The Resilient Founder

18Challenges and Pitfalls in Therapy

The hardest challenge for entrepreneurs, those who are driven by the notion of staying in charge at all times, is to let go and submit themselves. A utilitarian founder will often struggle with the intangible or subjective parts of the therapeutic process. Are we just going to sit around and talk? Give me a break; I have a company to run. Mantras like “what we cannot measure, we cannot control” will pop up. It's too fuzzy and loosey-goosey for me, one might say. Due to the subjectivity and motivations – sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden – several aspects of this entrepreneur-therapist relationship can create challenges.

Here are five challenges that often crop up in the process of working with a therapist:

Subjectivity: To start with, what we cannot measure, we cannot control. What we feel or cannot feel might be one guiding principle. If I walk into a practitioner's clinic and proclaim some symptoms of a disease – like fever or chest pain – the practitioner can measure, conduct standardized blood tests, examine lab reports, and establish the baseline and the ideal target metrics. These being clearly established, the two parties – the buyer of services and seller – then agree to work together and fix this situation. We know what success looks like. But in therapy, the diagnosis is not as simple nor can subjective states be measured easily. Although scales for measuring depression exist, such as Beck's Depression Inventory, they consist ...