Ben Huh on Therapy
My name is Benoit, and I'm the founder and former CEO of the Cheeseburger Network, and also co-founder of the news app Circa. Now, I work at Y Combinator on some special projects.
I first started going to therapy about four or five years ago when I was going through a lot of stress at work. It was actually prompted by one of my board members, Feld, who really believes in making sure that your mind is in a great place. It allows you to be highly performant. So, he suggested that I go see Jericho Luna, who is a well-known CEO coach out of New York. When I was in New York, I would see him, and that's how my entrepreneurial side of therapy started.
I think there are a lot of myths about what therapy is. A lot of people wait until there's a crisis. Doing that is like finding a cure when the disease is much harder to cure. Right? It takes a lot more effort. If you are a runner and you felt like there's something wrong with your ankle when you're running, you wouldn't wait until it was flaming and terrible until you went to see a doctor.
For whatever reason, we feel like there's a stigma with respect to therapy. People wait until it's gotten really bad until they can't handle it anymore. I think that actually causes bigger problems down the road. I also don't think therapy is about recovery from something negative; I think it can be used to actually keep yourself in a really optimal state. This is what I think entrepreneurial therapy or coaching should really be about.
One of the things that I'm doing right now through a kit is that I'm accessing a personal therapist, which is actually a first-time use of therapy for me. I've always used CEO coaching, which is a slightly different framework. In CEO coaching, I'm trying to figure out what is preventing me from making the difficult decisions. What is preventing me from seeing the perspective that I need to see to keep the company moving forward? Those techniques involve understanding my relationships with my employees and my executives, and understanding the stresses in my life.
On the personal side, I'm using it right now to understand my emotions, my responses, and my emotional reactions to certain topics. I'm trying to examine what behaviors are indicative of me running away from a problem or running away from something that's uncomfortable. Another is like behaviors that drive me towards being something constructive like reading or writing. What triggers that behavior, and how do I keep supporting it?
One of the mantras that I hear from Jerry and my former CEO coach colleague, Helen, is "This is being, so what?" Jerry says it so often that I feel like I should get it tattooed or put on a comma with him. The mentality here is, what is the reality of the situation, and what are you going to do about it? If you put it in those terms, it feels like something we've always heard before. What he's saying is, this is a situation that you have to deal with. There's nothing else you can do to change that situation, so what are you going to do?
It actually removes some of the pain, the stress, and emotion, or the euphoria out of the situation that you're in. It makes you focus on it on a very calm and differential level. This makes you go, "Okay, this is our situation. One of the options available..." I am not going to react emotionally to this. I'm going to understand my emotion and see how to actually use it in a better way.
If you're using therapy to manage depression, I think there's an assumption of honesty that people need to make about their current state. If you're in denial and your therapist doesn't know it, they can't help you. If you try to hide it, they might be able to figure out if there's something wrong, but you’re actually not investing the right amount of honesty and effort into the process. It’s like going to your coding team and saying, "I want this feature built," or, "I want to make sure that there's higher performance on this part of our service," but that's not really what you want.
Wonder how you would tell them that, right? A therapist here is like an employee, a co, or a service provider. You want to maximize their time and your time. If you're not willing to make that commitment, I think it's very difficult to get what you need out of it. Some great therapists are able to actually key out something that you may not be aware of, and I think that's part of the process.
If you're using it to manage depression, I think you need to be clear that you have depression. If you have it, say it. If you're just sad, say it. There's no stigma with this; this is private. So, go have those moments of honest conversation so they can help you.
On the performance side of things, I think it's actually very helpful to know what your personal motivations are, even if it's in the context of work. If you're running a startup and your desire is, "I just want to make a ton of money," fine, that's your desire. Let's be honest about that. If that's not what you want to do, let me show you how comfortable that is.
That's actually something to talk about as well. A lot of entrepreneurs I know hesitate about spending money on therapy or CEO coaching and things like that because they feel like it's a personal expense. My response to them is that if you are a better person mentally and emotionally because you're able to spend time being coached on it, a couple hundred bucks a week, every two weeks, or a month is nothing compared to the amount of effort that you can save and the amount of ROI you're going to get from that.
As an investor and a board member, I recommend that people spend that money and actually spend time with a therapist or see a coach because I know the ROI is great.