“I adore you all.”
The words left my mouth and my gut dropped before the sentence was finished. I was standing at a company all-hands, both founders watching from the front row, and I had just said to a hundred people something I’d only ever said privately to one of them.
Those words belonged to one relationship. They were something between me and the founder I reported to — part of how we’d gotten close, part of what made that bond feel meaningful. And I had just said them to a hundred people without thinking.
Then the thinking caught up. Why did I just say that to the entire room? I didn’t plan it. The words just came out. And the only honest answer was that the approval of a hundred people I barely knew had just mattered more to me than the one real relationship I had in that building.
Fuck.
The thread you’ve been managing
The way your energy shifts the moment someone whose approval you need doesn’t respond.
The way a meeting that ends without explicit praise leaves you carrying something unresolved for hours. The way you replay a presentation looking for the moment it might have landed wrong.
These aren’t separate moments. They’re a single thread running through your day. Every shift in their expression is a tug you feel in yours. Your job is to manage the tension on that thread, which means you can never put it down.
You get a win and something in your head doesn’t celebrate. It searches. Clicks over to the next problem and finds the flaw before the good thing settles. You’re already building the case for why it still wasn’t enough.
The room isn’t where the answer is
In a startup, reading the room is survival. And you get very, very good at it. Which means you stop asking the quieter question: What do I actually think?
The external noise gets loud enough that your own signal disappears. You know exactly how everyone else is feeling. You have no idea how you feel yourself.
This started before you got here
Not here. Not at this company. The hooks were there before this job. Before the last one.
Someone taught you early that your place wasn’t guaranteed. That you had to produce to earn it. That approval was something you had to work for, not something you were born deserving.
And that at any moment, one slip, and it could disappear. Like it’s this really fragile thing that takes so much effort to obtain and seemingly so little effort to lose.
And here’s what makes this system so hard to see: once you learn it, it feels like the truth. It doesn’t feel like a pattern anymore. It feels like the way the world works.
That lesson got written in. It’s still running because it worked. At some point, it kept you safe. It told you: if you perform, if you stay attuned to what everyone needs from you, you get to stay.
The system you’ve been running on is older than this company. Older than the role you got promoted into. Older than the version of you that succeeded. The success didn’t change the system. The success was the system working exactly as designed.
The system you’ve been running on is older than this company.
Who are you being right now?
These hooks are evidence you learned to survive.
Start noticing who you’re being in the room.
Standing at that all-hands, I wasn’t being the leader the company needed. I was being the version of me that needed everyone to believe I belonged there.
There’s a difference. One leads from vision. The other performs for permission. You can feel it in your body. One is you deciding what’s true. The other is you watching their faces to see if they believe it.
That’s what it looks like when the lines blur. The emotions from one part of your life bleeding into another. Your need for approval at age seven running the room at your board meeting.
You wear a lot of roles. When you stop noticing which one you’re in, your body doesn’t stop keeping score. You start borrowing from the wrong one, and every part of you feels it.
This isn’t about killing the want for approval. Before the next high-stakes moment, pause and ask one question:
Who am I being right now?
If the answer is someone from a different room, running an old pattern, you’ll recognize it. Your breathing will shift. And for the first time, you get to choose who stays.
Startup Stability is a weekly newsletter for first-time executives in the middle of the hard part. Next week: the conversation you’ve been avoiding with your founder, and what it’s costing you.