The Paris Olympics — wasn’t it fabulous, from start to finish and even more special for Australians resulting in our most successful Olympics to date. The highlights for me were the female heavy teams and their medal contributions, the aesthetically pleasing colour palette for these games creating a warm and calming connection for those of us who couldn’t get across to the city of lights, and the athletes openly communicating about their mental health and wellbeing more than ever before. I could go so far as to say that mental health conversations in sport have been normalised.
An example that stood out the most for me was Australian boxer Harry Garside. What an incredibly self-aware and generous young man to share with such vulnerability after his loss, in his words “Twenty years dedicated to one dream and it’s over, just like that. I visualised winning, I could feel the gold medal on my skin, I could feel winning it in my veins. I fear for what the next couple of months look like for myself and I’m sure there’ll be some dark times. I’ve got to prepare for that now. It’s my responsibility for how I feel. I need to sit in grief, sorrow and pain for a bit, which is normal. I am grateful for the man I have become. On this journey I’ve learned to become my own friend.”
I can’t help but think Harry has benefitted from the investment in athlete mental health and wellbeing that we’ve seen over the last two decades in Australia.
I started working in sport just over 20 years ago, around when Harry decided as a 7-year-old that he was going on an Olympic journey. It was at that time conversations were starting to grow around how we could reduce the fallout in Olympic and professional post-sporting career transitions. I took part in early conversations between the Institutes of Sport administrators and coaches and between professional codes.
Athlete welfare advocates were appearing around pool decks, gyms, tennis courts, and for the first time cricket and football pitches. Beyond Blue had just been founded and ‘mental health’ was becoming part of the vernacular outside of the clinical setting.
In 2006 Wayne Schwass launched the Sunrise Foundation and was one of the first AFL players to speak openly about the difficulties in managing depression. It was a pivotal moment for mental health and sport and not only were the hierarchy listening, they were also investing in and employing people to help. For mental health professionals like me, this was an exciting time.
There are many similarities between athletes and founders, the ability to manage high risk with no guarantee of any return, living with constant ambiguity, seeking funding, facing knockback, and often operating with a success-at-all-costs approach. As a result, common issues amongst both include burnout, loneliness, addiction, anxiety, depression and relationship breakdowns.
For me as the founder of Founder Families, vulnerablity and wellbeing aren’t words often heard in the startup universe. That’s why we’re changing the conversation.
There have been huge investments in the support structures built around athletes, ensuring they play an active role in being in tune and constantly assessing their physical and mental wellbeing. This was evident in Paris, including the magnificent return of Simone Biles after her withdrawal from the Tokyo 2020 Games to prioritise her mental health and safety.
I am advocating a similar model to support our startup ecosystem in Australia. Through my experience in sport, when organisations started to fund the delivery of mental health and wellbeing services for athletes, we saw a major shift in the uptake. Investing in a player welfare manager to be in the gym or sit alongside the coach and sports science team during training spoke volumes about how coaches felt about their athlete’s wellbeing. Pointing founders in the direction of a list of service providers is not enough.
As per a 2023 survey by Startup Snapshot, 72% of founders report a mental health impact from running their business and 81% are not open about stress, fears or challenges with anyone. Only 23% seek professional help, with stigma and the risk of reputational damage a concern. About 76% of startup founders feel a sense of loneliness and despite everything we know about the benefits of exercise and sleep, 47% exercise less than before founding their company, and the percentage of hours they sleep declines as the value of the capital raised increases.
Innovation is essential to our economic growth. In our rapidly changing world, we need entrepreneurs to find solutions to the problems we are facing more than ever before.
So the fact that 72% of entrepreneurs experience a negative mental health impact is a statistic too high — especially with no coordinated proactive model of support.
As elite performers, founders also benefit from taking the time to understand how their startup affects their lives and how to proactively put in place high-performance structures to manage the complexities of life and family alongside the demands of scaling business.
Managing the highs and lows of scaling companies is intense. Normalising the helping model by having open conversations about mental health and wellbeing, providing financial access to support, and encouraging founders to seek help can make all the difference in the sustainable success of the business.
We need to work together to reduce the mental health stigma and normalise proactive wellbeing support for founders and their families.
I started Founder Families to advocate for the mental health and wellbeing of founders and their families and educate the startup ecosystem on the benefits of help-seeking behaviours. My goal is to see investors take a proactive role in funding 1% of all capital raised to founder wellbeing services.
I believe founders know they would benefit from this approach and that investors have good intentions about wanting to help. It’s the stigma and fear of reputational damage that gets caught in-between.
Never miss a story: sign up to SmartCompany’s free daily newsletter and find our best stories on LinkedIn.
Kay Foss is a mental health professional who has also worked in not-for-profit community health, psycho-social rehabilitation and private practice. Foss is the founder and lead advocate of Founder Families.
