I’ve never met a founder that doesn’t have a particular penchant for problem-solving: It’s a well-practiced part of the job, and there’s a great deal of satisfaction in getting your teeth into a complex challenge and coming up with a solution. This is why we rarely encounter simple problems in our FounderCircles. The ones that make it to the Circle are gnarly and multi-faceted, and often emotionally-loaded – the perfect manifestation of founder-life.
The challenge with these problems is there is no ‘right’ answer, but this doesn’t stop our brains searching for (or believing in) one. Layer in the complexity of risk, and the weight of responsibility of our decisions (on the business, on our team) and it’s easy to start feeling very stuck. Hidden beneath that stuck feeling is a whirlwind of interconnected thoughts that undermine your usual problem-solving superpowers.
“I must get this right…”
“Everything relies on this…”
“If we don’t win this, everything is going to grind to a halt…”
“The team are going to be so frustrated, they think I’m [insert adjective]…
“This is never going to work…”
“That pitch didn’t work, our whole deck needs redoing”
That’s just a few I’ve heard founders say when talking about a gnarly problem, and I certainly recognise them in myself. Each one hints at the complexity and emotional weight of the decisions that we make in founder life. They pile up uninvited, sound very convincing, and have a habit of spiralling fast.
Each one is also a thinking trap. And it’s holding us back.
Thinking traps – like catastrophising, or all-or-nothing thinking – have become more recognised in recent years, but we rarely spot them creeping into our day-to-day. That’s how they hamper our usual decisiveness, subtly impact our behaviours and slow down our problem-solving.
What’s the real cost of letting them run unchecked?
It’s worth being honest about the downstream impact of these thinking traps, because this isn’t just an internal experience.
When these thoughts go unchecked, the effects ripple outward quickly: A founder catastrophising about a missed target often becomes – without realising it – more argumentative in team meetings and more controlling, and less willing to delegate (when everything feels precarious, handing over the wheel feels even more dangerous). But that impacts the team (even when you think you’re hiding it well) making focus and confidence erode quietly, and the culture takes a knock.
Similarly, the decisions made from inside a thinking-trap spiral tend to be defensive ones too: Fuelled by subconscious fears and exaggerations, the focus shifts to survival, over strategy. Left unchecked, it can look like pulling back from a bold hire, hedging a product decision, or avoiding a difficult conversation. The thinking traps create hesitation, even if the connection isn’t obvious at the time.
So what’s actually going on in there?
Building on decades of cognitive behavioural research, psychologist David Burns identified a set of thinking patterns he called cognitive distortions. These thoughts feel completely true in the moment but consistently skew our perception in unhelpful directions – clouding our judgement, especially under pressure – and often leading to increased worrying, hesitation and procrastination.
A few common ones to look out for in the complexity of founder problem-solving scenarios:
Catastrophising. Taking a real but limited setback and fast-forwarding to the worst possible outcome. One difficult investor meeting becomes “we’re uninvestable,” one piece of negative feedback becomes “the product is fundamentally broken.” The stakes genuinely are high in startup life, which is exactly what makes this one so convincing.
All-or-nothing thinking. Everything is either working or failing, succeeding or broken – there’s no middle ground. “If we don’t hit this target, the whole year is a write-off.” Anything short of the vision registers as failure, even when real progress has been made.
Overgeneralising. Taking one event and extending it into a sweeping conclusion that goes well beyond what the evidence actually supports. One difficult conversation becomes “I’m not cut out to manage people,” one lost deal becomes “our sales process is broken.” The data point might be real; the leap rarely is.
Mind-reading. Assuming you know what others are thinking (almost always negatively) without any real evidence – “The team will be so fed up with me…”. The snag with this one is that founders often do have good instincts, making this one harder to catch. Yet intuition and projection are different, and in a thought spiral, it’s usually the latter doing the talking.
Perfectionism. The rigid internal rule that there is one right answer, one right approach, one right moment — and anything short of it is not good enough. “I must get this right, or else…” – watch out for “must”, “should” and versions of “or else”. High standards drive quality. The trap is when the standard becomes so exacting that it creates paralysis rather than progress. In startup life, where iteration is the whole game, perfectionism is a particularly costly gremlin to let run.
Tuning in is taking back control
Most founders I know have a humble and earnest level of self-awareness and self-management (after all, how else can you lead and grow at the pace a startup needs). Yet these thinking traps have a tricky habit of sneaking into our problem-solving. So what we need is something practical to shake them out. That’s where the PP-Tool comes in – used in many a FounderCircle discussion, but also as a DIY coaching tool.
This tool is designed for you to be able to make sense of the messy thoughts spiralling, so that you spot the thinking traps and can deal with each one more productively.
First, capture the problem or challenge. A simple but common example could be “I can’t get going on this pitch deck”.
Then put pen to paper listing out all the thoughts running through your mind in relation to the problem. Capture the thoughts that are more practical on the left and those that are more psychological on the right. When trying the exercise, avoid getting caught up in the details of each category – instead, approach it as a way of teasing out all the threads of thought that are spiralling in your mind. If it is practical in nature (“I don’t know where to start”) put it in the practical column, if it isn’t (“I am worried I’ll do it wrong”) it’s for the psychological column.
Here’s an example:
Once you’ve got your list it becomes far easier to spot all the different aspects making the problem complex. Plus the distortions will be hiding in plain sight on the psychological side too.
Founder-tested approaches for tackling the cognitive distortions
Let’s be honest – there’s no universal fix for tackling these tricky thoughts. Each of us will have certain patterns, and our own shade of inner critic. However, once awareness is raised with the PP-Tool, it’s much easier to give the following approaches a go , all tried-and-tested by other founders.
The Thought Challenge
Drawn from cognitive behavioural therapy, this practice is all about slowing the spiral down enough to examine it — not to dismiss the thought, but to test its quality as information. Four steps to try:
- Write the thought down exactly as it appeared. Not a polished version, the raw one: “We’re going to run out of runway by Q3 and it’ll be my fault.”
- Name the pattern. Does this look like catastrophising? All-or-nothing? Overgeneralisation? Just naming it creates a little distance.
- Check the evidence. What actually supports this thought? What genuinely contradicts it? Be honest in both directions.
- Find a more complete version. Not a falsely positive one – a fuller one. “We’re facing real cash pressure. We’ve navigated hard moments before. I need to look at the numbers clearly and work out what options we have.”
The reframe isn’t about feeling better. It’s about getting cleaner data to make decisions from.
Bouncing it off someone who knows the terrain
Research on self-compassion suggests that we consistently give better, more balanced advice to others than to ourselves. This definitely shows when founders get together – the distortions that paralyse us internally often dissolve the moment we try to articulate them to a peer.
Sometimes the most effective move is simply saying the thought out loud to someone who’s been in similar situations, so they can critique it. In FounderCircles I’ve heard so many founders get this kind of reality check; someone who’s been in the trenches can compassionately shine a different perspective on a tough thought, and help us see that it may not be 100% right, or helpful, to our problem-solving situation.
If a trusted peer isn’t immediately available, try this: write down the catastrophising thought, then consider if you would say it to a fellow founder in the same way. The answer is almost always ‘No’, so what would you actually say to them? That version contains the balance you couldn’t find from your own inner critic.
If you want more help on how to interrogate and reassess the unhelpful thoughts that show up in the PP-tool psychological column, give our PITs-PETs tool a try. There’s a guide on challenging unhelpful thoughts with the PITs-PETs tool here.
So next time you find yourself stuck with a complex problem or procrastinating on a decision or project – don’t let the feeling stall you. Instead, get beneath the initial problem, and integrate the thoughts spiralling around the issue using these strategies. It’ll have you moving forward faster in no time.
Other FounderFuel articles on a similar theme
Take the FounderFuel Pulse here for free – 3 minutes, 21 questions, instant results
Keeping anxiety in check as a founder with the PP-Tool
Take on negative thoughts and thinking traps with the PITs-PETs tool
