In our recent series of articles, we highlighted ways to change habits, strengthen mindset, and find support to build resilience on the founderhood journey. In this article, we dive into how self-awareness is a fundamental component and how it benefits our team and business, with several practical self-awareness strategies to take away.
Keeping investors happy, raising new investment, tuning in with our teams, and connecting to customers…. The list of people we need to consider as startup founders is endless. It’s hardly surprising, then, that ‘weight of responsibility’ was cited as the most unique feature of founderhood in our recent resilience study.
In practice, this means our energies are focused outward, on other people. But how often do we turn that focus inward? And more crucially, how can we use that inner focus to perform at our best?
Don’t worry – this isn’t a fluffy article about self-care and the importance of looking after yourself. While those things are important, I want to delve into how well we truly understand ourselves and what we do with that knowledge to thrive as a startup leader.
In other words, self-awareness. Or in neuropsychological terms – metacognition and interoception.
If you want the TLDR, then here are the topics we’re going to cover:
The science of self-awareness
Communicating more effectively
Managing founder stress and building resilience
Agile decision making using intuition and avoiding bias
Growing your skillset with an honest assessment of knowledge
How can we build our metacognition skills?
How can we build our interoception skills?
The science of self-awareness
Metacognition is our ability to think about our thinking. Meta (on top of) and cognition (thinking). It’s the skill of observing thoughts rather than getting caught up in them. In truth, metacognition goes beyond “self-awareness” because it also requires control of our thoughts.
Interoception is an awareness of our bodily senses. It includes all the signals taken to the brain via the vagus nerve (e.g., heart rate, breathing, warmth, hunger), including how we interpret them as emotions.
Metacognition and interoception combined give us powerful knowledge of ourselves and what’s happening around us. This offers specific benefits for startup founders, yielding better decision-making, more effective communication, faster personal growth, and heightened resilience.
So, let’s delve into why metacognition and interoception are vital when leading a startup.
Communicating more effectively
Whether it’s communication with a co-founder, team, or investors, it pays to be aware of our style, how it fluctuates, and how it serves us in different situations.
In times of stress, communication styles have a frustrating tendency to change. What have you noticed about your style? Do you get uncharacteristically short-tempered, or perhaps you cease to communicate altogether? If we’re not familiar with our natural communication style and adept at noticing changes, there can be implications for our teams and businesses.
A founder with high levels of self-awareness will have the interoceptive ability to recognise tension within their body. They will also have the metacognition to notice its effect on their thought process and subsequent communication style. It’s this skill of recognising and adapting in the moment that’s so beneficial to relationship building.
And what about clarity? I think most of us can recall a tumbleweed moment when our team stared at us blankly after we’d explained a new idea. We just want to crack on, but our stakeholders demand more explanation. So what’s creating the tumbleweed?
As entrepreneurs, we’re adept at creative problem-solving and switching between analytical and creative thinking states. This is great for idea generation, but can be problematic when we need buy-in. Having the metacognition to recognise our tendency to “get it and move on” quicker than our audience allows us to take pause, and communicate more intentionally and effectively.
Managing founder stress and building resilience
Resilience was shown in our recent research to result in more motivated, confident, and productive founders, who were healthier than those with low-resilience scores. But what role does self-awareness play in this resilient mindset?
At times of stress, our bodies react very physically. Perhaps you’ve noticed a quickening of breath, a faster heart rate, sweaty palms? This is your amygdala taking control of your nervous system. It’s a primal, visceral response.
“Biologically and neurologically you can’t consciously control your body’s reaction to challenge”. Dr Emily Clements
We might not be able to control this physiological reaction, but with honed interoceptive skills, we can learn to notice what’s happening in our bodies and choose how to respond. As founders, our exposure to stress is so constant that these warning signals from our body become normalised, meaning we need to work harder to identify them.
Once we’re aware of how we’re feeling, those interoceptive skills continue to help by shifting power from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex. Bringing focus back to the body with techniques like breathwork means we use our physiology to regain control. It’s a fascinating subject that I’ve written about in more detail in my founders’ guide to emotion regulation.
Agile decision making using intuition and avoiding bias
How close do you think you are to your business? A bit too close sometimes?
In theory, our emotional connection to our startup makes us ideal decision-makers. But research shows it can do more harm than good if we lack self-awareness. It’s all down to the notion of cognitive bias.
“there’s a biological reason why entrepreneurs might get really, really set on their idea and their way of doing things and struggle to adapt and move past that” Dr Emily Clements
Research published in 2019 drew fascinating parallels between parents and entrepreneurs when it came to making objective judgments. Researchers noticed similar chemical changes in the part of the brain responsible for critical assessment. For both parents and entrepreneurs, these neural regions were suppressed.1
It’s metacognition that can help us here. Unless we self-monitor and recognise when we’re “too close”, we could end up taking unnecessary risks, or – perhaps worse – missing opportunities.
Interoception is also crucial to the decision-making process. To confidently trust our gut instinct, we need to know our bodies well enough to intuitively (and accurately) know when a business opportunity feels right, and separate the cognitions and feelings to make better decisions.
Grow your skill set with an honest assessment of knowledge
Ever feel like you’re nailing down tracks while driving a train along them? I think that’s what it’s like with professional and personal growth as a founder; our skill set needs to grow faster than our business.
It’s metacognition that helps us assess what we know and what we don’t know. This lets us focus our energy on what we’re good at, delegate tasks outside our skill set to those more qualified, and create a training plan for the knowledge we need.
What’s crucial here is what’s known as “metacognitive accuracy” – making an honest assessment of our skills, which often means seeking feedback from our network.
Where skill gaps get tricky, especially in the start-up phase, is the peril of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which you have probably heard referred to as “unknown unknowns”. Having the self-awareness to recognise our relative inexperience can lead us to seek out support networks to help identify and fill those knowledge gaps2.
Another part of skillset growth is learning from experience. The ability to reflect, analyse thought patterns, and adapt is key to knowledge and resilience. And, you guessed it, these all require metacognition.
How can we build our metacognition skills?
The great news is that there are myriad ways to work on metacognition without dedicating precious time to training. That said, self-awareness is a process that requires time for reflection, analysis, and familiarity, so there aren’t any instant hacks. Here are some ideas that can be built into a busy day:
Reflective writing. No, I haven’t gone mad – I’m not proposing hours of daily journalling. But sometimes jotting down reflections on a decision, challenge, or confrontation can make sense of what happened and help identify what we could have done differently. Try and separate thoughts and feelings, and notice any physical reactions, in your notes too, to build skills across all three modalities.
A “thinking about thinking” framework is helpful for decision-making, especially if there’s a risk of cognitive bias. Edward de Bono’s “6 Thinking Hats” is a good example, encouraging us to apply different ways of thinking to the same problem.
Get feedback and analyse it. Metacognitive accuracy is contingent on our ability to notice blind spots. It’s essential, therefore, to receive and analyse feedback from our stakeholders. I’m a big fan of the situation, behaviour, impact, and request framework because it is based on evidence while also providing an alternative perspective.
Peer-to-peer support – being around other founders who have a breadth of experience encourages new perspectives and provides an opportunity to reflect on our thinking process. It can also unveil blind spots and skills gaps we didn’t know we had.
How can we build our interoception skills?
Noticing how our body is feeling needn’t be time-consuming. Here are some habit-forming ideas that can help interoception become second nature.
Tuning in to how we’re feeling is as simple as asking yourself, “How am I feeling?” and “Where am I feeling it?”. It’s a moment to check in and recognise any tension. Over time, this can become a normal part of your day, like recognising if you’re hungry or thirsty. For me, I notice tension in my stomach, which I know will lead to shallow breathing, and that’s not physiologically helpful for emotion regulation or decision making.
Body scanning is also a great starting point because it gets us in tune with our bodies. Done regularly, we get a baseline understanding of how our body feels, so we’re able to notice changes. It doesn’t take long, and done as a daily practice, is invaluable for regulating emotion during times of intensity. Here’s a helpful article from Headspace to get you started.
Breathing is such an underrated skill. The physiological sigh is a quick and helpful technique for focusing on the breath during challenging times. It immediately creates a physiological shift to get you back into the driving seat.
The most powerful tools in our founder toolkit are often the simplest. But “simple” is so easily overlooked. The need for self-awareness permeates every aspect of founderhood, so it pays to balance the focus we place on our stakeholders with the focus we place on ourselves. We could be serving our businesses better by truly knowing our thoughts, physiology, and feelings. Give it a try.
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This is part of a series inspired by the research findings from nearly 400 entrepreneurs. Access the Founder Resilience Report, packed full of data and recommendations, here.
To get your dose of fuel for founderhood and be surrounded by a cathartic and knowledgeable community of fellow founders – subscribe to the FounderFuel Channel here.
Other FounderFuel articles on a similar theme
Kick start 2025 with the habits that help you thrive not just survive
Take control of founder stress and get your edge back
Keeping it together when you’re feeling the pinch – a founders’ guide to emotion-regulation
Sources
1 Why and how do founding entrepreneurs bond with their ventures?
2 Entrepreneurial metacognition: a study on nascent entrepreneurs
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