Team is Everything
Things I'd say to my 25 year old Self: Build your team before you need it.
G’morning - How are you doing today?
Networks of Care:
We’re in a moment, for sure. It feels like I only have one thing to share here today, and it’s regarding the LLM, Claude. Anthropic is in a heated negotiation with the head of the DOD. The DOD wants to remove the LLM’s guardrails, and if any company has held onto its guardrails while still having $200M contracts with the government, it is Anthropic. Everyone else bent a knee a while ago (aka Google). To learn more, read this article. If you pay for a subscription to any of these tools, resist and unsubscribe if you don’t want to support a domestic spy machine. Get the apps (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc) off your phone, computer, and iPad.
Team. I think about it a lot these days. But there I was the other night, alone in a cozy, soft chair, eating the best cookie I’ve baked in a long time.
Jessie Diggins on the screen, mid-race-season, starting to isolate from her team, and telling her story of relapse with eating disorders in 2024. I knew her story from what Jessie had shared publicly, but this story had more depth. It felt different because telling a story from a healed place is important to me, rather than telling it while you’re in it.
Watching Threshold, I realized isolation isn’t a personal failure or a character flaw. It’s a symptom of the larger brain disease of disordered eating. It’s what pressure does when ambition and passion are behind it. Jessie had a world stage, Olympic medals, World Cup wins, and still, when the internal pressure mounted inside of her because of her success, she found herself pulling the door shut behind her.
You don’t realize when you’re isolating at first. You think you’re having fun or thriving. The team is still there, and you’re a high-performer. What you don’t know, because of your brain, is that the people who care about you the most can see the joy leaving your face. They can feel you pushing your team away. I did.
The pressure that mounts when something starts working, when your career changes overnight or over two weeks, is surreal. You put in the hard work for a decade, and then one day a write-up turns into lines out the door and a whole new vertical in your business, a gold medal turns into your agent saying, “You can have whatever you want now,” or you go from waiter to household name because of a hit show. That moment of overnight recognition that wasn’t actually overnight. But suddenly, the energy of your hard work is enormous.
Processing the expansion can be put to the side.
The eyes, the comments, the investment, the rabbit holes, the expectations. It is a lot. More than people and brains and hearts can process in real time, so it seems easier if you keep going with the flow.
Jessie Diggins. Christina Tosi of Milk Bar. Jeni Britton. Women who know this experience. Every person who has ever had this happen to them, including myself when The Mother Love started taking off, wakes up and thinks, “Wait, this is actually happening,” and knows what it feels like to process scale in real time.
I see professional athletes as founders like any other company founder. The pressure is real in both directions. And in both directions, isolation is the thing that will quietly undo you.
If you’ve been here or know me closely, when I was ready, I was able to talk about my three-decade disordered eating and exercise journey. Watching Jessie’s journey through her senior year into adulthood, with relapses, it hit different. That was me. 1994, Senior year of Upper School. 2024, at 48 years old, when I was training 15 hours a week in remote Montana. I was the fittest I had been since high school, but also restricting again, and in one of the hardest places I’d been in my brain in years. I was untangling a lot.
What saved me, what is saving me, is the therapy that helped me connect to my True Self first, and, second, neuroplasticity. Most important to my recovery and health are the teams around me. Because if there is a secret to winning I’ve learned since 2020, it is how to find, build, and surround myself with team.
I have a personal care team that is core to my survival: therapist, physicians, exercise physiology coach (talk about male ally, thank you, Tom Cuddy). My people: soul weirdo friends and family. They are the people who have the courage to tell me the truth when I’m heading somewhere harmful, and I think I’m thriving.
I’m currently playing with and deciding how to build the dream team for Podium. Not only people who can help, but people whose strengths live exactly where my open centers are and will fill my gaps. That’s the Human Design lens I’m using now: stop trying to fill gaps with perfection and doing it all myself, and start putting the right humans in the right seats so we can build the plane together while it’s flying.
ALL the teams matter.
The inside-work people and the inside-the-company people. And if in my role model era I can do one thing, it is help the next generation of founders, leaders, and creatives know deep in their souls that teams of all sorts are necessary for actual thriving. Emotional support teams, health care teams, your work family, your blood family. Micro teams everywhere, please.
This is the architecture and foundation I am building The Coach on, because no founder should have to figure out who their team is - alone. Reach out for help when you build.
When I talk to my 25-year-old Self about team, this is what I say to her:
I’m so so proud of you. You are going to be incredibly ambitious. Your brain is intelligent and different - very different. You will learn about something called neuroplasticity later on - the brain's lifelong, activity-dependent capacity to reorganize its structure, functions, and neural connections in response to internal and external experiences, learning, or injury. You will learn to work with your brain in a powerful and generative way, sculpting it through intentional action. Your brain is different, and so is your soul. You’re going to run ultramarathons before they’re trending, and people are wearing hydration vests. You’ll say they are going to be used as a spiritual practice. But, they also might have a dark side if you don’t surround yourself with people who care for you: coaches, therapists, physicians.
You are then going to go on to become a Midwife, licensed in three states, all of it grueling but rewarding work, and hard to put into words. You’re going to burn out and move on from the job of being a Midwife, but stay in reproductive and maternal health. You’re going to start a company before you know what EBITDA is, how to pitch, and before you know why a Proforma can help you focus and visualize how to scale a business. You’re going to do hard things before the market sees them, and you’re going to do this alone, because grit and effort were how you were trained and designed by genetics, but also culture and systems of supremacy. You will rebel.
You will grow yourself up, people will want to join your team but you won’t understand how to navigate this with emotional maturity. You will find great partners, but not a team - yet. And, in your mid-40’s you will pause.
You will pause so hard you will wonder if you will ever have a job again. But in that pause, you will experience something unearthing, something you thought had healed, but really this is when the healing truly occurs. You will heal through the peaks and valleys you faced in your 30’s (all your decades, actually). You will drop the protective facade of isolation, you will release rigidity, and the 'I can do it all on my own' mentality, switching to a team mentality, because you will finally be able to feel compassion, connectedness, courage, creativity, clarity, calm, curiosity, and confidence cheering you on inside.¹
And, because you help your brain heal, you rewire the old wiring (psst..that’s neuroplasticity). You will know that mental health support and real human teams - work teams, friends and family teams, community teams - will be baked into the DNA of anything you start and build moving forward. We decide and design the shape we are in.
Building these teams to thrive and win takes patience, so go forward with discipline, focus, and care, and you will do great things.
The way to do that is to know: team is everything. Full stop.
Talk with you soon, enjoy the weekend, fam!
Becca
¹ The 8 C’s, compassion, connectedness, courage, creativity, clarity, calm, curiosity, and confidence, are the markers of Self-leadership in Internal Family Systems therapy, developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz. I wrote an 8-day series on each one starting here.
Resources:
No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz - available wherever books are sold
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