Lesson: Stress Resilience with Paul Campbell

Step #10 Startups: Optimal performance can be your startup’s competitive advantage

I think that startups need to pay attention to this aspect because in a startup you're looking for unfair advantages. By definition, there are a lot of things that are not in the small company's favor. Maybe you're disrupting an industry that has incumbents, or you're creating a new market opportunity, and so there is a lot of education, and you have to do this customer discovery to figure out what they want and how they want it.

To be as efficient and as effective as you can be, you have to be performing at the highest level. So let's just start with that premise. Performing at the highest level is going to give us the most advantage in being successful.

Then how do we form at the highest level? Will I perform at the highest level if I'm sleep deprived? Will I perform at the highest level if I'm not focused, if I'm not able to deal with the day-to-day winds of the positive and negative that every email, every text that comes through sends me on a mental or emotional roller coaster? Will I be able to see through the forest for the trees? Probably not, so that's why I think every startup who is trying, and there are a ton of disadvantages. You never have enough capital, you never have enough people, and you never have enough time.

So those things you don't have, you have to create a way through and part of the ingenuity and creativity of being an entrepreneur is figuring out how to hack all of those different things. How do you hack growth, how do you hack product development? How do you hack your people's performance? So that's why we need to pay attention to this. The science and evidence and wisdom are there, so now it's just about connecting the two things.

There is a health impact, which we talked about. That's what we are now understanding how being stressed impacts our health. There is a quality of life impact, just happiness impact. I think it's easy for most of us to make the connection that, you know what, I do my best work when I'm feeling good, so we can connect that.

But now we're getting some quantitative data. When you start to think about any company, healthcare costs are one of the largest components, and even for startups. The cost of your employees we talk about, our number one asset in a technology business in particular, but in any entrepreneurial endeavor, it’s the people. Right? In the medium to large businesses, and you can sort of extrapolate down from that, but the cost of a high-stressed employee is $7,500 a year. That's in terms of absenteeism, lost productivity, turnover, and medical and health claims. The costs for that employee in comparison to a low-stressed employee, the healthcare costs, are 46% higher.

So now employers and health insurance companies are starting to say, “Woah, you know what, we need to pay attention to addressing this issue because there is a financial ROI here that's tied to this that we can quantify. So there's an impact on the body and on ourselves and our ability to be our best. But there's a real financial impact as well, that as our companies grow, we're going to have to bear because most companies are now increasingly self-insured. So who is paying for all of this?

Most of us are trying to transform and create value where either something didn't exist, or there was a gap. But there's an Einstein quote that, "No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it." So if we think about entrepreneurs going after big problems, those problems were created by a consciousness.

How do we change that consciousness? How do we unlock this creativity that we know exists within all of us? We spend a lot of time talking about the science and the awareness of how our mind and our body connect and what's possible when we are in sync and in rhythm. Well, that's one powerful way to change our consciousness--by being connected, by being in sync.