of the how. Give a capable team member a project, show them exactly what success looks like at the end, and then step entirely out of their way. Let them do it their way (even if it's messy at first).

The Showman

The pitch is great. The press coverage is there. The founder is everywhere; on stage, in interviews, building in public.

Inside, operations are breaking. The pitch deck, however, is exceptional.

The Showman founder spends more energy building the narrative than the actual company. Investor expectations and social capital become the real product.

It becomes a trap when the public version and the internal reality diverge significantly, and the founder stops looking at the gap.

As long as the outside looks like success, there is no pressure to fix the broken machinery on the inside. Until the system breaks.

The Antidote: You know how to build a great pitch deck. This week, write a "Failure Deck." Create 5 slides detailing exactly how and why your current internal operations will crash the company in 12 months. Present it to your core team. Force your storytelling brain to look at the ugly truth.

What These Four Bugs Have In Common

They look like skill gaps, but they run deeper.

Each of these patterns is a response to discomfort. Each one protects the founder from something specific.

Reading another book on leadership won't fix this. To actually fix the bug, you have to name the discomfort driving it. I wrote about something related in High Agency's Dirty Secret: what looks like a leadership failure is usually just anxiety management.

The pattern exists because it worked once. Recognizing it is the first step.

But knowing your label changes nothing if you ignore the mechanism behind it. Your loop has a purpose: it is actively helping you avoid a specific discomfort. What is it? Sit with that one for a while.

If this post landed for you, hit the heart button and share it with a founder who might need to read it today 🫶

And if you want to go deeper on this, I work with founders one-on-one on exactly this kind of work. If you are curious about how 1-1 can help you debug your system, let's chat for 15 minutes.

With 🧡,

Beliz

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In this Deep Dive, two AI voices unpack Beliz’s essay on the four psychological loops that cause high-performing founders to become the ceiling of their own companies.

What they cover:

• The “accidental diminisher”: how caring too much turns you into the single biggest bottleneck in your company

• Why perfectionism is a control mechanism, not a standard of excellence, and the difference between delegating a method versus delegating an outcome

• The firefighter’s addiction to urgency: why resolving 50 support tickets feels more productive than one hour of actual strategy

• The showman’s hollow facade: when your real product becomes investor expectations, not the company itself

• The buried truth connecting all four traps: these behaviors were not always bugs. At one point, they were the features that kept the company alive.

This episode is for you if every operational problem in your company traces back, somehow, to you.

👉 Read the full essay here: [link]

Some people hear “pause” and translate it as rest.

But I am a founder myself. I know the late nights that blur into early mornings.

When I say pause, I don’t mean rest.

I mean: give yourself space to find out who you are when you’re not performing as the founder.

Rest is cute, rest is necessary, but it’s not the actual cause of burnout, nor the recipe. So I want to talk about the identity crisis that most burnout founders are experiencing.

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Science Calls It Depersonalization. Founders Call It “I don’t know what happened to me.”

I realized that rest alone wasn’t enough to recover from burnout when I returned from my vacation and found all my stress piling up just as before, but social psychologist Christina Maslach has thoroughly researched this topic and grounded it in scientific evidence. [1]

She identified three core dimensions of burnout:

• Exhaustion

• Depersonalization

• Reduced personal accomplishment.

Notice what’s at the center: a growing estrangement from yourself and your work.

A week in Bodrum won’t fix estrangement.

What Actually Happens When Founders Burnout

The standard burnout narrative goes like this: you work too hard, you deplete your resources, you need to recharge.

A founders’ life goes beyond just working hard.

They fuse their identity with their company.

Their startup, which is the result of what they do, becomes who they are.

That means when the company struggles, they feel it as an existential problem.

Psychologist Patricia Linville’s research on self-complexity explains the mechanism: people whose sense of self is concentrated in a single domain experience more extreme emotional swings when that domain is threatened.

A founder whose entire identity lives inside their company has no psychological buffer. Every business setback hits at full force because there’s nothing else to absorb the impact.

When your startup has a brutal day, you need other “buckets” to pour into. If you can leave the office and still feel like a “great marathon runner,” a “present father,” or a “skilled painter,” those roles act as emotional shock absorbers.

Consider getting back into that hobby you used to love but gave up :)

Three Questions That Actually Do Something

I can hear you asking, “Beliz, so what should we do in concrete?”

Start here 👇

• Who were you before this company?

  Don’t think of your CV or origin story for pitch decks. Tell me about the actual human underneath.

• What do you value that has nothing to do with performance?

  When pushed to your limits, you can realize that your entire value system has been overtaken by metrics.

• What would you choose to build if outcome were irrelevant?

  This question tends to produce either silence or tears. Both are useful data.

Research by Amy Wrzesniewski at Yale on “job crafting” shows that people who sustain long-term engagement in demanding work are those who maintain a clear connection between their daily actions and their core values. [2]

Identity coherence predicts resilience.

The Conversation Everyone Avoids

Telling a burned-out founder to rest is, in some ways, a kindness that protects everyone from a more confronting conversation.

Because the questions like who are you, and is this still the life you’re choosing? is uncomfortable. For the founder. For the people around them who depend on their momentum.

But it’s the only question that actually leads somewhere.

Rest will make you functional again. An identity reset will make you intentional again.

Those are very different things.

I ran this essay through an AI podcast generator. Two AI voices picked it apart and added a few angles I hadn’t thought about. If you want to hear it discussed rather than read it, the link is below.

🎧 Listen to the Deep Dive

References

1. Linville, P. W. (1987). Self-complexity as a cognitive buffer against stress-related illness and depression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(4), 663–676. Link

2. Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179–201. Link

In this Deep Dive, two AI voices unpack Beliz’s essay on why rest treats the symptom and what actually cures burnout.

What they cover:

• The three clinical dimensions of burnout — and why “exhausted” is only the beginning

• Why founders neurologically concentrate their entire identity into one volatile asset

• The identity portfolio: why diversifying your self-worth matters as much as your cap table

• Three questions that reveal exactly where your sense of self has been damaged

• Why the system around you actively prefers you rested, not healed

This episode is for you if you’ve taken the break, slept the sleep, and still felt hollow when you opened your laptop.

👉 Read the full essay here.

You’re in an investor meeting. They say, “This idea is useless.”

That moment, if your brain starts shouting, “You’re useless” it means you have an identity fusion problem. And it’s costing you more than you realize.

Identity fusion is responsible for more bad founder decisions than any market condition, bad hire, or wrong product bet.

What is identity fusion? Why is it found in almost every founder?

When you build from 0, you pour everything in: time, money, network, reputation, your best years. That level of investment creates a psychological overlap where the company stops being something you run and starts being something you are.

And actually, in early stages, this intertwinedness was the answer for the “Why the heck am I continuing this madness?” question during those nights when nothing seems to work with tons of uncertainty.

But identity fusion has a cost that most founders don’t see until it’s already expensive.

When it gets expensive

When a product launch fails. When a key hire walks out. When a board meeting goes sideways. Your brain processes a “threat to the company” and a “threat to me” with the same response.

And under threat, when cortisol spikes, you become defensive to feedback.

You delay the pivot because changing direction feels like admitting you were wrong.

This is when the most costly founder decisions get made. Most VCs attribute this to a lack of information and look for the problem there, but the problem lies within you. The actual problem is the inability to see clearly because the boundary between "is this strategy wrong?" and "am I wrong?" has dissolved.

You can test this simply

When a customer says, “I don’t use this feature” is your first instinct curiosity or defense?

When an investor says, “There’s no market validation,” do you think, “They don’t understand the vision”?

Neither reaction is always wrong. Sometimes the customer is the outlier. Sometimes the investor is missing context. But if defensiveness is your consistent default, then it means the feedback is hitting you.

What actually helps

Change your language

Try replacing "my role" with "the CEO role." The question "what does this role require right now?" produces a different answer than "what should I do?" because it creates just enough distance to think from the company's interest rather than your own ego.

Ask, “Is it the strategy, or is it me?”

Ask yourself this question when defending a decision or rejecting feedback: Am I doing this because the data shows it, or because I feel I have to be right? This question is uncomfortable precisely because it works.

Your company’s growth depends on your growth

When you started your company, you wanted to prove to yourself, “I can do this.” That makes sense. It’s human.

But at a certain point, the company’s growth requires you to grow as well.

And that growth often looks like this: seeing that the company can exist independently of you.

You were here before the company.

And you’ll be here after it.

Teaching this to your nervous system might just be the most important leadership skill of all.

I’ve created a podcast version of this article where two AI voices discuss the concept here with different examples. I always enjoy listening. You can listen on your 10.000 steps walk :)

Here you can listen.

In this Deep Dive, two AI voices unpack Beliz’s essay on identity fusion: the psychological trap where the boundary between founder and company completely dissolves, and why the very thing that keeps early startups alive eventually starts destroying them.

What they cover:

• Why merging your identity with your company is a survival feature in year one and a liability by year three

• How a product critique triggers the same brain chemistry as a physical threat

• The “binary stars” framework: staying obsessed with the mission without fusing with the ego

• One linguistic trick that reroutes your brain from panic to clarity in the middle of a crisis

• The question to ask yourself when you feel your face getting hot in a meeting

This episode is for you if you’ve ever defended a strategy you knew wasn’t working and couldn’t stop yourself.

👉 Read the full essay here: [link]

When we close a funding round.

When the first customer comes in.

When we get press coverage. We're over the moon :)

But the moments that truly transform us were the ones when things get really, really hard. A popular Turkish saying for this is when the knife hits the bone :)

I've summarized the 5 ugliest gifts founders unwrap. And what was actually inside.

🎙️ For those who'd rather listen: I turned this article into a podcast using two AI voices. They ended up having an interesting conversation :) Check it out here.

1. The Investor Rejection

Every founder has been rejected by at least one investor. The rejection itself isn't the gift.

The gift comes when you ask these two questions:
1. Why does this one hurt so much (if it does hurt)
2. Why am I ignoring this rejection? (Sometimes, founders are more inclined to ignore these moments. Rather, they’re moving on to the next challenge without creating a learning opportunity.)

If a rejection hurts disproportionately or doesn't affect you at all, it's pointing at something. Something you haven't yet allowed yourself to look at.

Throughout my career, I've spoken with hundreds of founders.

The ones who grew fastest were always the ones who paused long enough to read these signals.

2. The resignation of the key employee

Losing a key person is one of the most disruptive things that can happen to an early-stage company.

The weight falls directly on the founder(s). You’re now searching for a replacement, managing the gap, and onboarding someone new, all while keeping everything else running. It can take months before the team finds its rhythm again.

I recently had the chance to hear a CTO founder I respect speak at a panel:

His best developer had started getting restless over time and began generating side projects outside the roadmap.

This CTO said yes to those projects even though they weren’t a priority because he had learned through repeated experience that losing that key person would cost far more than allocating resources to a non-priority project.

This experience is tough. But it teaches something invaluable:

The people we call A players don't always leave for more money. Supporting their growth has to be part of our strategy.

Once you've lived through this firsthand, you can catch restlessness before it becomes resignation. And that learning permanently changes how you lead people.

3. The Pivot You Fought Against Until You Couldn't

Pride is the most expensive thing a founder carries.

Often more costly than a bad hire or a poorly structured cap table.

Because it keeps you iterating on something that isn't working.

I've watched founders stay in the wrong market far longer than necessary. For these founders, pivoting meant admitting they were wrong from the start, and for founders with naturally high egos, that's not an easy thing to accept.

The moment you stop blindly defending what you’ve built and start clearly seeing what the market needs is the moment your ego stops distorting your vision.

The gift was always there. Pride just kept the wrapping on.

4. The Co-Founder Conflict

Nobody starts a company expecting to fight with the person they trusted above everyone else.

But it happens.

And the first serious conflict, where you’re both standing on opposite sides of a real decision with real consequences, is one of the most clarifying experiences a founder can have.

When your ego takes over, you try to win the argument. But when you try to understand the need underneath the argument, that’s when the conflict becomes a gift.

It gives you the chance to see both your own values and your co-founder’s values more clearly.

You can’t change the other person. But you can understand them.

And once you start to understand them, you begin to control the game.

5. Your Competitor Ships The Product While You’re Still Perfecting

You were almost ready. Just one more month. One more round of testing. You wanted to wait until the onboarding felt just right.

Then someone else has already shipped the same product. And the market responded fast.

Delaying a launch rarely comes from rational product thinking.

More often, it comes from something harder to admit: the fear of rejection.

As long as the product isn't out, technically, no customer has rejected you yet 😅

Perfectionism, in this sense, is a very sophisticated way of avoiding honest feedback. (I’ve done it plenty, so I know 🙂)

Almost always, what you learn from real users in the first two weeks is worth more than everything you would have optimized in the two months you spent waiting.

When your competitor gets ahead of you, you finally see the deadline you were never able to set for yourself. An ugly gift, but a real gift.

None of these feels like gifts in the moment.

They feel like setbacks, like failure, like weakness, like loss.

The founders

• who learn to slow down inside these ugly moments,

• who turn their radar toward themselves and those around them,

• who interpret these struggles as data, are the ones who open these gift packages.

What’s the ugliest gift you’ve received as a founder?

Share in the comments so that we can grow together✨

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In this Deep Dive, two AI voices unpack Beliz’s essay on why the ugliest founder moments — the rejection, the resignation, the co-founder fight — are the only ones where real structural growth happens.

What they cover:

• Why dissecting a rejection is more valuable than moving on

• How perfectionism is just fear of feedback in disguise

• Why pride costs more than a bad cap table

• What co-founder conflict reveals about both of you

• Why your best employee never leaves for money

This episode is for you if you’re avoiding a hard truth your business has been trying to hand you.

👉 Read the full essay here.

On paper, they are successful. In reality, they are exhausted.

The founders immediately talk about their success when the conversation starts because investors and programs look for success signals, but inside, there’s a fire burning.

My corporate friends get promoted, start exciting new roles, but inside, there’s a hole they know all too well. They feel they’ve drifted away from ‘themselves’, from what actually matters to them.

They’re running, but without the fulfillment.

So, where does this burnout actually come from?

If I asked you, you’d probably say: working too hard, not resting enough, too many responsibilities, not enough boundaries. All true. But I think the root goes deeper than that.

The core problem is the game we’re playing.

The Two Games

Naval Ravikant has a great perspective on this. He says we basically play two different games in life: Status games and wealth creation games.

Status is entirely based on hierarchy. There’s limited room at the top, which means for you to rise, someone else has to fall. Office politics, social media flexes, the endless comparisons of “who is doing better”... They are all part of this game. It’s combative, it never ends, and worst of all, it drains your soul.

On the flip side, real "wealth creation" operates on a completely different frequency. Wealth creation thrives on solving problems, creating real value, and putting together amazing teams. It operates as a positive-sum game, meaning your growth doesn’t require anyone else’s shrinking. You can both win. You can win more together.

“Shining Stars Are Not Afraid of Others Shining”

I’m about to join the Arya Women Investment Platform Challenge Club, and in their membership agreement, I came across a beautiful line by Ahu Serter and Münteha Adalı that perfectly captures ‘wealth creation’:

“Shining stars are not afraid of others shining.”

This is exactly how it feels when we step out of the suffocating competition of status games and start building our own true value. We can both shine. In fact, we can shine much brighter together.

The Strategic Pause

If you find yourself feeling drained, unmotivated, or suffocated in a race built by others, it might be time to stop and ask yourself: Which game am I playing right now?

Our ecosystem constantly forces us into a non-stop sprint. But what I believe and observe is that you cannot win the game by running blindly; you need a strategic pause every once in a while to recalibrate your direction.

That’s exactly why I have exciting news for those ready to step away from the noise and set their own rules.

From May 1st to 3rd, I'm bringing together a group of tired professionals for a 3-day digital detox and a "strategic pause" experience at Bozcaada Revma Otel.

Before announcing the full details publicly, I wanted to share this with my inner circle first. And by that, I mean you 🧡. You're my inner circle because you value my thoughts and my writing, and you trust this vision blindly.

If you need to step away from the status games, take a deep breath, and clear your mind, I’m inviting you directly to our Waitlist Form.

Joining this list secures your spot and gives you access to a special early-bird pricing advantage, without any obligation to attend.

Looking forward to meeting you in that quiet, powerful space where we build our true wealth.

👉 Join the “Blind Trust” Waitlist Here

Warmly,

Beliz

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Silicon Valley loves a good narrative. And right now, that narrative is "high agency", the ability to make things happen regardless of circumstances.

Every VC or every C-Level executive in corporate thinks they can spot high agency:

"She doesn't take no for an answer."

"He finds the back door when the front is locked."

“They make the impossible happen."

In this article, I want you to look at it from a different angle.

What I often see as “high agency” in founders and leaders I know is actually avoidance.

The founder who emails 47 investors after 46 rejections isn't necessarily high agency.

Let me reveal the harder truth I’ve seen over and over: their pitch sucks, their market thesis is wrong, or they're solving a problem nobody has.

The real high agency move for those?

Stopping. Looking inward. Asking why this keeps happening.

The Founder Who Couldn't Hear "No"

I worked with a founder (let's call him Alex).

I reveal our conversation pattern (I’m sure you know at least one person who fits this pattern :))

• Product-market fit conversations → “We just need more iterations”

• Team turnover → “Not the right culture fit”

• Investor passes → “They don’t get the vision”

• Low user engagement → “We need better growth hacks”

Every external signal said: stop, reassess, pivot.

But Alex kept moving. Kept building. Kept pitching. He called it high agency. His team, however, finds this exhausting.

What was really happening?

Alex was terrified of sitting still long enough to feel the discomfort of uncertainty. Action became a drug. As long as he was “making things happen,” he didn’t have to face the possibility that he’d chosen the wrong problem.

His nervous system was running the show. And his nervous system’s primary job is threat avoidance.

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The Filter Most People Skip

Actually, to distinguish real high agency from performative hustle, we can ask the following question:

“Is this obstacle a feeling I don’t want to face?”

Let’s break this down:

Scenario A: Real Obstacle

• The investor says no because your CAC is too high

• You audit your acquisition channels

• You find inefficiencies, optimize, and retest

• Metrics improve, you go back with data

• This is high agency.

Scenario B: Emotional Avoidance

• The investor says no because your CAC is too high

• You immediately pitch 10 more investors without changing anything

• You tell yourself, “they just didn’t get it”

• You avoid looking at the underlying unit economics

• This is anxiety management disguised as hustle.

The difference? Willingness to feel the discomfort of being wrong.

While reading an article by AI researcher and writer Fatih Bildirici, referencing George Mack’s idea of high agency as a three-wheeled bicycle: clear thinking, bias to action, and non-conformity.

I found myself thinking we’re missing a fourth wheel: emotional literacy.

The Nervous System Trap

If you don’t have emotional literacy, your body doesn’t distinguish between:

• “This investor rejected me”

• “I am fundamentally unworthy”

Both trigger the same threat response. And when you're in threat mode, your brain has one job: resolve the discomfort as fast as possible.

So you act. You send another email. You build another feature. You schedule another meeting.

Because action temporarily quiets the anxiety.

What Real High Agency Looks Like

Let me tell you about another founder I mentor, let’s call her Maria.

Maria got rejected by 12 investors in 3 weeks. Instead of immediately lining up 20 more meetings, she called the investors back and asked:

“Can you tell me what actually made you pass? I’m seeking the real reason not the polite reason.”

One responded.

He told her: "Your team composition doesn't match the problem you're solving. You're building deep tech with a marketing-heavy founding team. It's a red flag."

Maria had been avoiding a hard conversation with her co-founder about bringing in technical leadership. Why? Because it meant admitting she couldn’t do it all herself. It meant sharing equity. It meant potentially losing control.

The high agency move wasn’t reaching out 20 more investors. It was having the conversation she’d been delaying for 8 months.

Three months later, with a stronger technical co-founder and a restructured cap table, she closed a pre-seed round.

I’ve seen founders dedicate years to a venture while staying stuck, unable to recognize the struggle keeping them in place.

The Agency Filter Framework

Now I’m sharing a practice I use with founders and leaders:

When you hit resistance, pause and ask three questions:

1. What am I feeling right now? (Not what you think you should feel. What you actually feel. Scared? Angry? Ashamed? Inadequate?)

2. What action does this feeling want me to take? (Usually: fix it fast, prove them wrong, find someone who agrees with me)

3. What would I do if I could tolerate this feeling for 24 more hours? (This is where the real agency lives)

Most founders and leaders skip straight to action because they can’t sit with discomfort. But the ability to pause is the foundation of strategic thinking.

The Self-Knowledge Test

Want to know if you’re operating from high agency or avoidance?

Track this for one week:

Morning:

• What decision am I avoiding today?

• What feeling comes up when I think about it?

Evening:

• What did I actually do today?

• Did my actions address the real problem or just manage my discomfort?

You’ll start to see patterns.

Maybe you’re great at tactical execution but avoid strategic decisions.

Maybe you’re comfortable with product risk but terrified of people conflict.

Maybe you hustle hardest when you’re scared of being seen as lazy.

Your avoidance patterns are the map to your agency gaps.

The Paradox

Here’s the counterintuitive part:

The more you can tolerate discomfort, the less you need to force.

When you’re not running from feelings, you can:

• Hear feedback without getting defensive

• Pivot without it feeling like failure

• Say no without guilt

• Wait when waiting is the smart move

• Ask for help without shame

This is what sustainable high agency looks like.

Not the founder or manager who never stops. The founder who knows when to stop, look inward, and recalibrate before moving forward.

Start Here

Remember that Self-Knowledge Test I mentioned? I built something to make it easier.

BeHumbo’s Capacity Check-In helps you see your operating patterns across 5 dimensions: awareness, decision-making, energy, alignment, and action.

It reveals the avoidance patterns you can’t see on your own (the ones quietly sabotaging your agency).

Then it gives you specific practices (not generic advice) to close those gaps.

Try it now

Go Deeper:

• Discussion:

  Wanna discuss your leadership roadblocks? Schedule a call with me here

• Retreat:

  Fill the pre-order form for my Unplugged Reset 1-2-3 May in Nature program.

Further Reading:

• George Mack’s High Agency framework

• Fatih Bildirici on High Agency in the AI age

• My thoughts on Emotional Literacy in Customer Discovery

When a founder emails 47 investors after 46 rejections, we call it “high agency.” But what if that 47th email is actually the path of least emotional resistance?

In this Deep Dive, two AI voices unpack Beliz’s Substack essay on the dirty secret of high agency: most of what we celebrate as relentless hustle is actually elaborate avoidance. We’re moving fast, maybe because we’re terrified of sitting still.

You’ll hear the story of Alex, the founder who couldn’t stop building, and Maria, who made the hardest move of all: she paused. We explore the nervous system trap that keeps high performers stuck in action mode, the three questions that reveal whether you’re solving problems or just managing anxiety, and why real agency looks less like a frantic swimmer and more like an Olympic athlete.

This episode is for you if you’ve ever wondered whether your drive is pushing you forward or just keeping you too busy to feel scared.

Key moments:

• The 47th email: Why action can be a hiding place [3:15]

• Alex vs. Maria: Two founders, two very different outcomes [8:40]

• The Agency Filter: 3 questions to distinguish real progress from anxiety management [18:22]

• The fourth wheel of high performance (hint: it’s not what VCs look for) [22:10]

👉 Read the full essay here:

I constantly postpone deleting the files in my folder until it feels overwhelming, until it becomes much harder to find the right doc.

We tend to delay the pain in the moment, even if we know that pain is the currency for our future goals.

• We don’t have that hard conversation → delay the pain.

• We don’t quit our jobs even though we constantly complain → delay the pain.

• We don’t spend time preparing quality food or exercising regularly → delay the pain.

• We postpone learning the skill we desperately need → delay the pain.

We often overlook that delayed pain usually comes with compound interest.

Tomorrow I will start is the most expensive sentence in the world.

The Monday diet. The speech is to be given, or the decision is to be taken, “when the time is right.” They all share the same story:

Instead of you choosing the time for pain, pain chooses your time.

There is one other factor affecting you in this loop. You’re postponing taking control of your life. Every decision you leave for tomorrow is a prepayment on a debt that will come back to haunt you.

The responsibility for controlling your life lies solely with you.

While delaying the pain, we feel lighter when we blame external factors.

I’ve seen founders blaming investors for fundraising failures. I’ve seen corporate professionals tying the economic environment to their postponed resignation (while not actively applying for jobs). I’ve seen entrepreneurs delay a launch to make the product “perfect,” which is actually just delaying the pain of rejection.

I’ve even caught myself creating external duties just to avoid acting 😅.

Those interested can watch a short video by here. She’s talking about children, but most of us are immature adults.

Be curious about the feelings that urge you to blame others.

Many of us try to escape the feeling of pain because our relationship with it is unconscious.

At BeHumbo, I work with founders and leaders to enable them to consciously communicate their own pain.

If you realize your feelings, acknowledge them, and accept them, you gain control over how you behave along with this pain.

You think you have time

You’re probably between 25 and 40 years old. The biggest misconception in this age group is: “I have time.”

No, you don’t.

For a 5-year-old child, one year is 20% of their life. For someone in their 40s? It’s only 2.5%. That’s why it’s the same “1 year.” It doesn’t feel the same weight in the brain.

Each passing year goes by faster than the last 😢.

So take the pain early. While it’s still cheap.

But be cautious.

I’m not glorifying burning yourself out. The culture of “hustle until you drop” is unhealthy. But so is the culture of “never feeling discomfort.”

If you listen to yourself strategically, you can build an internal system that sees the actual reason behind that delay. You can position yourself towards your goals, even if you have to be the one pushing yourself.

So:

• Yes, push yourself. But listen to your body.

• Yes, work. But know why you’re working.

• Yes, suffer. But don’t let suffering destroy you; let it transform you.

And it’s all about practice, practice, practice…

We always tell entrepreneurs to practice their pitches. Here comes life advice from me: PRACTICE.

Practice being more aware.
Aware of your feelings.
Aware of your needs.
Aware of your behavior patterns.

Reflection Question: What pain are you running away from today that you’re borrowing from your future with interest?

Go Deeper:

• Discussion:

  Wanna discuss your leadership roadblocks? Schedule a call with me here

• Retreat:

  Fill the pre-order form for my Unplugged Reset 1-2-3 May in Nature program.

Additional Materials:

• You may also enjoy this video by Alex Hormozi on delaying pain.

• 🎙️ Bonus: Listen to the AI Conversation. I created a podcast episode where two AI hosts discuss the hidden costs of delaying pain. It’s a great way to reinforce the message if you learn better by listening. Check it out below!

Don’t delay this part :)

If you found value in these words, please hit the heart button ❤️It helps others discover the newsletter.

Have thoughts? Drop a comment below sharing the one thing you decided to tackle today.

And if you haven't yet, subscribe so you don't miss the next insight.

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They dive deep into the ‘Compound Interest of Pain,’ debating why we self-sabotage by waiting and how the ‘I have time’ fallacy traps us. Perfect for listening on the go.

What did this year actually teach me?

I heard my own voice the loudest ( for someone like me, who prioritizes others’ opinions over their own, this is a commendable effort :))

I made decisions based on my inner peace instead of external validation.

That doesn’t mean every decision was fearless. Sometimes I believed I was choosing freely, only to realize later that fear was still holding the pen. But the thing I learned is that awareness itself is progress.

You cannot dismantle what you refuse to see.

If this year had a single theme for me, it was transformation.

But wait.. I'm not talking about the glamorous kind of transformation like the "I scaled to 7 figures" story. I'm talking about the messy kind. The kind where you realize you've been hiding your true self behind "strategic positioning" and "professional credibility”.

As I started taking steps that previously felt impossible, I transformed. I returned to myself. A version of me that had been buried under caution, responsibility, and old survival strategies.

And as I became more myself? I shone. I bloomed.

What made the difference this year for me is that:

I prioritized my mental and physical health like they were business-critical metrics. Because they are.

I exercised for an hour almost every morning for self-respect, and it’s grounded me.

I nourished myself with foods that made me feel good. I mostly avoid sugar, processed foods, gluten, and dairy because of autoimmune-related conditions. I stopped framing this as deprivation and started seeing it as freedom. The freedom to say no to things that don’t serve me.

This year, I have grounded myself in being myself, and I will continue to build upon that. For me, 2026 will be a year of establishment.

So what about you?

I want to share the set of questions I used for my New Year's reflection so you can more easily analyze where you are this year.

Where Did You Spend Your Time?

“Show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you your priorities.”

Look at your calendar from this year. Really look at it.

• What did you dedicate your time to this year?

• What did you do in your free time?

• Were you doing things you truly wanted to do, or were you living on autopilot?

The hard question: Did you give your time to things that helped you grow and brought you closer to yourself, or were you escaping from something?

What Did You Learn?

“The best investment is in learning across a lifetime.”

Not what you consumed. What you internalized.

• What taught you the most this year? Maybe a failure. Maybe a book. Maybe a person who challenged everything you thought you knew.

• Did you accumulate knowledge, or were you just exposed to more information?

Ask yourself:
By the end of this year, in what ways are you different from who you were last year?

How Did Your Relationships Change?

“You will become the people you’re surrounded by.”

• Who did you spend the most time with?

• Did these people lift you up or pull you down?

• Did you form deeper bonds, or did things stay on the surface?

Did any relationships end? Did new ones begin?
What kind of imprint did they leave on you?

How True Were You to Yourself?

“All the real work is inner work.”

• How much did you live as your authentic self this year?

• How often did you hear your inner voice, and how often did you silence it?

• Were you seeking external validation, or were you guided by inner peace?

If there were moments when you acted against your values, did you at least recognize them?

What Progress Did You Make With Money?

“You’re not going to get rich renting out your time.”

• How did you earn your income this year?

• Did you trade your time, or did you use leverage like code, media, or capital?

• How is your relationship with money? Peaceful, or filled with anxiety?

Does your working style require you to work harder every year, or one that compounds?

Your Physical and Mental Health?

“A healthy body and a calm mind are the foundations.”

• Did you take care of your body?
  Sleep, nutrition, movement: these are essential.

• Did you take care of your mind? Did you meditate? Unplug?

Were you in control of your stress, or was it controlling you?

What Did This Year Teach You?

“Life is a single-player game.”

Step back. Look at the whole year as one story.

Maybe this year had a theme like patience, surrender, courage, loneliness, transformation...

What was yours?

Did the year try to tell you something?

Why This Matters More Than Your 2026 Goals

Let me share with you what I’ve learned:

You can't build what's next until you understand what just happened.

Most leaders and founders skip this step. They barrel into January with new targets, new tactics, new promises to themselves, without completely processing what the previous twelve months revealed about who they're becoming.

What would change if you spent two hours with these questions before you set a single goal for next year?

A New Year Gift for You

If these questions revealed friction points you've been feeling but couldn't name, I want to offer something practical.

For the New Year, I'm offering a limited 70% discount on the Founder OS Diagnostic Report, a behavioral analysis that maps where you are across the seven dimensions above, identifies the specific patterns blocking your execution (decision delays, avoidance behaviors, cognitive overload), and delivers a 7-day action protocol to address your highest-leverage bottleneck.

Founder OS is something I’ll be actively improving this year, based on real feedback from founders and leaders. If you go through the report and notice what works, what feels off, or what could be clearer, your feedback will directly shape how this evolves. You'll be part of creating something more useful, not just consuming something pre-packaged.

If, after receiving your report, you feel like talking it through with me, you can also book a 1:1 conversation with the same 70% New Year discount coupon.

Here’s how it works:

• Sign up https://insight.behumbo.co/

• Choose the Founder OS Diagnosis

• At checkout, enter BEWELL26 (Valid until January 7)

• Work through the diagnostic questions, each one designed to reveal specific friction points in your decision-making, focus, and execution patterns.

• Get your report with an action map.

• If you want to talk with me, just hit discuss with Beliz. You can use the same code BEWELL26.

My wish for your 2026

May your vision for success include your own well-being.

May your growth strategy not require your burnout.

And may you build something that compounds, including your peace of mind.

Happy New Year 🎄

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In one of the FI sessions, shared his Nascent methodology, which is a framework for finding “People in Pain” and quantifying how much they might pay to solve their problem. If you’re curious about this framework, check out his Substack.

He noted that we need to notice and write down the customer’s emotional state when they describe their problem situation. The intensity of the emotion signals the magnitude of pain. A monotone description of a problem? Probably not urgent. But when someone’s voice tightens, when frustration or anxiety creeps into their words, that’s data.

Then Craig Elias suggested that understanding the full emotional circumplex, the framework psychologists use to map emotions, could help founders decode what’s really happening beneath the surface. Anger, for instance, isn’t just anger. It often masks fear, disappointment, or helplessness.

Why is understanding the emotions of customers so crucial?

It’ll be your marketing strategy.

But I want you to think in a different aspect. Can we read our own emotions?

Why Emotional Literacy Matters in Customer Discovery

When you interview a potential customer, you’re trying to understand:

• How much does this problem actually hurt?

• Is this a “nice to solve” or a “must solve”?

• Would they pay real money, and how much?

Mike’s methodology gives you the framework to quantify pain.

However, your ability to detect this pain depends on your own emotional literacy.

The Founder’s Blind Spot

During the session, Mike played audio recordings from real customer discovery interviews and asked founders to identify the customer’s emotional state.

The answers diverged wildly. One founder heard joy. Another heard anger. Same audio. Same words. Completely different reads.

I sat there thinking: how is this possible? We’re all experienced. We all know what anger sounds like. Don’t we?

But that’s exactly the point. We don’t hear emotions objectively. We hear them through the filter of our own emotional patterns.

Let me share with you what I noticed in myself and other founders:

We’re trained to suppress certain emotions. Anxiety feels like weakness. Doubt feels like a lack of conviction. Fear feels like failure before we’ve even started.

But those suppressed emotions don’t just disappear. They become blind spots.

And when a customer expresses the same emotion we’ve buried in ourselves, we miss it, or we misread it entirely. We hear their words but don’t feel their weight.

We project joy where there’s resignation. We miss anger because we’ve numbed ourselves to our own.

This made me wonder: Could our emotional “reading errors” in customer interviews actually be mirrors of our own suppressed emotions?

If you’ve learned to mask your frustration with forced optimism, will you hear a customer’s frustration as “they’re fine with the status quo”?

I don’t have definitive answers. But after watching that room of founders hear completely different emotions in the same recording, I’m convinced the question is worth sitting with.

My Own Journey with Emotional Vocabulary

I’ll be honest: my emotional vocabulary used to consist of three words. Angry. Happy. Unhappy. That was it. Everything I felt got squeezed into one of those three boxes.

Then I started working on this with my therapist.

At first, it felt almost silly. What’s the difference between frustrated and disappointed? Between anxious and worried? Between sad and melancholic? They’re all just... bad feelings, right?

As I learn to name emotions precisely;

I strengthened the connection with myself. When you can name what you’re feeling, you have a chance to understand your need.

I read others more precisely. Once I could recognize the texture of disappointment in myself, I started noticing it in others. That improved my communication with others.

It reduced unnecessary conflict. So many arguments happen because we react to what we think someone is feeling rather than what they’re actually feeling.

It helped me make better decisions. Emotions carry information. Fear might be telling you something is genuinely risky. Excitement might be telling you something aligns with your values. But if all you register is “good feeling” or “bad feeling,” you lose the signal in the noise.

A Practice for Emotional Literacy

You don’t need a therapist to start building this muscle (though it helps). I suggest a simple practice:

Pause and name it. Several times a day, stop and ask yourself: What am I feeling right now? Don’t settle for “fine” or “stressed.” Push for specificity. Use an emotion wheel if you need to.

Trace the trigger. Once you’ve named the emotion, ask: What triggered this? Sometimes it’s obvious. Sometimes it’s not. The act of tracing helps you understand your own patterns. This is the time when having a therapist can help detect those triggers.

Notice the body. Emotions live in the body before they reach the mind. Where do you feel tension? Heaviness? Lightness? Constriction? Learning your body’s emotional signature helps you catch feelings earlier. (I’m still developing this muscle)

Expand your vocabulary intentionally. When you encounter a new emotion word like wistful, apprehensive, ambivalent, or restless, don’t skip over it. Ask yourself: have I ever felt this? When? What was it like?

Next time you review a customer interview, try this: identify moments where you felt uncomfortable or checked out. What emotion might the customer have been expressing that you reflexively avoided? The pattern might surprise you.

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Further Reading:

• The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, great on interview technique, pairs well with emotional literacy.

• No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz explains why we suppress certain emotions and how understanding our internal “protector parts” can reveal the blind spots that show up in how we read others

For me, it was the day I finally registered my 5-year-old son at his new school. Not one of the well-known private schools that everyone recommended. A democratic school where students, teachers, and managers all have an equal voice.

And for days afterward, I couldn’t stop explaining why I chose that school.

To friends. To family. To casual acquaintances who showed even the slightest curiosity. I spoke first, spoke loudest, spoke longest until my husband finally asked:

“Who are you trying to convince?”

I was trying to convince people who weren’t even challenging me.

Why?

To prove I’d made the right choice. To demonstrate, I’d thought it through.

I’ve noticed that my impulse to explain often comes from fear:

• fear of being misunderstood,

• fear of being judged,

• fear of being wrong.

Nelson Mandela’s Lesson on Listening

This memory comes to my mind while watching Simon Sinek’s video. He shared a story about Nelson Mandela.

When Mandela was asked how he learned to be an effective leader, he said he learned it from his father, a tribal chief.

At every tribal meeting, two things always happened, he said,

1. Everyone sat in a circle

2. His father spoke last

By speaking last, Mandela’s father:

• Made everyone feel heard before adding his perspective

• Gathered complete information before forming his opinion

• Asked questions to understand why people thought what they thought, not just what they thought

• Avoided anchoring the conversation with his own biases

It sounds simple. But, it’s not.

That’s why I've committed myself to listening more as a New Year's goal.

What Changes When We Listen First

Since my husband’s observation, I’ve been trying to experiment with listening.

What I’m discovering: Questions create more influence than statements ever could.

When I ask, “What’s your biggest concern about this approach?” instead of defending my choice, people open up. They share the real issue beneath their hesitation. And often, we find solutions together that neither of us would have reached alone.

The irony? I’m leading more effectively by talking less.

A Task for Both of Us

Think about your last team meeting. Did you state your opinion first, then ask for input? Did you nod along with ideas you agreed with, shake your head at ones you didn’t?

Below is what I’m practicing now, and what I invite you to try:

In your next meeting or decision-making conversation:

• Claim the last seat. Let others go first.

• Stay neutral. Don’t nod in agreement. Don’t shake your head in disagreement. Your job is to absorb.

• Ask questions that dig deeper. Not “What do you think?” but “Why do you think that?” or “What experience shaped that perspective?

• Notice what you learn that you wouldn’t have heard otherwise.

• Synthesize from your learnings. When it’s finally your turn, don’t try to correct or convince, just try to weave together what you’ve heard and add the perspective that’s still missing.

I’m still learning this, too. Some days I nail it. Some days I catch myself mid-sentence, already over-explaining again 😅

If this resonated with you, do me a favor:

→ Subscribe so you don’t miss future posts where I share what I’m learning about the messy intersection of parenting and leadership.

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→ Share this with someone who, like me, sometimes catches themselves over-explaining. (We all have that moment, right? 😊)

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→ Try the exercise this week and report back. Your story might be exactly what someone else needs to hear.

With 🧡,

Beliz